Trump is reviving an earlier, more white-supremacist era of American imperialism, one that cost countless lives, led to a horrific global conflict, and almost undid itself. He and his crew are doing that because, deep down, they are dedicated to conquest for its own sake—because of how it makes them feel, and the personal profits they think can be gained.

You can see it in Trump’s destructive racism toward Puerto Rico and his neglect of the Virgin Islands, old stanzas of colonialism lifted like faded scraps from a segregationist Supreme Court. The same instinct fuels his sudden lust for Greenland—the “manifest interest,” as Cotton called it, knowing exactly the allusion he was making.

—Jonathan M. Katz, in Islands in the stream