‘America was never great’: Woman’s hat prompts death threats from Trump posse

American exceptionalists got riled up this week after a young Home Depot employee wearing an “America was never great” hat became the target of death threats and racist attacks by Trump supporters.

Krystal Lake, 22, wore her new custom-made cap to work in a Staten Island last Sunday when a customer violated her privacy and posted his photo of her online.

Those Trump supporters who are privileged enough to have Sunday off had plenty of time to send her death threats and rage on the internet.

Lake, a Sanders supporter, bought the hat after being inspired by Trump’s own hat emblazoned with his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

“The message that other people are trying to send out is that, America’s this wonderful place, like nothing bad ever happened in the world, but it never was great so I feel like it was a lie, so I wanted to show people that, no, it never was great,” she told Staten Island Advance.

Lake received a torrent of abuse online, including death threats.

“I’ve been getting the N-word left and right,” she said.

“You need to go back to Africa, America was great when people like you weren’t here” was another popular outburst by an irate Trump fan.

Lake called in sick to work Thursday, and although a manager called her to check on her, she expects she may be fired, the New York Times reports.

Trump supporters encouraged others to call Home Depot to complain and some called for a boycott using sexist and racist slurs.

While it sucks to lose a job, she might be better off given Home Depot’s notorious record on worker safety and union busting.

A 2011 leaked video revealed how the company discourages employees from joining unions.

One of its co-founders, Bernard Marcus, opposed both the Employee Free Choice Act, which he called “the demise of civilization,” and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He also said retailers that do not support Republican senators “should be shot” and “thrown out of their goddamn jobs.”

Lake says other employees have worn pro-Trump t-shirts and badges without comment. 

"For the past two months, there have been a few people I work with wearing 'Vote for Trump' pins on their uniforms," she said. "But no one ever says anything to them."

Explaining what she doesn’t like about Trump – and why America isn’t “great” for everyone, Lake said, “If you’re not the race that he would want, or whether it’s sexual preference, if you have any disabilities, your financial status, race, everything, all of that combined, or even if you don’t think like him, he will automatically write you off.”

Lake insisted she just wanted the country to be better, “and having Trump as a president definitely wouldn’t make America better.”

A number of people expressed their support for Lake.

Five reasons why some Americans think their country was never that great

1) WAR CRIMES

Under Obama’s presidency alone, the US has bombed seven countries and killed hundreds of people including children.

Since World War II, the US has intervened in more than 20 different conflicts, including Korea, East Timor, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, & the Philippines. One estimate puts the total number of people killed by the US military since World War II at 20-30 million.

2) HEALTHCARE

In the words of Bernie Sanders: “Every other major country on earth guarantees health care to all people as a right, and they do it more cost effectively than we do.”

Instead, the US allows thousands of uninsured Americans die every year, as many as 45,000 based on a 2009 Harvard study, and there were still 28.6 million uninsured Americans in 2015, even after the “universal” Obamacare system was put in place.

3) SLAVERY

The US enslaved those of African descent for almost a century before it was abolished by Congress in 1865. 

Today, their descendants are still trapped in a cycle of poverty predicated by mass incarceration and the “new Jim Crow", and there are now more Black men in prison than were enslaved in 1850, according to Michelle Alexander.

4) GENOCIDE

From germ warfare to bloody battles, European refugees and migrants who invaded North America wiped most of the indigenous population.

READ MORE: Dying Native American languages set for funding boost from US Senate

Those who survived were moved to inhospitable patches of land called “reservations”.

5) NUCLEAR ATTACK

The US remains the only nations to launch attacks with nuclear weapons, killing up to a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians, by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day, America has yet to apologize.