US president Donald Trump and The Force of Destiny
By Roberto de Mattei | 29 January 2025
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The tone of Donald Trump’s inaugural address at the White House on 20 January 2025 was one of comeback and challenge: a comeback in the face of those opponents, including the ones within his party, who had written him off after the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021. It is no coincidence that one of the first executive orders he signed was the pardon for the rioters of four years ago. But his speech is also a challenge to all those, in the West and in the East, who have announced the “decline of the American Empire”. In Italy, for example, the epochal crisis of the United States has recently been described by the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd in his book La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), and by the American journalist Alan Friedman in The End of the American Empire, one chapter of which is dedicated to “Trump and other miscreants”, but the conviction of irreversible American decline is above all the basis of the geopolitical ambitions of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who on 21 January appeared before the world via video link to confirm their anti-American alliance.
The thematic thread of the new president’s speech was that of the “golden age” that opens for the United States, starting from 20 January. His inaugural address opened with this statement: “The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” Twenty minutes later he closed his speech with similar words: “The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun… God bless America.”
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” President Trump also exclaimed, renewing his trust in his mission and in “our manifest destiny”. The term “manifest destiny” used by Trump was coined in 1845 by the journalist John L O’Sullivan, who in justifying the annexation of the Republic of Texas maintained that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent”. This was the rationale that the supporters of Jacksonian democracy gave in the mid-nineteenth century for the expansion of the United States towards the Great Plains and the West Coast.
Trump revisited the idea of an American “mission” saying:
“Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens, and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.
“Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback. But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do. In America, the impossible is what we do best… And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
When Trump spoke these words, Elon Musk could not contain his jubilation at seeing proclaimed before the whole world his visionary plan to populate the stars of the universe. Few perceive the dangers inherent in the transhumanist utopia à la Musk, to whom Trump has entrusted the department for government efficiency. The progressive press around the world instead raged in its criticism of Trump’s words and first acts of absolute common sense: the fight against uncontrolled immigration, the rejection of the Green New Deal and woke ideology; in a word, what Trump called “the revolution of common sense”. The pinnacle of Trump’s common sense resounded with limpid clarity when he stated, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
On domestic policy, Trump presented a detailed agenda, followed the next day by a flurry of executive orders. On foreign policy, the new president did not name friends or enemies of his country, but said only that “during every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first”. “America,” Trump said, “will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” This strategy is not outlandish, but places Trump within a political and cultural tradition called “exceptionalism”, based on the idealised vision of America as an “exceptional” country, thanks to its historical evolution and its particular political and religious institutions (Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: The Double-Edged Sword, W W Norton & Co, Inc 1996). Among the declared precursors of Trump’s position, which intertwines “exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny”, are Andrew Jackson, the seventh American president (1829–1837), and William McKinley (1897–1901), the twenty-fifth president, in office from 4 March 1897 until his assassination on 14 September 1901. Trump announced, not coincidentally, that he will reassign McKinley’s name to the highest mountain in North America, rebaptised in 2015 by Barack Obama with the indigenous name of Denali.
McKinley dealt the coup de grâce to what remained of the old Spanish empire by conquering Cuba and the Philippines. His Republican successor Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) took the same tack by intervening in Puerto Rico and Panama, where he claimed sovereignty over the canal that Jimmy Carter ceded to the Republic of Panama and that is now largely operated by Chinese companies. Trump claims it as American, without this meaning the use of military force. “Like in 2017,” he explained, “we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into… My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
Trump’s speech expresses the sense of vigour, anger and pride with which the then presidential candidate got up from the ground after being grazed by a bullet on 13 July 2024, but above all it dovetails with the desire for a return to order and common sense on the part of most Americans. Today the euphoria of those who voted for Trump is understandable after his victory. But there is another America that detests the values proposed by the new president. In this respect, a new internal war within the United States has begun and could even explode violently. Moreover, the “axis of evil” made up of China, Russia and Iran has not dissolved: it has only found itself facing a more fearsome enemy. What response to an inevitable duel will come from weak Europe, represented in Washington only by Giorgia Meloni?
The United States may not need Europe, but Europe certainly needs America, together with which it forms the much-hated West, which today faces an uncertain and not “manifest” destiny. Will the four years we now face be accompanied by the sweet and reassuring melody of “America the Beautiful”, or by the gloomy notes of The Force of Destiny? We will do well to entrust ourselves to that “Virgin of the Angels” who, in Verdi’s famous opera, is invoked as the infallible protector of men, the only one who can change their destiny.