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Has everyone missed America’s imperialist foreign policy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the nation annexed Hawaii, freaked out about non-white immigration, and demanded a canal cutting across the Panama isthmus that would allow naval power and commerce to move more quickly between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans?
You hadn’t? Well tough cookies, kids, because Donald Trump is threatening to bring back all sorts of imperialist bullshit that we have previously only read about in biographies of Teddy Roosevelt.
The latest shot across the bow came over the weekend, when President-elect Juice Box spoke at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2024, the latest in the long interminable line of conservative get-togethers that seem to happen every other weekend, where the same exact speakers do the same exact wanking off for the same exact crowds of Dockers-clad virgins.
The headline was Trump getting all jingoistic about the Panama Canal, threatening to take it back and excoriating Jimmy Carter for selling it back to Panama for one dollar in the first place.
While he was at it, the convicted felon promised to change the name of Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley, change the names of various military bases back to whichever Confederate traitors they used to be named for before Ol’ Woke Joe Biden got hold of them, get all the “woke” and “transgender” out of the military and college sports and elementary schools, and sign an executive order on Inauguration Day closing the border and kicking off mass deportations.
Basically, it was every campaign speech we’ve heard the last few years, in all its offenses and absurdities.
Later, Trump took to his vanity social media site to double down on demanding Panama give back the Canal, or else they will be sorry:
….The United States has a vested interest in the secure, efficient, and reliable operation of the Panama Canal, and that was always understood. We would and will NEVER let it fall into the wrong hands! It was not given for the benefit of others, but merely as a token of cooperation with us and Panama. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question. To the Officials of Panama, please be guided accordingly!
He followed that up with some more jabber about the cost in treasure and lives to America in the original building of the canal — which is not true, as most of the laborers who died digging the canal were natives of the British and French West Indies, and they worked in conditions so terrible at first that Americans didn’t want the jobs, which sounds familiar — and also criticizing Jimmy Carter for giving the Canal back to Panama, and so on, who knows, the Adderall-and-Diet-Coke cocktails must have been hitting hard.
The president of Panama pushed back, saying every inch of the canal belongs to Panama, to which Trump responded “We’ll see about that!” He followed that up by posting this picture with the comment “Welcome to the United States Canal!”
We have no idea what this is about. Maybe there is some sort of dispute about the fees the US pays for its naval ships and cargo carriers to transit the Canal, something that needs to be worked out diplomatically. Maybe he didn’t understand something from one of his briefings. Maybe somebody put the idea in his head and he can’t expel it without making a fool of himself.
But Trump being Trump, he’s handling it the same way he handled NATO members spending less of their GDP on their militaries than the US wanted. Which is to say, he’s leaning on a sovereign nation like it’s an Atlantic City zoning board.
As if that wasn’t enough imperialism for one weekend, Trump on Sunday also let us know he would still like to own Greenland. In a tweet or a truth or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to call them, he announced his nomination of venture capitalist Ken Howery as ambassador to Denmark, and added:
For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.
Ah, Greenland, object of his heart’s desire for thirty seconds during his first term. Remember when he actually canceled a state visit to Denmark in a snit because the nation’s Prime Minister told him No, that’s ours, you can look at it but you can’t play with it and Trump threw a hissy and ran all the way home screaming Mom, Tom Cotton said I could have Greenland but Denmark said I couldn’t have it just ‘cause it was theirs first and it’s not fair!
Needless to say, Greenland wants nothing to do with an imperialist nation led by a dementia-addled buffoon, and who can blame them:
Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede said the island nation is “not for sale and will never be for sale,” after President-elect Donald Trump suggested the U.S. should take it over. … “Greenland is ours,” Egede wrote. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”
Maybe Trump should try blackmailing Denmark: Nice, uh, fjords or whatever you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to them.
The chest-beating over territory comes on the heels of Trump also trying to troll Canada by suggesting it should become the United States’s 51st state, referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor,” and announcing he plans to slap tariffs of 25 percent on Canadian imports unless those French-fries-and-gravy-eating weirdos stopped all the tiny amount of all fentanyl (.08 percent of all of it in the US) coming across the northern border or presented Terrance and Phillip for execution or something.
Much like the picture of the American flag planted in the middle of the Panama Canal, remember there was also a dumb photoshop or AI something meant to imply Trump would conquer Canada by invading the Swiss Alps:
God, he’s embarrassing. He’s like a toddler running around a dinner party screaming and throwing food while everyone else gets irritated at his parents for just sitting there beaming and saying Oh, he’s got so much joie de vivre, isn’t he great?
This all comes on the heels of President-elect Binkie also threatening a “soft invasion” of Mexico to stop all the drugs he imagines are being humped across miles of open deserts by Venezuelan migrants. Next he’ll demand that Mexico renegotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to give the US even more of its territory.
This is all the sort of “he’s joking but maybe he’s not joking” shtick that Trump’s fans love while normal people with a sense of humility and shame clutch their heads and pour life-numbing bourbon down their throats by the barrelful.
What colonial possession should Trump order America to take back next? Will he demand Duterte hand back the Philippines? Maybe send the Rough Riders to invade Cuba again? Pull the Great White Fleet out of mothballs and point it towards Haiti?
We should probably stop talking before we give him more ideas.
OPEN THREAD.
[CBS News}
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