‘We, the people,’ the three words that open the US Constitution have shaped the identity of the United States of America, fuelling its myth as a land of freedom. But that ‘we’ has never applied to everyone: the federal states were founded on land stolen from the Native Americans, on the forced labour of enslaved Africans, and on rights reserved almost exclusively for white people. With journalistic rigour and historical sensitivity, Claudio Gatti recreates the birth of the nation that proclaimed itself a beacon of democracy, finally giving a voice to those who were excluded from it. Through documents and speeches that have made history, but also previously ignored testimonies from Native Americans and African Americans, the author intertwines the stories of the latter with those of the Founding Fathers, showing how slavery, racism, and violence were not mere contradictions, but pillars of the American experiment. These were triggers that, centuries later, would fuel a populist, armed, supremacist, and anti-statist culture: the one from which the MAGA movement draws its strength today and which appears increasingly attractive to the rest of the West.