In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement from NASA:
A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will destroy most of Europe upon impact, causing seismic events that will generate one-thousand-foot-high tsunamis and nine-hundred-degree surface winds traveling faster than the speed of sound. Within hours, all of the continents will be on fire as the impact’s molten debris rains down from the upper atmosphere.
The family manages to get on a small plane heading for Greenland. As they fly, Garrity dreams of a verdant homeland of lush groves and sprinklers watering the lawn where his wife and child are playing—the lost America from which they are now refugees. He wakes to the sun shining through the window. Then, like Noah on the ark, he spies land: “Look, see it!” An ice-mottled peninsula, its shoreline washed by a glittering sea, comes into view. A glacier gleams on a craggy, snow-topped mountain. There is more drama with hurtling meteoric fireballs and a crash landing. The family runs to an American air base and, with the military personnel and the other survivors from the plane, finds shelter in a huge underground bunker just as the asteroid is about to obliterate Europe.
The screen fades to black. Then we see scenes from the incinerated world: the white of the Sydney Opera House turned a sickly gray by its coat of ash; a twisted and decapitated Eiffel Tower leaning precariously over the dusty traces of Paris; streetscapes that look like the recent drone footage of Gaza or Los Angeles. After what we understand to be the passage of nine months, the doors of the bunker open and the Americans shield their eyes from the dazzling sunlight. Chirping birds fly over the sublime landscape. The survivors emerge into their new New World: Greenland. The next American century begins here.
On January 15, five days before his inauguration for his second term as president, Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes—long-standing and loyal allies of the US—are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.”
Just over a week earlier, in a show of monarchical and dynastic power, Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:
Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!
He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland.
These events shed some light on the nature of Trump’s second coming. For a start, they mark a transition of Trumpian modes from comedy to brutality. According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, buying Greenland was an idea Trump acquired from the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder. But it was not regarded within his first administration as anything other than a flight of fancy:
After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. “You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real.’”
At that time Frederiksen dismissed Trump’s Greenland proposition as “absurd.” And even though Trump was plainly furious at her rebuff, he also played it for laughs. He tweeted a Photoshop mock-up of a mammoth Trump Tower looming over some scattered huts in what looks like an Arctic seaside village: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”
In response the right-wing podcaster Graham Allen tweeted, “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN,” the joke Trump has now repeated not as an absurdist gag but as an American strategic imperative. Trump is signaling that the first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands. “This isn’t real” is a get-out clause for his enablers that has now been canceled.
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Don Jr. landed in Greenland on the day that devastating wildfires began to destroy the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. Scenes from a disaster movie were playing out in real life as Sunset Boulevard was choked with people trying to flee. The drone footage on the news bulletins was hard to distinguish from the simulated urban wastelands of Hollywood Armageddons. The conjunction makes a kind of sense: at some level, Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk—a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.
Greenland has an evil double: Puerto Rico. We know from Baker and Glasser that after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, killing more than three thousand people in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US in a century, Trump asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, “How much hurricane disaster relief are we giving to Puerto Rico?” and added, “Can we just take that and use it for [the purchase of] Greenland?” Likewise, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, later told MSNBC that in 2018, before a flight to Puerto Rico to inspect the damage, Trump asked him and other officials whether the US could swap the Caribbean island for Greenland. Thus the cataclysmic consequences of climate chaos—and the people who have to live with them—would become Denmark’s problem, while the US would gain a clean, cool new frontier.
The same warped logic was at work in Trump’s _expression_ in early February of his opinion that the United States should annex the Gaza Strip: “I do see a long-term ownership position…. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” (It is telling that, in a Fox News interview six days later, the possession of Gaza had become personal: “I would own this.”) Greenland is largely uninhabited; with 56,000 people living in an area of over 800,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country on earth. Gaza has been rendered almost uninhabitable for its current population, and in Trump’s imagination those people can be made to disappear. Greenland is a postapocalyptic refuge; Gaza looks like the apocalypse has already happened. Each can be envisaged in this twisted thought process as a tabula rasa.
