It was something of an irony that Donald Trump chose to extol William McKinley in his inaugural speech last week, passing over McKinley’s immediate predecessor Grover Cleveland, who for 128 years had been the only president in history to serve two non-consecutive terms — until Trump.
Trump’s on board with the American Empire but is more pragmatic, he doesn’t seem in favour of getting American boys killed, (nor Ukrainian/Russians) and frankly he is cost-conscious. His loadstone seems to be - not wasting money on these inconsequential issues when America is a not mess. He is hilarious when he mocks the liberal imperium as money poorly spent doing stupid things.
I know the author knows this, and so do you, but I felt like saying it . It’s a giant improvement over the dingbat liberals.
I doubt Trump cares much about "American boys getting killed".
What he does see though is that the American Empire is declining. He (and his supporters) just want to be sure that the Democrats don't have a chance to bring forward an FDR to "save capitalism" because the people who support Trump now, lost under FDR. Either way there was going to be WWII
The last 5 minutes of this Garland Nixon interview of Chris Hedges explains the "Corporatists" vs the "Oligarchists". I think we need a better label than Oligarchist but whatever...
Hedges (and I) will certainly tell you that Trump is not on your side. Whatever you imagine it is that he's doing that is "better" than the Democrats (can't call them liberals because that label has too many conflicting definitions), I assure you "Mr. Everyman" is still going to get screwed.
Trump is retreating to "Fortress America" where he and his cohorts will expand the rentier economy and privatize everything by creating chaos.
Had Harris won, the MIC would have continued to export war.
Thank you. This is the kind of principled critique that never emerges from liberals, or anyone one of the political class, and is why we desperately need more good journalists.
On McKinley, another great source is Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, out of print but available from Harper’s. It’s a dual examination of McKinley’s legacy along with that of Woodrow Wilson, another titanic racist and monomaniac.
Trump is unquestionably channeling McKinley by way of emulation, and he is as heedlessly and dangerously ambitious as McKinley was, and as cynical and hostile to the American spirit.
“What joins the Americans to one another is not a common nationality, race, or ancestry but their voluntary pledge to a shared work of both the moral and political imagination. My love of country follows from my love of its freedoms, not from pride in its armies or its fleets, and I admire the institutions of American government as useful and well-made tools (on the order of a plow, an axe, or a surveyor’s plumb line) meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. The Constitution serves as the premise for a narrative rather than as the design for a monument or a plan for an invasion.”
Oh my. Just the first few sentences in Lapham's wikipedia page and there is no doubt that he didn't mean a word of this quote. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth with his Grandfather being a founder of Texaco.
This is just a variation on the propaganda that supports Trump and MAGA
I'd say he's equivalent to Tucker Carlson who has changed his spots to appeal to "Mr. Everyman" as a Corporatist opposing the Oligarchists.
•Steering and Policy Committee, making her the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.
•"Do you really want someone who, in the case of Kash Patel...." [Actually, I like the idea of dismantling the FBI]
•"No matter how many tech bros you have at the inauguration, none of that helps the people who weren’t in that room." [LIke George Soros doesn't own the Democratic Party. 21 Billionaires contributed to Klobuchar in 2019 for her presidential campaign.. The top contributor was AIPAC in 2024. Does Klobuchar support the Gaza genocide?]
•"but all of this chaos takes us away from that mission." -- [No chaos at all when Anthony Blinken was running the Ukraine war and threatening China. /s]
• "Trump's a crook" [I paraphrased several otherwise empty paragraphs. Biden wasn't? ]
•"Export markets, opening them up, not just for the big corporations, but for the small businesses". [Just how is that going to happen? The G7 economies only represent about 25% of the world's GDP. BRICS is just over 35%. China is over 30% of the entire world's manufacturing capability. The US has little. Russia produces 10x the number of artillery shells of the entire "West". Trump's tariffs are the "next step" {not that I think it a good idea} after Biden's IRA (which stole Europe's industry and convinced it to move to the US) in isolating the US economy from BRICS. The USA can no longer complete economically. I could go on and on and on. Klobuchar offers only word salad to change this.]
