Performative Imperialism For MAGAty Morons
Yesterday Señor T, losing his mind, said: “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country.” Marjorie Traitor Greene immediately announced that she would introduce a bill to do that. If Trump— or Congress— tried to do that it would be a violation of international law. Changing the name would require an international agreement not just a Marjorie Traitor Greene bill in Congress. In fact, even within the U.S., naming or renaming geographic features falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for domestic use. The BGN can only designate names used in the U.S. and has no authority to alter internationally recognized names. Obviously, Señor T’s statement and Greene’s response are more about performative nationalism and MAGAt xenophobia than a serious policy proposal. It’s intended to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment and reinforce Trump’s base by presenting Mexico as a scapegoat for border issues.
At least he didn’t say he would send an American fleet into the Gulf to enforce his decree— unlike in the cases, also yesterday, of Panama and Greenland in which he pointedly refused to rule out military force. So far, he’s only sent his clownish oldest son to Greenland but, as Aaron Blake reported, Señor T “is the king of not ruling things out. It’s his default response when a possibility, no matter how far-fetched, gets floated, both because he has little regard for norms and because he seems to view extreme ideas as negotiating ploys… But this lack of a clear ‘no’ is quite different; he just left open using a military threat against a NATO ally, Greenland. And NATO rules require an attack on any member to be treated as an attack on them all. That’s certainly no small thing, even if it’s just Trump being Trump.”
Michael Shear covered Tuesday’s clown show for he NY Times, noting that Señor T was making bellicose statement and refusing to “rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal America built more than a century ago and to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Trump also reiterated his threat that ‘all hell will break out in the Middle East’ if the hostages being held by Hamas are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times. ‘If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East,’ he told reporters. ‘And it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is.’ Trump did not elaborate during the news conference, where he delivered a hodgepodge of grievances, complaints and false claims, from the Afghanistan withdrawal of 2021 to offshore drilling to the criminal cases against him and the size of his electoral victory.”
Trump’s desire to expand the U.S. footprint is entirely in keeping with his mind-set of making whatever he controls as big as possible, going back to his series of acquisitions in the late 1980s. In recent days, Trump has talked repeatedly about buying Greenland and taking over the Panama Canal.
It was not clear how serious the president-elect was about some of his comments during the news conference. At one point, he suggested that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
…Before taking questions, Trump talked for more than a half-hour without focusing on any single topic. He ranted about Biden’s focus on electric cars, saying “I don’t know what it is with electric. This guy loves electric.” And he complained about shower heads with restricted water flow.
“It’s called rain, comes down from comes down from heaven. And they want to do, no water comes out of the shower,” he said. “It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens you’re in the shower 10 times as long, you know. No water comes out of the faucet.”
He also returned to one of his favorite targets: his hatred of windmills.
“The windmills are driving the whales crazy,” he said.
The president-elect talked at length about foreign policy, criticizing Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine, the Afghanistan pullout, and the conflict in Israel. He also repeated his threat not to protect NATO allies, a foundational part of the pact, if they did not increase the amount of money they spend on defense of their own countries.
At one point, he appeared to confirm a recent story in the Financial Times suggesting that he wants NATO countries to commit to spending up to 5 percent of their economic output on defense, a significant increase.
He also criticized Canada, saying that the country should be a state in the United States because of the economic support that the United States provides to the country. He said he would not use military power to achieve that but said that he would use economic power to pressure the American neighbor.
“Why are we supporting a country, 200 million-plus a year?” he told reporters, and then referred to the country’s prime minister. “Our military is at their disposal— all of these other things. They should be a state. That’s what I told Trudeau when he came down.”
Trump threatened to use “economic force” to join Canada and the United States together, implying that the United States would pare back its purchases of Canadian products.
He also said he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it does not give Greenland to the United States.
So… why? Has he just lost his marbles or is there a strategy— or even any premeditation— behind this? Jonathan Chait called it a kind of menacing performative imperialism. “On the one hand,” he wrote, “Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario. On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.”
Chait mused that “An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss. A second reason is that Trump uses his international bullying as fan service for his base. The actual, concrete policy agenda of Trump’s presidency consists largely of boring regulatory and tax favors to wealthy donors and business interests— priorities that most of his voters don’t care about. Trump seems to grasp the need for public dramas to entertain the MAGA base.”
Spectacles of domination play an important role in Trump’s political style. “Build the wall” is the classic example: Trump never did build his “big, beautiful wall” along the length of the southern border, yet his fans don’t hold that against him, because the physical manifestation of a barrier on the southern border was beside the point. They thrilled instead to the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When Trump would respond to criticism by saying, “The wall just got 10 feet higher,” he was performing dominance. The real wall was the threats he made along the way.
The giveaway came when, during Trump’s first term, Democrats in Congress offered to fund the wall in return for minor immigration-policy concessions, at which point Trump appeared to lose interest in the project. The fact that Democrats would cooperate drained the trope of its transgressive allure.
Trump’s most recent gestures likewise reveal his symbolic intent. To be sure, you can construct a coherent policy rationale for some kind of international deal involving Greenland. But there is little evidence that Trump is interested in any kind of practical deal. He wants to menace allies. You don’t dispatch Donald Trump Jr., whose professional expertise, to the extent he has any, is monetizing the Trump brand, to advance a real diplomatic or military strategy. You send Don Jr. to entertain the base. Meanwhile, renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t even plausibly related to any economic or territorial objective. It’s pure symbolic bluster.
Trump could very well blunder from performative imperialism into a live shooting war. (When I was a kid, my teachers banned play-fighting at recess on the sound basis that it often led to the real thing). More likely, he will antagonize allies and provoke voters in those countries to elevate nationalist leaders of their own who will stand up to the United States rather than cooperate with it.
This would be a long-term cost to American foreign policy purchased for fleeting political gain— mortgaging the interests of the country to extract immediate value for Donald Trump. That form of arbitrage is precisely the kind of deal that Trump long ago turned into an art form.
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