In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business. Speaking of Greenland after the end of his first term, Trump recalled, “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” On his flying visit to Greenland in January, Don Jr. may have claimed to be there to see the sights, but he was also no doubt eyeing the sites. Likewise, Trump’s démarche on Gaza follows the rationale of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s public musing in March 2024 that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…. It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
The template for Gaza is a building in New York City called 100 Central Park South. Trump bought it in 1981. The tenants had enjoyed controlled rents. Trump wanted, as he recalled in The Art of the Deal, “to vacate and raze the building.” “It happens to be very easy to vacate a building if, like so many landlords, you don’t mind being a bad guy.” He hired a company that “specialized in relocating tenants.” As CNN has reported, according to lawsuits filed by those tenants, “Trump had cut off their hot water and heat during New York’s freezing winters and stopped all building repairs.” He was also, for once in his life, overcome with compassion for the destitute and took out newspaper advertisements offering to shelter homeless people at 100 Central Park South. In the end Trump’s plan to demolish the building was thwarted, but the idea has not gone away: force the existing residents out, raze everything to the ground, and you have a site fronting on Central Park or the Mediterranean ready for its lucrative new life.
Catastrophes are opportunities. Climate change has an upside: as the ice sheet that covers three quarters of Greenland melts, enormous mineral and carbon reserves become available for exploitation, and vacant expanses become not just habitable but desirable as northerly refuges from intolerable heat. Israel’s pulverization of Gaza is merely the unfortunate prelude to the creation of what Trump calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Refugees will make way for resorts. The only question, as David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, recently mused on social media, would be whether to call this new US territory “Mar-a-Gaza or Gaz-a-Lago?”
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Trump’s imperialist ambitions are in some respects familiar from US history. Building new paradises on land whose indigenous population has been exterminated, displaced to reservations, or otherwise “cleansed” was America’s foundational act. Trump’s recent suggestion that Canada be subsumed into the US as “the 51st state” harks back to John Quincy Adams’s claim that “our proper domain [is] the continent of North America.” His grandson Henry Adams described the expectation that “the whole continent of North America and all its adjacent islands must at last fall under the control of the United States” as “a conviction absolutely ingrained in our people.” In Democratic Vistas (1871), Walt Whitman wrote that “long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba.” At the end of World War II, Harry Truman approved efforts (conducted quietly and diplomatically and gently rejected) to persuade Denmark to sell Greenland to the US.
What is new, however, is the fusion of different apocalyptic visions, one religious, the other techno-utopian. The annexation of Gaza by a Christian America appeals to the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that the conversion of the Jews in Israel will set in motion the end times and therefore hasten the Rapture, in which they themselves will ascend to Heaven. The acquisition and development of Greenland dovetails with Musk’s Martian fantasia: Trump, in his inaugural address, pledged that “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Thus is Musk’s infantile obsession launched into orbit around Trump’s own colonial reveries.
This Martian mission in turn shares a genealogy with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which the title character is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazis’ leading rocket scientist, who went on to work on the American ballistic missile program and on NASA’s space missions. According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, his unusual first name was inspired by Project Mars, a novel Braun wrote in the immediate postwar years. Braun describes the political system of the colony:
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
The DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Isaacson that during a visit to the SpaceX factory after the two men met in 2012, Musk explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.” The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself—as Strangelove explains of the underground world to which the US president and his highest officials, along with civilians selected for their “necessary skills,” will escape when nuclear war begins. “Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” aided by the provision of ten women (selected for their sexual attractiveness) for every man. As a bonus, “there would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”
All of this may be insane, but it is a necessary insanity. How else is it possible for Trump and his followers to reconcile his seeming determination to speed up climate collapse with his declaration of a new golden age? In his inaugural address, Trump evoked climate-driven disasters in North Carolina and Los Angeles, showing special sympathy for members of the elite who had been victims of fires “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.” Yet he simultaneously promised to extract “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth” and stop the transition to a carbon-free economy.
Nonetheless, “the future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” The last time we heard this was in Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech as British prime minister in July 2019: “We will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.” That prophecy has not worn well, and even at the time it seemed ludicrous. But it is an obligatory form of nonsense in contemporary reactionary discourse. It offers the escapist promise of a future that does not match any imaginable version of the burning world we actually inhabit.
