Petty Trump spikes football over nearly 200-year-old Mexican-American War
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It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.
So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.
Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”
Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet on Feb. 2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared that a war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”
And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.
“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence and destruction.”
The Mexican-American War of remade the U.S. and Mexico — and the much-debated border that separates the two countries. But it remains a relatively overshadowed conflict in American history. In Montebello, a group of men and women try to educate people by reenacting a key battle.
No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.
So of course Trump did it.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columns, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.
Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.
A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.
He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.
“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights and the interests of our country.”
No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”
Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.
No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.
Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark and constantly referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.
In the post, the White House makes no mention of the key role slavery played in the war and glorifies the wider “Manifest Destiny” period, which resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from their land.
Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies.
Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught — our relationship is just too complicated. But when another American president marked the 100th anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far different.
In 1947, Harry S. Truman became the first U.S. commander in chief to visit Mexico City. At a state dinner at the National Palace, he acknowledged that “it would be foolish to pretend that fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”
But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.
“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”
The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.
“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”
Today, “viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The author argues that President Trump’s commemoration of the Mexican-American War represents an inappropriate celebration of a conflict rooted in colonialism and imperial expansion, pointing out that the 1846-1848 war was designed to humiliate a weaker nation and was waged by a president whose actions were later criticized by historical figures including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass.[1]
The author contends that Trump is weaponizing history to justify his current border and immigration policies, much like President James K. Polk used questionable claims about Mexican aggression to justify war to Congress, with Trump characterizing his border enforcement as a continuation of the unfinished agenda of territorial expansion.[1] The author notes that Trump has elevated Polk as a model president, viewing the historical figure as a “real estate guy” who pursued expansion by any means necessary to acquire what is now the American Southwest.
The author emphasizes that the Mexican-American War resulted in lasting injustices, including the dispossession of Mexican and Indigenous peoples who were displaced from their lands as white settlers and corporations exploited the newly acquired territories, leaving original inhabitants marginalized in their own homeland.[2]
The author argues that Trump’s approach marks a dramatic departure from presidential precedent, as no commander in chief since the Civil War has publicly celebrated the Mexican-American War in official proclamations, contrasting Trump’s stance with President Harry S. Truman’s 1947 reconciliatory visit to Mexico City, where Truman acknowledged the conflict as a “terrible quarrel” and called for friendship and mutual support between the nations.
The author contends that Trump’s anti-Latino sentiment and deportation policies are rooted in a historical tradition of American suspicion toward “brown-skinned people” dating to the era of the Alamo, representing a continuation of the subjugation that has manifested in lynchings, legal segregation, and ongoing stereotypes against Latinos.
Different views on the topic
Trump has framed the Mexican-American War as a demonstration of American strength and divine providence, declaring in his February 2 proclamation that the war showcased “the unmatched power of the American spirit,” characterizing it as “legendary” rather than an unjust territorial conquest.[1]
Trump has connected his border security and immigration enforcement policies to the historical precedent of territorial defense, asserting that his efforts to protect the southern border against what he characterizes as “invasion” represent a continuation of American sovereignty efforts that began with the territorial disputes leading to the Mexican-American War.[1]
Trump’s elevation of President Polk as a historical model suggests an implicit view that expansionist policies and the acquisition of territory through forceful negotiation represent legitimate exercises of national power and presidential leadership, framing such actions as consistent with American national interests rather than imperial overreach.[1]
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