You might remember that when Trump first entered office for his second term —— “I, Donald John Trump …” He was speaking quite a bit about a certain 25th president of the United States, William McKinley. William McKinley was elected in 1896 and served from 1897 to 1901. And when Trump first brought up McKinley, it was often in the context of tariffs. “McKinley, he was the tariff king.” This is an age where there isn’t an income tax, and where much of the American government’s revenue comes from tariffs. “Tariff. It’s more beautiful than love.” But there is another aspect to the McKinley administration beyond the fact that McKinley presided over rampant income inequality and the domination of American government by the superwealthy and corporate interests, which sounds familiar to me. Now, the other thing that distinguished the McKinley era was imperial expansion. William McKinley led the United States in war against Spain. He sent thousands to the Philippines and set the stage for a decades-long occupation of the Philippines by the United States. McKinley annexed Puerto Rico and Guam, again, part of the Spanish-American War, and he pursued the annexation of the Republic of Hawaii to benefit, in part, American business interests. “Over a million tons of sugar a year. Most of it is sent to the mainland.” In any case, you can clearly see in McKinley’s project of imperial expansion inspiration for Donald Trump, who has himself begun a project of 19th-century-style imperial expansion. Hence the saber rattling around Greenland. “All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.” The comments that Canada might become the 51st state. “Oh, Canada. The national anthem, keep it. But it’ll be for the state, one of our greatest states.” The operation in Venezuela, which is intended to create an American client state. Even the Iran war, which the president expected to end quite quickly with an American client being put in power, fits this model. And more recently, Trump has been speaking about going after Cuba —— “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah.” The best way, maybe, to understand Trump’s thinking is he has never escaped the confines of a game of Risk. And in Risk, it’s true: The more territory you have, the better you’re doing. And so if the whole world is a big game of Risk to the president, then yes, for him, what’s relevant about the McKinley example is that it is brute force imperialism. The notion that there might be other ways of extending American power, that there might be other ways of creating American prosperity, do not compute to him. The irony, of course, is that this saber rattling, this aggression, this desire for imperial acquisition, these wars, have left the U.S. in the weakest position it has been probably since the end of World War II. It’s been utterly destructive to American national interests. But I’m not sure the president sees any of this. I think the president imagines that he is playing a big board game, and that the more he takes, the more he wins.
