One of the more annoying conceits of the MAGA cult is its insistence that Donald Trump is some kind of religious figure dedicated to bringing world peace and mutual understanding among all of humankind. They insist that he’s been cheated out of his well-deserved Nobel Peace prize. That anyone could believe that about the most hostile, aggressively insulting, vengeance-seeking, demagogue this country has ever elected to high office is enough to make you wonder if there are hallucinogens in the water supply.
Setting aside his promises to wreak revenge on his political opponents and round up and deport mass numbers of people, including American children, there is the simple fact that his first term was not without war or death at the hands of the U.S. military, as he and his acolytes so often claim. Despite his promise to end the “forever war” in Afghanistan, it continued under his watch. It was left to President Biden to do the difficult task of ending it and take the heat that Trump was too cowardly to take. And naturally, Trump criticized him for it.
It appears that he has decided that American First means a return to American expansionism.
He bombed Syria, carried out assassinations of foreign leaders and massively escalated the drone war, simply removing all accountability and transparency and creating what the ACLU called “a presidents’ unchecked license to kill.” He pardoned war criminals (at the behest of the man he now wants to put in charge of the Department of Defense.) He exhorted the heads of the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security to shoot protesters and migrants. If this is a man of peace, the word has no meaning.
He’s also supposedly an isolationist in the old “America First” tradition. MAGA argues that there will be no more “interventionism” abroad under Trump. It’s none of our business what other countries do. If they decide to invade their neighbors and take their land, that’s their privilege. We have no stake in any kind of international order or stability. In fact, Trump proposes to build “a great Iron Dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before” to keep us safe from everyone else in the world. Experts told ABC News that “it’s unrealistic, unaffordable and unachievable.” It’s also unnecessary but I don’t think anyone will be surprised if Trump’s majordomo, Elon Musk, gets a fat government contract to attempt to make it happen.
However, let’s not fool ourselves that Trump is actually an isolationist. He never has been, at least in any coherent definition of the term. He generally prefers to use economic threats to bring the rest of the world to heel, but he is all about American dominance. And in his second term, it appears that he has decided that American First means a return to American expansionism.
It’s hard to say what inspired him to start threatening to seize other nations’ lands. Maybe he’s just feeling his oats and thinks he pretty much runs the world like a Roman Emperor now. Or perhaps he’s just watching his idol, Vladimir Putin, waging war against Ukraine and feels he should be able to do the same thing. Whatever the reason, Trump’s been on a tear in the last month threatening America’s neighbors (and some others) in increasingly hostile ways.
We knew that in the first term, Trump had mused about launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” He wanted to keep it on the QT back then, suggesting that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” and “no one would know it was us.” But since then he’s been openly calling for military action. But then virtually all the presidential candidates in the Republican primary were also slavering over the idea so it’s not just one of his rash ideas that nobody took seriously.
Florida Governor Ron Desantis said he would “do it on day one” when asked if he’d send troops over the border. The allegedly moderate former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley told Fox News that “when it comes to the cartels, we should treat them like the terrorists that they are. I would send special operations in there and eliminate them just like we eliminated ISIS.”
That “terrorist” designation is important because that would give the White House quasi-legal authority to send in special forces or possibly even an invasion force. That’s not off the table. Here is what Vice President-elect JD Vance said at the time:
“We need to declare the Mexican drug cartels a terrorist organization because that’s exactly what they are. It allows our military to go into Mexico, to go on our southern border, and actually do battle with them.”
Rolling Stone reported last month that members of the incoming administration have been actively brainstorming “how much” to “invade Mexico.”
Recently, Trump has decided that our neighbor to the north also looks mighty tempting. He’s been taunting the Canadians with the idea that they should be the 51st state because the U.S. is supposedly “subsidizing” them which is his definition of trade. (He thinks that anything America pays for Canadian goods is a subsidy regardless of what we get in return.) That hasn’t gone over very well among Canadians who know they are a sovereign country and are entitled to respect. So far, Trump hasn’t threatened them with military action but with the way he’s been talking, they probably shouldn’t assume it’s all just a big joke.
Over the weekend, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he intends to take back the Panama Canal, which was given by treaty to the Panamanians back in 1977 with a full hand-off finally completely 25 years ago. He lambasted the country for allegedly charging “exorbitant fees” (of course) and said that if they don’t change it he would “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.” When the president of Panama responded by saying, “the sovereignty and independence of our country aren’t negotiable” Trump posted “We’ll see about that!” and then later posted a picture of the canal with the words, “welcome to the United States canal.”
On Sunday night the once and future president announced yet another possible conquest. While announcing the nomination of his ambassador to Denmark, he threw in this bizarre statement:
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
You may recall it was reported that in his first term, Trump floated the idea of trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. He also believed that it could be bought from Denmark which was, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, an idea he got from billionaire Ronald Lauder. He obsessed about the idea for months, causing much concern among members of his Cabinet. When the Danish Prime Minister called the idea absurd, Trump had a temper tantrum and canceled a planned trip to the country. So this latest declaration may be yet another of his vendettas.
As one BlueSky commenter quipped, “threatening to invade and annex all our neighbors sure does cross off another item on the list for the ‘he’s not technically a proper fascist!’ folks.” At the very least it sure does look like “Donald the Dove,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd fatuously named him back in 2016, is looking to make American territorial expansion great again. That Nobel Peace Prize is right around the corner.
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