It was a conflict fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker nation, fought within the identify of revenge and waged by a racist president.
So go away it to President Trump to spike the proverbial soccer over the U.S. victory 178 years in the past within the Mexican-American Warfare.
Abraham Lincoln first earned nationwide consideration by calling out President Polk’s lies concerning the lead-up to the battle, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the ground of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant referred to as the conflict “probably the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s well-known essay “Resistance to Civil Authorities” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American Warfare, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a couple of people utilizing the standing authorities as their instrument.”
Different American paragons of advantage who have been publicly opposed on the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. But on Feb. 2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared {that a} conflict wherein america conquered greater than half of its southern neighbor for no cause apart from it needed to was a testomony to “the unequalled energy of the American spirit” and guided by “divine windfall.”
And in case anybody was nonetheless questioning why Trump would really feel match to commemorate occasions that occurred virtually 200 years in the past, he argued the job wasn’t achieved.
“I’ve spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border towards invasion, upholding the rule of legislation and defending our homeland from forces of evil, violence and destruction.”
No president for the reason that Civil Warfare has ever publicly bragged concerning the Mexican-American Warfare in official proclamations. To take action could be impolite, politically perilous, insulting to our largest commerce companion and simply plain bizarre.
So after all Trump did it.
As I’ve repeatedly identified in my columns, historical past is one among Trumpworld’s most essential battlefronts. Just like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the previous to justify his current actions and future plans, omitting and enhancing occasions of yesteryear to suit a bellicose agenda. That is the man, in spite of everything, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico because the Gulf of America with one among his first govt orders in his second time period and has punished information companies that refuse to conform.
Trump has proven a particular obsession with the Mexican-American Warfare and its architect, Polk. The Wall Avenue Journal reported final 12 months that the president noticed his predecessor as a “actual property man,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of massive coats and bushy mustaches.
A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the Home, Polk received the presidency in 1844 by promising to increase america by any means crucial. He annexed Texas regardless of the objections of the Mexican authorities, tried to purchase Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and elements of Montana and Wyoming.
However the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies considered as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and crucial for the U.S. to satisfy its Manifest Future.
Then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, left, listens as President Trump speaks throughout an occasion on the White Home on July 8, 2020.
(Evan Vucci / Related Press)
He tried at first to purchase the territory from Mexico; when the nation refused, Polk despatched troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to assault. Once they did, Polk went earlier than Congress to hunt a declaration of conflict, claiming Mexico had lengthy inflicted “grievous wrongs” on People as much as and together with ripoffs and deaths and thus wanted to be handled.
“We’re referred to as upon by each consideration of responsibility and patriotism,” the president mentioned, “to vindicate with determination the consideration, the rights and the pursuits of our nation.”
No marvel Trump’s current proclamation referred to as the Mexican-American Warfare “legendary.”
Polk brushed apart the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American Warfare and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who determined to remain of their new nation. Lots of these Mexicans noticed their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous folks noticed their numbers plummet and their lifestyle obliterated. White settlers and companies shortly swooped in to faucet into the huge pure riches of those new territories, relegating the unique inhabitants to being strangers in their very own land.
No marvel Trump changed a portrait of Thomas Jefferson within the Oval Workplace with one among Polk shortly after the beginning of his second time period.
Trump has made expansionism an indicator of his second presidential time period, together with attempting to wrest Greenland from Denmark and always referring to Canada because the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of attempting to usher in a brand new period of imperialism. However all he’s doing is constant the Mexican-American Warfare, which by no means actually ended.
People have been skeptical of brown-skinned folks for the reason that days of the Alamo, at all times fearful Latinos are one step away from rebel and thus should at all times be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, authorized segregation and stereotypes that proceed to the current day. That is the mindset and legacy Trump depends on for his deportation deluge, the playbook he makes use of to persecute undocumented folks with demonizing language and wholesale lies.
Relations between america and Mexico will at all times be fraught — our relationship is simply too sophisticated. However when one other American president marked the a hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American Warfare, his strategy was far totally different.
In 1947, Harry S. Truman grew to become the primary U.S. commander in chief to go to Mexico Metropolis. At a state dinner on the Nationwide Palace, he acknowledged that “it could be silly to fake that basic variations in political philosophies don’t exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American Warfare as a “horrible quarrel between our personal states.”
Folks go to the monument to the Niños Héroes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico Metropolis on Aug. 14, 2019.
(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Pictures)
However Truman spent the remainder of the speech preaching allyship in a brand new world the place Mexico and america ought to see one another not as enemies however buddies.
“Although the highway be lengthy and wearisome that results in a great neighborhood as broad because the world, we will journey it collectively,” Truman informed the appreciative viewers. “Our two international locations won’t fail one another.”
The next day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage army cadets who died in one of many final battles of the Mexican-American Warfare and thus maintain an exalted place within the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the shock of his hosts, positioned a wreath on the monument.
“All through the day,” the New York Instances reported, “folks shouted his identify, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States residents appeared on the streets or in cafes.”
In the present day, “viva” positive isn’t going to be a phrase Mexicans use in the event that they utter Trump’s identify.
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