Donald Trump Announces Return of National Expansion

January 21, 2025 Hunter Wallace Capitalism, Conservatism, Politics, Populists, Progressives 7

Make America Great Again.

What does that mean? When was America great?

Donald Trump has repeatedly answered the question in recent months: America was great in the 1890s when William McKinley was president at the end of the Gilded Age. In contrast, 20th century America was dominated by a liberal establishment that took the country off course. The whole 20th century was a mistake and we should go back to America as it was at the end of the 19th century.

Trump was crystal clear about his vision of America in his inaugural address when he announced a return to Manifest Destiny, national expansion and the creation of the External Revenue Service. He spoke in what used to be familiar terms about the conquest and settlement of North America. He said nothing about “fascism” or World War II or Israel or Zionism. He said very little about foreign affairs.

The Economist:

“The traditional point of an inaugural address is to transcend the politics of the campaign and draw the country together. Donald Trump’s second inaugural was not that. But it stuck with tradition in other ways—it’s just that the traditions in question were much older.

The only one of his predecessors President Trump spent any time discussing—other than excoriating the administration of the outgoing Joe Biden—was William McKinley, in his telling “a great president”, though he is not one many Americans would put in their pantheon. The reference came in a passage about restoring the 25th president’s name to Mount Denali, an idea that combines two Trump obsessions. America’s tallest mountain was officially given its koyukon (native Alaskan) name in 2015—which he considers a rewriting of history in deference to liberal sensibilities that is evidence of a woke mind virus. And the president who signed that change into law was Barack Obama, so reversing it undoes an Obama achievement too. But Mr Trump’s homage to McKinley, a fellow Republican, did not end there.

McKinley, who was inaugurated in 1897, presided over the negotiations that created the Panama Canal. He loved tariffs, both as a way to fund the government and to protect domestic industry. And he courted, and was courted by, robber barons of the Gilded Age …

So does the talk of territorial expansion, a theme no president has pursued seriously in over a century. The last president who increased America’s acreage substantially, as it happens, was William McKinley. Territories including Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines were added to America in his first term, the latter as a consequence of a victory over Spain. “The truth is I didn’t want the Philippines,” McKinley said, “and when they came to us, as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them.” America got bogged down fighting an insurrection there. For Mr Trump the point of territorial expansion is clear. (And extraterrestrial too—he thinks it is the country’s manifest destiny to plant its flag on Mars.) America must be “a growing nation” once again.”

It makes perfect sense to me.

If you are a reactionary businessman and a billionaire from New York like Trump, wouldn’t you be nostalgic for a time of virtually unfettered free market capitalism when the country was ruled by the Rockefellers, Morgans and Carnegies who were the biggest “winners” in American history?

The Atlantic:

“Eight years ago, with his “American carnage” speech, Donald Trump delivered what was likely the darkest inaugural address in U.S. history. During his second inaugural, he tried for a slightly more uplifting message.

“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success,” Trump said. And although he listed many challenges, he assured the nation that  they would be “annihilated” by American momentum. (Yes, the word choice was strange.) “The golden age of America,” he declared, “begins right now,”

Perhaps it would be more aptly called a Gilded Age. Trump was joined in the Capitol Rotunda by many of the nation’s richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. The attendance of the business titans was rendered conspicuous by the small space. (Other major donors to the inauguration were forced to watch on a livestream when the ceremony was moved inside because of frigid temperatures. Don’t shed a tear for them; they made the donations to curry favor and influence, not for the view.) Their presence also added a strange dimension to Trump’s complaint that “for many years a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens.”

This was the first time since Grover Cleveland’s second inauguration in 1885—during America’s first Gilded Age—that a president was sworn in for a non-consecutive second term. And many of the policies and ideas in the speech evoked the late 1800s more than any recent presidency.

As Southern reactionaries, we get misty eyed thinking about ancestors sitting on the front porch of the Big House, mint julep in hand, watching our slaves toil as the Confederate flag flaps in the breeze and our boys are in Virginia fighting off the Yankee Army in 1862. That’s our lost Golden Age.

For our Neo-Nazi commentators, their lost Golden Age is the Third Reich in 1942 at the peak of Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Europe. Everything went to hell when Germany lost the war. There are other flavors of reactionaries like the Trad Caths who date the fall to Martin Luther and the Reformation. Midwesterners might look back to their own Golden Age before they declined into the Rust Belt.

Surely, to be a New York business tycoon in the 1890s before the Jews took over the city and ran it into the ground must be a nostalgic fantasy that that appeals to some Gentile New Yorkers. Imagine what it would have been like to be in New York City at its peak and watch the skyscrapers being built or the electricity coming on when New York was a dynamic city approaching the peak of its power.

Note: Donald Trump himself was in this History Channel series.

7 Comments

  1. My family, as far as I know, are more recent immigrants that came in the 1800’s (Irish among other flavors) and were poor sandhillers that settled in Appalachia, specifically the coal country of Eastern Kentucky/Western Virginia (wasn’t West Virginia at that time).

    There has never been a time that my family would be nostalgic for slavery, or would have revelled in the extorted labor of other people.

    I have universal and completely consistent contempt for southern aristocracy, and the collossal catastrophe they foisted on everyone in the south for their own benefit that ended inevitably in war with the North, along with contempt for the industrialists who forced the southern aristocracy into an economic corner and used their puppet Lincoln to extort for them an entire labor force of blacks to compete with free Whites for work.

    I’m perfectly content to hate all gentlemen of that era with equal vehemence. Lincoln deserved his fate, as did the southern aristocracy.

