Trump's Imperial Presidency
In which I evaluate whether and how #NoKings was an appropriate rallying cry against Trump and explore the limits of fascism as an analytic framework for understanding what we now face
Two-and-a-half weeks ago I, along with four to six million other people, participated in rallies and marches under the banner of “No Kings!” The branding felt like an odd choice, but hey, the point is to show mass opposition to the President and his policies, and at least it was less cringe than the pussy hats. But calling Trump a “king” felt oddly quaint, or milquetoast, when among left academics, commentators, and my friends, the threat of Trump II (and the rallying cry) has been identified as fascism. During and after Trump I, “Is Trump a fascist?” spawned Twitter (now Bluesky) and podcast debates, articles in various highbrow publications by political theorists both scholarly and of the pop variety (and those in the former category aspiring to the latter), and at least one book. That book, entitled Did It Happen Here? came out on January 14, 2025. Since then, well, the question seems to have been answered, both on the merits and in the discourse. Tim Walz compared ICE to the Gestapo in mid-May. In early June images and video of masked agents grabbing people off the street became daily social media fodder. On June 8 Trump called up the California National Guard to suppress resistance to these kidnappings in L.A. And just today Trump and DeSantis shared photos of a concentration camp in the Everglades and suggested it might not just constitute an expansion of the existing gulag of immigration detention but eventually house denaturalized citizens or, say, the future mayor of New York City.
But the imagery chosen for the loosely-organized network of protests intended to show national solidarity in opposition to Trump hearkened back not to the nightmares of the twentieth century but the country’s foundational myths. With a date selected as counterprogramming to Trump’s (ultimately rather deflated) birthday military parade, the logo and language rejected unitary rule: No throne, no crown. That’s not to say that protesters limited themselves to the suggested message and imagery (when do we ever?), but among the institutional instigators, anti-monarchy was the theme of the day. And it’s not difficult to see why organizers might have wanted to avoid the “f” word: Invoking horrors that are still (barely) within living memory risks a chorus of “well, actually”s about how this is not 1933 Germany and offending those who feel their suffering is diminished by comparison. Anti-monarchy attacks also have quite a small radius: Trump, personally, is the problem and it is Trump’s assumption of personal rule that is the problem. Fascism, on the other hand, is a political ideology that glorifies a leader but rules via party. The imagery of fascism is of mass violence against disfavored groups, and the nameless jackbooted thugs come in for moral condemnation as well as their Dear Leader. To accuse Trump of fascism is to (implicitly) accuse his enablers of the same – and those organizing national protests still believe (rightly or wrongly) that Republican voters and believers in the moral sanctity of law enforcement are needed for the popular front to succeed.
So #NoKings it was. And as someone who has read quite a bit of political pamphleteering about whether England should have a king,1 I Have Some Thoughts about the historical accuracy and political usefulness of kingship as the model from Trump’s many sins. What follows - which I will freely admit does not cohere all that well - is a case for why: (1) The #NoKings protest implicitly relied on an anachronistic understanding of kingship, but (2) even defenders of the political and moral necessity of kingship would have recognized Trump as a “tyrant,” and (3) this analogy helps to elucidate what is persistently and peculiarly pre-modern in the way Trump has conducted himself as President since 2017; and while (4) Trump’s pre-modern personal rule creates a potentially exploitable tension between his political instincts and the fascists that surround him, (5) the distance between tyranny and colonial rule is not nearly so far, and the enactment of the Big Beautiful Bill, terrifyingly, enables both.
Here goes.
“No Kings,” on first glance, juxtaposes dictatorial or autocratic rule and democratic accountability: The U.S. rid itself of a king and replaced him with elected representatives. No man is above the law! Except that, as of 1776, the British King wasn’t. Or at least, not exactly. The Brits (or at least the English; the English and Scottish Parliaments would be combined in 1707) had their own revolution in 1688-89. That (bloodless) revolution replaced one (Catholic) monarch with a (Protestant) husband-wife monarchical team and culminated, shortly following such replacement with a Declaration of Right that incorporates a list of grievances followed by various clauses limiting the power of the Crown (hmmm). Standing armies or taxes without Parliament approval? Prohibited. Trials? Mandatory. William and Mary of Orange took an oath to the law as enacted by Parliament.2
Which is to say the problem of Trump is not (just) that he’s a king - kings were subject to legal limits and supposed to respect their subjects’ rights. It’s that he’s a bad king. The use of #nokings helpfully captures the ways in which Trump is a kind of throwback, a return to misrule more recognizable to Medieval and Early Modern political theorists than twenty-first century commentators. But Trump is not a problem of a reversion to a pre-modern account of political legitimacy (kingship) that has been rightfully replaced. Trump’s aspirations are not (just) to a different type of rule, one which is incompatible with U.S. founding principles. No, his pretension to monarchy is a failure on its own terms. Trump is a tyrant.
