Donald Trump has never been known for originality, but his latest act is his most dangerous yet—a desperate imitation of history’s most aggressive land-grabbers and strongmen. From James Polk’s expansionist conquest to William McKinley’s imperialist scheming to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian crackdowns, Trump isn’t just following in their footsteps—he’s trying to outdo them all.
During his first term, Trump admired “Indian killer” Andrew Jackson, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, but today’s speculation centers around three other national leaders: James Polk, William McKinley, and Vladimir Putin.
According to recent reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Trump got House Speaker Mike Johnson to give him the painting of President James Polk (1845–1849) to hang in the Oval Office. Polk basically doubled the size of the United States by acquiring Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, along with territories including what eventually became Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Oregon.
He took the southwestern territories by forcing a war against Mexico, a brutal conflict that’s romanticized in stories of the Alamo but was loudly and angrily opposed in Congress, where the leader of that opposition was Congressman Abraham Lincoln.
Polk was also a Democrat, back in the day when that was the party of slavery and segregation; he was a protégé of populist President Andrew Jackson and owned a plantation in Mississippi that was farmed by enslaved Africans he had purchased.
Then there’s William McKinley, the presidency after which Karl Rove often said he’d modeled the George W. Bush presidency. McKinley lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba, leading to our seizure of both island nations, and tried to impose a massive tariff on the Canadian territory to force them to become an American state.
As Mark-William Palen writes for Time magazine:
Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.
To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs.
The problem for McKinley was that the tariff threat backfired; instead of servility, it evoked widespread nationalist sentiment north of the border, pushing Canadians to strengthen their relationship to Mother England and eventually form a full-fledged nation.
The third option for a Trump role model is Vladimir Putin during the late 1990s and early 2000s as he was rising to absolute power in Russia.
By 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical reforms of the Soviet state laid the foundations for a truly democratic nation. He introduced multicandidate elections in 1989; over 300 reformists had won seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies, Russia’s first directly elected legislative body. With his glasnost (transparency) policy, he introduced governmental reforms that opened up the media to dissenting voices, exposed systemic corruption, and enabled grassroots political movements.
When Putin came into power, however, he quickly dismantled Gorbachev’s federalism by replacing elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees solely loyal to himself. He established the Duma as a rubber-stamp and largely powerless Parliament, initially requiring opposition parties to register, which subjected them to costs and harassment.
He then took control of the nation’s election systems, stuffing ballot boxes and requiring politicians to “prove nationwide support,” thus effectively banning candidates not aligned with his own United Russia Party. Next, he went after the media: Independent outlets like Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta were shut down or co-opted, and critical journalists were first sued into bankruptcy for libel and later imprisoned.
Putin’s Constitutional Court (like our Supreme Court) gave him lifetime immunity from prosecution for any crime, a position echoed for Trump last year by six corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court. He passed over 50 “anti-extremism” laws, arresting protesters and criminalizing dissent. Non-Russian, non-Caucasian residents were deported en masse.
With the help of several morbidly rich oligarchs, he essentially took the democratic aspects of the Russian government apart, stripping or crippling many of the agencies that helped average Russians while seizing full control of the state’s police and judicial agencies through toady appointees. Then he and his oligarch buddies re-nationalized many of the previously privatized former state assets, forcing multiple oligarchs who controlled major businesses or industries to either swear fealty to him or surrender their companies.
Putin’s final step was—like Polk and McKinley—to begin the expansion of the Russian state, conquering Chechnya, annexing parts of Ukraine (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson), maintaining de facto military control over territories in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Moldova (Transnistria).
So who is Trump trying to pattern his presidency after?
I’d argue that he’s taking pieces from all three of the above national leaders.
Combined, they explain his fixation with Canada becoming the fifty-first state, his threats to NATO about Greenland, and his order to the Pentagon—reported yesterday—to prepare for a military seizure of the Panama Canal.
Also appealing to him would be the reality that American democracy was extremely limited during the presidencies of Polk and McKinley: Racial minorities, women, and often poor people were expressly forbidden from voting, a situation the GOP appears committed to re-creating through the SAVE Act and the red-state voter suppression campaigns that put Trump back into office last November. And then there’s Trump’s love of Putin.
Understanding Trump’s motivations and role models may well help American patriots formulate appropriate opposition and messaging. And should have guided Chuck Schumer’s ability to rally Senate Democrats to create a united opposition to today’s continuing resolution that further empowers Musk’s dismantling of our government.
Trump’s imperial fantasy isn’t just about power—it’s about dismantling democracy itself. Like Polk, he dreams of annexation; like McKinley, he thrives on manufactured conflict; and like Putin, he seeks absolute control.
If America doesn’t wake up, his fantasy will become our nightmare.
