{"id":9878,"date":"2026-02-06T11:50:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T11:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/06\/commentary-petty-trump-spikes-football-over-nearly-200-year-old-mexican-american-war-latimes-com\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T11:50:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T11:50:55","slug":"commentary-petty-trump-spikes-football-over-nearly-200-year-old-mexican-american-war-latimes-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/06\/commentary-petty-trump-spikes-football-over-nearly-200-year-old-mexican-american-war-latimes-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary: Petty Trump spikes football over nearly 200-year-old Mexican-American War – latimes.com"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War. <\/p>\n

Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk\u2019s 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 \u201cone of the most unjust ever waged.\u201d Henry David Thoreau\u2019s famous essay \u201cResistance to Civil Government\u201d was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as \u201cthe work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.\u201d <\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe unmatched power of the American spirit\u201d and guided by \u201cdivine providence.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t done.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have spared no effort,\u201d he blared, \u201cin defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So of course Trump did it. <\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas<\/a>, history is one of Trumpworld\u2019s 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<\/a> with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201creal-estate guy,\u201d which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\"Two <\/picture>\n
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President Trump speaks as Mexican President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador listens during an event in the White House Rose Garden on July 8, 2020.<\/p>\n

(Evan Vucci \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

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 \u201cgrievous wrongs\u201d on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,\u201d the president said, \u201cto vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

No wonder Trump\u2019s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War \u201clegendary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo<\/a>, 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark<\/a> and constantly referring to Canada as the \u201c51st state<\/a>.\u201d Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all he\u2019s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.<\/p>\n

Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo<\/a>, 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<\/a>, the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies. <\/p>\n

Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cit would be foolish to pretend that fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist\u201d and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a \u201cterrible quarrel between our own states.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"People <\/picture>\n
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People visit the monument to the Ni\u00f1os H\u00e9roes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on Aug. 14, 2019.<\/p>\n

(Rodrigo Arangua \/ AFP\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThough the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,\u201d Truman told the appreciative audience. \u201cOur two countries will not fail each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Ni\u00f1os H\u00e9roes \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThroughout the day,\u201d the New York Times reported, \u201cpeople shouted his name, with the inevitable \u2018viva,\u2019 wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, \u201cViva\u201d sure isn\u2019t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump\u2019s name. <\/p>\n

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More to Read <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}