A tyrant, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the king’s conceptual evil twin. Scholastic just war theorists (including Aquinas himself) distinguished the just king from the unjust tyrant as follows: while the rule of the king is directed to the public good, the rule of the tyrant is “directed to private advantage.” Bodin, the French political theorist to whom the first (European) account of sovereignty is attributed, puts the distinction pithily: while the king “accounteth his own goods to be the goods of the people; [the tyrant] reckoneth not only the goods, but even the bodies of his subject to be his own.” Infringement upon individual rights arises not from a desire to shape a particular civic body, but of a failure to recognize the personhood of one’s citizens as distinct from one’s own. The identification of tyranny with theft was even stronger among the English Parliamentary sympathizers of the 1640s. John Milton asserted that tyranny itself encompassed any number of crimes, and that submission to a tyrant is no different from handing over one’s goods to “a Multitude of Highway-men.” Even before they were constitutional, monarchs could serve at the pleasure of the people. The perversion of kingly rule was the inversion of this purpose: the property (and perhaps the person) of one’s subjects should benefit the king.
Sound familiar? Treating the U.S. Presidency primarily as a means of personal enrichment, not by trading the exercise of political power for financial gain, but by actually combining the public and private fisc is uniquely and quintessentially Trumpian. Corruption is well known in the White House; Spiro Agnew solicited kickbacks for directing architecture and paving contracts. And Trump, to be sure, has offered use of his presidential powers to others’ benefit in exchange for money: He pardoned a nursing home executive convicted of tax fraud after the executive’s mother paid $1 million to attend a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. But that’s not all! Trump is marketing his own image, the symbolic authority of the presidency, as a consumer good; the day I typed this he posted an ad on social media for a new perfume fragrance in a bottle with a “gold” statue of him on it. To put it in early modern terms: He is selling majestas, the inherent dignity of the king, but the money goes to his personal bank account.
And when money flows from the public fisc, Trump (for the first time in U.S. history) emblazoned his name on the checks, suggesting that anyone who received a COVID stimulus had Trump’s personal beneficence to thank.
The most egregious, and novel, forms of Trumpian corruption entail not a pay-to-play but a conflation of his personal finances with those of the state. Trump’s crypto coin is, perhaps primarily, a vehicle for foreign bribes that evades direct payments that increase legal risk (purchasing the coin and driving up the price benefits Trump without requiring the interested foreign person to actually transfer money to him). But it also establishes a currency both separate from the U.S. dollar and entirely identified with Trump personally. The Boeing 747-8 Trump “accepted” from the Qatari government (although later reporting suggested both that Trump sought the plane and that the Qatari government was eager to rid itself of it) will be used as “Air Force One” – and upgraded to serve that role at taxpayer expense – before leaving its official position, with Trump, to become his personal plane. And the “golden shares” that Nippon Steel issued as a condition of their acquisition of U.S. steel last week were issued to Trump, personally. Nippon Steel cannot make certain decisions without Trump’s written consent or the consent of his designees. At the expiration of Trump’s presidency, that authority goes not to his successor, but the Treasury and Commerce Departments.
Trump’s neo-mercantilism, among (if not the) highest policy priority of his second-term, helpfully enables both ordinary corruption and Trump’s tyrannical economic logic. Imposing an enormous tariff on every other country and then compelling each to individually negotiate for a better deal structurally enables quid-pro-quos as each individual country need not consider others in finding a way out from under the economic punishment. (It also flatters Trump or his negotiators, as most immediately the source of largesse rather than the person who created horrific conditions in the first place. See: police interrogation techniques.) But while Trump’s trade policy enables corruption, that doesn’t seem to be its motivation; Trump’s (longstanding) obsession with trade deficits suggests not just a misunderstanding of the economic meaning of being “in the red” vis-a-vis other national economies,3 but a desire that the national bank account reflect a net profit, because Trump, personally, identifies with the country’s monetary holdings as if they were one of his casino’s ledger. Trump cannot see that trade deficits reflect the cumulative decisions and choices of individuals; he can only see the net outcome as a manifestation of his country’s relative wealth.
