I live in a small village in the countryside of south Apulia, not far from the place where I was born seventy-five years ago. I have traveled widely in Italy and Europe, and I lived abroad for some time, but I have never been to the USA, though I so yearned to do it in my teens. As a boy, I kept cutting proofs of purchase from the packaging of a particular brand of toothpaste and sending them to a post office box in northern Italy. It was part of a contest: The name of a customer would be drawn every month, and, if fortune smiled at you, you could win a fully paid, one-week stay for two in New York, the City that Never Sleeps. New York, in particular, and the USA in general, so appealed to my imagination that I used to ravenously read everything I could find on the subject.

At my age, I no longer harbor the wish to travel intercontinentally. Moreover, it seems that after landing in an American international airport, Customs officers now ask foreign passengers to hand over their mobile phones and personal identification numbers. The officers check whether passengers have posted, over the past months or years, any critical comment on the Trump administration in their social accounts. Failing to comply with this request may lead to your detention for hours without being allowed to see a lawyer or to call your consulate, before being denied entry in the U.S. and deported.

If you are a journalist, you may already be on a blacklist. It seems that some special unit has the sole task of monitoring what journalists write, even online (maybe, especially online), and they target you even before you land, notwithstanding a perfectly valid visa. In an article published in The New Yorker (“How My Report on The Columbia Protests Led To My Deportation,” June 19, 2025), Alistair Kitchen, an Australian journalist, tells how Customs officers pulled him out of the passport control line upon his arrival at Los Angeles Airport on a flight from Melbourne. During interrogation in a nearby office, the Customs officer candidly told him that he was being detained and interrogated for “what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University.” Ultimately, they checked his mobile phone, scrolled through his photo gallery, and found evidence that, in the past, he had used marijuana, purchased in New York where it is legal. In the end, they put him on a flight back to Australia. Kitchen was lucky, because, as he reported, before being deported he was detained in a room, where he “encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for information.” In the same room, there was another woman who had been there for four days. I am afraid that I would also fall foul of the Trumpian “law” should I decide to venture to the United States. So much for the right of free speech and expression.

For my generation, the Boomers, the USA was the land of freedom, the first democracy in the modern world. In the 18th century, the sparks of the American Revolution had reverberated in Europe and had been the tinder for the French Revolution, which flared up just twenty-three years later. The American Constitution, the oldest still in effect in the world, the product of the French ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, would be the model for the constitutions promulgated in Europe in the 19th century.

I loved reading that paragraph in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, as it was drafted by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The same concepts reappeared in the French Revolution motto: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” However, I did not fail to see more than a shade of hypocrisy in those illuminated words: all the founding fathers had slaves on their plantations.

In the early nineteen-sixties, an American friend of my father’s brought me a 15-centimeter tall model of the Statue of Liberty from New York. On the book Lady Liberty holds open on her left arm I could read “Liberty enlightening the world” and at its base, in tiny letters my young eyes could then decipher “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In Italy, in my heyday, we almost all grew up nurturing the myth of America. The United States epitomized North America. Then, there were all the other states of the vast continent stretching in both hemispheres. Those who had migrated to the United States had “gone to America,” the others had gone to Canada, Brazil, Argentina. . . .

The Americans were the “liberators” who had freed Italy and Europe from Nazi-Fascism at the cost of thousands of young GIs’ lives, 7,900 of whom rest in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, not far from the Anzio beachhead, and 4,392 more lie in the American Military Cemetery in Florence. A large part of the generation that was born after WWII, including me, had come of age reading Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Melville, J. D. Salinger, Edgar Lee Masters, and so many others.

The years of John F. Kennedy at the White House — the “Camelot years” — are still remembered as an age of hope and confidence in the future by millions of people in America and around the world.

What is left, today, of those dreams?

The America I loved now has a bad name. In the last half-century or more, the U.S. government has supported dictatorial regimes all over the world, organizing coups to overthrow elected presidents and, over the years, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, they started to “export democracy,” invading countries under false pretense and sowing death and destruction.

In Italy, for decades, the CIA, in collaboration with Italian deviated secret services, was behind attempted coups and the massacres perpetrated by terrorist organizations (however politically motivated) in what was dubbed the “strategy of tension,” whose aim was to prevent the Communist Party from democratically winning the elections and governing the country.

The USA, a nation of immigrants and born out of the toil of millions of people coming from every corner of the world, is now witnessing a ferocious deportation of foreign citizens, who are adults or even teens hunted in workplaces, at bus stops, going to volleyball practice, near elementary schools, and in stores or supermarkets. Masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cops ride along the streets in their ghastly SUVs like a pack of wolves, harassing people, bursting into houses and dragging unclothed U.S. citizens out at gunpoint in freezing weather then returning them later with no explanation, even shooting at people for futile reasons and against all rules. They have the status of federal agents, but in their violence and bullying, even in their full-combat outfit, they are more similar to thugs, their very presence generating fear and anguish in the neighborhoods. Actually, in the opinion of many of my American friends, they are a sort of militia, like the brown shirts in Germany during Nazism, and their sole allegiance is to the man sitting in the Oval Office, who recently said that there are no limits to his power, except “my own morality. My own mind,” to which everyone must conform. The principle stated in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, “Cuius regio, eius religio” (“the state religion is the one decided by the king”), seems to have been reinterpreted in secular terms by the White House.

However, thank God, a growing number of Americans, now in the order of millions, are taking to the streets all over the country in the wake of the “No Kings” non-violent movement. Congress members from both political parties are raising their voice in a bipartisan denunciation of Trump’s (and his administration’s) abuse of power. Therefore, there is hope, for the USA and the World, that things may change for the better in the near future. A nation born two hundred and fifty years ago out of an act of rebellion against a mad king is hardly inclined to bow to a 21st-century replica of absolute authority and wannabe tyrant apparently no less unhinged.