On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale University and the author of books such as America, América: A New History of the New World. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s “America First” model?

U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s “America First” model?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale University and the author of books such as America, América: A New History of the New World. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: We’re all familiar with MAGA, or Make America Great Again. The strange thing is it has begun to evoke making America not just great, but greater in size.

Greg Grandin: This came out of nowhere during Trump’s second inaugural address, when he talked about Canada, Greenland, and possibly taking over the Panama Canal Zone. Like many things with Trump, it’s hard to figure out. It seems like he rummages through the trash bin of U.S. history and pulls out whatever suits him.

I don’t think he’s an expansionist president in the way that I would use the term, but he is in many ways the first “batten down the hatches” president. During his first term, he substituted the myth of the frontier for a new symbol: the border and the wall that became the articulating center of his many constituencies. He invokes “America First,” despite occasionally talking about taking over Greenland or annexing Canada as the 51st state.