Donald Trump is just like other US presidents – except for one thing | World News

If one listens to commentary about Donald Trump – and there’s so much of it that banning the word ‘Trump’ would bankrupt WENA outlets – you would assume he was an anomaly in the system, the sum total of all unbalanced equations, antithetical to the American way of life. In recent times, his actions — expansionist tendencies, warmongering, using government agencies to target his opponents, justifying his actions, and snatching basic liberties — have been held up as something as un-American as socialism.But Trump isn’t an aberration from past American presidents, but their Jungian composite sketch: the Expansionist, the Warmonger, and the Freedom Crusher.

What makes Trump a more evolved version is that he refuses to participate in the diplomatic pageantry of pretending that America’s actions are for some great good instead of self-aggrandisement. Trump isn’t here, to borrow a phrase from Morpheus’ epic speech in Zion in The Matrix Reloaded, because of the path that lies before him, but because of the path that lay behind him in American history. The only difference from former premiers is that he performs these old imperial instincts as pure, unembarrassed id — an unrestrained force not seen in reel or real life since Tyler Durden.

The Expansionist

When Trump expressed a desire to annex Greenland or jokingly called Canada the 51st state, the commentariat clutched their pearls, forgetting the history that expanded the US from 830,000 square miles (the original 13 states) to nearly 3.8 million square miles, roughly increasing its size by 360%.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson doubled the territory by buying Louisiana from Napoleonic France. Andrew Jackson expanded it with the Indian Removal Act, displacing the five tribes because Americans wanted to get their hands on gold found on Indian land, which displaced 100,000 Native Americans and led to the death of 15,000 indigenous people, a journey so horrific it came to be known as the Trail of Tears, while scholars justified it by claiming they were ‘vanishing Indians’ anyway.By the 1840s, Americans had come up with the term ‘Manifest Destiny’, which sounds like something an Instagram influencer would caption under a sunset selfie in 2026 but was in fact the 19th-century belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its dominion by spreading democracy, capitalism, republicanism and the American way of life across the entire North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west.

It was used to justify the Mexican–American War in 1846 under James K Polk, leading to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, with Mexico losing half its territory and the United States gaining California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The California Gold Rush displaced even more indigenous tribes.Manifest Destiny soon moved beyond the continent with the Spanish–American War delivering Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, while the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani in Hawaii — backed by American businessmen and US Marines — eventually led to its annexation in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt perfected expansion not through settlers but strategy, backing Panama’s rebellion against Colombia so the United States could build and control the Panama Canal.

The republic that began as thirteen colonies hugging the Atlantic coast had by the early twentieth century turned itself into a continental empire spanning the entire landmass of North America — transforming thirteen states into fifty and an insecure republic into the dominant power of the modern world. So, when Trump expresses a desire to suddenly annex Greenland, he is just exhibiting 250 years of American muscle memory. Trump’s leitmotif since 2016 has been MAGA, Make America Great Again, and this is exactly the way America became ‘great’.

The Warmonger

The world has gotten used to American exceptionalism, but even among those exceptionalist peculiarities, gun violence remains the most bizarre hill where all debates die. Perhaps it has something to do with the Second Amendment. America, in the popular imagination, is the idea that the nation was born with the boom of a gun, which means that no American politician can admit that the world would be a safer place if mentally deranged people didn’t have access to weapons that can help commit murder.

This craving for violence is also reflected in the inherent bloodlust that is a feature of every American regime, a nation addicted to war. The Warmonger is America’s oldest political archetype, and the American presidency almost has divine retribution rights, the most powerful person in the free world.Over time, thanks to the vague wording in the US Constitution (“The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America”), the president has unprecedented powers with few checks when launching wars without formal declarations, bombing sovereign countries, assassinating foreign leaders, conducting covert wars, and maintaining permanent military bases around the globe. This is the war machine that Trump has inherited.The idea that Trump’s actions of picking a head of state (Nicolas Maduro) or killing another (Ayatollah Khamenei) are isolated is to ignore history. America remains the only nation to drop atom bombs. Harry Truman got into the Korean War without a formal declaration. Bill Clinton ordered NATO bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Iraq while scandals engulfed the White House. Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War with some of the most destructive bombing campaigns in history with American force. Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos, with the US dropping more bombs than those used in World War II.

