When President Donald Trump invoked the phrase “manifest destiny” during his inaugural address Monday and celebrated “our American ancestors” for having “won the Wild West,” he used phrases that drained historic crimes of their brutality and bloodshed. There is no way to soften it: This new “Golden Age” Trump promises arises from an imperialistic mindset that views people in America’s way as subjects to conquest. Using language that reframes imperialism as heroic doesn’t make it so.
Using language that reframes imperialism as heroic doesn’t make it so.
The language Trump used in his address foretold a Monday evening flurry of executive orders that included attacking the legal right to asylum and declaring an end to birthright citizenship. Trump described migration as an “invasion.” This new “Golden Age” mirrors a past America when leaders wielded violence as a tool of “progress” and “prosperity.”
After describing the Panama Canal as having been “foolishly given to the country of Panama,” Trump claimed that “we have been treated very badly” and said, “Panama’s promise to us has been broken.” Ignoring Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino’s comment last month that “every square meter of the canal belongs to Panama and will continue to be so,” Trump claimed that China has control over the Panama Canal. “And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
In the same speech, he said, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth … carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.”
Popular columnist John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in 1845 in arguing for Texas’ annexation. He claimed it was America’s God-given right “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
“The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders,” O’Sullivan wrote about Western expansion into California.
This belief, adopted by President James K. Polk, dismissed the sovereignty of Mexico and Indigenous nations and treated their lands as a divine inheritance for Anglo-Americans. It justified forced removal, war and the spread of slavery into new territories, cloaking violence in the language of inevitability. Manifest destiny is a call to domination and erasure, a justification for the nation’s most brutal expansions. And it’s the message Trump led with on the first day of his second term.
Manifest destiny is a call to domination and erasure, a justification for the nation’s most brutal expansions.
Even as he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and said, “We will make his dream come true.” Promising to send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, take the Panama Canal, criminalize the legal right to asylum and declare that children born in the United States aren’t Americans aren’t parts of King’s dream.
An estimated 62.1 million U.S. Latinos constitute the nation’s largest ethnic group. Never a homogenous population, Latinos in the United States now face the dual reality of being excluded from an “America First” narrative while also becoming its proponents. As the Brookings Institute notes in a postelection study, “Even amidst rising xenophobic rhetoric and being scapegoated for many of the country’s challenges, certain segments of the migrant base, who have traditionally leaned Democratic, are showing signs of shifting to the right.”
That means some Latinos, drawn by Trump’s promises, find themselves supporting the very forces that marginalize their communities. And leading this charge is Marco Rubio, whose nomination as Trump’s secretary of state Senate approved 99-0 on Monday. Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants, is now the face of an America First foreign policy, allowing Trump to claim to be inclusive while declaring a manifest destiny ideology. Rubio’s presence forces U.S. Latinos to confront the uncomfortable reality that some of their own are active participants of an American ideology founded on crimes against humanity, all in the name of making America bigger, less welcoming and more imperialistic. The pattern is clear: In the Trump era, a new Manifest Destiny is here, accelerating protectionism and expansionism at the cost of the powerless. This is a “United States that feels far too familiar.” Manifest destiny was a failure of the American past. We shouldn’t talk about it with nostalgia or fondness, in the same way we don’t talk about slavery or the subjugation of women with fondness. However, in the first few minutes of his second term as president, Trump praised that benighted worldview and made it the basis of his policy views.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
