Newly elected US President Donald Trump resembles Britain’s mad King George (1760-1820), who went through bouts of violent insanity punctuated by periods of senile lucidity.
Trump’s unhinged inauguration speech — full of half-baked theories and hare-brained schemes — demonstrated that he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing over the past eight years. He is a master of chaos bent on violent vengeance.
An inaugural address traditionally designed to display magnanimity and unite a nation was instead transformed into a deranged diatribe crafted to reassure his hateful MAGA (Make America Great Again) mob that he will vigorously pursue their mission to maintain a white supremacist Christian country. This was Richard Nixon on steroids.
A rabble-rousing, aspiring monarch and his MAGA storm troopers are bent on a nihilistic mission, declaring a Golden Age that never was
An atavistic Trump described himself as a peacemaker, even as he threatened to retake the Panama Canal by force. Despite the tendentious history of analysts such as John Stremlau, a former US state department official, that America was never an imperial power, Trump’s speech was part of the “gunboat diplomacy” and “Yankee imperialism” that Washington has historically practised, annexing Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and Puerto Rico after 1898, while occupying the Philippines, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Equally antediluvian was Trump’s echoing of America’s “manifest destiny” which had, from the 1840s, asserted a God-given right to launch a genocide against indigenous Indian groups, continue to enslave 450,000 Africans, and expand westwards to the Pacific. In 1803 the US purchased Louisiana from France for $15m, while Florida was forcefully seized from Spain by 1819, with Madrid also forced to surrender Guam and Puerto Rico, while selling the Philippines to America for $20m in 1899. Uncle Sam also threatened to annex Canada while pushing the Danes to sell the Virgin Islands for $25m in 1917.
These were the historical antecedents for Trump’s musings about purchasing or seizing mineral-rich Greenland from Denmark, and turning Canada into America’s 51st state. But Greenlanders (where, to control fertility, more than 4,500 Inuit girls and women were forcibly fitted with intrauterine devices by Danish doctors without their consent in the 1960s and 1970s) and Canadians, surely deserve their right to self-determination, free of American or Danish colonialists.
Trump also bizarrely announced that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America, without any sense of irony at the US having stolen 55% of Mexico’s territory by 1848. His renaming of the gulf was reminiscent, in its eccentricity, of a kryptonite-fuelled Superman flying to Italy to straighten the leaning Tower of Pisa in the 1983 movie sequel.
In just three breathless weeks Trump has announced self-destructive 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which were abruptly suspended. He imposed 10% tariffs on his second largest creditor, China, which retaliated with its own tariffs. As if elected Emperor of the World, he ordered crude oil cartel Opec to lower oil prices and threatened 100% tariffs against the Brics+ bloc’s attempts to dedollarise.
He has vowed to cut US aid to SA in response to what he erroneously described as the government’s illegal seizure of (previously stolen) white-owned land and announced a bizarre plan for Washington to take over Gaza and displace its Palestinian inhabitants to neighbouring countries.
Trump is an aberration only in his assault on domestic democratic institutions. Abroad, he is merely playing out two and a half centuries of American imperial hubris more crudely than his predecessors, while unleashing the latent racism that has always been part of America’s DNA.
A rabble-rousing, aspiring monarch and his MAGA storm troopers are bent on a nihilistic mission, declaring a Golden Age that never was. These are locust people who will leave death and destruction in their wake.
Trump’s second coming is most eloquently captured by the Turkish proverb: if a clown enters a palace he doesn’t become a king; the palace instead becomes a circus.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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