The Axe and the Tree
“We Are All to Blame for the Attack on Iran.”
That was Esquire magazine this week. Ninety-two years of American journalism, and that was the best they had. The subline: “We elected, twice, a man with no conscience, no ethics, no empathy, and no concept of how to wield power.”
Who is the “we”?
When the country had the chance to stop this, nearly every group helped him win. Men went 55% for him. White voters, 55%. Hispanic voters split nearly even. Young voters split. The country looked at this man and called it a coin flip, a toss-up, close enough to go either way.
One group was not close. Eighty-six percent of Black voters voted against him. Not a coin flip. Not a split decision. A verdict. The only group in America that saw this man with near-unanimous clarity was the group that has been seeing men like him with near-unanimous clarity for four hundred years.
That verdict was not enough. He won. And now the house he built is cracking. Republican support for his policies has dropped from 67% to 56%. The share of his own voters who believe he acts ethically fell from 55% to 42%. Podcasters who built their audiences carrying his message are calling for impeachment. Media figures with millions of followers are posting that he lied to his voters and backstabbed his country. One of the most listened-to voices in America told a guest on air that the whole movement is divided now, that one of the things they voted for was no war, and now they are in one.
The people who built this are watching it collapse. And the headline says “we.”
There is no “we.” There is the axe and there is the tree.
The Axe Discovers What It Cut
On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury. Six American soldiers dead in Kuwait. One hundred forty-eight girls killed in a school airstrike in Minab. Skies across the Gulf are empty. The State Department told Americans to leave the Middle East immediately, on commercial flights that no longer exist. A retired general stranded in the UAE told a reporter he feels abandoned. The British government is evacuating its citizens. America told its people to figure it out.
He tells it like it is. He will shake things up. At least he is not her. The photos with Epstein, the lawsuits, the accusations -- all public, all before the vote. They voted anyway. Then the files came out. His name 38,000 times in the redacted version. Over a million in the unredacted files his own DOJ tried to hide. Six soldiers and 148 schoolgirls later, here we are.
By Sunday the fracture was public. Conservative commentators who spent years telling their audiences to trust this man were reversing on camera. One who had warned a year ago that if this president launched a war in Iran he would apologize for the rest of his life went on air and made good. Another, with millions of followers, called it the biggest fall from grace he had ever seen. Another said the movement was splitting in real time.
The language everywhere was the same. He lied. He betrayed us. This is not what we voted for.
As if the tree had not been saying so for years.
The Tree Remembers
There is a proverb that crosses continents and centuries. West African. Caribbean. The American South. The version changes. The truth does not.
The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.
The axe forgets because for the axe, the swing was just a moment. A vote. A hat. A flag on a bracket. A rally that felt like church. Forgetting costs the axe nothing. It was one choice among many. A vibe. A calculation. A gamble that seemed reasonable at the time.
The tree remembers because the tree was cut and kept the record. The scar is the wound and the evidence. It is how the tree knows what the axe does, because the tree watched it swing before anyone else admitted it was swinging.
The tree is the 86%. Black America. The ones who saw clearly and said so. Du Bois connected Jim Crow to European fascism in the 1930s, before the camps were built. Claudia Jones called it a fascist system and imperialist from a courtroom before they deported her. Frederick Douglass asked what the Fourth of July means to the enslaved in 1852.
Ida B. Wells documented lynching as state terror when the country still called it justice. Generation after generation, the truth about what this country was while everyone else recited the myth. The 86% is the product of four hundred years of clear sight, passed down, earned, refused, and proven right again. Acting on that sight has never been free. It has cost jobs and neighborhoods and lives, and it has changed nothing except the price of telling the truth in a country that does not want to hear it.
They watched every other group treat the most dangerous man in American politics like a coin flip -- 53% here, 55% there, split decision, toss-up -- and they voted against him at 86% because they recognized what centuries of record-keeping had taught them to recognize.
Now the axe posts apologies. He LIED to us. As if the tree had not been saying so the entire time. As if this were not exactly what the tree said would happen, in exactly the words the tree used, at exactly the volume the tree could manage before the axe told it to be quiet.
And the headline asks the tree to share the blame. “We are all to blame.” The tree never swung. The demand to share guilt is the axe swinging again. The innocence of “we” is itself another cut.
People would rather hand the wheel to someone who sounds certain than sit with the terror of deciding for themselves. That is the trade. You give up judgment for relief. It feels like freedom but it is the opposite. The thing about giving someone the wheel is you do not get to choose where he drives. They gave him the wheel. He drove to Iran. They want it back. It does not come back.
