Isaac Chotiner: When was the last time an American President spoke this way?
Greg Grandin: I would distinguish between the frontier as a general metaphor, and a frontier of actual territory. The last time a President actually spoke of the frontier as actual territory—I mean, I don’t even think William McKinley, before going to war with Spain, and taking Cuba and the Philippines, talked about Manifest Destiny as the taking of actual territory. I think you’d have to go back to James Polk, and Mexico, and Texas; he identified the future acquisition of new territory as a key to American prosperity, welfare, and destiny. Certainly after the Civil War, as the United States was wrapping up the conquest of the West, Presidents would reference filling out our nation in that way.
IC: Trump is an admirer of Andrew Jackson, and was often talked about as a Jacksonian in his first term. Did that make sense to you?
GG: Yeah, they made a big deal about Andrew Jackson, and there was much invocation of Jackson in the sense that he was the first populist President, the first anti-élite President. He swung open the doors to the White House, and he let the people in, and he expanded the franchise to all white men. But now it seems we hear more about McKinley. Trump reinstated the name Mount McKinley [the mountain was called Denali], and he likes McKinley’s tariffs. In Jackson, he taps into one variant of U.S. political nationalism that defines freedom as freedom from restraint—that white men define their freedom as freedom from government control. I think Jackson is the avatar of that.
McKinley, I think, is an avatar of other aspects that Trump is now trying to expand into. McKinley was the President who basically presided over the leap from territorial expansion on the continent into the Pacific, and into the Caribbean, with the Spanish-American War of 1898. And, simultaneously, he is most known for building an enormous tariff wall to help U.S. industry by keeping out European and British manufacturers. I think Trump identifies with McKinley more in terms of the tariffs. I don’t know how aware he is of the politics of the War of 1898.
IC: I have a guess.
GG: But, importantly, the War of 1898 was a qualitative leap in the justification of war. It was the first war that was explicitly fought in the name of human rights. Spain was waging such a ruthless counterinsurgency in Cuba and Puerto Rico that the United States invoked human rights as one of the justifications for going in. As the story goes, McKinley fell down on his knees the night before he made his decision to go to war, and he asked God what he should do, and God said, Go in and save Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
IC: This reminds me of George W. Bush in some ways, but not at all of Trump. When you were explaining Trump’s vision earlier, there were ways in which I thought of Bush, but really it’s very distinct, certainly in the rhetoric.
GG: Yeah, I think that’s right. Bush was very careful, despite lapsing occasionally into cowboy talk, of presenting his vision of a global war on terror as an advancement of liberal values, or universal values, and this, I think, was the neoconservative project in full, and I think that that’s why you see so many of the Never Trumpers come out of that movement.