I daresay not a soul in a million who voted for Donald Trump last November did so because he or she wanted to buy Greenland, annex Canada, seize the Panama Canal, or “own” Gaza and displace 2 million human beings.
This expansionist frenzy isn’t America First: Trump’s land-and-people grab is to the historic political tendency of America First as murdering the adulterous lover whose inheritance you stole is to the Ten Commandments.
The utter perversion of America First by people who couldn’t even spit the phrase out a couple decades ago—“tainted” as it was by association with the antiwar tradition—astonishes. Once the term America First was denatured, market-tested, and approved, it was coopted by the usual Beltway grifters: people who sneered at Trump 10 years ago but slobber over him now.
So affixed are the lips of the sycophants to Trump’s ass that they won’t even mumble a discouraging word about such embarrassingly low-brow exercises as the “Gulf of America.” I’m not sure which clause of the Constitution grants the President toponymic powers, but we are learning Lesson #947 in Why the Anti-Federalists were Right.
I have never been afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I started keeping a file on him in 1987, when he made noises about running in the ’88 GOP primaries. His hobbyhorses then were much the same as they have been since he came down the escalator: high tariffs, industrial policy, burden-sharing by other NATO nations, and peace with Russia—or back then, the Soviet Union. Young Trump sounded like a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, albeit with a curious and welcome skepticism of war. The Republicans could have done—they did do—a lot worse choosing a candidate in 1988.
But I’m afraid Trump’s love of Bigness is doing him—and us—in.
“Thinking Big” inevitably means discounting or erasing the small. The Little Americas are this country’s soul and the wellspring of cultural vitality, but they count for nothing in a noncontiguous empire that would consummate the expansionist dreams of the post-Lincoln Republicans, led by Secretary of State William Seward, who sought to add Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, the Danish West Indies, and the Dominican Republic to a no longer modest republic. (Charles Sumner, among others, also wanted to absorb Canada.)
Trump’s faux State of the Union promised that “we are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science,” a bloviation that portends techno-geeks gone wild, as our rulers invade Mars while imposing on little ol’ Earth a sublunary dystopia of sex robots and driverless cars and an “America” that mocks geography—all of this to be enacted, it seems, by the magic wand of executive orders whose legitimacy our situational constitutionalists will sedulously ignore.
Of course Trump is dead right on a number of matters, from scrapping the neocon slush fund that is the National Endowment for Democracy to abolishing the Department of Education, but a centralizing mania is expunging federalism, grass-roots democracy, and local self-rule from the conservative catechism.
If the San Francisco Board of Education wishes to allow boys who pretend to be girls to compete against real girls in track or swimming, what possible business is that of politicians in Washington, D.C.?
I know: the Democrats have become the party of war, censorship, and hectoring nags. But if we are to be ruled henceforth by presidential edict, can someone please ask President Trump to:
- Restore Pluto to planethood. Trump prizes Bigness and Pluto committed the planetary sin of Smallness, but before its demotion to the status of “dwarf planet” Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American: the diligent astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff—in the swing state of Arizona!
- Ban driverless cars and pardon—or maybe present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to—the rambunctious youths who smash, trash, and burn these vehicular vanguards of a humanless future. The kids are ragged but they’re right.
- Save the penny. Mr. Musk, the philoprogenitive godfather of our coming robot overlords, won’t like this (or the preceding diktat), but the humble and demotic penny, whether bearing Miss Liberty, an Indian head, or Abe Lincoln on its obverse, is as American as Johnny Appleseed, Dorothy Day, and lemonade stands.
- Resign. A forlorn hope, I suppose, but if new stars are to be stitched onto Old Glory, I’ll bet President Vance would rather catasterize Northern California, Upstate New York, and Southern Illinois than Canada, Greenland, and Gaza.
The whores—excuse me: sex workers—of Conservatism, Inc., who leapt with tick-like nimbleness from Iraq War cheerleaders to platitude-dispensers conceding the need to avoid “endless wars,” will rah-rah for expansion. But patriots must oppose this imperialist madness.
No man born with a living soul prefers Goliath to David.
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