• ICE arrests soar

• Milo deported

• US takes ownership of Venezuelan oil

7:15 PM ET
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• Dolly Parton, hero of left and right, dies

• Was Jason Arday lynched?

• Scholars debate whether US empire is over

7 PM ET
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• Trump backs away from attacking Iran, again

• Why did African migrants flood into Ceuta?

• El-Sayed wins Michigan Dem primary for Senate

7 PM ET
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• Major US strike on Iran

• Ukraine attacks Iranian ship

• Fauci pleads the Fifth to Congress

7 PM ET
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• Four US troops killed

• Mamdani can’t arrest Netanyahu

• Trump claims China is stealing US elections

7 PM ET
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Michael and I will see you next week!

-Thad

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• Tyler Robinson trial begins

• NATO meets in Turkey

• Trump calls off ceasefire with “scum” Iranians

7 PM ET
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• More talks, more ceasefire violations between US, Israel & Iran

• Congress holds hearings on MKULTRA

7 PM ET
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• US, Iran and Israel continue to lethally disagree on peace deal

• Israel bombs Lebanon to scuttle deal

• Socialist, anti-Zionist candidates win Democrat primaries in NYC

7 PM ET
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• The United States surrenders to the Islamic Republic of Iran

• Knicks win

7 PM ET
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• US and Iran resume missile attacks
• Karmelo Anthony convicted of murder
• Henry Nowak murder and Belfast knife attack cause riots

7 PM ET
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NO AFTERSHOW TONIGHT. GO KNICKS.

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• Israel continues bombing Lebanon

• Trump reportedly curses Netanyahu

7 PM ET
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• Russia announces plan to capture Kiev

• US-Iran ceasefire on and off again

7 PM ET
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• Thomas Massie loses

• Trump-Xi meeting causes speculation about US-China relations

• Trump threatens new strikes on Iran

7 PM ET
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The Aftershow, for Patrons and Paid Substack Subscribers, will take place tomorrow, Thursday, May 21 at 7 pm ET.

• Did Trump just surrender?

7 PM ET
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82594682428

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In Unregistered 291, Thaddeus Russell sits down with historian David T. Beito (author of FDR: …

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When Donald J. Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, he became the first major candidate from either party to call into question the American imperial project. Since the nation’s founding, presidents, senators, and intellectual architects of U.S. foreign policy had embraced the idea of America as divine savior, spiritually obligated to advance democracy, regime change, nation building, and cultural reconstruction through economic and military power. But Trump, who had never before participated in electoral politics nor ever served in the military, brought with him a long career of challenging the very idea of an American mission.

In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s Cold War buildup, Trump purchased full-page ads in major newspapers lambasting US allies for freeloading on American military protection and calling into question the idea of the United States as the world’s father. His “open letter to the American people” argued that the nation “should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” He declared, with characteristic irreverence toward the great American project, that the country had to “stop this insanity.” “It’s time for Japan and other nations to pay their fair share for the protection we extend to them. . . . The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.” When Larry King said to Trump in an interview that year, “We are the world’s keeper, aren’t we?” Trump shot back, “I don’t believe we should be.” “The concept of America financing and paying and losing lives for countries that in 24 hours would be wiped off the face of the earth if it weren’t for America, it’s ridiculous. . . . This country cannot afford to defend Japan and every other country in the world.”

In his 1988 commencement address at Lehigh University, Trump continued to attack “our friends” who “are just ripping off America,” but asked the audience to “forget about our enemies.” “Russia,” he said, “we don’t deal with them that much.” The real estate mogul viewed foreign policy as simply transactional, not moral. In a 1990 Playboy interview, Trump explained that he did business with Soviet officials not because he admired communists, but because “generally, these guys are much tougher and smarter than our representatives.” Trump continued to put forward this early “America First” critique as he moved toward a political career. In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, Trump called for an enhanced military budget in order to defend America from its enemies, but clarified, “I’m not advocating that America go forth and police the world. Far from it.”1

Reviving Racist Anti-imperialism

Throughout his political career, Trump denounced both legal and unauthorized immigration, arguing that migrants were eroding America’s security and cultural integrity. In so doing, Trump was responding—apparently without knowing it—to one of the effects of the U.S. empire on the American homeland. The principal targets of Trump’s ire were all migrants from countries where the U.S. held major influence, through direct military interventions or economic and political coercion—and the politicians who had welcomed them here.

