Donald Trump’s imperial presidency is a tawdry, threadbare affair. The emperor has no clothes to cloak his counterfeit rule. Lacking crown and robes, he resorts to vulgar ties and baseball caps. His throne is but a bully pulpit, his palace a pokey, whitewashed house, his courtiers mere common hacks. His royal edicts – executive orders – are judicially contested. And while he rages like Lear, his critics are publicly crucified or thrown to the lions at Fox News.

Yet for all his crudely plebeian ordinariness, a parvenu imperialism is Trump’s global offer, his trademark deal and most heinous crime. He peddles it against the tide of history and all human experience, as if invasion, genocide, racial inequality, economic exploitation and cultural conquest had never been tried before. If it wasn’t clear already, it is now. He wants to rule the world.

Trump’s menacing claims to Canada, Panama and Greenland revive the elitist fantasies of Elon Musk’s grandfather and Technocracy Inc, a 1930s rightwing populist movement that sought to unite North and Central America under US suzerainty – the “Technate”. The mindset feeding such pretensions is rooted deep in the national psyche. It’s a mix of Monroe doctrine, “manifest destiny” and the white man’s burden. It’s evil, it’s pernicious, and it’s back.

In 1823, president James Monroe, fending off predatory European powers, defined what Russia’s Vladimir Putin, among others, would........

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