Peak Historical Ignorance

Josh Gohlke and Harry Litman

As the Trump administration renewed its threats against Greenland and other U.S. neighbors following the Venezuela invasion, my former L.A. Times colleague Josh Gohlke wrote this essay on America’s imperial past and the president’s weaponization of a revisionist history to justify a radical rejection of the postwar order. Josh, a veteran opinion editor and writer who resigned from the Times for ethical reasons last year, posts frequently about politics and policy on his Substack, Laughing Leads to Crying.

Talk to you later.

It’s easy to forget underneath the mountain of absurdities Donald Trump has amassed in less than a year, but one of his first acts of this term was to reattach William McKinley’s name to the nation’s highest peak, which had been re-recognized by its Alaska Native name, Denali. This was an expression not just of Trump’s familiar racism and nostalgia but also of his avowed fondness for the 25th president.

Trump’s bad taste in presidents — Andrew Jackson; himself — is well-known, but his preoccupation with one so obscure and middling revealed that the supposedly “great” American past of his rhetoric is not so much the 20th century of his youth as the 19th. His reckless invasion of Venezuela and menacing of our other hemispheric neighbors — Greenland, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia — amount to a wholesale rejection of postwar progress and a revival of a past characterized by great-powers colonialism, of which McKinley was an American avatar.

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