During Donald Trump’s first presidency, many Never Trump conservatives attacked him as an “isolationist” who failed to understand the importance of the United States’ leadership role in global politics. Trump, however, took a much more interventionist turn after returning to the White House roughly 19 and one-half months ago. But according to Democratic insider Sidney Blumenthal — a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton — Trump’s “imperialism” is making the U.S. weaker, not stronger, around the world.

Blumenthal, in an op-ed for The Guardian, describes Trumpism as “the lowest stage of imperialism” — arguing that Trump showed how confused he is when he told members of the Alfalfa Club, “It’s never been my intention to make Greenland the 51st state. I want to make Canada the 51st state. Greenland will be the 52nd state. Venezuela can be 53rd.”

“Trump’s imperialism of piracy and plunder is less of a system even than that of the earliest imperialism of 17th Century privateers raiding the Spanish Main, the divine right of kings, and monarchs dividing up the spoils as favors to create their lords and earls,” Blumenthal writes. “His schemes of aggrandizement operating by threat and force are justified by no larger rationale, nothing as exalted as ‘the white man’s burden’ marauding wherever and however he can to seize resources. Describing his actions as some version of colonialism grants him a more orderly and coherent method than he possesses.”

The Democratic insider adds, “His pillaging bears not the slightest resemblance to the highly organized administration of Queen Victoria’s British empire. Trump’s predation is calculated to wreck the long-established arrangements of international trade, law and cooperation created after the Second World War and the fall of colonial empires, whose guidelines he sees as obstructing his own profit and power.”

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