What’s different between Trump and Hitler is the speed. Hitler took years to move from rhetorical revisionism to Anschluss to Sudetenland.
- Anschluss logic for Canada (“51st state” rhetoric, economic coercion framing)
- Sudetenland logic for Greenland (protecting strategic interests, the current holders are inadequate)
- Panama Canal “recovery” (revanchist claims to previously held territory)
Which crisis do allies prioritize? Which does Congress address first? The media covers each as a separate story rather than a unified program of territorial revisionism.
Shock doctrine applied to imperial expansion. Bessent’s illogical rant today is that he believes “Europeans project weakness. U.S. projects strength”. That is remarkably naked as a statement of might-makes-right ideology, from a very scared sounding man who just says whatever he is told.
This administration announced three territorial ambitions rapidly and the Overton window moved instantly to accommodate the debate. We’re now discussing which emergency powers might justify seizing Greenland rather than whether the ambition itself has disqualified Trump from legitimacy.
The debate has already moved past the threshold of democracy into dictatorship without acknowledging it was crossed.
The other difference: there’s no external constraint yet. No larger power to intervene, although it could be China. If Trump continues to fail at democracy, the alignment of Canada and the EU with China becomes the logical counter-balance to American tyranny—the logic America itself used to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler.
Democratic accountability is being tested to destruction. The mechanisms that would constrain this—congressional war powers, alliance treaties, international law—exist on paper. Whether they function as anything more than paper is now the open question.