Commentary: Petty Trump spikes football over nearly 200-year-old Mexican-American War

This was a war fueled by colonialism, launched to humiliate a weaker country, waged in the name of revenge, and led by a racist president.

So leave it to President Trump to elevate the proverbial football to the U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War 178 years ago.

Abraham Lincoln first gained national attention by addressing President James K. Polk’s lies to Congress about the conduct of the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust wars ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written in part in response to the Mexican-American War, which he described as “the work of relatively few individuals using the existing government as their instrument.”

Other American examples of virtue that were openly opposed at 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 war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason of its own was a testament to the “unparalleled strength of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”

And if anyone is still wondering why Trump felt it appropriate to commemorate events that occurred almost 200 years ago, he argued that the work is not over.

“I have spared no effort to defend our southern border against invasion, uphold the rule of law, and protect our homeland from the forces of evil, violence and destruction,” he shouted.

No president since the Civil War has openly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official statements. Doing so would be rude, politically dangerous, an insult to our largest trading partner, and just plain weird.

So of course Trump did it.

As I have stated many times in my articles, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battle fronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his current actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing the events of the past to fit a warlike agenda. After all, this is the man whose first executive order in his second term changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and punished news agencies that refused to comply.

Trump has shown a particular obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president considered his predecessor a “real estate agent”; This is like calling Josef Stalin a lover of big coats and bushy moustaches.

Polk, a former governor of Tennessee and speaker of the House of Representatives, won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. Despite the objections of the Mexican government, he annexed Texas, attempted to purchase Cuba from Spain, and signed a treaty with Britain that secured to the United States what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming.

But the big prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies saw as untouched lands squandered by mixed-race Mexicans and needed for the United States to realize its Manifest Destiny.

At first he tried to purchase the territory from Mexico; When the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and encouraged the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to request a declaration of war, claiming that Mexico had long inflicted “gross wrongs” on Americans, including robbery and death, and therefore needed to be dealt with.

“We are called upon to resolutely defend the honor, rights and interests of our country, with every sense of duty and patriotism,” the President said.

No wonder Trump’s latest statement calls the Mexican-American War “mythical.”

Polk set aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had ended the Mexican–American War and guaranteed land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to remain in their new country. Many of these Mexicans saw their property invaded or confiscated by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people have seen their numbers plummet and their way of life destroyed. White settlers and corporations moved quickly to exploit the vast natural wealth of these new territories, turning the original inhabitants into strangers in their own land.

No wonder Trump replaced the portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with a portrait of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.

Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidency, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark and constantly referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all it really does is continue the never-ending Mexican-American War.

Americans have been suspicious of people with brown skin since the days of the Alamo; They always feared that the Latins were one step away from rebellion and therefore must always be subjugated. My ethnic group suffered lynchings, legal discrimination, and stereotypes that continue to this day. This is the mentality and legacy that Trump relied on in his deluge of deportations; is the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies.

Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught; Our relationship is very complex. But when another American president marked the centennial of the Mexican-American War, his approach was very different.

In 1947, Harry S. Truman became the first U.S. commander in chief to visit Mexico City. At a state dinner at the National Palace, he acknowledged that “it would be foolish to pretend that there are not fundamental differences in political philosophies” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican–American War as “a terrible fight between our own states.”

People visit the Niños Héroes (Male Heroes) monument in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on August 14, 2019.

(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Images)

But Truman spent the rest of his speech preaching allyship in a new world in which Mexico and the United States should see each other as friends, not enemies.

Truman told the grateful audience: “Though the road to a neighborhood as wide as the world may be long and weary, we will travel it together.” “The two countries will not fail each other”

The next day the president visited the mausoleum of the Niños Héroes (Child Heroes), six young cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and who therefore hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. To the surprise of his hosts, Truman placed a wreath at the monument.

“Throughout the day, wherever citizens of the United States appeared on the streets or in cafes, people were chanting his name with the inevitable ‘viva’ sound,” the New York Times reported.

If Mexicans mention Trump’s name today, the word they will use will definitely not be “Viva.”