America First: MAGA wants to be a colonial power

America First: MAGA wants to be a colonial power
First Venezuela, now Greenland: Trump is promoting an international Manifest Destiny updated for the 21st century

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published January 7, 2026 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) MAGA is rapidly descending into 21st-century colonial fantasy, dressed up in the language of national security and draped in the flag of patriotism. “America First” is currently being reimagined as the public resurrection of a colonial project. Along with Saturday’s military assault in Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, which killed around 75 people according to an estimate by U.S. officials, Donald Trump has also bombed targets in Nigeria, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia in his first year back in office. Now his administration is openly encroaching upon Greenland, a NATO ally, which is finally raising bipartisan alarm bells on Capitol Hill.

The resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine sits at the heart of Trump’s imperial project. He has openly embraced this 200-year-old policy, which essentially declared the Western Hemisphere to be the domain of the United States. “We sort of forgot about it,” the president said. “It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” He has since dubbed his version the Donroe Doctrine.

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For decades, neocons maintained at least the pretense of respecting sovereignty, supporting democracy and human rights, building international coalitions and working through multilateral institutions. Following Trump’s lead, the MAGA coalition has stripped away that pretense entirely, revealing the raw will to dominate that has always lurked beneath the surface of American power. When the president talks about seizing land in Panama, or appropriating Greenland and all its vast mineral resources without considering the will of the indigenous population that lives there, he is offering an updated version of the European colonial project of the 19th century and Germany’s fascist colonial project of the 1930s and ’40s.

On Monday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller argued on CNN that because Greenland lies in the Western Hemisphere, it falls under the U.S. sphere of influence as defined by the Monroe Doctrine and therefore should not remain a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. When host Jake Tapper later asked why Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was not acceptable to the Trump administration as a transitional leader, Miller erupted. He dismissed elections as a “neoliberal frame” and launched into a tirade about the Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine as guarantors of “the future of the free world.” When Tapper pointed out that the U.S. had invaded Venezuela and seized its leader, Miller shouted back, “Damn straight we did!” because, he claimed, the U.S. would not allow “tinpot communist dictators” to send rapists and drugs into the country. ..........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/07/america-first-maga-wants-to-be-a-colonial-power/