(Also just on a vibes basis, Trump’s oval office decor screams Versaille, not Berlin.)
Jonathan Rauch made a somewhat similar argument in the Atlantic back in February. As Rauch put it, “every policy the president cares about is his personal property.” Rauch, too, identified this aspect of Trump’s rule as pre-modern, a throwback. Trump’s presidency can best be described as patrimonialism, in which the state is a household and the leader a father, there is no distinction between the personal and political capacities of the top office holder; political legitimacy flows from this identification (“father knows best”) and benefits to the leader are indistinguishable from benefits to the people. Max Weber juxtaposed patrimonialism with the modern rule of bureaucracy, which assigns legitimacy to a quasi-independent hierarchy of managers on the basis of supposed expertise. DOGE’s destruction of the federal bureaucracy, on this account, was not just Musk’s pet project, a manifestation of the Silicon Valley disrupter culture, but inherent to Trump’s patrimonial project.
Rauch identifies two weaknesses of patrimonialism: corruption (although he does not distinguish between the quid-pro-quo and “as if it were mine” forms) and incompetence. Without a bureaucracy Trump cannot accomplish either his own nefarious goals or maintain governance, and will be directly thwarted and engendered popular resentment leading to electoral collapse. Thus, understanding Trump as a tyrant, specifically, in all its pre-Westphalian and pre-administrative state connotations, helps to explain what has at times felt like the Schrodinger’s horror of the administration.
To be sure, every day brings a new example of the administration’s expressed disregard for constitutional limits (including the authority of Article III judges); the administration is redirecting agents of legitimate state violence previously engaged in law enforcement to the purging of undesirables (immigrants), often through semi-regular means (neck gaiters, unmarked vans, attempted entry into elementary schools); there is an increasingly explicit invocation of white nationalism on social media. A legislator was murdered in Minnesota (though even that is not without at least partial precedent).
And yet, for most citizens, even people who are openly mocking or critical of the regime, life continues as more-or-less normal. The #NoKings protests did not meet a crackdown; its organizers still post freely. While certain institutions are capitulating to Trump’s individual, targeted demands (like Penn’s utterly shameful repudiation of Lia Thomas) as part of a personalized deal with the devil, those institutions’ members, generally speaking, are not. Unlike in, say, 1933, no one I know has “turned MAGA,” whether out of self-preservation, a desire for professional advancement, or from a revealed preference that can now be shared from a perceived position of strength. The administration continues to staff key positions with 22-year-olds. Yes, the inexperience is partially the point; putting these kids in charge is a way of saying, “fuck you, our qualifications don’t matter.” But it is also, I strongly suspect, because those individuals with qualifications aren’t falling in line. A relatively electorally weak government attempting to consolidate power for an authoritarian regime generally does not start out by shedding state capacity through indiscriminate firings and termination of social programs. But that is of course what Trump did.
This ambivalence and these internal contradiction becomes more intelligible if we understand Trump, personally, as a tyrant in the seventeenth-century sense, surrounded by would-be fascists who, consistent with their ideological commitment to a Fuhrer, must carry out their project through and subject to Trump’s self-serving whims and instincts.
Fascism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, because it presupposes and is defined by deployment of large-scale violence and state management of economic production and is consumed with the relation between blood and soil and national identity that dates back (in its theoretical origins, according to Arendt) the French Revolution and (in its sociological phenomena, according to Anderson) nineteenth-century quasi-mass literacy and capitalism. Trump, personally, in his aspirations and his approach to politics, seems less interested in marshalling the forces of the twenty-first century state to gain control over civil society and enable the glory of a unitary nationalist identity (that is to say, doing a fascism), than getting very, very personally rich, and viewing the various administrative and military machinery at his disposal as vehicles for his personal gratification. Trump does not seek to be the will that unifies the nation, but believes it is his benefit (and glory) that the nation serves.
