Opinion | This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test

Now, there are people around him — the Bronze Age Pervert world of Republican or conservative or MAGA policy thinking. There are all kinds of racists who attach themselves to Donald Trump — white supremacists, etc. It’s a coalition that stretches, at this point. And a lot is being pasted onto him. But his rules, I think, have to do with loyalty.

Dominance was a central theme of the speech. It has been a central theme since they came back into power in January. Can we talk a little bit about that part of it?

There’s dominance over the people within your clan, but we’re also now talking about, as he said in the inaugural speech, expanding the territory of the United States. And he brought it up again last night: We’re going to retake the Panama Canal. There was a bizarre section about Greenland:

Archived clip of Donald Trump: And I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland. We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it, really, for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other. We’re going to get it.

So how do they use this rhetoric and make it reality? They’re doing it in some ways. Even the ridiculous contretemps about the Gulf of America and the Gulf of Mexico ended up having real-world consequences for The Associated Press. They wouldn’t toe the line, and now they’re out.

The simplest way to put this is: I think that Donald Trump and the people around him believe that American politics has become weak — feminized, soft, restrained.

The soaring denouement of the speech, at the end, really got at this. Like what did Trump ultimately say he’s going to try to do here? He said:

Archived clip of Donald Trump: And we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.

You did not hear George W. Bush say that the intention of his democracy promotion around the world was that America would be the most dominant nation the world has ever seen. Nor was that the vision of Ronald Reagan — at least not in the way it was spoken about. Trump thinks we gave up the expansionist, muscular, violent frontier spirit that once made this country great.