The axe does not look at what it did. It cannot afford to. The tree cannot afford not to.
The Scar
Two conversations are happening across every platform in this country.
The first is the sound of the axe discovering what it did. The language of shock, as if the man who lied about everything was not going to lie about this too. Apologies appearing where flags used to be. Posts deleted. Accounts scrubbed. The same mouths that said trust him now saying we were deceived, as if deception were something that happened to them and not something they chose to look past.
The second is quieter. The 86%. Not grieving. Unsurprised. The people who kept the record, who told the truth about the founding, who warned about this man in the same voice they have used to warn about this country since before it called itself a country. Watching people arrive at conclusions they reached generations ago. The feeling is not vindication. Vindication would require that being right prevented something. It did not. Being right meant you saw the cut before it landed and could not stop the swing.
Now the headline says “we.” The axe wants the tree to hold the handle too. Share the guilt. Distribute the weight so nobody has to carry what they chose.
The axe forgets. It always does.
The tree remembers. It always will.
Who is the “we”?
Notes & Sources
The Esquire Headline & MAGA Fracture
Pierce, C. P. (2026, March 1). We are all to blame for the attack on Iran. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70564063/us-attacks-iran-trump/
ABC News. (2026, March 1). Trump’s Iran decision sparks backlash from Tucker Carlson and some MAGA supporters. https://abcnews.com/US/trumps-iran-decision-sparks-backlash-tucker-carlson-maga/story?id=130622270
Hodgetwins [@hodgetwins]. (2026, February 28). President Trump has completely LIED to his voters, backstabbed our country [Post]. X.
https://x.com/hodgetwins/status/2027776374522380352
Rogan, J. (Host). (2025, June 24). Bernie Sanders [Episode]. The Joe Rogan Experience. Reported in: New York Post. (2025, June 26). Joe Rogan says MAGA “very divided” over Trump strikes on Iran. https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-rogan-says-maga-very-161944839.html
Exit Polls & Voting Data
NBC News. (2024, November 5). National exit polls: Election 2024 results. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
Washington Post. (2024). Exit polls from the 2024 presidential election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/exit-polls-2024-election/
Pew Research Polling
Pew Research Center. (2026, January 29). Confidence in Trump dips, and fewer now say they support his policies and plans. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/01/29/confidence-in-trump-dips-and-fewer-now-say-they-support-his-policies-and-plans/
Operation Epic Fury & Casualties
Wikipedia contributors. (2026, March 3). 2026 Israeli-United States strikes on Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Israeli%E2%80%93United_States_strikes_on_Iran
NBC News. (2026, March 2). Live updates: Trump lays out Iran attack’s objectives; US casualties rise to 6. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/live-blog/live-updates-iran-war-israel-us-hezbollah-lebanon-khamenei-trump-rcna261259
CNN. (2026, February 28). February 28, 2026 — US-Israeli strikes on Iran. https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-attack-02-28-26-hnk-intl
Epstein Files
NPR. (2026, February 24). DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
Axios. (2026, February 10). Trump is in the unredacted Epstein files “more than a million times,” Raskin alleges. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/trump-epstein-files-jamie-raskin-unredacted
CNN. (2026, January 30). DOJ releases millions of pages of documents in Epstein investigation. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/epstein-files-release-doj-01-30-26
Historical References
The proverb “the axe forgets, but the tree remembers” is of African origin, widely attributed to multiple West African, Caribbean, and Southern traditions. Versions appear in Shona, Igbo, and Yoruba oral literature.
Whitman, J. Q. (2017). Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press.
Every word of this rings true. As a white woman who saw this coming, I wish I could argue, and say no, wait, I'm part of the tree too, but I can't. At best I can say I am the branch of some other tree. The branch who got turned into the handle even though we never wanted to be.
Thank you.
My comment strays somewhat from the basis of your essay (which, as usual, is incisive and beautifully written)
People want to believe the person that tells them what they want to hear. For some - those who voted for him - it is the assurance that they will retain the comfort they enjoy. For the rest of us, it is the hope that this country will take proper care of all its people.
It is beyond belief to me that so many could vote for this disgusting, reprehensible, ignorant, misogynistic, bigoted criminal, with total disregard for the welfare of others.
I was shocked that ANY person of color (what were those 14% of blacks, and 50% of Latinos, even thinking?) could vote for him.
It reminds me of the wealthy Jews in Germany and Austria who supported Hitler. Apparently, because they were well to do, they thought that antisemitism did not apply to them, but only to ghetto Jews.