Opinion

Trump’s inauguration address tapped into America’s violent history of expansionism

US president invoked manifest destiny and frontier mythology behind which lurk native soil genocide and the use of force to acquire land

Trump speech word cloud
The US's frontier myth hides a dark history of the bloody dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. It hides the wars of expansion that made the US territory what it is today. Image: Irish Times Premedia
Daniel Geary
Tue Jan 21 2025 - 17:39

The most revealing part of Trump’s first day in office may be not what he did but what he said. Most of the executive orders he signed, while significant, had long been expected: the pardoning of nearly all those convicted for their roles in the January 6th insurrection; stepping up deportation of undocumented immigrants; and deploying the military to prevent the entry of further migrants across the Mexican border. Many of these measures – such as revocation of birthright citizenship – are constitutionally dubious and will be delayed or overturned by the courts.

Trump’s inaugural address, on the other hand, was surprisingly coherent. He kept to a script. And he accomplished something he had never done before: placing his presidency within the sweep of American history. America’s history of expansion across the frontier, he claimed, once made the United States great. And reclaiming that legacy – by, for example, retaking the Panama Canal – can make it great again. In this historical vision may lie the key to his future approach to world affairs.

Trump clearly articulated what historian Richard Slotkin has called “the myth of the Frontier,” which has long been central to American identity. “The spirit of the frontier,” Trump said, “is written into our hearts.”

Trump has become the first president in a long time to threaten violence as a means of US territorial expansion

“Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness,” he asserted. Such passages gave his inaugural a decidedly more optimistic tone than his 2017 “American Carnage” address. Indeed, they helped Trump appear more presidential than ever before. He placed himself in a tradition from JFK to Reagan of claiming the settlement of the frontier as the embodiment of American dynamism.

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The frontier myth, however, hides a dark history of the bloody dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. It hides the wars of expansion that made the US territory what it is today, such as the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 in which the US grabbed half of Mexico’s territory. Greater knowledge of this history – that the American frontier was not peacefully settled but violently conquered – has made American presidents in the years since Reagan reluctant to claim it. But Trump is determined to turn back the clock on that reckoning with American history. In his speech, he promised to “change very quickly” the American “education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves, in many cases to hate our country”. Trump promises to ratchet up the so-called “war on woke” already begun by Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis.

Trump’s sanitised version of American expansionism – “pushing across” an “untamed wilderness” – only thinly veils his own dark agenda. His open calls for territorial expansion – for example, by taking Greenland – echo those of 19th-century American politicians who believed the country’s expansion was its “manifest destiny”. In his inaugural, Trump promised to “take back” the Panama Canal from Panama by force if necessary. While his ultimate endgame may be only to win a better deal for American ships passing through the canal – and a worse deal for rival Chinese ships – Trump has become the first president in a long time to threaten violence as a means of territorial expansion.

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But such threats would have been commonplace among 19th-century American leaders. Indeed, Trump is oddly obsessed with President William McKinley, promising in his inaugural to revert the name of Alaska’s Mount Denali to Mount McKinley (after Obama changed the name during his administration). Though Trump praised McKinley in his inaugural for his tariffs and his role in building the Panama Canal, McKinley is best known for fighting the expansionist Spanish-American War of 1898 which saw the US acquire the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

Trump has also claimed another disturbing feature of the American conquest of the West: its despoiling of the natural environment for the creation of private wealth. He promised to fully exploit the “liquid gold” of the “largest amount of oil and gas on Earth”. Unsurprisingly, he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords. With the support of the fossil fuel industry, he will accelerate the disastrous warming of the planet that has led to the wildfires that have burned so much of Los Angeles. His central contribution toward the world’s failure to deal with the reality of the climate emergency may ultimately be his biggest legacy.

Trump’s vision of American history also informs his draconian approach to migrants. For him, America belongs to the people who conquered it. He promised to halt the “invasion of our country” across the Mexican border (into parts of the US that were once part of Mexico). Here, he implied that allowing large numbers to recapture that territory via migration would be akin to reversing the settlement of the American Frontier that had defined the nation’s greatness.

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Trump’s reclaiming of the history of American expansionism helps to characterise his stance toward the rest of the world. His outlook has wrongly been labelled “isolationist” because Trump has promised to disentangle the US from conflicts in other parts of the world.

For sure, Trump helped effect what Biden could not: a ceasefire in Gaza. And he will open negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. But he is not the “peacemaker” that he promised to be in his inaugural address. He undermined that claim with his embrace of the violent conquest of the American frontier and with his threat to retake the Panama Canal. Trump is no isolationist but an America Firster who embraces the naked use of power to achieve what he sees as its national interests. Unlike his predecessors, he will not even give lip service to human rights or international law. And for Trump, the threat of violence is never far below the surface.