Daniel Immerwahr

And so much of the imperial expansion of the United States was not just

rendered in the sort of cool calculations of, well, this will help our balance sheets and our business might expand.

It was, this will psychologically redeem us.

This will feel good.

This will be a kind of state, you know, an arena for masculinity.

And Trump is offering that.

I mean, and that part of it,

seems to sell.

I mean, a lot of MAGA is about gender roles and about, particularly about masculinity and about sort of men who've been constrained and oppressed and, you know, become effeminate, finally get to be men again.

Well, we'll see what Joe Rogan has to say when the time comes, but I don't know that that's a, it's getting unanimous MAGA

I mean, you look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, who obviously has become a kind of dissident within that movement.

She's not alone.

There's a lot of people in the movement who are very, very loyal to Trump who find this a betrayal of America first and a sense that there are plenty of problems at home that need attending to and we don't need to be invading America.

Venezuela, threatening Colombia, threatening Greenland, and on and on.

So there's this slippery slope between a threat, an airstrike, abducting the president, and then, as Trump has pondered, running the country.

And I think the further you slide down that slippery slope, the less it looks like America first, and the more it looks like

nation building, all the things that Trump ran against.

So you can see this as very quickly becoming a sharp betrayal of Trump's base.

In the piece about McKinley and tariffs that you wrote for The New Yorker, you wrote tariffs did lead to colonization.

The depression of the 1890s exacerbated by McKinley's tariffs stirred American support for taking colonies in order to right the economy.