Thus, while members of his party and administration scrambled to explain his tariffs as necessary to restoring a masculine volk – factory jobs for everyone, forever – “TACO” Trump cut deals or suspended tariffs as he felt suitably supplicated to or to avoid a market crash that would reflect poorly on him, personally. Trump violated both the Constitution and the Wars Power Act in bombing Iran without Congressional approval or even consultation – but rather than (so far) serving as the opening gambit in a war of choice to restore the nation’s military glory, that bombing now appears to have been a means of creating leverage so that Trump, personally, could claim the glory of making peace between Iran and Israel.
All this invites a cautious optimism: Trump and those around him (or rather, Stephen Miller) are operating from fundamentally different principles and have different goals. The odd hybrid of seventeenth and twentieth century forms of oppressive rule is unstable. Tyranny, moreover, is an inherently weak form of rule because it presupposes a disjuncture between the king and his subjects. Where fascism aims to bring about an identification that produces SS street gangs and neighbors-cum-informants, loyalty to a tyrant is always conditional.
And if I were writing this even a few days ago, I might have ended on that not-pessimistic note. But events, as they always do, run ahead. So let us return to the #NoKings protest and the implicit invocation of the U.S. revolution and anti-monarchical U.S. political culture. Many, many microbloggers have pointed out that many of the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence map pretty cleanly onto the most egregious outrages of the administration thus far. The renditions to Cecot and tariff-palooza, in particular, are captured nicely by the colonists’ complaints against “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses,” and “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” respectively.
But as I have argued above, King George III’s rule was not absolute, and as other historians have argued, many of the authors of the U.S. Constitution were not even particularly interested in jettisoning an executive authority that closely resembled a king in powers. When Thomas Jefferson et al. directed complaints to King George III almost a century after his predecessors had been compelled to swear an oath to Parliament, the source of the colonists’ discontent was not the absolute authority of kings as such (for the British king had no such authority), but of their colonial status, specifically. The U.S. War of Independence was just that – a war of independence. The listed grievances are not exclusively, or even primarily, infringements upon the freedom or self-determination of individuals, but of occupation, economic isolation, and extraction. The first five listed examples of George III’s misfeasance include his refusal to “assent” to laws enacted by colonial legislatures and various other activities intended to interfere with their ability to enact and enforce laws, and his refusal to call elections (hi, Governor Abbott!). Also included are making judges personally dependent; “erect[ing] a multitude of new Offices [and] send[ing] swarms of Officers to harass our people,” failing to punish members of the British army who murder colonists, and sending in mercenaries. And, of course, taxation without representation. The grievances demanded not that the King’s power be limited relative to either the law or elected representatives (Parliament was part of the problem), but rather that political authority be located in the colonies, and (maybe more to the point) that the economic productivity of those colonies remain in situ rather than be shipped abroad for the metropole’s benefit.
Yes, yes, we’ve all seen Hamilton. And (more seriously) all of this was rich beyond belief coming from political leaders who were engaged in even greater extraction of unrecognized political communities, who were making such claims from stolen land. It is hard to find any spark of political inspiration in the acts of anti-colonials who were simultaneously engaged in colonization themselves.
But bear with me: In invoking America’s Founding to reject the notion of autocratic rule, the “No Kings” branding elides the repugnancy of absolute rule and that of colonial rule. And the latter provides not only an interesting and compelling framework for interpreting what is happening now (one that can encompass Trump’s tyrannical tendencies), but pushes us toward a response that goes beyond anti-fascism and requires much more radical action.
Spencer Ackerman (who I’ve previously cited in this blog) has described the events in L.A. over the past two weeks as the return of the “imperial boomerang.” Ackerman is borrowing from French poet and past-president of Martinique, Aimé Césaire, who in 1950 wrote that, as Europeans engaged in violence abroad, “the continent proceeds toward savagery.”
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapo are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss….[W]hat [the bourgeois] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [non-white colonial subjects].
According to Césaire, fascism was simply the logic and horrors of colonialism returned home. The violence characteristic of fascist rule was not new, only its objects. According to Ackerman, the military technologies and personnel utilized in Los Angeles are the boomerang of post-9/11 imperial security apparatus, previously deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, come home to roost.