• "I’m the lead on the COPS reauthorization, which helps local police departments with funding." [Now we know why AIPAC funds her. She supports the police brutality used against the pro-Palestinian protestors and the firing of government employees and lawyers who do the same.]
•"This was, as I said, a change election." [Yes it was. Klobuchar doesn't acknowledge why.]
•"And it’s been my experience that our farmers want trade that’s an even playing field for them." [This is almost funny. The USA used farm exports to undermine the indigenous agriculture in other nations to initiate neo-liberal (neo-colonial) policies that would bankrupt them. Now China is buying its grain from the fellow BRICS country -- Brazil, because Biden (and before him Obama) continues to press China about Taiwan and the USA has China surrounded by military bases threatening war. Again, I could go on and on and on.]
•"I’m not going to disclose everything we discussed" in the car with Trump. [Duh, of course not. It was all about how to con the American Tax Payer yet again.]
It's too bad Trump gets under your skin so much, because you really write well and could contribute so much more to the conversation than you are apparently able to on account of the unshakable distaste you have for him. For example, you could have observed what is apparent to most other people, which is that Trump's isolated compliment of McKinley had more to do with the 25th president's embrace of tariffs (which you barely mention) than with his embrace of imperialism.
Dief believed in selling Canadian natural resources at a premium price. In his day, his party was pro-tariff… the Liberals (most notably Sir Wilfrid Laurier) were swept out of power for being pro-free trade.
Typical Trump: float a few good ideas like “peace” and “ better relations with Russia “ while campaigning and then when in office go full speed in the opposite direction while praising one of the shittiest presidents in American history
Not surprising. Trump is following in the fraudulent footsteps of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan used his golden oratory to galvanize poor farmers and workers into a populist movement, then joined the Wilson admin as sec of state, where he helped to take us into WW1 and organize the League of Nations.
Even during the Spanish-American war, we made no attempt to conquer or purchase Cuba. We had the chance to buy it from Spain, but we did not want an island full of people. We wanted Puerto Rico for its location as a naval base.
Admiral Mahan seems to have made no impression on you. He is one of the few authorities that both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt respected. He said that the United States needed a blue water Navy and, for that, we needed naval bases. That is what we wanted from the Philippines. We went out of our way to disassemble the British Empire during World War II.
Hey, Michael, I really enjoyed your interviews in DC. I heard a rumor that Glenn Greenwald was going to have you do some reporting from Minnesota, but maybe he was just joking.
I don't get Trump's whole McKinley thing. I don't care what a mountain in Alaska is called, and I don't care about Greenland. Trump did not campaign on annexing Greenland, & I find it a bit ominous that a Club of Rome map from 1973 shows the US, Canada, & Greenland all as one big, happy region. This is globalist nonsense.
I am also distressed over his unconstitutional EO regarding deporting foreign students here on valid student visas for daring to criticize "Our Greatest Ally in the Middle East." They are free to criticize the US, you understand, just not Israel.
On the other hand, I am thrilled that he is now requiring bureaucrats to cancel out 10 regulations for every one new regulation they impose. I also like seeing pedophiles, rapists, and murderers sent back to their home countries. Trump's greatest accomplishment may be in motivating typically feckless weeny Republican Congress Critters to actually push back against woke nonsense spouted by talking heads in legacy media.
William McKinley used tariffs to concentrate the wealth of the American People. So much money was flowing into the nation that they did not know what to do with it.
President Trump has mentioned McKinleys administration and his approach to trade deficits numerous times as the economic model he would emulate.
The fact that you failed to mention this fact in this piece disqualifies your overall contention that he is an imperialist ready to annex all of North America and bundle the varying countries into the US.
Thanks Michael, that was informative. And somewhat puzzling. Trump is a baby brained bully but thus far seems allergic to prolonged military incursions. So it's hard to say what or who is behind this apparent new found bellicosity.
Agree!!!! No matter what Trump does, no matter what Trump says, Michael Tracy will find something negative to say about him. I am surprised Glenn Greenwald calls him his friend.
