He’s Not Joking

The case for taking Trump's expansionist talk seriously

This year, an American president stood before Congress and declared his desire to absorb another sovereign country. Trump said he hoped the people of Greenland would vote to become part of the United States, affirming America’s determination to honor such a decision. Then he added, “I think we’re gonna get [Greenland]. One way or the other we’re gonna get it.”

He smirked. Seated behind him, Vice President JD Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson laughed along with the Republicans in the room. But if anyone was laughing because they assume Trump doesn’t mean it—that he was “just trolling” for fun—they’re mistaken. Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal have featured prominently in Trump’s foreign policy messaging since taking office, all in the context of annexation.

Trump has claimed the US needs the Panama Canal for economic interests. He similarly insists Greenland is required for national security purposes. Both claims ignore that the United States currently reaps economic and security interests from both the Canal and Greenland thanks to the very international order Trump is now upending.

Regarding Canada, Trump and his aides have repeatedly intimated that the real goal of his trade war with America’s long-time ally and economic partner is to force it to join the United States. Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau directly accused Trump of this in one of his last speeches in office. In the fallout, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that Trump “believes that Canadians would benefit greatly from becoming the 51st state…The President has made it clear he believes Canadians would be better served economically, militarily if they were to become the 51st state of the United States of America.”

This past weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a similar defense at the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Canada, framing American menacing as mere “disagreement” between Trump and the Canadian government. Rubio, in all his craven bumbling, is technically correct. Like with any annexation-threat, there is a disagreement between the aggressor and the target.

Besides laughing at how Trump’s threats make others uncomfortable, neither the president nor his aides have indicated that any of his proposed land grabs are jokes. This is another scenario in which he must be taken both seriously and literally. Donald Trump’s expansionism is a natural outgrowth of both the man and the extreme nationalism he preaches.

Mogul, Abusive Narcissist, Imperialist

Real estate shaped Trump as much as anything. It’s a world where hardball negotiating, extraction, and ultimately raw territory dominate. Even Trump-friendly commentators like Rich Lowry have observed how Trump’s expansionist talk appears to be an outgrowth of his real estate mogul past: “In business, Donald Trump was a real-estate guy. In the presidency, he might be one, too…Trump is talking like a neo-imperialist, at least in our own hemisphere.”

Trump’s vision of foreign policy is one of spheres of influence. He sees land as supremely valuable and doesn’t begrudge a state taking chunks of territory to benefit itself, thinking that might always makes right in such situations. As with any negotiation, you’d better win. As for the map itself, Trump is clearly drawn to the sheer physical impression created by merging the United States and Canada, not to mention Greenland, telling NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “This would be the most incredible country visually.”

Trump frequently references President McKinley in the context of his love for tariffs, but McKinley also oversaw the acquisition of Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. America has a right to be top dog across the Western Hemisphere and, if other countries want to throw their weight around in their own backyards, that’s fine by Trump.

Of course, Trump’s inspiration is hardly limited to the distant past. He admires Vladimir Putin, and said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” It’s a sentiment that betrays not only Trump’s thinking about geopolitics but a darker psychology that is indifferent to human suffering and the horrors of war.

Historians like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and public commentators like George Conway have drawn attention to Trump’s many dark personality defects, and the way these relate to the pathologies of past strongmen. His psychology is central to our crisis because of his personalist approach to power. As Ben-Ghiat put it, in those systems “everyone becomes a personal tool of the leader.” Like many of history’s worst dictators, we can’t separate Trump’s mind from the direction of the American state because for him they are indivisible.

In the 2020, the documentary #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump argued that he is a “malignant narcissist.” The film details his lifetime of shady business dealings and misogyny alongside his explosive rise to the presidency on the back of a vicious form of politics. And it does not shy away from the darkest available historical comparisons, including Hitler, whose speeches Trump’s ex-wife Ivana has claimed he enjoyed reading. Speaking to Agence France Presse about the film, psychologist John Gartner said, “It’s not that he's as bad as Hitler, or that he's the equivalent of Hitler. But he has the same diagnosis as Hitler."

In 2024, George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC released an ad in which 200 mental health professionals declared Trump, once again, to have “malignant narcissism.” Defying the Goldwater Rule, according to which the American Psychiatric Association discourages the diagnosis of individuals not personally assessed, the ad asserted: “the field has modernized the DSM diagnostic system, which relies exclusively on ‘observable behavioral criteria.’ …we’ve all observed thousands of hours of Trump’s behavior, reinforced by the observations of dozens of individuals who have interacted with him personally.”

And the calls have also come from inside the Trump family. Donald’s niece, Mary Trump, holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, she also asserts he is a narcissist but adds that “his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be."

What has been offered by insiders and numerous observers is a portrait of a deeply malicious individual—fundamentally dishonest, selfish, grotesquely needy, and rapacious, who reacts to criticism with unbridled anger and resentment. These are the ingredients of a tyrant, traits shared by street thugs and imperialist warmongers alike. 

To be clear, I am not claiming Trump and his destruction are due to insanity. Rather, his actions should be understood as part of a dangerous psychology that, combined with his fundamental assumptions about the world, makes his expansionist talk something to be taken seriously.

Make America Greater Again: Lebensraum for Losers

America could have a 51st state tomorrow. The people of the District of Columbia have overwhelmingly expressed their desire for full representation. Puerto Rico, too, has a robust statehood movement.

But those statehood questions revolve around injustice, inequality, citizenship, and representation. They do not speak to greatness in the same way as seizing the world’s second largest country by land area would. Great nations, in the old world conception, take not only what they need but what they want. And they do not stop burnishing their greatness, lest they molder with the other has-beens of geopolitics. It isn’t enough to be great or “great again.” There is always the need to be greater.