While it is hard not to draw a line from 2003 to 2025 given it is ICE and DHS (both created under George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11) that have been unleashed as the primary force for carrying out Stephen Miller’s desired ethnic cleansing, I think Ackerman suffers from recency bias. U.S. imperial violence long predates 9/11. Two recent books make the strong theoretical case that colonial forms of rule have always been endemic to the U.S., deployed against Black people (Hayes, Colony in a Nation) and a historical case that the specific technologies of policing in U.S. cities both informed and were informed by counter-insurgency tactics coordinated and developed by a subsidiary of the CIA that was, in turn, staffed by local police officials (Schraeder, Badges Without Borders). Squint, and the Monroe Doctrine can be understood as planting the seeds for the notion that the U.S. may move Central Americans from Maryland to Cecot because North and South America are unified under U.S. rule. One doesn’t need to compare the use of Blackhawk helicopters in Baghdad and Boyle Heights to understand the latest ICE raids as part of an imperial project.4
Ackerman also underplays the racial component; crucial to Césaire is not just the fact that the violence is deployed in the metropole, but that it’s deployed against white people. (Whether Césaire’s argument suffers from its failure to grapple with the historical specificity and contingency of Jewish whiteness I will leave to others.) But the violence in L.A., while incidentally directed at white activists and reporters, is fundamentally aimed at non-white residents, and indeed is directed specifically at migrants from places over which the U.S. has exerted at least imperial (if not colonial) authority. If one understands the U.S. to have been an internally colonial project of displacement and control vis-a-vis indigenous and Black people all along, the boomerang has not yet reached the bourgeoisie of Césaire’s account, only those whose membership in the metropole was contingent and marked by racialized difference.5
But pointing out the ways in which I think Ackerman is wrong reinforces, rather than detracts from, the relevance of Césaire’s analysis. Kristi Noem just came out and said it: DHS believes it is “liberating” Los Angeles. Liberation, of course, being the predicate for most U.S. imperial occupations (see: Iraq, Afghanistan). Senator Padilla’s reaction to this statement, specifically, precipitated his arrest, and the resulting news cycle that followed focused almost exclusively on that arrest, rather than Noem’s statement. (Agents of the state arresting opposition leaders being a clear indicator of fascism, or at least authoritarianism.) But that statement was at least as outrageous as Senator Padilla’s brief detention: Noem suggested the federal government would displace the locally elected leaders of a heavily Latino political subdivision in which more than 2% of the U.S. population lives. In the ongoing Battle for Los Angeles, it is the locus of authority, and not its limits, that constitutes the fundamental crisis. The leading court case in this latest round of Trump v. was not brought by individuals but by the State of California, demanding it be restored its monopoly on legitimate violence (or, at least, its National Guard).
It is not just L.A. - Trump administration officials, and Trump himself, talk about cities as full of savages, uncivilized, requiring outside intervention and incapable of self-rule - that is, in need of colonization. They are not the real America, but they should be ruled by it.6
(And yet, we have to hold this alongside the understanding that before the National Guard appeared or even ICE stepped up its aggression, the LA Sheriff’s Department and LAPD already exercised a kind of absolute rule over Black and Latino men in the city, including engaging in highly irregular enforcement activities.)
Colonization, like tyranny, is built upon extraction; a metropole’s king is a colony’s tyrant. Trump’s first major policy bill - which the Senate narrowly passed today - will eviscerate public programs, deprive millions of people access to health care, and enrich those who have paid fealty to Trump. It will also more than triple ICE’s budget for detention (from $3.4B per year to $45B through FY 2029) and awards a lump sum of $29.9B for ICE enforcement. Elected Democrats and much of the media have focused on the ways in which the bill will have devastating material impacts on potential midterm voters, both because these are genuinely awful and will kill people (both directly, through depriving them of financial access to medical care, and indirectly, through precipitating the closure of rural hospitals) and because anger at these cuts may help Democrats win elections in 2026. But withdrawing social programs at the cost of lives is old hat in the U.S.; Republicans do not need Trump to prompt such inhumanity (although Trump’s perceived electoral invincibility no doubt makes their choice to indulge their sadistic instincts easier).
