The second Trump term is not like the first, or if it is it’s an augmented version. The oldest US president to take office – at 78 years old – intends to redraw America’s borders. He asserted in the speech following his swearing-in on Monday, January 20, that, under his aegis, his country will consider itself “once again” as a nation that expands our “territory.” The phrase is as polarizing as it is polysemous and represents a clean break with the Republican’s first term in office.
As during the campaign that paved the way for his incredible return to power, Trump stuck to a static definition of the border. It was almost reduced to the “wall” he intended to erect over the 3,000 kilometers running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, and which Mexico, he claimed, would finance.
His aim was then to protect his country from “drug dealers, criminals and rapists” (2015) who were “poisoning the blood of our country” (2023), as well as from globalization, which had turned to benefit rival China. His trade protectionism was part of the same project of a fortress America, as was his criticism of the alliances set up after the Second World War, which he felt could at any moment drag the United States into military adventurism beyond its borders.
Trump didn’t shy away from this defensive obsession in the early hours of his inauguration, announcing the introduction, on February 1, of the first taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico. He also wants to revisit the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, in order to deprive the children of undocumented migrants born on American soil of their American nationality.
But he seems to believe that the time has come to complement this posturing with an expansionist policy that will not be merely lexical and limited to the rather derisory desire to rename the Gulf of Mexico after America. Hence the return of the “manifest destiny” that supposedly belongs to the US and the mythologized narrative of the conquest of the West, supposedly empty of any native population. Trump intends to underline this by stripping the highest point in the US of its ancestral name, Denali, reinstated by Barack Obama. Trump will return the Alaska mountain to the name of the 25th American president, William McKinley.
You have 57.26% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
This post was originally published on here
