The recently elected president made extraordinary statements about poaching from other countries. We want to write them off, but we have to take it seriously.
Graffiti on the sidewalk at the Trump International Hotel on December 23, 2024. in New York.
(Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
A little over four years ago, I wrote a political obituary Donald J. Trump. My fervent hope then was that I was writing a grand finale about the national trauma that Trump had been inflicting on the country for four years; I wanted to somehow lead us out of the political darkness that Trump has embodied during his term, then take a long shower to wash away the dirt accumulated during four years of covering this hideous figure, and move on to sunnier topics.
Unfortunately, this dream was very premature.
Here we are, in 2025, approaching another round of chaos, dysfunction, sadism, corruption and sycophancy. Except this time you can’t even say we as a country voted for all of this in a fit of insanity. We can’t claim that we didn’t know the full ugliness of what Trump and Trumpism are. We cannot plead ignorance of the pseudo-fascist catechism of the MAGA movement. Nor can we take solace in the fact that Trump was elected without winning the popular vote — because in 2024, he not only won the Electoral College vote, but he won a majority (and not quite, but almost a majority) of the popular vote. to cast This, in other words, is exactly what America is now.
Almost half of the voters in this country were willing to make a deal with the political devil in exchange for a promise to lower the price of eggs at the supermarket and the price of gas at the gas station – and in exchange for allowing their IDs to rally around marginalized “others”, let it would be asylum seekers or trans youth. Their voices will now unleash the attack dogs in our culture.
But give the man his due. It’s hard to imagine how boring the next four years will be. Heck, Inauguration Day is more than two weeks away, and the stock market has already become one giant roller coaster ride. Various fledgling wings of the MAGA movement are at open war with each other over immigration policy and how much xenophobia is too much. Elon Musk and Laura Loomer indulged in the X equivalent of an illegal cockfight – you know you’re in the mirror when Musk, who recently supported Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD partystands as a voice of moderation in the immigration policy debate. I bird flu threatens to make a leap into the human population just as the anti-vaxxer and pro-conspiracy RFK Jr. is poised to take control of the Department of Health and Human Services.
And none of this even touches on Trump’s extraordinary proposals to change the international order. In the past few weeks, as he hovers in the wings to retake power, Trump has revealed his foreign policy priorities based on a series of threats unilaterally introduces tariff regimes not only against geopolitical rivals such as China, but also against close allies of the United States, as well as a series of highly unusual reflections on poaching land from other countries— The Panama Canal from Panama, Greenland from Denmark and Canada from… Canada.
CNN reported the plans as simply an audacious geopolitical strategy similar to the one that led to the Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska Purchase from Imperial Russia. It seems to me that it is actually more about two favorite German words of the Nazis: Habitat and Connection. The first expressed the desire of the Nazis to expand eastward into lands inhabited by people whom their racial theorists, such as Alfred Rosenbergidentified as representatives of a lower level of humanity than were the Aryan Germans. The latter expressed the idea of uniting all ethnic Germans into a single political unit, an idea that reached maturity with the absorption of the rest of the Austrian state into the Third Reich in March 1938.
When Trump talks about grabbing land in Panama or appropriating Greenland and all its vast mineral resources without taking into account the will of the indigenous people who live there, it is an updated version of the European colonial project of the 19th century and the fascist colonial project of the 1930s and 40s. When Trump Deliberately Knocks Canadian Leader Justin Trudeau By Calling Him On Social Media “Governor Trudeau” and is considering Canada joining the US as the 51st state, he believes Connection the philosophy of Manifest Destiny, updated for the 21st century; a worldview that believes that all of rich North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, is inherently destined to fall under the rule of Washington, DC.
It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as the usual ugly trolling strategy of Donald J. Trump. And it is certainly possible that this is all. After all, in the 21st century, no one in their right mind will pounce on a former friend and neighbor, seizing his land… Really, Putin?
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But it’s also possible that Trump 2.0 is far more committed to an extreme political philosophy than Trump 1.0. It is quite possible that this time, intoxicated by his own power and faith in fate, as well as a sense of political invulnerability, the almost eight-year-old Trump, as Putin did before him, will allow his fascist instincts to manifest unhindered. After all, Trump has survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and two apparent assassination attempts, not to mention being rewarded for his serial misconduct with a Supreme Court ruling that found him with virtual impunity, and a stunning victory in the elections last November. For a man with Trump’s already massive narcissism and ego, such a string of good fortune can only be seen as something akin to divine intervention. Indeed, he has clearly suggested that God saved him so that he could save a “broken country.”
If so, I suspect we’ll see it unfold more than domestically—with a full-frontal assault on media and academic freedoms, political persecution and show trials, and a willingness to deploy the National Guard and possibly the US military. , against protesters and against immigrants, but also quite quickly on the international stage.
Trump and his allies like to portray the “America First” policy as a practice of peace through strength, where the United States only cares about the well-being of its own citizens. In fact, this gang of hooligans offers an America that uses or threatens to use brute military and economic power not only against established enemies, but also, just as importantly, against former friends. It is a “might is right” philosophy that views the world entirely from a zero-sum perspective, assuming that what benefits the United States must, almost by necessity, hurt others; and conversely, that which benefits others must somehow be seen as an intolerable robbery of the good old US of A.
Given these calculations, why would Trump, who will soon lead the most powerful military on earth, no bully allies to give him territory? Why would he? no threaten to pull out of alliances if allies don’t pay for the game? Why would he? no seize key infrastructure facilities such as the Panama Canal, or at least force the governments that own these facilities to make huge economic concessions to preserve their sovereign integrity?
I desperately hope I’m wrong and that Trump turns out to be more of a troll than a tyrant. But to be honest, I don’t see too many signs of a cool, calm and collected management strategy emerging in this strange interregnum. What I see hiding in plain sight is the unstable, perhaps aging, character of a potential strongman on full, rancid, display to a global audience.
