I don’t know what scared me the most this morning: The declaration by the President of the United States that trans people are not people, or the Nazi salute by Elon Musk, or the suggestion that the US would seize the Panama Canal, or the promise of mass deportations and an end to birthright citizenship (which is in the Constitution, but maybe not safe under this Supreme Court).
But the language that startled me—maybe because I didn’t expect it, even from Donald Trump—was “manifest destiny.”
Seriously.
That’s the term that pretty much defined the displacement and death of tens of thousands of native Americans. It defined settler colonialism and US imperialism. It was used to justify slavery. It’s about the most openly racist thing I’ve heard a president say (publicly) in my lifetime, and I was around for Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign.
The news media coverage of the term was relatively subdued.
In this case, Trump was talking about sending astronauts to Mars—something highly unlikely to happen in the next decade or more. He likely won’t be around to see it. (I probably won’t either, and I’m 11 years younger than he is. And I don’t eat a lot of cheeseburgers, and when I play golf I walk.)
Elon Musk, of course, smirked at the line, because his company will likely get the continuing multibillion contracts with NASA. (The good news about Mars is that it will be even harder to get back than to get there, so maybe Musk will go start a new colony somewhere that isn’t on Earth.)
But that’s not the point. The term suggests a return to a very ugly time in US history. Trump underlined it by talking about restoring the name Mount McKinley to a peak in Alaska that’s been known as Denali since 2015. He talked about how wonderful President William McKinley was, celebrating the man who was by many accounts the father of US imperialism.
I don’t know why this was a media footnote to the event; maybe we are all so used to Trump saying horrifying things that nobody pays attention any more.
But we have to. Because it’s not going away; it’s getting worse.