The golden age is described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses as an impossible past in which there was no need for laws because everyone behaved sweetly and no need for work because the earth, bathed in a perpetual springtime, was so abundant. What happened to this paradise in the Christian tradition is that it was transported from earth to Heaven. It became a posthumous location—you have to expire before you get to inhabit it. As a political promise about the future, the golden age is a lightly secularized version of pie in the sky when you die.
And this afterlife is best lived in after-places. In the Trump/Musk phantasmagoria, colonization is temporal as well as spatial. It is the “post” in postapocalyptic. New spaces—a warming Greenland or Gaz-a-Lago or Mars ruled by the Elon—will be new beginnings where, as Strangelove guarantees, there will be “no shocking memories” of the horrors in which the old world died screaming. That is why these places must be unpopulated, scarcely populated, or depopulated. The slate must be clean.
This insanity runs deep, but it is important to understand that there is also method in the madness: imperial fantasies create the conditions for an imperial presidency. This latter phrase—coined by the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker—gained wide currency in the dying days of Richard Nixon’s deranged second term, when it served as the title of Arthur Schlesinger’s best-selling book of 1973. The imperial presidency whose history he traces is one that leverages supposed foreign dangers to justify domestic tyranny. In 1793 James Madison warned that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” International adventures, he wrote, inflate the persona of the president and unleash the “strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity.” Five years later Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
Schlesinger noted, in a new preface to the 2004 edition of The Imperial Presidency, that Nixon had “carried the Imperial Presidency still further by using against his political opponents at home—‘enemies,’ he called them—powers that the presidency had accumulated to save the republic from foreign foes.” He also wrote that “it was hard to reconcile the separation of powers with a foreign policy animated by an indignant ideology and marked by a readiness to intervene speedily and unilaterally…everywhere on earth.” “Indignant ideology” is a phrase that demands revival.
It is striking, though, that American historians have tended to take comfort in the notion of the imperial presidency as a temporary aberration. Schlesinger was able to conclude that “Nixon’s attempt to institutionalize the imperial Presidency failed.” By December 2000 Michael Beschloss could publish an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “The End of the Imperial Presidency,” in which he hailed the then-incoming George W. Bush as “the first truly post-imperial president.” In the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America of September 11, 2001, that turned out to be very wide of the mark.
Yet even after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Schlesinger could express a quiet confidence in the capacity of the American republic to reassert itself:
As a world empire, the United States is undone by its own domestic politics and its own humane, pluralistic, and tolerant ideals. The premises of our national existence undermine our imperial aspirations. So the Imperial Presidency redux is likely to continue messing things up, as we are doing so successfully in Iraq, the needless war. Then democracy’s singular virtue—its capacity for self-correction—will one day swing into action.
Oddly, though he would not have used the terms, Trump, in his first manifestation as a presidential candidate in 2015 and 2016, was quite in tune with Schlesinger’s belief that America’s “national existence” was incompatible with “imperial aspirations.” Part of his appeal—particularly in contrast to the perceived hawkishness of Hillary Clinton—was his promise to end the forever wars. In his first big foreign policy speech, delivered in April 2016, he condemned the “foolishness and arrogance” of America’s post–cold war military interventions in Asia and the Middle East:
It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of American [lives] horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result.
Even as president, Trump presented himself as a devotee not just of the sovereignty but of the sanctity of nation-states. “The free world,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, “must embrace its national foundations. It must not attempt to erase them or replace them.” The great enemy then was globalism: “The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”
Trump has never been coherent or consistent, but the flagrantly imperialist turn of his second term demands an explanation. How does he go from decrying the results of American meddling in the Middle East to imagining the creation of an American colony in Gaza? How does he go from the absolute insistence that one must “not attempt to erase” national “foundations” to wanting to absorb Canada, force Panama to cede its sovereignty over the canal, coerce Denmark into handing over Greenland, and annex part of Palestine?
