Donald Trump’s return to the American political scene during this tense period has not only sparked discussions over his popularity or conservatism but also provoked critical debates, especially on the role of power in global politics. With Trump’s resurgence, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has risen as a political culture that bears a stark semblance to the violent, racialised, and self-serving age of American imperialism.
Trump is carrying imperial cruelty to a higher level, giving it visibility and making it desirable to a significant portion of the American populace. Under his administration, imperial cruelty has become a political philosophy for the organisation of society, a disciplinary tool for the margins, and a source of entertainment for the centre, with the violence televised and tweeted rather than remaining hidden in bureaucracy. To understand the Trump era as an age of imperial cruelty is to acknowledge that America’s imperial instincts have never disappeared. Instead, they have simply evolved through policies that encroach on human rights and civil freedom, as well as actions or words that instigate violence.
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In Trump’s America, imperial cruelty is practiced both abroad and against its people at home. Following the Second World War, the need arose for international organisations such as the IMF, WTO, G20, UNESCO, and the International Court of Justice to be created. Trump, however, has shown a clear commitment to destroying these institutions.
On the international scene, Trumps’ stance has been defined by opportunism and aggression, with foreign policies driven by erratic decisions such as the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, threats of war with Iran, trade wars with China, Canada, Mexico, and Europe through tariff impositions, proposal to seize territories in Canada, Panama and Greenland, threats to NATO allies, deliberations with Russia in absence of Ukraine, and engaging North Korea in performative diplomacy. While such policies reveal an open disdain for multilateralism and promotion of deliberate destabilisation, they also echo an imperial tradition that places national dominance over international norms. According to Kramer and Madley, behaviours like these are part of a longstanding United States tradition that leans towards conquest and control rather than cooperation and community.
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From projecting its power internationally to consolidating control over marginalized populations within its borders, American society has always had dual facets. With Trump in charge, the internal consolidation of power became more aggressive, with actions such as the deliberate neglect during the height of COVID-19, which affected many poor communities of colour, attacks on reproductive rights, and the use of militarised policing, among others. These acts can be regarded as deliberate ideologies of administration through cruelty and not as a failure of governance.
In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman reminds us that domination results from constant violence and symbolic humiliation. Under Trump, acts like weaponising public health for partisan politics, downplaying the police killings of Black Americans, denigrating sexual assault survivors, and public mockery of the disabled, point to the fact that America now practices “Political Sadism,” where these moments have become central to governance. According to the concept of “social death,” Trump’s policies can create invisible zones in which people are trapped, excluded from civic life, denied protection, and deemed expendable. In this kind of set-up, citizenship is no longer a right; it has become a privilege, earned through loyalty and likeness to the imagined American norm.
Policies such as travel bans targeted at Muslim-majority countries, denial of civil rights protections, assaults on Indigenous sovereignty, as well as a foreign policy that is based more on destabilisation than diplomacy, make the enactment of this cruelty symbolic and material. “Make America Great Again” does not aim for collective progress; rather, it is a call to restoration and the resurrection of a white, male-dominated imperial America. The slogan is straightforward and loaded in history, with most of its supporters seeing it as a call to return America to the Age of racial hierarchies — a medium to return America to the policies that featured imperial and racial logics.
In Paul A Kramer’s essay, “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire,” he offers some illustrative insights into how American soldiers, through a racial hierarchy that presented the Philippine people as an inferior race, justified the brutal suppression of the Filipino resistance. In the present era, the MAGA movement maintains similar strategies in demonising immigrants, Muslims, political dissenters, women, people of colour, and harshly treating detainees. This has resulted in the normalisation of cruelty as a legitimate tool of the state and the derivation of a political culture. However, one thing remains the same: the logic of dehumanisation for domination.
The assault on Indigenous sovereignty under Trump, including his support for corporate and military encroachments on Indigenous lands like Mauna Kea, reflects a disregard for spirituality and Indigenous agency, echoing the Native Hawaiian resistance explored in Noenoe Silva’s Aloha Betrayed. After Hurricane Maria, the Trump administration’s negligence, dismissive response, and public disdain for Puerto Rican leadership exposed the enduring colonial relationship between the so-called territories and the mainland United States.
Beyond that, the failure to provide relief materials not only highlighted Puerto Rico’s colony status but also exposed the reality of Puerto Ricans who are considered United States citizens and yet are denied their full rights and political power, as their suffering was politicised. In Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall’s edited volume, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, the American legal frameworks construct Puerto Rico as a possession rather than a partner. Episodes like these are not evidence of a colonial past but chapters in an ongoing story of unending imperial ambitions.
Another dimension of the assault on Indigenous sovereignty can be seen in the selective application of the United States’ civil rights law to the Indigenous people, which contradicts America’s liberal image. This dimension was analysed in J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s research on Hawaiian sovereignty. Rather than resolving these inconsistencies, Trump’sadministration has further expanded on them by invoking them when convenient and ignoring them when not.
Trump’s desecration of sacred lands, the removal of environmental protections, and the suppression of Native resistance movements with the military further lend credence to the everlasting nature of imperial cruelty. According to Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide, there are similarities between these actions and those of the settler-colonial logic of the mid-nineteenth century, which traces the extermination campaigns carried out on the Indigenous peoples of California. Although the scale and methods differ, the rationale behind them has remained the same: to exploit Indigenous land as a natural resource and group their lives as secondary to the interests of the state.
Trump’s current tenure is a pronounced return to the age of brutal imperialism. With policies and public statements aided by digital amplification, his actions seem to imitate the same imperial fantasies of nineteenth-century Europe, which involved the invasion of foreign territories, enslavement, and genocide. Trump’s current America is a continuation of imperial history, and this is not an exaggeration. It wakes us to the reality of America’s long history of domestic and international violence woven into the fabric of its governance.
Toyin Falola, a professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Austin, is the Bobapitan of Ibadanland.
