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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

The Historical Roots of Donald Trump’s Aggressive Nationalism

The Historical Roots of Donald Trump’s Aggressive Nationalism

“What the President’s confrontations with Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Colombia suggest about his expansionist vision.

President Donald Trump

Source photograph by Leah Millis / Reuters

Five days before his Inauguration, Donald Trump had a tense phone call with the Prime Minister of Denmark and made clear that he wanted to take possession of the self-governing Danish island of Greenland. In his Inauguration speech, Trump declared, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” Meanwhile, he’s said repeatedly that he intends to take back control of the Panama Canal, and that Canada should become a U.S. state. Over the weekend, he announced tariffs and sanctions on Colombia after the close American ally said that it would not accept American planes full of deported migrants. (The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, backed down on Sunday night, agreeing to accept the planes.)

Often considered an inward-looking nationalist or even isolationist in his first term, Trump has been sounding these notes of aggression and expansion quite a bit lately. It’s still too early to decipher exactly what Trump intends for his second term, but his increasingly militaristic comments have concerned foreign allies and led to questions about what the next four years could look like in terms of how America exerts power abroad.

This reminds me of George W. Bush in some ways, but not at all of Trump. When you were explaining Trump’s vision earlier, there were ways in which I thought of Bush, but really it’s very distinct, certainly in the rhetoric.

Yeah, I think that’s right. Bush was very careful, despite lapsing occasionally into cowboy talk, of presenting his vision of a global war on terror as an advancement of liberal values, or universal values, and this, I think, was the neoconservative project in full, and I think that that’s why you see so many of the Never Trumpers come out of that movement.

Trump is fusing this use of American power, which the neoconservatives and George W. Bush had no qualms about, to a much more aggressive vision of national interest. You can say what you want about the old liberal order; it at least rested on the presumption that the starting point of diplomacy was that nations had mutual interest, and that coöperation was the way to proceed. Trump is saying the exact opposite. Trump is saying that the international order rests on dominance, on asserting one’s national interests. It’s an older vision of international relations. I think it’s a dangerous vision.

I agree. But does he have a conception of the national interest beyond lining his own pockets?

I agree that it’s likely, on one level, a complete grab bag. Somebody used the image of a plane of drunk billionaires flying into Las Vegas. That’s the Inauguration. Everybody’s getting ready to just grab what they can. The Trump coin, the Melania coin. It’s hard to process everything that’s happening. I think Trump is venal. I think that he is obviously out to enrich himself, and his family. In some ways, it is a vision of a kind of patriarchal capitalism which has now triumphed, and in which Trump is the paterfamilias and the family is the nation.

On the other hand, though, I have to say, if you go back—Trump has a Times op-ed on why he left the Reform Party, in 2000. It’s actually a quite sane op-ed. He has been consistently anti-free trade since the beginning, and he’ll always get that in. He’ll always be, like, Well, Reagan was a great President. I didn’t like some of his trade treaties.“

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