Michael, your interview with Cori Bush is incredible. I love the line about how we need to protect "black and brown bodies" by funding Ukraine, all while avoiding eye contact with you. It's a level of shocking level of social incompetence. I'm not even calling her dumb -- I'm saying she's a nervous wreck, caught in a lie, but without the smoothness of a politician. Like a kid with her hand in the cookie jar. I support Ukraine, but I understand how clowns like this turn people (especially anti-woke Republicans) away from interventionism. The foreign policy establishment is not sending their best with Cori Bush.
I just don't think that if a country shares a land border with Europe that it is reasonable to deny that country military aid to defend itself. I'm not in favor of wanton aggressive violence, or the invasion of Iran. But I think globalism is good.
Let the Europeans pay for it, if they deem it necessary.
Ukraine would not have needed to "defend itself" if we hadn't staged a coup there in 2014, in order to set up CIA spying bases throughout the country. Multiple US Admins promised Russia that we would not admit any more countries on its borders to NATO -- which is no longer needed, anyway -- and yet we did just that.
But yeah, poor, pitiful, pure and "democratic" Ukraine must be "defended" from big bad bully Russia.
My grammar wasn't clear: I should have said "It is good for humanity when there is one ruling superpower which has overwhelming unilateral power, and prevents the outbreak of war between minor European powers, as that historically led to WWI and WWII."
For more info on this perspective from an anti-war anti-interventionist blog, you can read glenn, who disagrees with me but I think lays out the two sides clearly:
Fantastic, Michael.
Right or Left, people simply do NOT want their perceived heroes/saviors trifled with. Nuance, history and facts be damned.
Thanks for the much needed perspective and framing on holding power to account—wishful thinking ain’t gonna cut it.
That was a pleasure to read.
Trump’s on board with the American Empire but is more pragmatic, he doesn’t seem in favour of getting American boys killed, (nor Ukrainian/Russians) and frankly he is cost-conscious. His loadstone seems to be - not wasting money on these inconsequential issues when America is a not mess. He is hilarious when he mocks the liberal imperium as money poorly spent doing stupid things.
I know the author knows this, and so do you, but I felt like saying it . It’s a giant improvement over the dingbat liberals.
I doubt Trump cares much about "American boys getting killed".
What he does see though is that the American Empire is declining. He (and his supporters) just want to be sure that the Democrats don't have a chance to bring forward an FDR to "save capitalism" because the people who support Trump now, lost under FDR. Either way there was going to be WWII
The last 5 minutes of this Garland Nixon interview of Chris Hedges explains the "Corporatists" vs the "Oligarchists". I think we need a better label than Oligarchist but whatever...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg9gV3k9VzU
Hedges (and I) will certainly tell you that Trump is not on your side. Whatever you imagine it is that he's doing that is "better" than the Democrats (can't call them liberals because that label has too many conflicting definitions), I assure you "Mr. Everyman" is still going to get screwed.
Trump is retreating to "Fortress America" where he and his cohorts will expand the rentier economy and privatize everything by creating chaos.
Had Harris won, the MIC would have continued to export war.
Either way, Americans are going to get screwed.
OK comrade.
Thank you. This is the kind of principled critique that never emerges from liberals, or anyone one of the political class, and is why we desperately need more good journalists.
On McKinley, another great source is Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, out of print but available from Harper’s. It’s a dual examination of McKinley’s legacy along with that of Woodrow Wilson, another titanic racist and monomaniac.
Trump is unquestionably channeling McKinley by way of emulation, and he is as heedlessly and dangerously ambitious as McKinley was, and as cynical and hostile to the American spirit.
NO ONE has been as cynical and hostile to the American spirit as much as Brandon and Cackles.
Ummm... The 'American spirit 🤮" is only WEALTHY WHITE MEN should rule the world. So Trump is actually embracing it.
“What joins the Americans to one another is not a common nationality, race, or ancestry but their voluntary pledge to a shared work of both the moral and political imagination. My love of country follows from my love of its freedoms, not from pride in its armies or its fleets, and I admire the institutions of American government as useful and well-made tools (on the order of a plow, an axe, or a surveyor’s plumb line) meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. The Constitution serves as the premise for a narrative rather than as the design for a monument or a plan for an invasion.”
