There is a particular chill that descends on Washington when the president of the United States labels his own lawmakers ‘unpatriotic’. It is not merely a heated word. It is a declaration of war on the very idea of shared governance. Yesterday, as the House voted to formally rebuke Donald Trump for his handling of the Ukraine affair, the president responded not with a defence of policy but with an attack on the soul of the opposition. ‘These people don’t love our country,’ he told a rally of supporters, his voice thick with grievance. And in that moment, the political crisis deepened into something more existential: a crisis of national faith.
The House rebuke, a rare and pointed resolution, accused the president of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. But the language of impeachment has become almost background noise in a capital accustomed to scandal. What resonates more is the emotional fracture: the sense that America’s core institutions are no longer seen as neutral arbiters but as enemy territory. On the streets of small-town Ohio, I spoke to a retired factory worker named Larry who summed it up bluntly: ‘If they’re against him, they’re against us.’ That us-versus-them mentality has become the defining feature of the American political landscape. And it is not new. But the president’s explicit branding of his critics as unpatriotic gives it a dangerous legitimacy.
The cultural shift is palpable. In diners and barbershops, the word ‘patriot’ has been co-opted. It no longer means someone who pays taxes, votes, and serves on juries. It means someone who supports the president. Conversely, to oppose him is to be un-American. This is not a simple partisan divide. It is a redefinition of citizenship itself. I recall covering the 2016 election and feeling a certain optimism in the air, a belief that democracy could self-correct. That hope feels naive now. The rebuke was meant to be a check on executive power, but it has instead become a rallying cry for the president’s base, a proof that the ‘deep state’ is out to get them.
Meanwhile, the human cost is measured in frayed relationships, in the quiet of family dinners where politics is now forbidden, and in the growing number of Americans who simply stop following the news. A waitress in Pennsylvania told me she ‘tunes it all out’ because it’s too exhausting. That is a form of civic disengagement that should terrify both parties. When the public stops caring, democracy becomes a stage play with no audience, performed by actors who believe their own lines but speak to empty seats.
What happens next is uncertain. The president’s allies in the Senate are likely to acquit him, which will only deepen the divide. But the real story is not the vote tally. It is the quiet erosion of the belief that we are all in this together. That is a loss no resolution can fix.