Some of the answer may lie in the waning influence over Trump of Steve Bannon’s brand of nationalist ideology and the increasing sway of Musk’s global—and indeed extraterrestrial—ambitions. It may also rest in Trump’s egomaniacal desire to turn the map of the world into a mirror that reflects his own glory. (Having renamed North America’s highest mountain after one of his predecessors, he may well fancy the designation of the highest in the Arctic, Greenland’s Gunnbjørn Fjeld, as Mount Trump.)
But the deeper answer is that imperialism is the inseparable twin of the imperial presidency. Schlesinger’s article of faith that attempts to make the US a world empire would always be undone by its “own humane, pluralistic, and tolerant ideals” is now null and void. Trump flaunted his contempt for those ideals, and a majority of American voters endorsed that disdain. The “domestic politics” that Schlesinger thought would always act to correct the excesses of Madison’s “executive aggrandizement” collapsed when the Republican Party entered its post-democratic afterlife. Nixon’s once infamous claim that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal” is now in essence an official doctrine of Trump’s Supreme Court. There is no effective restraint on Trump’s open emergence as (to borrow the title of Iggy Pop’s startlingly prescient album of 1993) the American Caesar.
Trump almost certainly does not want to start a war with Denmark or Canada. The speed with which his claim that he might send US troops to occupy Gaza (“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he said on February 4) melted away (“No soldiers by the US would be needed!” he posted on Truth Social on February 6) suggests that he remains uncomfortable with direct military intervention. The excruciating attempts by his officials and supporters to water down or explain away his statements do not point to the existence of any serious plan to colonize Gaza. At least for the moment, his expansionist swagger can be thought of as a kind of meta-imperialism—the language and gestures of international aggression without the physical force. But this does not mean the posturing is empty. As Madison pointed out to Jefferson, the foreign entanglement a president uses to usurp power at home can be “real or pretended.” With Trump the line between those conditions is always blurred. What matters is, to borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams, the “structure of feeling” he is able to generate.
The structure of feeling that shapes the colonial mindset is what Caroline Elkins in her recent history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence, calls “legalized lawlessness.” This paradox stretches across the abyss between supposedly law-bound and civilized democracies and the unfortunate things they have to do to keep their unenlightened (usually dark-skinned) foreign subjects in order. Actions that would not otherwise be either legal or decent become so when they are seen as serving imperial ends. Anarchic state violence can then be understood as the rigor needed to uphold law and order among unruly peoples.
Legalized lawlessness is a good fit for the hybrid nature of Trumpism’s second coming. The MAGA movement has to manage a contradiction between the libertarian, antigovernment ideology of its Big Tech wing and the despotism of the fascist traditions on which it draws. The solvent is a kind of anarcho-authoritarianism that divides Americans in the same way that Western empires divided humanity into citizens of the motherland (who have rights) and subjects of the empire (who do not). For now “real Americans” are the citizens and migrants are the subjects.
This is why one of Trump’s first acts, on the night of his inauguration, was to sign an executive order that seeks to uproot the fundamental concept of American citizenship by ending the automatic entitlement to it of all those born on US soil. In doing this he is forging his own paradox—the American foreigner, the nonnational native. “Colonial subjects,” writes Elkins, “were effectively stateless people,” and that is exactly the condition to which Trump intends to reduce millions of Americans. And as Hannah Arendt showed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, once people are rendered stateless they are also “rightless”—“the scum of the earth” to whom anything can be done.
The immediate victims of legalized lawlessness in Trump’s America will be migrants. This is where the imperial presidency will first exercise its unrestrained authority. Trump has internalized the foreign danger that Madison warned could be used to make a president a monarch—the enemy is already fully within. And thus there must be, alongside the fantasy of postapocalyptic colonies, a shadow empire of extraterritorial camps into which migrants can be decanted: Guantánamo Bay, El Salvador, and what Trump says are “numerous, many” other countries. One of the minor outgrowths of European imperialism—the penal colony—is to be the main event of Trump’s revived version. Clearing a postapocalyptic Gaza of millions of people may be, at least for the moment, as The New York Times put it, “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” but it sits in that head alongside a much more intimate form of ethnic cleansing in America itself. Imagining Americans fleeing a global catastrophe to Greenland helps prepare the way for a forced exodus of other Americans to bleak and barren futures.
—February 13, 2025
