PALESTINE | USA | TRUMP

Trump: Globalize Gentrification

American Empire parading in the raw

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Few people remember Trump’s RNC speech last summer. Do you? The pioneer speech? Promising to restore America to its past greatness, Trump gave a vision of “our pioneer ancestors” in their wagons pushing the Frontier across “empty lands”, and “taming the wilderness.” (In the same speech, he condemned the “invasion” at the Southern border about ten times, making me wonder what’s the difference.)

He’s not wrong in viewing American history that way. America’s tale was one of continued expansion and an unquenchable thirst for “territory”.

Screenshot of one of the Trump NFTs, released a few years ago (Screenshot by the author)

The “Frontier” was where bands of “settlers”, in the name of “defense” frequently raided indigenous villages to loot, burn, and shoot. As one of Steinbeck’s characters in The Grapes of Wrath says, “‘My grampa fought the Injuns for it.’”

Writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:

“The same methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad.” (p. 162)

“The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period…