Instead, I (partially) agree with JD Vance, for the first and perhaps the only time, that all the fiscal impacts of the bill, the “details” of Medicaid policy, he tweeted, were “immaterial” compared to the ICE funding. The cuts are material, and devastating. But if Trump is understood to pose an existential threat to the form of U.S. government, Congressional authorization of the material means to carry out large-scale, largely due-process free detentions and expulsions lays the groundwork for such a transformation. If the bill is re-passed by the house then, yes, another plank of the material and political preconditions for something like totalitarian rule has been placed. But while I do not want to rule out the possibility that the camps will be for political dissidents (as Andrea Pitzer has argued), there are horrors other than totalitarianism for which we should be prepared.
With that in mind, I’ll return one last time to the U.S. War of Independence, that #NoKings touchstone. In 1773, American colonists threw a shipment of tea into Boston harbor to protest an arrangement by which the East India Company (which had shipped and sought to sell the tea) could sell tax-exempt tea in Britain, while the same tea was taxed in the colonies. Why was the tea tax exempt in Britain, you ask? Well, the East India Company was the beneficiary of a massive corporate bailout after finding itself unable to pay its debts because it could not collect sufficient revenue from the denizens of the Mughal Empire, from which the Company extracted revenue through its control of the diwani. And why could the Company not collect the usual tax? Because in 1769, when the usual monsoon did not arrive and crops failed, the Company (which bought large quantities of grain for its army of local mercenaries) did not forgo its usual taxation (which prior rulers had) and instead pressed farmers for the usual amount. To quote William Dalrymple’s account:
A senior official of the old Mughal regime in Bengal wrote in his diaries: “Indians were tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined: these were the ‘delights’ and ‘religions’ of the directors and their servants.”
Between seven to ten million Bengals are estimated to have died between 1769 and 1770.
The East India Company had fewer than 200 employees in England at the time.
The horrors of the 1769 Bengal famine (which would not be the last famine caused by the East India Company or the British when they assumed direct rule) were known to the British at home and elsewhere in the Empire. Which meant that when the American colonists boarded the Dartmouth in Boston Harbor three years later, Dalrymple argues, they understood the stakes to be a bit higher than the increased price of tea.
ICE will likely have several orders of magnitude more resources at its disposal in the next few years than at any point in its history. The boomerang may complete its return trip, and we may in a year or two confront a force of militarized agents with the authority and power to penalize dissent or disappear dissidents. But we risk becoming Césaire’s metropolitan bourgeois if we can only see the horrors of Trump through the lens of fascism, if we insist on the stability of the metropole and our membership in it, if we fail to recognize that all the colonial logics of U.S. power need to be uprooted to protect all of us from tyranny. It is not enough to return ICE to its 2024 budget; ICE must cease to exist. And, ironically to me, given my other political commitments, there are surprising continuities between these demands and the country’s profoundly flawed origins. In other words (to get pretty damn cringe-y myself), we need to complete the Revolution that began in 1776.
No kings, indeed.
Not that having done so helped me when asked about the topic on national TV.
Conversely, it’s not at all clear that the presidency wasn’t intended to largely replicate both the powers and limits of the monarchical office. According to at least one historian, the office was modeled on the British monarch. Subsequent developments, including the rise of the “imperial” presidency, the vast administrative state, and perhaps most significantly the unilateral decisionmaking authority to drop a nuclear bomb, have only increased the “absolute” power of the presidency.
A superficial (and wrong) understanding of trade deficits is that the U.S. is somehow “out” money that has flowed to other places rather than a relatively wealthy consumer in a global economy. I have a “trade deficit” with my grocery store but that says nothing about my relative economic comfort to that of its employees).
And sometimes, as in the case of SFPD, they just tweet it out. (The author can personally vouch that the billboard pictured is real and was displayed for months if not years in the early 2010s.)
Or even continued colonization itself: Many of the immigrants subject to ICE enforcement can claim at least partially indigenous heritage. The expulsion of indigenous Central Americans from North America therefore arguably effects the same kind of displacement of indigenous North Americans through the 18th-20th centuries, assigning political significance to the contingent location of those individuals across an area to which they had previously had access and forcibly removing them from the land on that basis. As many Mexican-Americans say: “The border crossed us.”
One might even say urban areas are subject to taxation without representation - that is, rule from the outside - by virtue of the electoral college and Senate, which result in massive vote dilution of the coastal elite, to the benefit of those not just in rural areas, but rural states.