What Trump Left Out of His ‘Manifest Destiny’ Inaugural Address
As was said of his first address, ‘that was some weird shit.’
“WE WILL PURSUE OUR MANIFEST DESTINY,” declared Donald Trump in his inaugural address, not only here on Earth but “into the stars . . . to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Welcome to the Age of Interplanetary Expansionism.
Much of Trump’s speech was empty bombast. He promised to “build the strongest military the world has ever seen”—a mission accomplished before he even took the oath of office. He stressed that military success should be measured “not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and . . . the wars we never get into”—yet he made no mention of the war in Ukraine, which he had promised to end before he even became president again.
Also missing: any explanation of how the Pax Trumpiana he boasted of—American power “will stop all wars” and make the world less “angry, violent, and totally unpredictable”—would be accomplished.
Yet as full of chest-pounding bluster as Trump was, perhaps most notable about the address were some of the other things he didn’t say, namely, “Greenland” and “Canada.” Even as he threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal (“we’re taking it back”), promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali, and said he would designate drug cartels as “terrorist” targets of the U.S. military, he left off the most ambitious items on his revived romantic nationalist agenda. The clock hasn’t quite ticked all the way back to 1845 just yet.
Who knows what the explanation for these omissions is? It may just be that Trump didn’t read the full script. Or it may be that he remains a bully who will back down when stoutly opposed. Perhaps the vociferous response from Justin Trudeau and other politicians from the Great White North served as a deterrent. Or maybe it was the effect of Trump’s confrontational phone call with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen last Wednesday—echoed by Greenland Prime Minster Múte Egede’s assertion that “We don’t want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.”
And a final and merciful omission was the absence of any rant about the “woke” military and the threat of a purge of senior generals. Military professionals do not like to be lectured by pundits or politicians who proclaim a culture of “warriors” from a distance.
Even if these omissions prove, as is almost certain, no more than temporary lapses of Trumpian attention, they made the new president’s end-zone dance less awful. America’s decline isn’t over, but just beginning.
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