A Colorado high school student is among the national list of honorees for C-SPAN’s 2025 StudentCam short film competition. Lily Mauro, a 11th grade student at Vista Peak Prep School in Aurora, earned an honorable mention for her film, “My Message To The President: A Story of Unity and Advocacy,” which tackles complicated cultural divides during the onset of a second Trump presidency.
“What does it mean to ‘Make America Great Again?’ Is greatness an equal opportunity concept or something that will ultimately require more sacrifice from some than others? Or, if our past carried so much disparity, what is left to return to?” Mauro asks in the film.
The film plays a clip from a speech by Trump, in which he says, “It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us.”
But, as Mauro says in the film, “Unity is often easier to preach than practice.” In Trump’s case, his call for unity has seemed, to many, less like a call to find common ground and more like a demand to get behind his agenda or get out of the way.
“To the President, I say, allow us to continue to build our American together instead of ripping us apart at the mercy of the economy and the expense of our lives,” Mauro says. (Mauro’s artistic vision cannot be fully conveyed over text, as her sections have the cadence of spoken-word poetry, so I recommend watching the full video.)
During the film, Mauro interviews multiple local leaders to ask them for their thoughts on moving forward as a community in the time of Trump, and how the president could, if he wanted to, work to strengthen those bonds rather than cause more divisions.
“When there’s no faith in the system, the rule of law doesn’t exist. The people chose President-Elect Donald Trump for a second term,” says Don J. Toussaint, Judicial Court Judge for the 18th Judicial District, which covers Arapahoe County.
Isaiah Powers, who is the Student Body President at Vista Peak Prep, echoed the sentiment about Americans losing faith in their government.
“I think that in order to create trust between American citizens and the government, there needs to be some type of accountability holding true to what they say they’re going to do,” he says.
“If I could relay a message to our next leaders that are coming in, really relay the message of uniting a community to come together to listen, and hear each other’s stories,” says Mehran Ahmed, Principal of Vista Peak Prep.
In his segment, Ahmed posits that people can find common ground not just through similarities, but through understanding the value of different experiences and perspectives from their own.
“Sometimes we always think about how our similarities bring us together, but at the same time if we could really think about our differences bringing us together that can lead to some good conversations for how we want to live our life in our community.”
Keithen Holiday, CEO of Seb’s Recreation Center, which serves aging and disabled people in Aurora, referenced cuts to assistance programs by the Trump administration. While such benefits may seem abstract to those who don’t need them, he advised empathy towards those who do.
“If you live long enough you will end up elderly and could possibly be disabled. And some of the services they are thinking about or trying to cut, we need,” Holiday says. “Just because you’re not in that predicament now doesn’t mean a family member or yourself won’t be in that predicament.”
Mauro concludes by expanding the message of the film not just to the president, but to everyone. Statistics over the past several years have shown that while much of the U.S. population remains politically moderate, partisan polarization has only increased.
“This address isn’t just for our incoming president, it’s for our community. A reminder that in a time when sides are chosen, we find ourselves in the same cities, surrounded by the same people. People that we need and people that need us,” Mauro says.
