U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s “America First” model?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale University and the author of books such as America, América: A New History of the New World. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s “America First” model?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale University and the author of books such as America, América: A New History of the New World. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: We’re all familiar with MAGA, or Make America Great Again. The strange thing is it has begun to evoke making America not just great, but greater in size.

Greg Grandin: This came out of nowhere during Trump’s second inaugural address, when he talked about Canada, Greenland, and possibly taking over the Panama Canal Zone. Like many things with Trump, it’s hard to figure out. It seems like he rummages through the trash bin of U.S. history and pulls out whatever suits him.

I don’t think he’s an expansionist president in the way that I would use the term, but he is in many ways the first “batten down the hatches” president. During his first term, he substituted the myth of the frontier for a new symbol: the border and the wall that became the articulating center of his many constituencies. He invokes “America First,” despite occasionally talking about taking over Greenland or annexing Canada as the 51st state. All those things seem to have fallen by the wayside, although we did get the symbolic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

RA: Well, let’s talk about that trash bin of history. James Madison wrote in 1787 about “extending the sphere.” There is a long history of the American frontier as being something that one can and should expand.

GG: American exceptionalism means a lot of things to different people, but I don’t think any other self-proclaimed nation had the promise of expansion built into its very fundamentals—the founders believed that the United States was going to reach the Pacific.

When we talk about the frontier, we’re talking about the land frontier, [Native American] removal, and wars against Mexico to get to the Pacific. But we’re also just talking about the ideal of limitlessness and the use of limitlessness to organize domestic politics. The ideal of a frontier is infinitely useful because it can be projected into infinity.

RA: You’ve written that when nationalism is inward-looking, it can be destructive. So, the possibility of looking outside allows you to not self-destruct, as it were, and instead to keep expanding both the frontiers and the myth that things are OK internally.

GG: Both the reality and the ideal of expansion do a lot of work. The land frontier was an enormous bank of wealth for the new nation in terms of land, minerals, and plant cultivation. But the promise of limitlessness was a way of venting social discontent. Other nations had to deal with labor parties organizing, but the United States never had a Labor Party, so it could constantly use the promise of limitlessness in order to reconcile internal contradictions. All of the violence and brutality associated with Western expansion could be kept on........

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