- Lewis Lapham
Oh my. Just the first few sentences in Lapham's wikipedia page and there is no doubt that he didn't mean a word of this quote. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth with his Grandfather being a founder of Texaco.
This is just a variation on the propaganda that supports Trump and MAGA
I'd say he's equivalent to Tucker Carlson who has changed his spots to appeal to "Mr. Everyman" as a Corporatist opposing the Oligarchists.
Then you must be mystified at the large number of working class voters who supported him.
Not at all.
Read Amy Klobuchar's empty double talk. Minnesotans like her a lot.
https://archive.ph/GnxJk
A TLDR summary was provided.
•Steering and Policy Committee, making her the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.
•"Do you really want someone who, in the case of Kash Patel...." [Actually, I like the idea of dismantling the FBI]
•"No matter how many tech bros you have at the inauguration, none of that helps the people who weren’t in that room." [LIke George Soros doesn't own the Democratic Party. 21 Billionaires contributed to Klobuchar in 2019 for her presidential campaign.. The top contributor was AIPAC in 2024. Does Klobuchar support the Gaza genocide?]
•"but all of this chaos takes us away from that mission." -- [No chaos at all when Anthony Blinken was running the Ukraine war and threatening China. /s]
• "Trump's a crook" [I paraphrased several otherwise empty paragraphs. Biden wasn't? ]
•"Export markets, opening them up, not just for the big corporations, but for the small businesses". [Just how is that going to happen? The G7 economies only represent about 25% of the world's GDP. BRICS is just over 35%. China is over 30% of the entire world's manufacturing capability. The US has little. Russia produces 10x the number of artillery shells of the entire "West". Trump's tariffs are the "next step" {not that I think it a good idea} after Biden's IRA (which stole Europe's industry and convinced it to move to the US) in isolating the US economy from BRICS. The USA can no longer complete economically. I could go on and on and on. Klobuchar offers only word salad to change this.]
• "I’m the lead on the COPS reauthorization, which helps local police departments with funding." [Now we know why AIPAC funds her. She supports the police brutality used against the pro-Palestinian protestors and the firing of government employees and lawyers who do the same.]
•"This was, as I said, a change election." [Yes it was. Klobuchar doesn't acknowledge why.]
•"And it’s been my experience that our farmers want trade that’s an even playing field for them." [This is almost funny. The USA used farm exports to undermine the indigenous agriculture in other nations to initiate neo-liberal (neo-colonial) policies that would bankrupt them. Now China is buying its grain from the fellow BRICS country -- Brazil, because Biden (and before him Obama) continues to press China about Taiwan and the USA has China surrounded by military bases threatening war. Again, I could go on and on and on.]
•"I’m not going to disclose everything we discussed" in the car with Trump. [Duh, of course not. It was all about how to con the American Tax Payer yet again.]
It's too bad Trump gets under your skin so much, because you really write well and could contribute so much more to the conversation than you are apparently able to on account of the unshakable distaste you have for him. For example, you could have observed what is apparent to most other people, which is that Trump's isolated compliment of McKinley had more to do with the 25th president's embrace of tariffs (which you barely mention) than with his embrace of imperialism.
Dief believed in selling Canadian natural resources at a premium price. In his day, his party was pro-tariff… the Liberals (most notably Sir Wilfrid Laurier) were swept out of power for being pro-free trade.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/dief/
Seriously insightful. Thank you, Michael
Typical Trump: float a few good ideas like “peace” and “ better relations with Russia “ while campaigning and then when in office go full speed in the opposite direction while praising one of the shittiest presidents in American history
Not surprising. Trump is following in the fraudulent footsteps of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan used his golden oratory to galvanize poor farmers and workers into a populist movement, then joined the Wilson admin as sec of state, where he helped to take us into WW1 and organize the League of Nations.
Even during the Spanish-American war, we made no attempt to conquer or purchase Cuba. We had the chance to buy it from Spain, but we did not want an island full of people. We wanted Puerto Rico for its location as a naval base.
Admiral Mahan seems to have made no impression on you. He is one of the few authorities that both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt respected. He said that the United States needed a blue water Navy and, for that, we needed naval bases. That is what we wanted from the Philippines. We went out of our way to disassemble the British Empire during World War II.
