The collective sense of identity in the US is founded on a mythic hero that has permeated American literature since the 19th century: the American Adam. Like the biblical Adam before the fall, he takes his destiny into his own hands in an innocent paradise - his own modern Eden, a new world given to America by God. He is a naïve “wild man”; an outsider, living free and independently without regard for convention or human laws. The American Adam is a symbolic mental representation which continues to be influential, today, finding its expression as guiding principle for the political leadership of the USA which must fulfill the unspoken expectation of preserving this myth of innocence and protecting the nation from confronting its historical offenses (such as the displacement of Native Americans, slavery, the Vietnam War). Most Americans are unable to forego this fantasy of innocence, as exemplified in the filming of the military biography of Vietnam veteran James Gordon “Bo” Gritz. In this respect, the election of Donald J. Trump as American President can be regarded as a response from reactionary America to his predecessor Barack Obama. The latter violated a taboo on March 18, 2008, by referring to the unresolved racial question with its roots in slavery, the nation's original sin. Trump embodies the bitterly ironic, clownesque variant of the Adam myth as brilliantly characterized by the American writer Herman Melville in his satire “The Confidence Man. His Masquerade”. Like Melville's dazzling Confidence Man, who knows and ruthlessly exploits the weaknesses of his fellow men, Trump entices his voters, today, to negate unpleasant aspects of their own history and in return blindly put their faith in him.