Dreamland and Greenland, Trump’s New Manifest Destiny
There was always an undercurrent to Trump’s MAGA movement that didn’t make sense. How was it possible that a brutal, lecherous convicted felon could attract such support from the religious community? How was it even conceivable that evangelicals could support such a grotesque figure? The answer lies in the thinness of religious conviction within American society and the convergence of ideology between colonialism and Anglo-American Protestant political thought, used previously to explain and justify the conquest and eradication of an indigenous people, and being evoked today to rationalise the latest stage of US imperialism.
Rep. Brandon Gill: “President Trump is bringing us into a golden age of America. This is the new Manifest Destiny. Reacquiring the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. This is the light of America expanding.” pic.twitter.com/emC1yGUx3e
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2025
Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined – by God, – to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. The philosophy drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the genocide of Native Americans. It was a form of extreme romantic nationalism and offered justification for settler-colonialism. The concept was used by Democrats to justify the 1846 Oregon boundary dispute and the 1845 annexation of Texas as a slave state, culminating in the 1846 Mexican–American War. It’s a foundational myth for Christian Nationalism in America and has been re-born in the 21st C by supporters of Donald Trump.
American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west
There has long been a strand of religious culture in America that was in a morbid co-dependent relationship with the far-right, emanating from Ronald Reagan’s era the movements spanned cultist tv evangelicals to coalitions embracing issues such as creationism in public education, school prayer, opposition to the teaching of biological evolution, embryonic stem cell research, LGBT rights, feminism and women’s rights, sex education, abortion, euthanasia, use of drugs, and pornography.
Framed as a backlash to the cultural revolution of the 1960s (in the 1980s) these issues have been regurgitated and turbo-charged by the MAGA movement and became the backdrop to much of Trump’s campaign (even if any of this made little sense). Much of the religious right has a tendency towards the Paranoid Style of American Politics, from Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, now amplified by an order of magnitude by drugs, online culture, conspiracism and algorithm.
In 1979, the Moral Majority, widely considered the first religious right organisation, was founded by Jerry Falwell, and the conservative operative Paul Weyrich, and began emphasizing such issues as abortion, pornography, gay rights, and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. Such movements perceived a grand moral decline of the United States, and played a major role in mobilizing evangelicals to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Presidential election.
One of the great things about the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ is that it’s almost meaningless. You can project whatever previous era you ascribe to onto it – the 1950s, the pre-civil rights era; the pre-civil war era or whatever nostalgic/reactionary/imaginary glorious past you require. A strong and recurring element here is ‘anti-communism’, a thread which links right through from Reagan to Trump and excites religious elements keen to oppose ‘atheism’.
But a foundational myth for MAGA is certainly a pre-60s America, a period now associated with a loss of innocence, sexual promiscuity and the rise of drug culture. One of the great ironies of the MAGA and adjacent movements is the extent to which they mimic and adopt the cultures of the era they claim to hate, think of the Shock Jocks of the or Elon Musk getting stoned with Joe Rogan.
From Camelot to Winalot
If we can chart this decent into a zealous mania and the corruption of a faith-based outlook in America, we can span the descent from cover to cover.
Yet if today’s bizarre phenomenon of Trumpism has its roots, or at least its tentacles in the swamp of 1970s and 80s religious extremism, it also marks the period of terminal decline for America. We have just marked the death of Jimmy Carter, an evangelist of a very different kind, and we can look back and watch with some horror the extent to which the era of Reagan (and Thatcher) moved the western world rightwards in ways that we are still scarred by.
In its January 1964 issue, Time named Martin Luther King, Jr., “Man of the Year” for 1963, making the civil rights leader the first African American recipient of this honor.
In 2024, sixty years later, Time’s person of the year was Donald Trump, making the MAGA leader the first convicted felon to receive this honor.
Martin Luther King was of course assassinated in April 1968, and two months later Robert F Kennedy would be killed too. And if we want to mark the descent of America, and without ignoring the complex and in places awful legacy of Camelot (not least the Kennedy’s relationship with MLK) we can still see the decline from era to era, from cover to cover, from RFK to RFK Jnr, from Camelot to Winalot.
See, previously The Madness of the MAGA Misogynoir and Menagerie – Bella Caledonia.
So, here we are today with Donald Trump’s second term incoming and already barking out rhetoric about expansion and invasion and threats to Greenland, Denmark, Mexico and Canada. For Trump’s religious supporters, and media acolytes this all makes sense in terms of US triumphalism, exceptionalism and chosen status.
Writing in Bella in 2016, Alastair McIntosh noted:
“Clifford Longley and other writers have shown that in Anglo-American Protestant political thought, the presumption of being God’s “chosen people” drove an imperial sense of “manifest destiny”, justifying American exceptionalism as the God-given right to lord it over lesser nations. If this sounds like an overstatement of the case that religion has been weaponised, check out the words of national charter songs like Rule! Britannia, or America’s national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.”
As Alasdair notes, there’s a redemptive violence that’s hard-wired into this religious thinking which has domination of nature and colonial conquest at its core. This spirit justifies and rationalises ecocide, sexual violence, domination and imperialism.
Epic iconography of late-capitalism https://t.co/67yE3wRr8Q
— BELLA CALEDONIA (@bellacaledonia) January 9, 2025
Trump’s threats towards Canada and Greenland may be about geopolitical issues – as global warming opens up previously frozen waterways – or it could be about the need for essential minerals such as copper, lithium, cobalt and nickel. But it represents a new stage of dystopian imperialism and omnicide. As Putin and Netanyahu have shown, any semblance of ‘order’ is absent, Trump is simply mimicking the behaviour of those leaders he admires.
The difference, as Los Angeles burns and we hurtle past 2 Degrees is not imperialism, the USA has long been an imperialist project, the difference is that the focuses of attack are not ‘developing countries’ or Central or South American or Asian or Middle Eastern, but neighbours and European countries. The threat is to Copenhagen not Saigon. In 2025 the sense of complete breakdown, collapse and decay is palpable and Trump is just the personal manifestation of all of this.
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Thanks for an excellent analysis – the parallels between different forms of religious extremism are well worth exploring – could help to explain the proclivity of US military converts to jihadism. And the ‘chosen people’ theme invites comparison with Netanayhu’s Zionism and the extremist settlers many of whom are from the US. This alien (to us) political discourse is all the more reason for resisting political and economic control from the US based oligarchs – as much as the Russian ones.
Along with all this pious cant goes hypocrisy. In Bad Gays: a Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller devote Chapter 10 to J Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, which speaks volumes about what USAmerican establishment figures were really capable of in that field. Their portrait of deeply weird anti-Communist pervert JE Hoover, tasked at 24 with running new General Investigation Unit for US Justice Department, crushing First Red Scare by 1921, amassing the countries premier pornography collection for blackmail and his own perusal, banning women agents throughout his life, surveilling blacks and leftists, marketing his limited successes for public who were indoctrinated in fear of Communism, should be required reading, if you want to understand the template (and how many figures in the incoming administration fit this kind of profile).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
Of course if the incoming administration really wanted to protect children, it would ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Instead of the USA being virtually the only state in the world which refuses to do so.
Agree with much/all of this. More can be made of the organised rise of Christian Dominionism, its connections into Project 2025, and how it is cynically and opaquely funded/piggybacked by network of ultra-wealthy backers, and efforts to spread it to the UK and Europe.
And don’t forget that he’d rather see more oil rigs and fewer windfarms from his estates on the North Sea coast.
The way that Trump talks about Greenland and Panama being important to US interests is not dissimilar to how Putin talks about Ukraine and sovereign nations adjacent to Russia.
I doubt that Trump will go full Putin and invade Greenland as US would have to leave NATO or declare war on themselves.
More likely is that they will try to destabilise these countries to get leaders in power who are aligned with USA interests. The USA and all large powers have a long history in undermining sovereign nations in this manner.
@John, or Greater Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
Presumably the USA would have to leave the United Nations too. I’m sure its Charter said something about:
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
They could declare war on themselves.
I wouldn’t put it past Trump!
@John, Make America Disintegrate Again?
https://dearscotland.substack.com/p/could-trump-be-returning-to-the-monroe
Well said. American settler colonialism has always had a strong religious element to it. In a departure from traditional Christian teaching about camels and eyes of needles, some protestant traditions saw wealth and power as marks of God’s favour and so self-justifying. From at least the 18th c however the ‘illuminati’ or ‘enlightened’ ones took control themselves – God was removed from everyday involvement and seen as the clockmaker who winds up the device and then lets it run itself; so in this mechanistic world, the powerful who ‘owned the science’ only needed technology to demonstrate their superiority and entitlement to do as they please. They saw (and still see) the entire planet and its people as mere resources for them to exploit, there to provide ‘services’ of various kinds for their pleasure. Of course this is always presented as benign ‘progress’ as we were all made dependent on them for our consumer goods. Religion for the sceptical became the opium of the masses. For the others it justified any horror, because God, or ‘civilisation’ was always on their side. Technology proved that anyone who did not possess it was a – in Trump’s terms – a ‘loser’, who deserved to be enslaved or destroyed as ‘necessary’.
This attitude continues today, and is becoming more blatant. If the billionaire ‘robber barons’ of America want something, they will get it, just because they can. Nothing and nobody else has any role to play except either as ‘useful’ pawn (‘resource’) or despised competitor for resources, to be eliminated. On every dollar bill there is the image of this philosophy: a pyramid surmounted by the all-seeing eye. The ‘Great Architect’ builds the pyramid, and exclusively ‘owns the science’, and this gives him absolute power. It is the philosophy of Freemasonry. At the bottom of the pyramid are the minerals, then we have the bacteria, fungi, plants, fish, birds, animals. Above these are the humans – first the ‘human animals’, the native peoples of various non-white colours, then the whites, starting with the non-Christians and proceeding through the Catholics to the Protestant Americans. And then through them according to status, wealth and power to the ‘robber barons’, the gangsters at the top. And at each stage, of course, male above female. Nietzsche puts them above morality altogether.
It’s worth noting that this is much the same philosophy as lies behind Zionism – in fact modern Zionism is rooted not in Judaism at all but in American Protestantism. Many Zionists are US Evangelical ‘Christians’ who come from a Protestant tradition that favoured the Old Testament and saw themselves as an ‘elect’, a ‘chosen’ people. They see the rise of Israel and its coming destruction as just part of their own American (Christian) destiny. Any surviving Jews would, according to this, eventually be forced to convert to Christianity. Meanwhile the idea of Israelis representing a Jewish ‘race’ provides a surrogate and scapegoat for American colonialism. When those who condemn genocide are told they are ‘anti-semitic’ it (deliberately?) stirs up racism and divides and rules. Both Jews and Muslims are demonised. Musk seemed delighted last summer at the prospect of civil war in Britain. But of course white, European American ‘Evangelical Christian’ people are above all that. And Musk, the white South African, who is trying to spread his DNA as widely as possible, and more than anyone else has demonstrated his technocratic megalomania, is trying in his desperation to jump on the bandwagon.
It is no secret that one reason for the genocide in Palestine was the discovery of natural gas in Gaza. I understand it has already been sold off by the Israelis to a consortium of oil and gas companies (which includes BP). But the Israelis themselves are just pawns in the Americans’ game.
@John Wood, I must have heard this Bob Dylan song recently watching Burns and Novick’s The Vietnam War (TV series):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_God_on_Our_Side_(song)
As I understand it, the origins of evangelical politics were squarely racist.
Desegregation in schools was fully affirmed by Green v. Connally in 1971, when tax exemptions were removed from private segregated schools. (White parents had removed their children en masse from public schools and the private schools now received no state support via tax exemption, leaving the right in a quandary about how to be racist but not appear so).
Roe v. Wade was decided just a couple of years later in 1973 but its potential use as a moralising stalking horse was not adopted until as late as 1979, as you say above, indeed fundamentalists were pro-abortion throughout the ’70s.
Weyrich however had spotted the potential or a different vocabulary for racism by the mid-’70s when he wrote : “The new political philosophy must be defined by us in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition.”
Wittingly or unwittingly, Republicans were mobilised by this new style of apolitical moral improvement and by the 2010s it was as plain as a pikestaff that MAGA meant make America white again. The likes of Elon Musk can snicker to the public approval of millions of Trudeau being a ‘girl’ because it is understood that is equivalent to saying ‘black’, and ‘know your place’.
Thanks for the nod, Mike. I have unpacked the Calvinist psychology and theology of manifest destiny in the American psyche in depth in the innocent-sounding “Poacher’s Pilgrimage: a Journey into Land and Soul” (Birlinn), as I walked through Trump’s mother’s homeland. I think it’s vital that we start to get to grips with such psychohistory and the way it weaves colonising charters.
Great piece. I wonder also at some of the muted reaction to Trump right now, Western leaders seem genuinely fearful of how he might react if they really tell him what they would like to i.e. get lost you nasty unhinged bullying arsehole, you ridiculous and pathetic two-bit Putin. The direct response of the Danish leadership has been very muted, even conciliatory (notwithstanding the post-colonial relationship with Greenland).
Couple of points – as you hint Jimmy Carter was also religiously motivated, a born again Christian. So what’s the difference here? Is it really religion as such or those who so seriously distort it? The malign fundamentalists for whom religion is mainly an excuse for their own desire to dictate and make the world how they want it to be. It is almost unbelievable that in Christianity, Christ’s message is actually the opposite of what these right wing fundamentalists believe in. ‘Turn the other cheek’ is almost like heresy to them! Disclaimer: I am not religious (any more).
It can be easy to look at the 1960s through rose-tinted spectacles. Don’t forget the position of black people when Time made MLK its man of the year was way, way worse than it is now, with routine legal discrimination the norm and as you say yourself, look how many of the figures we now revere, were assassinated. It was in many ways, a terrible time too.
Thanks Niemand, yes its true we (I) can be guilty of nostalgia for past eras – when as you say the conditions that created the civil rights movement were appalling. Progress as well as regression have both happened and, as someone once said, these battles need to keep being fought over and over again. I suppose the point I was trying to make was that faith leaders, were once figures of hope and inspiration and stood for light and progress, and today, in America, the high profile faith leaders and movements are some of the most toxic and regressive you can ever imagine, and its heart-breaking imho. I say this as a non-religious person but someone who recognises that leadership comes from various sources and from various parts of society.
Yes, I agree about faith leaders and how the current ones seem so malign – I didn’t quite pick up on that underlying point.
Of course in quite a bit of western Europe, the idea of a political faith leader has been seriously undermined by questioning certain aspects of a faith that go against current societal norms (and these aspects are always there it seems since religion sits outside the normative), making it quite hard for a senior politician to express any religious faith at all. I wonder if the backlash against that is part of what we see in the New Manifest Destiny?
I hate the way religion can be hijacked and we see this across the globe with horrendous consequences of course. Some would blame religious faith itself but a close look at most of the core beliefs of the worlds religions bely this.
Niemand – you have make a lot of good points and put today into context with the past.
There are many people of faith (Christian’s or others) who use this faith as a guide as to how they live their own lives. That is as valid a way to live your life as any other and Christian organisation’s are also often a source of support for needy at home and abroad.
From a more historical perspective organised religion has always involved a large element of control and power. I suspect a lot of the evangelical movements are also interested in controlling people and the power that gives them.
While I agree that in some ways life is better for many than they were 100 years ago this is not guaranteed to continue. The threat from climate change is becoming greater each year and the world seems a less stable place with powerful individuals holding more power and influence.
Circumstances change but the vagaries of human nature never seem to alter.