Hey, Michael, I really enjoyed your interviews in DC. I heard a rumor that Glenn Greenwald was going to have you do some reporting from Minnesota, but maybe he was just joking.
I don't get Trump's whole McKinley thing. I don't care what a mountain in Alaska is called, and I don't care about Greenland. Trump did not campaign on annexing Greenland, & I find it a bit ominous that a Club of Rome map from 1973 shows the US, Canada, & Greenland all as one big, happy region. This is globalist nonsense.
I am also distressed over his unconstitutional EO regarding deporting foreign students here on valid student visas for daring to criticize "Our Greatest Ally in the Middle East." They are free to criticize the US, you understand, just not Israel.
On the other hand, I am thrilled that he is now requiring bureaucrats to cancel out 10 regulations for every one new regulation they impose. I also like seeing pedophiles, rapists, and murderers sent back to their home countries. Trump's greatest accomplishment may be in motivating typically feckless weeny Republican Congress Critters to actually push back against woke nonsense spouted by talking heads in legacy media.
It's definitely going to be a rocky four years.
William McKinley used tariffs to concentrate the wealth of the American People. So much money was flowing into the nation that they did not know what to do with it.
President Trump has mentioned McKinleys administration and his approach to trade deficits numerous times as the economic model he would emulate.
The fact that you failed to mention this fact in this piece disqualifies your overall contention that he is an imperialist ready to annex all of North America and bundle the varying countries into the US.
Jenny Marie Hatch
Thanks Michael, that was informative. And somewhat puzzling. Trump is a baby brained bully but thus far seems allergic to prolonged military incursions. So it's hard to say what or who is behind this apparent new found bellicosity.
Are you all fricking blind? Compared to the bleeping DISASTER the Democratic Party has been since 44, Trump writes mean tweets. BFD.
Agree!!!! No matter what Trump does, no matter what Trump says, Michael Tracy will find something negative to say about him. I am surprised Glenn Greenwald calls him his friend.
Thanks Mike. I'm a little wiser now. Safe travels.
Michael, your interview with Cori Bush is incredible. I love the line about how we need to protect "black and brown bodies" by funding Ukraine, all while avoiding eye contact with you. It's a level of shocking level of social incompetence. I'm not even calling her dumb -- I'm saying she's a nervous wreck, caught in a lie, but without the smoothness of a politician. Like a kid with her hand in the cookie jar. I support Ukraine, but I understand how clowns like this turn people (especially anti-woke Republicans) away from interventionism. The foreign policy establishment is not sending their best with Cori Bush.
She was all but a domestic terrorist. She should not have been given any committee assignments or just plain not seated. She was LEADING BLM riots.
😤 Nazi.
I just don't think that if a country shares a land border with Europe that it is reasonable to deny that country military aid to defend itself. I'm not in favor of wanton aggressive violence, or the invasion of Iran. But I think globalism is good.
Globalism is a recipe for crimes against humanity.
It's not our fight; not our problem.
Let the Europeans pay for it, if they deem it necessary.
Ukraine would not have needed to "defend itself" if we hadn't staged a coup there in 2014, in order to set up CIA spying bases throughout the country. Multiple US Admins promised Russia that we would not admit any more countries on its borders to NATO -- which is no longer needed, anyway -- and yet we did just that.
But yeah, poor, pitiful, pure and "democratic" Ukraine must be "defended" from big bad bully Russia.
Nope.
I think it's good for America and Europe to have a concept of united defense.
How is it good for America?
My grammar wasn't clear: I should have said "It is good for humanity when there is one ruling superpower which has overwhelming unilateral power, and prevents the outbreak of war between minor European powers, as that historically led to WWI and WWII."
For more info on this perspective from an anti-war anti-interventionist blog, you can read glenn, who disagrees with me but I think lays out the two sides clearly:
https://statesofexception.substack.com/p/steelmanning-iraq-or-america-fights
🤡
I don't think America, a country where the fastest growing demographic is multi-racial children, is a Nazi country.
He ended the private central bank then called The Second U.S. Bank.