    I take your point that Trump may well be a return to that post war mould. But he sure hasn’t been yet, and I’ll take an unfettered capitalist environment where I am allowed a fair shot instead of being actively discriminated against for being male and White.

    I would feel no shame or sense of inferiority shaking hands with Trump or Elon Musk. They aren’t better men than me, just bigger. Nothing they have said or done leads me to believe they think any other way either.

    I’m content knowing my place and the limits of my aspiration. I don’t have grand ambitions, just simple ones that I’ll die to keep.

    They are no threat to me.

    I have no nostalgia for a better time. I was born in 1987 and the country has been a declining shit hole all my life. Things can only get better from here.

    Reply

  2. My nostalgic age is definitely before the 1960s, not that the world before the 1960s was perfect but since that time between Hippies, drug liberalization, cultural Marxism and the third wave of Frankfurt school, obsession against the political right and faggots, many problems began and at an embryonic level many of the follies of today.

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  3. I enjoyed this series years ago, however I look at it from a Southern lens vs my former NY Empire State mentality.

    God Bless Dixie First!

    President Trump don’t forget about the families in western NC and Eastern Tennessee,

    Please!

    Reply

  4. There is clearly still a very strong Israel Lobby influence on Trump and his team.

    He had the families of the Israeli hostages on stage with him through most of the post-inaugural parade ceremony. It was awkward – dozens of people on stage with him for a very long time, and every one of them shaking hands with every member of Trump’s family.

    Trump’s sudden interest in American expansionism doesn’t ring true. McKinley’s imperial acquisitions (Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii etc.) are and always have been a net drain on America’s wealth and strength. Greenland wouldn’t be a net benefit for America either. Trump did not run on a platform of expansion. He did not run on a promise to be William McKinley 2.0

    He has no mandate for this.

    I think he is trying to prepare his supporters for a foreign policy which makes concessions to Israeli and Russian expansionism. If he gets his supporters to morally endorse dreams of American expansionism, they will be less likely to oppose the expansionism of other countries.

    I think he is trying to simultaneously undercut Neoconservative opposition to the Russian acquisition of the Crimea, and also undercut America First opposition to Israeli expansion in the West Bank and elsewhere.

    The real frontier for American “expansion” is internal. We need to take back our own country, not dream of purchasing other people’s countries – and certainly not expend our blood, treasure and moral capital helping Israel seize other people’s land.

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  5. > If you are a reactionary businessman and a billionaire from New York like Trump, wouldn’t you be nostalgic for a time of virtually unfettered free market capitalism when the country was ruled by the Rockefellers, Morgans and Carnegies who were the biggest “winners” in American history?

    Of course. It makes perfect sense in the context of Trump’s background. Your choice of names for the rulers of that era are interesting too. Of the three, only Carnegie actually built much of anything (early in his career), Rockefeller fit the term ‘Robber-Baron’ perfectly, Carnegie less so, while Morgan was merely a front-man for the Rothschilds. When he died in 1909, his supposedly massive empire turned out to be mostly paper, though he was an avid collector of art and other valuable objects – which for the basis of NYC’s Morgan Museum.

    Here’s a bit of trivia for y’all: J. P. Morgan’s uncle was a Confederate soldier by the name of James Lord Pierpont, who also composed the song originally titled as “The One Horse Open Sleigh”, better known as “Jingle Bells” which has become one of the more noxious ear-worms of the Christmas season. The original 1857 setting is actually just a piece of quaint Victoriana which kind of sounds like a tune played by a saloon-pianist in a Western movie.

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  6. ” When was America great? “. 1776-1860 America was great and territorial expansion, was a favorite past time, of our founding stock forbears, territorial expansion and a glass of KENTUCKY BOURBON ……..
    Oh ya …….

    Reply

  7. “The whole 20th century was a mistake and we should go back to America as it was at the end of the 19th century.”

    The astronomical disparities of wealth in America after the Civil War when Capitalism was unleashed inevitably summoned the liberal/leftist/progressive movements of the 20th century, which have their origins in the late 19th century. Capitalist societies are inherently unstable because of their fraudulent combination of freedom and equality. They have to promise freedom to justify economic exploitation but also equality to justify their access to capital against the old feudal order since capitalists are by definition “new money” and have no genuine claim to their own wealth.

    Liberalism then took the country off course because not only because The South’s racial argument was rejected but also because of Capitalism. Capitalism is innately antiracist because of its bourgeois “meritocracy.” Any transcendental claim impeding capital’s consolidation is “socialism.” So, the patriarchy is socialism. Racism is socialism. God is socialism. Sounds like Richard Hanania, right? That’s because the Cuckservatives are indeed the true capitalists. When we look back, who truly profited from Capitalism’s attack on human roots? Jews. Divide and conquer. Capitalism always cannibalizes itself because at bottom it is based on the same lies of liberalism. It was Capitalism that took the country off course.

    America was Great when it was white and when it put whites first regardless of circumstance. America was great when it was *not* Capitalist. In 2016 everyone knew that MAGA meant Make America White Again. 2016 MAGA was the very belated response to the antiwhite politics of the 1960s. Yet that was rendered illegal in 1865. Everything after that is a remorseless decline of whites. The Gilded Age was the first age of White Flight. Whites trying to throw other whites under the bus so they could escape the looming consequences of Black Republican victory. Reconstruction did not fail because it never ended in the first place. The whites thrown under the bus had nowhere to go besides labor movements. With Capitalism’s attritional appetite, the numbers of labor swelled endlessly. Then you have the 20th century.

    Reply

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