Trump’s Trolling Reveals His Push for Hemispheric Domination
Por Sasha Abramsky — The Nation » Article
The president’s social media posts are ludicrous distractions from his policy failures—but they also put his fascistic views on full display.
Donald Trump carrying the World Cup trophy on July 19, 2026 in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
At the height of the Nazi regime, the Swastika covered almost all of continental Europe and much of the Middle East and North Africa. Look at maps from 1933 to 1943 and one can see a steady growth in German-dominated territory. It almost looks alive, a great beast absorbing its neighbors, either through politically coerced annexation, Anschluss, or conquest.
More than 80 years after the end of World War Two, President Donald Trump seems determined to embark on a similarly expansionist and destructive project. This weekend, Trump posted on Truth Social a map showing the Western Hemisphere colored in the red, white, and blue of the Stars and Stripes, the entirety labelled the United States of America. On this map, there is no Canada, no Greenland, no Iceland, no Mexico, none of the Central American countries, and none of the Caribbean island nations. It is a visual manifestation of Trump’s drive for US Lebensraum: an increasingly explicit push for hemispheric political domination and endless resource extraction—witness the brazen theft of tens of billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil and the almost certainly illegal assigning to the Pentagon of an equity stake in the Venezuelan oil industry—so as to fund perpetual US military and economic hegemony.
On one level, Trump’s map—spewed out to the world the same night that he posted a threatening superhero image of himself marshalling US military might, accompanied by the words “beware my power”—was so puerile that it could just be chalked up to the old man’s infinite capacity to goad everyone around him. Yet, the Icelandic government took it seriously enough to call in the US ambassador to issue a formal rebuke. As for all the other countries whose sovereignty was denigrated so cavalierly by Trump, most chose not to give the post the oxygen of publicity. After all, they are already all-too aware of his predatory intentions.
This past week, Canada, historically the US’s closest ally, has been subject to a barrage of ugly economic and political threats from Trump and his cabinet minions. These range from Trump warning he would stop the sale of Canadian-built aircraft in the United States to Trump saying he would end all trade with Canada to Trump vowing to torpedo the Canadian currency to Trump repeatedly calling the Canadian prime minister “governor.” Treasury Secretary Bessent has also called Canada a “little yippy dog,” and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has repeatedly claimed, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that Canada chose to “blow up” the trade negotiations with the United States.
As for Mexico, Trump is so hostile to the very name of the country that, this week, months after he declared that the Gulf of Mexico was now to be called the Gulf of America, he floated the idea of christening the US state of New Mexico as “New America.”
Yes, of course the idiotic name calling and AI-generated social-media posts are a distraction from Trump’s domestic and foreign policy failures, and from polls showing that fewer than one in three voters approve of his actions as president. Yes, of course they’re trolls from a master propagandist. But they also speak to the man’s views on global affairs: The rest of the world exists to service the United States of America, and the United States of America exists to service Donald Trump and his inner circle of oligarchs and brigands.
What Trump is proposing is a global compact that pushes the rest of the world to remake itself in the United States’ increasingly vicious image. For weeks now, Trump’s ICE hoodlums have been tormenting Haitians who until just a few weeks ago were living in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status. Now, they are being hunted in the streets, rounded up, either fitted with ankle monitors or incarcerated, and then deported to one of the most impoverished, dysfunctional, and violent countries on earth. Recently in Springfield, Ohio, a student named Pierre Damas Bel was so traumatized by having to attend college wearing an ankle monitor that he walked into traffic on an interstate and killed himself.
Think of those ankle monitors, placed on Haitians simply to humiliate them, as Trump’s version of Hitler’s yellow star of David, forced on Jews to mark them as untouchables, as a lower caste devoid of rights and of dignity.
No wonder Trump was so ecstatic at the Alternative für Deutschland’s electoral triumph in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt last week. While European leaders warned that the return of far-right political figures to government in Germany for the first time since 1945 would pose a grave danger to democracy and to European stability, Trump heralded the result and urged the AfD’s leaders to go fast and hard against immigrants so as to “Make Germany Great Again.” Apparently, in Trump’s grotesque worldview, making Germany great again means behaving toward immigrants the way that ICE is behaving toward Haitians in the United States; it means endorsing policies that when last put into effect in Germany resulted in the most heinous killing spree in human history.
In response to Trump’s endorsement of the AfD’s “remigration” policies of mass deportation, which mainstream German parties have labelled as a plan for ethnic cleansing, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz abruptly canceled a scheduled phone call with the US leader.
Gone are the days when erstwhile allies of the United States attempted to turn a blind eye to Trump’s fascistic rhetoric and increasingly off-the-wall social-media posts. The Canadian leadership, faced with the prospect of Trump’s escalating trade war, is barely on speaking terms with the US administration; the German government, faced with Trump putting America’s propaganda machine to work in support of neo-Nazis, are giving Trump the cold shoulder; even the Icelandic government, faced with America’s territorial ambitions, is calling out Trump’s trolling tone.
But at least the US president is in Vladimir Putin’s good books. The authoritarian Russian leader heaped praise on Trump this week. Trump responded in kind, by phoning Putin and, over the course of the hour-long call, explaining that he wanted a full resumption of economic and trade ties between the two countries. I would say that we are heading down the rabbit hole. But truth be told, there aren’t rabbit holes deep enough to represent the chasm that Trump is hurtling us into.
Between the reemergence of right-wing red-baiting and Donald Trump’s use of the chilling National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 to criminalize left political organizing, we’re seeing McCarthyism reborn before our eyes.
This assault on democracy cannot be ignored or wished away. Resisting it requires bravery in the face of threats and repression, a steadfast commitment to the truth, and the unwavering belief that we can—and will—overcome this darkness.
We must have an independent media that sets the record straight, unearths corruption and abuses of power, and advances a politics of justice and dignity for all if we’re to win this fight.
That’s why I’m writing to you today. This September, The Nation needs to add 100 monthly donors to sustain our progressive journalism. Your contribution makes the next investigative report, the next truth-speaking column, and the next pathbreaking essay all possible.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
Sasha Abramsky is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. His latest book is American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government.
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Fonte: The Nation » Article