As Ben-Ghiat explained in an interview for her book Strongmen, authoritarian leaders often rally the people around the idea of some glittering future where the nation is perfected:

“Utopia, the desire for a pristine and perfect community, links to the leader's promise to obtain what his people feel the country lacks or has been deprived of. Whether this is modernity and international prestige, or the right to expansion, it always involves a glowing future that redeems a bleak present.”

Trump has repeatedly described his second administration as ushering in a “golden age” in the wake of a Biden presidency that, in Trump’s presentation, left America poor and weak.

So his expansionist talk is both about greatness generally and about addressing these inequities. Greenland is about security, he insists. Canada would be better off, he says. The Panama Canal was America’s gift to the world and should be ours, he claims. It’s not simply about a greater America in terms of military and economic prestige but a literally greater one, massively increasing its presence on the world map. 

With the role of nationalism in a fascist state, there can be a reciprocal relationship between what the leader desires and what the nation wants or will at least accept. It functions like a ratchet, and pushes the public towards the kind of nation the leader envisions.

As historian Mark Mazower describes Hitler’s conquest of Poland and the public reactions:

 “Once Hitler himself came to realize the extent of popular perversity writing the Reich, he felt confirmed in the view he had long held that war was necessary, not merely for the conquest of Lebensraum and the security of the Reich, but to test and steel the Germans themselves.”

Expansion and conflict exists to instruct and invigorate fascism and its denizens. And the laws of the natural world yield to these instinctive passions. Discussing Mussolini, authors Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey put it this way in their book Fascism: The Story of an Idea:

“[Mussolini] came to believe that only conflict could replenish fascism’s energies…he believed, wrongly but not uniquely, that economic growth required territorial expansion…Strong nations had a right to subjugate weak ones.”

America, in this fascist conception, can only be great if it grows. Our “golden age” can be achieved only if we seize new land, expand our reach across new waters, and subjugate new people and resources to our control. If that sounds extreme, it’s because it is. But it’s the unavoidable interpretation of Trump’s promises to usher in a new era of greatness alongside his repeated promises to annex other countries.

These ideas also clearly link to Trump’s rhetoric about foreign countries, where he praises bullies and disdains resistance. Earlier this year he told Sean Hannity, "[Ukrainian president] Zelenskyy was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn't have done that, because we could have made a deal." This is straightforward social Darwinism. The weaker country shouldn’t fight back. It’s folly and flies in the face of how the world works. Ukraine should have accepted its fate.

It’s obvious Trump sees Greenland as a landmass to covet that happens to be occupied by some inconvenient residents he can entice, calling it a “very small population, a very, very large piece of land” and promising “we will make you rich.” We are the much bigger, much more powerful country. Like Ukraine, Greenland should make a deal. 

It’s not clear what’s on the other side of Trump’s proposed deal-making with Greenland and Canada. But his language suggests he has no intention of letting “no” be the end of it. And people in the wider MAGA orbit agree. Steve Bannon recently told Global News:

“[Canada doesn’t] really have an option [but to join us] if you want your sovereignty because from the north, from the Arctic, it’s going to get encroached in a great power competition that you don’t have the ability to win.”

It’s hard not to see Canada as an Arctic Poland in Bannon’s description. It’s there to be hoovered up and absorbed for the needs and greatness of America. If anything, Trump seems to view the existence of our neighbor to the north as an affront to some greater imagined America that could be, or should have been. Consider his assertion that, “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It's so perfect as a great and cherished state.”

This is particularly dark because it implies America is the real nation-state whereas Canada is an arbitrary and fictional accident of a line being drawn on a map. It’s fascistic, chauvinist nationalism, as virulent and puerile an expression as Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov’s declaration that “there is no Ukraine.” Historian Timothy Snyder shares this view, referring to Trump’s Canada talk as “strangely Putinist,” and offering the “notion that Canada is not real is an example of the complaisant lies that imperialists tell themselves before beginning doomed wars of aggression.” 

Fascism is a locomotive that requires constant fuel. You can never stop shoveling coal into the fire. It cannot stop, cannot decrease its momentum, cannot tolerate “no.”

You Miss 100% Of The Countries You Don’t Invade

Will Trump try to order American troops into Nuuk? It should be hard to imagine. Will he attempt to break another economy in the hopes he can gobble up the wreckage? The Canadians already believe this is what he is trying to do to them. 

Perhaps this will all pass without further catastrophe. In fact, maybe that is more likely. Trump could keep this at the level of threats, insults, and trade wars, or move on to other pet issues.

But the notion that he absolutely can’t or won’t attempt to take some combination of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal is naive and unimaginative. Sure, it seems preposterous. But an American Secretary of State just stood on Canadian soil and described the president’s stated desire to make Canada the 51st state as a “disagreement” with the Canadian government. Just a few months ago, that would’ve sounded preposterous too.

In Greenland, exiting Prime Minister Múte Egede declared “enough is enough” after Trump once again expressed a desire to acquire their country. Danish politician Rasmus Jarlov stressed that America attempting to take Greenland “would mean war between two NATO countries.”

Those words seem incomprehensible. War? War with a European ally? And yet, Trump’s every provocation and violation so far has been met within his own party by complete support. When he made these threats in his address to Congress, they chanted “USA!” Is there any reason to doubt that this Congress, which is already letting him steal the power of the purse, would give the president extraordinary and even unconstitutional powers to engage in his expansionist agenda? I have no cause for comfort in this regard. 

If Trump does not press his expansionism, it will be because other events have pulled him in some different direction. That’s entirely possible. But it’s not guaranteed, and other countries won’t wait to find out before acting against it. The nature of Trump’s personality and the contours of his fascist politics make expansionism a natural step. It’s well past time to take him seriously.