American Empire

But what Trump and his minions cannot do, as they blunder around breaking things and congratulating each other by emoji, is to force Europe backward into picture-postcard fantasyland, or build a new American empire.

It's anti-government; Trump — the Trump regime and Trump himself — seems to really admire the era of the downfall of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age; the age of robber barons, of unregulated, rapacious capitalism and open imperialism, when the United States acquired an overseas American empire after the Spanish-Cuban American war of 1898.

I wanted to pull a quote from your book that I think is particularly relevant here: “A racist thermidor resulted from the unwinding of Reconstruction, which involved not just the subjugation of African Americans and western Indians but also the exclusion of Asian immigrants. The rise of Jim Crow in the South and other internal regimes of racist hierarchy fed into the logic and momentum of US imperialism. These domestic developments were, in fact, the preconditions for the rise of an overseas American empire.”

Trump is pretty brazen because he is not talking about the informal American empire.

But Trump's real interest these days is as the creator of a new American Empire, the prince of peace and prosperity who will end all wars simply by exercising what he believes to be his infinite power to force the people of the world to pay up.