And what if Donald actually reads History? Not the kind that teaches lessons, but the kind that celebrates achievements. Not the kind that offers distilled wisdom, but that feeds you epic narratives to create endless mental images of glory. Trump did not discover America. He reads this very History to write his own story with the same ink. One might need great wisdom to assume he will also write it with the same blood.
Those who follow the traces of blood—having surely read far more American History than the American president himself—arrive at an almost forgotten world. Not merely pre-war, but pre-modern.
It is the world of 1823 and the Monroe Doctrine, which laid the foundations of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Of 1867 and Andrew Johnson, the president who bought Alaska from the Russians. Of 1898 and President McKinley, who went to war with Spain to bring Cuba under American influence and to seize Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And of 1904 and the Roosevelt Corollary, which became the basis for American interventions in Latin America.
No one returns to that world by simply flipping a switch. One returns by copying, as it has been imprinted in the imagination, that “glorious past.” But perhaps in doing so, one also opens Pandora’s box. Time may tell. Only that time today does not stretch as it did then; History is no longer written over the span of eight decades that separate James Monroe from Theodore Roosevelt. Time today is dense; the world is smaller than it once was, and pain and death from Pandora’s box travel by drones, long-range missiles, and—yes—nuclear warheads.
Connected as it is and accelerated by modern technology, today’s world has the scale of a single geographic community. Everyone is next to each other. America, under a president who believes his country has too much power to remain unused; Europe, coughing; China, silent; Russia, hiding its envy—fighting for four years in the snow and mud of Ukraine, while another plunges a Venezuelan into forty minutes of chaos.
How much Russian envy, Chinese silence, and European cough remain? Probably not for long. By spending the power of his country, Trump pulls from the box the rules of the pre-modern world—but applied to the scale of today. A world that is no longer as vast as it once was.
The question, therefore, is how quickly “events will run their course,” not only in Venezuela but also in Colombia, Cuba, Ukraine, Greenland, and Taiwan. It is also how the map of both the Western and Eastern hemispheres will be shaped. And whether the two hemispheres—or the two or three empires—will ultimately clash, as has happened many times before, with incalculable consequences.
History is supposed to have taught us this lesson, and the post-war world was built upon it—a world that exorcised the violence of wars, but no longer exists. It does not exist because that America, which after World War II exercised a kind of moral leadership over the planet, no longer exists.
Nor does the liberal America that held itself up as a model of democracy and individual rights exist. What else could the murder of Renée Nicole McLean Good in Minnesota signify, if not that Trump’s America spends its power recklessly even internally? This is the world of a pre-modern emperor.
