It’s hard to say what’s more shocking: Donald Trump’s aggressiveness in the Western Hemisphere or his advocates’ unquestioning defense of his words and actions. From Greenland to Venezuela, from Canada to Colombia to Mexico, it’s quite astonishing.
Let’s back up for some context.
When he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, Trump and his MAGA movement lambasted the so-called “neocons.” They excoriated President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Iraq invasion and the whole notion of U.S. interventionism. In a bizarre identification with the International ANSWER/Code Pink crowd, Trump recklessly asserted that Bush flat out “lied” about Iraqi WMDs. Trump found strange bedfellows with the “no-blood-for-oil” gang on the political left.
Trump won the presidency in 2016 on an “America First” platform, vowing to avoid “endless wars.” In his first presidential term, he did just that. He even praised despots like “rocket man” “little Kim” in North Korea and was friendly with Vladimir Putin. In Trump’s defense, he kept America out of foreign wars. In the Middle East, he secured the Abraham Accords, a tremendous achievement worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
By the start of his second presidential term in January 2025, we expected more of the same. Instead, Trump made wild statements about allies and various countries in our Western Hemisphere, from making Canada a 51st state to startling claims on Greenland. Outside the Americas, he bombed Iran amid its attacks on Israel — and in retrospect, successfully.
But most remarkable are Trump’s actions lately. He forcibly removed Nicolas Maduro, a corrupt dictator who seized power and the state’s resources and stole elections. Everyone was happy to see Maduro go. But then came Trump’s claims on Venezuela and its oil. “We are going to run the country,” he declared. Looking elsewhere in the hemisphere, he issued stern warnings to Cuba’s thugs and to the Colombian president to “watch his ass.”
Trump is justifying this in the name of U.S. national security. That’s not a stretch, whether stopping the flow of dangerous narco-trafficking or criminal gangs. Even with Greenland, he makes a not inconceivable case that it must be kept from Russia and China. He’s invoking the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.
Trump defenders, such as Breitbart News, hail this “Donroe Doctrine,” insisting “Trump’s foreign policy, what he’s doing right now, is incredibly coherent. (He’s looking at) actual threats to the United States and how … you make America stronger.”
In that sense, yes, there’s coherence. These are legitimate threats. I know parents who lost children to fentanyl.
But still, there’s much hypocrisy here among Trump and his supporters. His cheerleaders at Fox News shake the pom poms for their boy no matter what. Then there’s the Trump cult — the element that defends anything he does. Trump himself had them pegged 10 years ago when he insisted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
We’re seeing that again now. Indeed, how can the typical MAGA supporter, given the remonstrations against Bush-Cheney “neocons” and all else, so blithely accept the current Trump stridency in the Western Hemisphere? It smacks of some sort of 1900-era McKinley/Roosevelt “bully” foreign policy.
When it comes to their leader, they’ll apparently cheer him on regardless. And yet, this doesn’t comport with the noninterventionism they had long claimed to champion in their Donald.
