It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.
So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.
Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”
Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet 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 other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”
And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.
“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.”
No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.
So of course Trump did it.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.
Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real-estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.
A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.
President Trump speaks as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador listens during an event in the White House Rose Garden on July 8, 2020.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.
“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”
No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”
Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.
No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.
Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, 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 he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.
Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, 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 just too complicated. But when another American president marked the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far 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 fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”
People visit the monument to the Niños Héroes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on Aug. 14, 2019.
(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Images)
But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.
“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”
The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.
“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”
Today, “Viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.
MEXICO CITY — Historians and observers accused the Trump administration of trying to rewrite American history to justify its own foreign policy decisions toward Latin America by posting a “historically inaccurate” version of the Mexican-American war.
The Monday statement from the White House commemorating the anniversary of the war described the conflict as a “legendary victory that secured the American Southwest, reasserted American sovereignty, and expanded the promise of American independence across our majestic continent.” The statement drew parallels between the period in U.S. history and its own increasingly aggressive policies toward Latin America, which it said would “ensure the Hemisphere remains safe.”
“Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago, I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction,” the statement said, though it was unsigned.
In the post, the White House makes no mention of the key role slavery played in the war and glorifies the wider “Manifest Destiny” period, which resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from their land.
Sparking criticism
Alexander Aviña, Latin American history professor at Arizona State University, said the White House statement “underplays the massive amounts of violence that it took to expand” the U.S. to the Pacific shore at a time when the Trump administration has stuck its hand in Latin American affairs in a way not seen in decades, deposing Venezuela’s president, meddling in elections and threatening military action in Mexico and other countries.
“U.S. political leaders since then have seen this as an ugly aspect of U.S. history, this is a pretty clear instance of U.S. imperialism against its southern neighbor,” Aviña said. “The Trump administration is actually embracing this as a positive in U.S. history and framing it – inaccurately historically – as some sort of defensive measure to prevent the Mexico from invading them.”
On Tuesday, criticisms of the White House statement quickly rippled across social media.
Asked about the statement in her morning news briefing, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum guffawed, quipping and noting “we have to defend sovereignty.” Sheinbaum, who has walked a tight rope with the Trump administration, has responded to Trump with a balanced tone and occasionally with sarcasm, like when Trump changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Historical sticking point
The Mexican-American war (1846–1848) was triggered by long-running border disputes between the U.S. and Mexico and the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845. For years leading up to the war, Americans had gradually moved into the then-Mexican territory. Mexico had banned slavery and U.S. abolitionists feared the U.S. land grab was in part an attempt to add slave states.
After fighting broke out and successive U.S. victories, Mexico ceded more than 525,000 square miles of territory — including what now comprises Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah — to the U.S.
The moment turned Texas into a key chess piece during the U.S. Civil War and led former President Ulysses S. Grant to write later that the conflict with Mexico was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
The Associated Press was formed when five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War — as it is sometimes known in the U.S. — north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.
The war continues to be a historical sticking point between the two countries, particularly as Sheinbaum repeatedly reminds Trump that her country is a sovereign nation whenever Trump openly weighs taking military action against Mexican cartels and pressures Mexico to bend to its will.
Rewriting history
The White House statement falls in line with wider actions taken by the Trump administration to mold the federal government’s language around its own creed, said Albert Camarillo, history professor at Stanford University, who described the statement as a “distorted, ahistorical, imperialist version” of the war.
Aviña said the statement serves “to assert rhetorically that the U.S. is justified in establishing its so-called ‘America First’ policy throughout the Americas,” regardless of the historical accuracy.
The Trump administration has ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution, saying it was “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”
The administration has scrubbed government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable. Trump also ordered the government to remove any signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” including those making reference to slavery, destruction of Native American cultures and climate change.
“This statement is consistent with so many others that attempt to whitewash and reframe U.S. history and erase generations of historical scholarship,” Camarillo said.
Commentary: Petty Trump spikes football over nearly 200-year-old Mexican-American War
It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.
So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.
Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”
Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet 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 other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”
And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.
“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.”
No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.
So of course Trump did it.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.
Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real-estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.
A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.
President Trump speaks as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador listens during an event in the White House Rose Garden on July 8, 2020.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.
“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”
No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”
Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.
No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.
Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, 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 he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.
Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, 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 just too complicated. But when another American president marked the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far 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 fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”
People visit the monument to the Niños Héroes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on Aug. 14, 2019.
(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Images)
But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.
“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”
The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.
“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”
Today, “Viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.
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Trump accused of distorting history of Mexican-American War to justify heavy hand in Latin America
MEXICO CITY — Historians and observers accused the Trump administration of trying to rewrite American history to justify its own foreign policy decisions toward Latin America by posting a “historically inaccurate” version of the Mexican-American war.
The Monday statement from the White House commemorating the anniversary of the war described the conflict as a “legendary victory that secured the American Southwest, reasserted American sovereignty, and expanded the promise of American independence across our majestic continent.” The statement drew parallels between the period in U.S. history and its own increasingly aggressive policies toward Latin America, which it said would “ensure the Hemisphere remains safe.”
“Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago, I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction,” the statement said, though it was unsigned.
In the post, the White House makes no mention of the key role slavery played in the war and glorifies the wider “Manifest Destiny” period, which resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from their land.
Sparking criticism
Alexander Aviña, Latin American history professor at Arizona State University, said the White House statement “underplays the massive amounts of violence that it took to expand” the U.S. to the Pacific shore at a time when the Trump administration has stuck its hand in Latin American affairs in a way not seen in decades, deposing Venezuela’s president, meddling in elections and threatening military action in Mexico and other countries.
“U.S. political leaders since then have seen this as an ugly aspect of U.S. history, this is a pretty clear instance of U.S. imperialism against its southern neighbor,” Aviña said. “The Trump administration is actually embracing this as a positive in U.S. history and framing it – inaccurately historically – as some sort of defensive measure to prevent the Mexico from invading them.”
On Tuesday, criticisms of the White House statement quickly rippled across social media.
Asked about the statement in her morning news briefing, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum guffawed, quipping and noting “we have to defend sovereignty.” Sheinbaum, who has walked a tight rope with the Trump administration, has responded to Trump with a balanced tone and occasionally with sarcasm, like when Trump changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Historical sticking point
The Mexican-American war (1846–1848) was triggered by long-running border disputes between the U.S. and Mexico and the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845. For years leading up to the war, Americans had gradually moved into the then-Mexican territory. Mexico had banned slavery and U.S. abolitionists feared the U.S. land grab was in part an attempt to add slave states.
After fighting broke out and successive U.S. victories, Mexico ceded more than 525,000 square miles of territory — including what now comprises Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah — to the U.S.
The moment turned Texas into a key chess piece during the U.S. Civil War and led former President Ulysses S. Grant to write later that the conflict with Mexico was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
The Associated Press was formed when five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War — as it is sometimes known in the U.S. — north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.
The war continues to be a historical sticking point between the two countries, particularly as Sheinbaum repeatedly reminds Trump that her country is a sovereign nation whenever Trump openly weighs taking military action against Mexican cartels and pressures Mexico to bend to its will.
Rewriting history
The White House statement falls in line with wider actions taken by the Trump administration to mold the federal government’s language around its own creed, said Albert Camarillo, history professor at Stanford University, who described the statement as a “distorted, ahistorical, imperialist version” of the war.
Aviña said the statement serves “to assert rhetorically that the U.S. is justified in establishing its so-called ‘America First’ policy throughout the Americas,” regardless of the historical accuracy.
The Trump administration has ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution, saying it was “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”
The administration has scrubbed government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable. Trump also ordered the government to remove any signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” including those making reference to slavery, destruction of Native American cultures and climate change.
“This statement is consistent with so many others that attempt to whitewash and reframe U.S. history and erase generations of historical scholarship,” Camarillo said.
Janetsky writes for the Associated Press.
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