The president-elect has made extraordinary statements recently about poaching land from other countries. It’s tempting to write them off, but we must take him seriously.
Graffiti on the sidewalk at the Trump International Hotel on December 23, 2024, in New York City.
(Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images)
A little over four years ago, I wrote a political obituary of Donald J. Trump. My fervent hope then was that I was penning the grand finale about the national trauma that Trump had imposed on the country for four years; I wanted, somehow, to write us out of the political darkness that Trump had embodied during his term, then to take a long shower to scrub off the accumulated filth of covering this heinous figure for four years and to move on to sunnier topics.
Alas, that dream was frightfully premature.
Here we are, in 2025, careening toward another go-round of chaos, dysfunction, sadism, corruption, and sycophancy. Except this time around we cannot even say that we, as a country, voted for all of this in a fit of absence of mind. We cannot claim that we didn’t know the full foulness of what Trump and Trumpism represent. We cannot plead ignorance to the pseudo-fascist catechism of the MAGA movement. Nor can we take solace in the fact that Trump got elected without winning the popular vote—since in 2024 he not only won the Electoral College vote but also won a plurality (and not-quite-but-almost a majority) of all the votes cast. This is, in other words, exactly what America now is.
Nearly half of voters in this country were willing to make a bargain with the political devil in exchange for a promise of lower egg prices at the supermarket and gas prices at the pump—and in exchange for permission to give their ids free rein to gang up on marginalized “others,” be they asylum seekers or trans youth. Their votes will now unleash the attack dogs in our culture.
But give the man his due. It’s hard to imagine how the next four years will be boring. Hell, we’re still more than two weeks out from Inauguration Day and the stock market has already become one giant roller-coaster ride. The various inchoate wings of the MAGA movement are in open warfare with one another over immigration policy and exactly how much xenophobia is too much. Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have been indulging in the X equivalent of an illegal cockfight—you know you’re through the looking glass when Musk, who recently endorsed Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, comes off as the voice of moderation in a debate on immigration policy. And bird flu is threatening to make the leap into the human population just when the conspiracy-mongering anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. is poised to take control over the Department of Health and Human Services.
And none of that even touches on Trump’s extraordinary proposals to upend the international order. Over the past few weeks, as he hovered in the wings to take power once more, Trump has signaled his foreign policy priorities, anchored around a string of threats to unilaterally impose 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 utterly extraordinary musings about poaching land from other countries—the Panama Canal from Panama, Greenland from Denmark, and Canada from… Canada.
CNN labeled these plans as just an audacious geopolitical strategy akin to that which led to the Louisiana Purchase and the buying of Alaska from imperial Russia. It seems to me that in fact this is more about two German words beloved by the Nazis: Lebensraum and Anschluss. The former expressed the Nazi itch to expand eastward into lands lived in by people whom their racial theorists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, identified as being of a lower order 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 rump Austrian state into the Third Reich in March 1938.
When Trump talks about seizing land in Panama, or appropriating Greenland and all its vast mineral resources without considering the will of the indigenous population that lives there, that 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 needles Canadian leader Justin Trudeau by referring to him in social media posts as “Governor Trudeau” and speculates about absorbing Canada into the US as its 51st state, he is positing an Anschluss philosophy of Manifest Destiny updated for the 21st century; a worldview that believes all of wealthy North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, is, inherently, destined to fall under the governance of Washington, DC.
The temptation is to dismiss all of this as just the usual ugly trolling strategy of Donald J. Trump. And it’s certainly possible that that’s all it is. After all, in the 21st century, nobody in their right mind would possibly turn on an erstwhile friend and neighbor by seizing their land… Would they, Putin?
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But it’s also possible that Trump 2.0 is far more committed to an extreme political philosophy than was Trump 1.0. It is possible that this time around, drunk on his own power and belief in destiny, as well as his sense of political invulnerability, the near-octogenarian Trump will, as Putin did before him, allow his fascist instincts unfettered expression. After all, Trump has survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and two apparent assassination attempts, not to mention the fact that he was rewarded for his serial misbehavior by a Supreme Court ruling granting him virtual impunity and by a stunning election victory this past November. For a man of Trump’s already vast narcissism and ego, such a string of good fortune can only come off as something akin to divine intervention. Indeed, he has explicitly suggested that God has saved him so that he can save a “broken country.”
If that is the case, I suspect we will see it play out not only domestically—with a full-frontal assault on the media and on academic freedoms, with political prosecutions and show trials, and a willingness to deploy the National Guard, and perhaps the US military, against protesters and against immigrants—but also fairly quickly in the international arena.
Trump and his allies like to portray “America First” politics as the practice of peace-through-strength, of a United States concerned only with the well-being of its own citizens. In fact, what this gang of hoodlums is proposing is an America that uses, or threatens to use, brute military and economic force not only against established enemies but also, at least as importantly, against erstwhile friends. It is a might-is-right philosophy that views the world entirely in zero-sum terms, judging that what benefits the United States must, almost of necessity, hurt others; and, conversely, that what benefits others must, somehow, be seen as an intolerable rip-off of the good ole US of A.
Given such a calculus, why would Trump, who will soon control the most powerful military on earth, not bully allies to cede territory to him? Why would he not threaten to walk away from alliances unless allies pay to play? Why would he not grab key infrastructure assets, such as the Panama Canal, or at the very least coerce the governments who own those assets to make huge economic concessions, in order to maintain their sovereign integrity?
I desperately hope that I’m wrong, and that Trump turns out to be more the troll than the tyrant. But, frankly, I’m not seeing too many signs of a cool, calm, and collected governing strategy emerging in this bizarre interregnum. What I am seeing, hiding in plain sight, is the erratic, perhaps senescent, nature of the would-be strongman, paraded on full, rancid, display before a global audience.
