Zaidane is the president and CEO of the Millennial Action Project.
This holiday weekend Americans will celebrate with hot dogs, poolside parties and firework displays. What they’ll be celebrating is an open question among young Americans like me.
Scroll through TikTok, the town square for Generation Z, and you’ll find over 20 billion views on videos labeled #politics. The vast majority of this viral content directs ire toward the state of our democratic experiment. Celebrations of the star-spangled holiday are tempered with a sobering reality: Only 19.5 percent of young people view the word “patriotism” in a positive light.
It’s not hard to put a finger on why: increasingly slim opportunities for economic mobility, the steady drumbeat of hard-won rights overturned by unelected courts or gerrymandered legislatures, unfilled pledges from the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, recent testimony from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, and widespread bad faith arguments throughout the political spectrum. The lack of patriotism among millennials and Gen Z should be seen for what it is — a rebellion against the complacent promises of America. That doesn’t mean young people hate this country, it means we love it enough to want change. It means we believe that we can do better. And that’s something worth celebrating.
Independence Day is a time when we commemorate the aspirational and unique founding of our nation. This wasn’t the work of one generation and certainly not the work of a small set of delegates from 13 colonies. In fact, some of America’s greatest founders, who brought to life the aspirations we celebrate this weekend, would have never been permitted in Independence Hall in 1776.
When we reflect on America’s founders this holiday, we ought to think of people like Harriet Tubman, who is just as influential to who America is as Thomas Jefferson. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. built upon the American dream and fought for civil rights, Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson led early movements of LGBTQ activism, and Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Jeannette Rankin advocated for women’s suffrage based on the vision that America could be a fully representative democracy. These American Refounders lived in a country where the systems did not work for them, and yet they forced the nation to live up to its founding ideals and built a better future for all.
Millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward patriotism seem to be coming from this same place. It’s not a rejection of our country or national identity, but rather a stirring conviction for what America can and should be. The good news is that young people have not given up on this country. From 2018 to 2020, there was a 266 percent increase in millennials running for Congress. In 2020, the Millennial Action Project tracked 703 millennial candidates for Congress throughout the cycle, compared to just 264 in 2018. An MTV/AP-NORC poll reported that two-thirds of Gen Z feel that their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Most notably, each day, here at MAP, we see young people who not only stepped up and won local office, but who are using their platform to work across the aisle and bridge partisan divides.
Thomas Edison once said, “Vision without execution is just hallucination.” Each generation, we improve on the execution of the vision of America. And I’ve been inspired by how millennials and Gen Z are stepping up to the plate.
So what can we celebrate this Independence Day, when the work of our founding is far from complete? We can celebrate that since the founding of our nation, America is always being refounded, and with a generation of millennials and Gen Z overwhelmingly committed to improvement we have a lot of founders on the job.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.