In his complaints about the influx of migrants from non-white countries that had been objects of U.S. interventions, Trump revived—almost verbatim—the fear that animated the racist anti-imperialists at the turn of the twentieth century: that empire abroad becomes a “bridge” for unwanted people to our home. Where Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia warned in 1898 that the annexation of the Philippines would deliver to the United States “a mess of Asiatic pottage,” and South Carolina’s John L. McLaurin, another segregationist senator and anti-imperialist, argued that acquiring the Philippines would bring into the American nation “a mongrel and barbarous race” and create a “heterogeneous compound of inefficient humanity,” Donald Trump put the same idea in contemporary language, arguing that U.S. interventions in poor countries backfire because they end up bringing into America the very people he derided as coming from “shithole countries.”2

Trump’s own version of racist anti-imperialism came in a 2018 meeting when, asked to grant asylum to migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and Somalia, he replied: “Why is it that we only take people from certain countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden—just a few? How about Denmark—do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia—places that are a disaster: filthy, dirty, disgusting, and ridden with crime.” By 2023, he amplified the same racialized civilizational panic—now framed as demographic contamination—claiming that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” arriving “from Africa, from Asia, from everywhere,” and bringing “tremendous crime” and “tremendous terrorism.”3

The Rise of Vulgarity and the Decline of America’s Puritan Mission

Since Trump’s rise, American political culture has veered sharply away from the norms of the stewards of the American global empire. Vulgarity came to be in vogue, not just for Trump and his “Make America Great Again” followers, but also for his liberal opponents.

This has not just been a shift in tone. It marks a rupture with the American political past, in which politicians were expected to publicly display the self-control, repression, discipline, and genteel respectability of the Puritan inheritance.

Trump did not merely violate that code. He made it a constituent element of a new politics. His speeches at campaign rallies often contained profanity, a first for any American politician. In December 2025 Trump not only publicly acknowledged his use of the phrase “shithole countries” but did so proudly. In another sign that profanity had become normal in politics, Trump visited a Ford plant in January 2026 and responded to a heckler by giving the middle finger and twice mouthing “fuck you.”4

Trump’s habit of blowing past the usual rules of “respectable” speech opened the door for politicians in both parties to talk the same way, what the Associated Press described as a “race to the verbal gutter.” Vice President JD Vance called a podcast host a “dipshit” and wrote on X, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Trump aide Steven Cheung told a reporter to “shut the fuck up.” Democrats joined in as well. Kamala Harris said of the Trump administration, “these motherfuckers are crazy.” Senator Chris Murphy told Americans to “pick a fucking side.” Senator Chuck Schumer warned the administration not to “fuck around,” then said, “No. Fucking. Way.” And Rep. Jasmine Crockett more than once has told opponents to “fuck off.”5

Trump’s vulgarity has been part of a larger rejection of puritan norms. Past American political leaders uniformly presented themselves as selfless servants of the American mission, willing to repress their individual urges and sacrifice the demands of their egos to serve the American and global collective. Until 2017, presidents and foreign policy leaders justified U.S. power in a priestly idiom. They spoke of “responsibility,” “leadership,” and “sacred duty,” covering American coercion abroad in language of ascetic evangelism. Not so with Donald Trump, whose flagrant and often comical narcissism has made a mockery of American pretensions to act on behalf of others. His foreign policies have been presented not as duty to a world order but as a running tally of what others think of him: whether allies “respect” him, whether adversaries “laugh” at him, whether bureaucrats and judges “treat” him fairly, and whether the country is “winning” under his name. “Only I” could have stopped the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and “only I” could have made peace in the Middle East, he has often said. In Trump’s rhetoric, the moral language of leadership is replaced by the crowing of self-aggrandizement.6

The narcissism and vulgarity of the Trump era present a fundamental challenge to the champions of the American exceptional empire.

Since the Founders dreamt of an American Rome spreading virtue to all the populations of the globe, U.S. power has presented itself as morally exceptional: a force that would sacrifice blood and treasure to uplift all nations. Whether foreign military operations were carried out in the name of democracy, modernization, development, or human rights, they all relied on the projection of American political life as sober, self-governing, and virtuous. Throughout its imperial history, the United States did not merely project military force and economic might. It projected a claim that its rule was preferable because its leaders embodied the purest iteration of the Judeo-Christian tradition. That claim is no longer available to the leaders of the American state.

For the global, liberal imperialists who carry forward the faith in the U.S. as the godly savior, uplifter and reformer of all peoples, the age of Trump is the ultimate blowback.

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Adar Weinreb YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AdarWeinr…

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Drawing on his books The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela and Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, Miguel Tinker Salas reconstructs the oil camps around Lake Maracaibo—where he was born a…

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Payne shows how American missionaries and the U.S. government exported a specifically Protestant, Puritan…

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