US Manifest Destiny Vision Escalated in Trump?

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Rebecca Harvey on Facebook:

TRUMPS MANIFEST DESTINY!?!?😬 - The core idea is the US has a Divine Right to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Trump said the U.S. will launch astronauts to plant the “stars and stripes” on Mars: “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars.” Musk wants NASA to drop its plans to return to the moon and instead head straight for Mars. The Moon is a distraction,” he says. Trump wants to expand US territories further with Canada, Panama Canal and Greenland, echoing the 19th century American expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny, according to American historians. In 1845, conservative American journalist John O’Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny as the overlying principle of the great American dream – “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us”.

"A year after O’Sullivan laid claim to the whole of the North American continent, then-president James Polk, a Democrat and a big fan of the expansionist concept, waged a war against neighbouring Mexico to extend American territories as far as the Pacific Ocean.

Polk’s war, which legendary American general Ulysses S Grant denounced as the “most unjust war ever”, helped the US claim 55 percent of the Spanish-speaking state, including areas corresponding to current California, Nebraska, New Mexico and a few other states.

Nearly two centuries after O’Sullivan justified expanding “democratic” rule across the continent, President-elect Donald Trump seems to have invoked the same doctrine to lay out his own imperialist agenda – to seize Canada, take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

“Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Trump said in a social media post, drawing a sharp rebuke from outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“While Manifest Destiny (in a modern form) has remained an implicit assumption of US leaders ever since, Donald Trump embodies it as a modern ‘manifestation’ better than any president since Teddy Roosevelt, over a hundred years ago,” says William Earl Weeks, a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of several books, including the Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War.

“Trump seems to intuitively grasp that ‘making America great again’ requires that the nation return to its expansionist roots, both for strategic as well as ideological reasons,” Weeks tells TRT World.

Toward Manifest Destiny

According to Weeks, Manifest Destiny envisages the US as “a godly-ordained nation” on a universal divine mission to bring freedom and representative government, not just to the Western hemisphere but to the whole world.

Adam Dahl, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, agrees.

“The idea of Manifest Destiny is quite complex and has many moving parts. But the core of the idea is that the US has a divine right to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” Dahl tells TRT World."
- TRT World