Ronald Reagan ordered retaliation strikes in Libya after a terrorist attack. George W Bush pushed the archetype further, pre-emptively invading Iraq with false claims of weapons of mass destruction. Barack Obama refined American warfare with drone strikes across Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.Trump has – for all his pre-election bluster to be different – followed in the footsteps of his predecessors with Operation Midnight Hammer, which was supposed to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme before following it up with Operation Roaring Lion.Most former American presidents used some form of doctrine to justify their bloodlust like protecting the Americas from European colonialism or trying to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but this regime particularly doesn’t try. Are the strikes in Iran to get rid of its nuclear programme? Was it done to facilitate regime change? Was it to protect women and children? Was it the endgame for the Crusades? Was it for Israel? No one quite knows, not even Trump.Read: What is the Trump Doctrine? What he does know is that he’s the best, that America is the best and the way to celebrate any sort of attack is to share slickly produced edits featuring Iron Man, John Wick, Transformers, and the Mortal Kombat leitmotif saying “Finish Him”. It feels like the logical endpoint of meme culture: war edited like a Marvel trailer and death scored to a video-game soundtrack.

The Freedom Crusher

And finally, the snatching of liberty. Americans have long fashioned an image of themselves as the global upholders of freedom, pointing proudly to the First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” — as the sacred scripture of their political faith. Americans love to believe they embody the Statue of Liberty, but liberty is usually the first casualty of power.

For the longest time, the nation that prided itself on equality did not allow women or Black Americans to vote.Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, allowing citizens to be detained without trial. Woodrow Wilson criminalised dissent during World War I. Franklin D Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.The Cold War produced McCarthyism, blacklists and loyalty oaths that destroyed careers and reputations. After 9/11, George W Bush constructed the architecture of the modern security state: the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition.Read: How Obama birthed TrumpBarack Obama preserved that system and extended it. So when Trump used executive power with little restraint — threatening institutions, testing the limits of federal authority, and treating constitutional norms as obstacles rather than guardrails — he was not inventing something new. He was drawing from the long institutional memory of American democracy, where liberty expands in theory but contracts whenever power feels threatened.

The Tyler Durden

But perhaps the key to understanding why Trump behaves the way he does is because of where he sits. Trump, the former real estate developer, views the world as property. Gaza? A premium property just waiting to be rid of war. Greenland rich in resources that can help America. Venezuela? Oil that can be used by America. Shakespeare said the world is a stage. For Trump, it’s prime real estate.

All said and done, Trump is, to use a Latin phrase, ceteris paribus. The only thing he is doing differently is refusing to apologise for it, much like Tyler Durden, the imaginary character from David Fincher’s Fight Club. The film was meant to be a critique of toxic masculinity and patriarchal capitalism, yet it ended up becoming the totem of those who celebrated it.Where earlier presidents wrapped power in the language of democracy, freedom and humanitarian duty, he dispenses with the ritual entirely. The Expansionist, the Warmonger, and the Liberty Snatcher were all fleshed-out archetypes that existed before him. Trump simply plays them without the moral costume.But the most disturbing thing is, anyone who has watched Fight Club knows Tyler Durden didn’t exist. It was all going on in the Narrator’s head.What if everything Trump says and does exists first inside his head? That would certainly explain the logorrhoea, the stream-of-consciousness speeches, the vague justifications, and more. In the past, the power of the executive has always been debated but there was the illusion of institutions that could stop him. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry has a conversation with Dumbledore when he discusses everything that’s been going on. And then he asks: “Is this real? Or is it just happening in my head?” Dumbledore replies: “Of course it’s happening in your head, but why would that mean it’s not real.”And that is the problem because whatever is happening inside Trump’s head is painfully real for the rest of us, and with catastrophic consequences.