Why Trump turned to Manifest Destiny

President-elect Donald Trump is a week away from taking office, but his musings on forcing Canada to join the United States while acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal — refusing at one point to rule out the use of military force in those two specific cases — made for a surreal prologue to his second administration. It’s a fixation that has alarmed world leaders and put congressional Republicans in the awkward position of insisting the incoming president has no plans to storm the Arctic.

“The United States will not attack another country,” Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said on “Meet the Press” yesterday..” Trump, Lankford insisted, was simply making “bold” statements intended to “bring everyone to the table.”

Whether the words are a negotiating tactic or something more, the newly elected’s desire to expand his national footprint reflects an urge that has driven much of his career in public: to make everything he controls as big as possible.

In this sense, Trump’s talk of seizing control of Greenland and seizing Canada with “economic force” can be seen less as an articulation of a foreign policy goal than as an extension of an ethos that goes back to his single-minded efforts to expand his businesses through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s.

In tonight’s newsletter we will explain why.

Painting other people’s houses

The Prime Minister of Greenland says that the territory wants to work more closely with the United States on certain issues, but the Greenlanders, like the Panamanians, have not shown much interest in handing over their territory to the Americans.

However, as a businessman, Trump often paid little attention to the people who stood in the way of his desired expansions, even though they sometimes found ways to stop him.

In the early 1980s, while Trump was building a public reputation as a developer and trying to step out of his father’s shadow, he bought a 15-story building in Central Park South and planned to demolish it for a luxury skyscraper. project. His problem? People who already lived there.

Instead of buying them out, as was common at the time, the tenants claimed he wanted to evict them, skipping maintenance, serving eviction notices and inviting homeless people to move into some of the units.

“It was a long but successful battle,” he said later, although the tenants prevailed and he was forced to change his plans.

A few years later, Trump, wanting to improve the area around the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, ordered people who worked for him to go paint some houses that looked dilapidated near his property. He never asked permission to do it, he just did it.

One resident, James Corcione, told The New York Times at the time: “What gives him the right? He should have asked me.”

Trump essentially dismissed the idea that he should have asked first. “I wanted to make them beautiful,” he said.

Decades later, he posted a picture on social media of North America with Canada covered in the Stars and Stripes — painted like a house that needs painting in Atlantic City.

From “take the oil” to “Oh Canada”

Despite his claims to the contrary, Trump has been thwarted in some of his outreach efforts. Trump tried to force the widowed owner out of her home to make way for landscaping and parking at one of his casinos, but she won. He quickly expanded his casino empire by borrowing money at high interest rates – a move that later led to bankruptcy.

He saw the world as his attitude—an attitude now displayed again on a much larger stage. But instead of taking pictures of other people’s homes without their permission, Trump is essentially talking about a global land grab.

He has long demonstrated a rhetorical disregard for the norms of international sovereignty and diplomacy. As a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, he said the United States should simply “take over the oil” controlled by the Islamic State.

His fascination with Greenland dates back to his first term as president, when a special team assessed the prospects of leasing the Arctic territory, which is a semi-autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. That’s massive. It should be part of the United States,’ Trump told our colleague Peter Baker.

(On maps showing the Mercator projection, Greenland appears significantly larger than the United States; in reality, it is about one-fourth the size of the continental United States.)

His post showing Canada covered in stars and stripes came with a two-word caption: “Oh, Canada!”

In so many ways, things are flat and the same for Trump. Cleaning up local real estate is no different than declaring, as he did last week, that he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And he will be met with resistance, as he was in his casino days.

But pitching outrageous-sounding ideas and seeing how far he can take them has been his longtime modus operandi.

The mayor who said she will not travel abroad

Three years ago, Karen Bass, a former congresswoman who traveled the world representing the United States, told my colleague Shawn Hubler that if elected mayor of Los Angeles, she would give up those trips. Now a visit to Ghana that coincided with the outbreak of forest fires has brought Bass the first crisis of her tenure. Here’s more.

If elected mayor, Bass said, “the only places I would go would be DC, Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, over LA.”

But Bass traveled out of the country at the city’s expense at least four more times in the past few months before visiting Ghana — once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudio Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

Her broken promise to end foreign travel and her jam-packed international schedule since becoming mayor in December 2022 barely registered with the public before the wildfires, and voters in Los Angeles have embraced — and in some cases even welcomed — a mayoral identity of no only as municipal leaders but also as a global player in the style of Washington.

However, now her rivals attacked her because she was away when the fires broke out. Liberal supporters whose homes burned down became furious critics. An online petition demanding her immediate resignation has garnered more than 100,000 signatures. MAGA Republicans and their allies flooded social media, amplifying and exploiting the outrage.

— Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla