If anyone listens to the commentary donald trump – and there’s so much that banning the word ‘Trump’ would bankrupt WENA outlets – you’d assume he was an anomaly in the system, the sum total of all unbalanced equations, the antithesis of the American way of life. In more recent times, their actions – expansionist tendencies, warmongering, using government agencies to target their opponents, justifying their actions, and taking away basic liberties – have been considered un-American, tantamount to socialism.But Trump is not different from past American presidents, but rather his Jungian composite sketch: expansionist, warmonger, and freedom suppressor.

What makes Trump a more evolved version is that he refuses to participate in the diplomatic spectacle of pretending that America’s actions are for some greater good rather than self-aggrandizement. Borrowing a phrase from Morpheus’ epic speech in Zion in The Matrix Reloaded, Trump is here not because of the path that is in front of him, but because of the path that is behind him in American history. The only difference from previous prime ministers is that he displays these old royal instincts in the form of pure, unabashed id – an unchecked power not seen in reel or real life. tyler durden.

expansionist

When Trump expressed his desire to annex Greenland or jokingly called Canada the 51st state, commentators clutched their pearls, forgetting the history that expanded the US from 830,000 square miles (the original 13 states) to nearly 3.8 million square miles, increasing its size by nearly 360%.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson doubled the territory by purchasing Louisiana from Napoleonic France. Andrew Jackson expanded this with the Indian Removal Act, displacing five tribes because Americans wanted to get their hands on gold found on Indian lands, displacing 100,000 Native Americans and killing 15,000 indigenous people, a journey so horrific it became known as the Trail of Tears, while scholars justified it by claiming they were ‘Vanishing Indians’ anyway.By the 1840s, Americans had come up with the term ‘Manifest Destiny,’ which sounds like something an Instagram influencer would caption beneath a sunset selfie in 2026, but was actually a 19th-century belief that the United States was divinely appointed to expand its dominance by spreading democracy, capitalism, republicanism, and the American way of life throughout the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It was used to justify the Mexican–American War under James K. Polk in 1846, resulting in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico lost half its territory and the United States ceded California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The California Gold Rush displaced even more native tribes.Manifest Destiny soon extended beyond the continent with the Spanish–American War, involving Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, while the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii – supported by American merchants and American marines – ultimately led to its destruction in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt expanded not through colonists but through strategy, supporting Panama’s rebellion against Colombia so that the United States could build and control the Panama Canal.

The republic that began as thirteen colonies located on the Atlantic coast transformed itself by the beginning of the twentieth century into a continental empire spanning the entire landmass of North America – turning thirteen states into fifty and turning an insecure republic into the preeminent power of the modern world. So, when Trump suddenly expresses a desire to annex Greenland, he is merely demonstrating 250 years of American muscle memory. Trump’s watchword since 2016 has been MAGA, Make America Great Again, and that’s exactly how America became ‘great’.

warrior

The world has become accustomed to American exceptionalism, but even amidst those exceptional exceptionalisms, gun violence remains the strangest hill where all debates end. Maybe it has something to do with the Second Amendment. America, in the popular imagination, has the idea that the nation was born with the gun boom, meaning that no American politician can accept that the world would be a safer place if mentally disturbed people did not have weapons that could help them commit murder.

This lust for violence is also reflected in the inherent bloodlust that characterizes every American regime, a war-addicted nation. The Warmonger is America’s oldest political symbol, and the American presidency has almost divine powers of vengeance, being the most powerful man in the free world.Over time, thanks to vague wording in the U.S. Constitution (“The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States”), the President has had unprecedented powers with few checks and balances to launch wars without formal declarations, bomb sovereign countries, assassinate foreign leaders, conduct secret wars, and maintain permanent military bases around the world. This is the war machine that Trump has inherited.The idea that Trump’s actions of electing one head of state (Nicolas Maduro) or killing another (Ayatollah Khamenei) are isolated is to ignore history. America remains the only country to drop a nuclear bomb. Harry Truman joined the Korean War without any formal announcement. Bill Clinton ordered NATO bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Iraq while the White House was beset by scandals. Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War with some of the most destructive bombing campaigns in history with the US military. Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos, in which the US dropped more bombs than were used in World War II.

After the terrorist attack, Ronald Reagan ordered a retaliatory strike in Libya. George W. Bush took this ideal further, invading Iraq with false claims of weapons of mass destruction. Barack Obama refined the US war with drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.Trump – to put all his pre-election threats aside – followed in the footsteps of his predecessors with Operation Midnight Hammer, which was supposed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program before following it up with Operation Roaring Lion.Most former US presidents used some sort of theory to justify their bloodlust, like saving America from European colonialism or trying to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but this regime doesn’t particularly try. Are the attacks on Iran to get rid of its nuclear program? Was this done to facilitate regime change? Was it for the safety of women and children? Was this the end game of the Crusades? Was it for Israel? No one knows, not even Trump.Reading: What is the Trump Doctrine? What he knows is that he’s the best, that America is the best and the way to celebrate any kind of attack is to share a cleverly constructed edit of Iron Man, John Wick, Transformers and Mortal Kombat leitmotifs called “Finish Him.” It seems like the logical endpoint of meme culture: war edited like a Marvel trailer and death edited like a video-game soundtrack.

freedom crusher

And ultimately the snatching of freedom. Americans have long portrayed themselves as global champions of liberty, proudly pointing to the First Amendment – ​​“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or the freedom of the press…” – as the holy grail of their political faith. Americans like to believe they are symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, but freedom is usually the first loss of power.

For the longest time, the country that prides itself on equality did not allow women or black Americans to vote.Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, allowing citizens to be detained without trial. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson criminalized dissent. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.The Cold War produced McCarthyism, blacklists, and loyalty oaths that destroyed careers and reputations. After 9/11, George W. Bush created the architecture of the modern security state: the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, and extrajudicial extradition.Reading: How did Obama give birth to Trump?Barack Obama preserved and expanded that system. So when Trump used executive power with little restraint — threatening institutions, testing the limits of federal authority, and treating constitutional norms as barriers rather than guardrails — he wasn’t inventing anything new. He was drawing from the long institutional memory of American democracy, where freedom expands in theory but shrinks whenever power feels threatened.

tyler durden

But perhaps the key to understanding this is that the way Trump behaves depends on where he sits. Trump, a former real estate developer, sees the world as property. Gaza? A premium asset waiting to be redeemed from the war. Greenland is rich in resources that can help the US. Venezuela? Oil that America can use. Shakespeare said that the world is a stage. For Trump, this is prime real estate.

All said and done, to use a Latin phrase, Trump all else is equal. The only thing he’s doing differently is refusing to apologize for it, much like the fictional character Tyler Durden from David Fincher’s Fight Club. The film was intended to critique toxic masculinity and patriarchal capitalism, yet it became a totem of those who celebrated it.Where earlier presidents had wrapped power in the language of democracy, liberty, and human duty, he has abandoned this ritual altogether. Expansionists, warmongers, and freedom-takers were all fanatical ideals that had existed before him. Trump simply plays them without moral attire.But the most disturbing thing is that anyone who has watched Fight Club knows that Tyler Durden never existed. All this was going on in the narrator’s mind.What if everything Trump says and does exists first and foremost in their minds? This would certainly explain logorrhea, stream-of-consciousness speech, vague justifications, and more. In the past, the power of the executive has always been debated but there was a confusion of institutions that could constrain it. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry has a conversation with Dumbledore as he discusses all the things that are going on. And then he asks: “Is it true? Or is it just happening in my mind?” Dumbledore replies: “Of course it’s happening in your mind, but why would that mean it’s not real.”And that’s the problem because what’s happening inside Trump’s mind is painfully real to the rest of us, and with devastating consequences.