An earlier version of this article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Friday mornings here.
Hello, friends.
The big idea
Trump’s manifest destiny
In his inaugural address last month, President Donald Trump laid out his plan for the “golden age of America.”
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation,” he said, one that “expands our territory” and “carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
It soon became clear that Trump was speaking literally. Since taking office, Trump has flirted with annexing Canada and Greenland. He has suggested retaking control of the Panama Canal. And this week, he laid out his plan to move Palestinians out of Gaza and rebuild the region.
It appears Trump’s evocation of “manifest destiny” in his inaugural was intentional — and signaled Trump’s intentions to expand U.S. borders.
But why would this appeal to Trump? Annexing Canada would grant access to key minerals and provide the U.S. with more strategic geography vis-a-vis Russia; it would also be political suicide for Trump’s party, according to an analysis by Politico. Controlling the Panama Canal could push back on Chinese influence in the region; it could also torpedo relationships in the region and violate international law.
Trump is no ideologue, at least not like the 19th-century proponents of American manifest destiny: He doesn’t see America as a beacon on a hill, as having a divine mandate to spread across the continent.
“Trump’s a very practical person,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, told me last month. “He’s not an ideological person. He looks at results.”
The results, in this case, are an expanded real estate portfolio. To Trump, property is power. He once described his own portfolio as “the Mona Lisa of properties”; now, it appears he views the country’s territorial expansion in the same light.
“The real legacy is you have expanded the United States,” one person briefed on Trump’s Greenland negotiations told Reuters. “Literally in 70 years we haven’t added one piece of real estate to the portfolio. He talks about it a lot.”
Publicly, this is the language Trump has used to discuss complex and improbable arrangements. In 2019, when Trump first flirted with purchasing Greenland, he said it was “essentially a large real estate deal.” The war-torn Gaza region, he said this week, is a “big real estate site” and that the U.S. “would view it as a real estate transaction. We will be an investor in this part of the world.”
In a show of branding, Trump slapped the name of the U.S. on the Gulf of Mexico, declaring it “the Gulf of America” — and barred The Associated Press from access to the Oval Office when the publication refused to update its style guide accordingly.
The urge to expand America’s real estate seems to be the most likely reason for Trump’s flirtations. Yes, the U.S. could benefit from Greenland’s minerals and strategic location, but far more effective than purchasing the island would be engaging it in “strategic cooperation,” one Bloomberg columnist wrote. Yes, annexing Canada would likewise grant access to rich natural resources, but so could a healthy trade relationship, as the countries shared up until two weeks ago.
Even if Trump views these as a massive game of Monopoly, the other players do not. “Trump might have looked at Greenland as a real estate deal, but for Denmark and Greenland, it’s a matter of geopolitical survival,” Tom Høyemm, Denmark’s minister to Greenland from 1982 to 1987, told ABC News.
3 things to know
- Trump’s Cabinet is taking shape, with little opposition from Republicans. Two nominees widely seen as the most unlikely to be confirmed both made it through the Senate this week: Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.
- As Elon Musk takes a buzzsaw to federal government programs from USAID to the Treasury, he is getting help from Congress. Utah Sen. Mike Lee introduced a bill Thursday that would allow the president to unilaterally decrease the size of the federal government and eliminate programs he deems wasteful or unnecessary. Read more here.
- Tension between churches and Trump is growing. The pope penned a letter criticizing Trump’s deportation policies this week, and 27 religious organizations united to sue the Trump administration over its policy that allows immigration raids within houses of worship. Read more here.
Weekend reads
2028, anyone? The shuffling to be the Democratic heir has already begun. Kamala Harris is in the mix, of course, and so are a number of governors — Beshear, Whitmer, Newsom. The top choice on this list has to be Democrats’ biggest “what if” — as in, What if Harris never picked Tim Walz? The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028 (The Washington Post)
Immigration crackdown: Trump promised to go after illegal immigration. But he’s severely narrowed legal paths to immigrate, too, by shutting down the refugee system, ending parole programs and canceling appointments for asylum-seekers. A constitutional scholar breaks it down: Trump’s Cruel Assault on Legal Immigration (Reason)
What happens after the raids? In north Texas, after the largest ICE raid in history in 2006, a meatpacking plant attempted to raise its wages by 8% to lure new workers. U.S. citizens still refused. After the Raid (Texas Monthly)