It’s really hard to take Secretary of State Marco Rubio seriously. He’s a child of immigrants who has cynically sold his political soul to the most anti-immigrant administration in modern American history, one headed by the man from whom Rubio endured humiliating verbal abuse during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. But Rubio is all-in for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Last week he was on the world stage in Athens, Greece, for the sixth U.S.-Greece Strategic Dialogue, trying to put a good spin on what he called the Trump administration’s “unapologetic pursuit of national power.” 

The hollowness and hypocrisy of this boasting is plain to see: When Rubio warns that such pursuit of power is justified because “there is war again,” it’s impossible not to think of the administration’s needless war of choice against Iran and its catastrophic impact on the global economy. Same with his attempt at celebrating Trump’s investment in the “new frontier” of “super intelligence,” the president’s favored term for the deeply unpopular products of the environmentally and economically disastrous artificial intelligence industry. The lengths to which Rubio has to go to try to praise this administration’s unpopular policies would be laughable if they hadn’t all been so harmful on a global scale.

Where does a high-ranking representative of a failed administration turn when they’re in an impossible rhetorical situation like Rubio’s? As I argued in “The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate,” there’s a time-honored and finely tuned template for trying to make the ideas that define the administration’s worldview seem respectable, natural and desirable: Linking those ideas to a period of history you believe most of your audience has been taught to admire and take seriously. A speech at the Pnyx, where Athenians once gathered for popular assemblies that birthed democracy, provided a perfect opportunity to link America First to ancient Greek statecraft. Framed against the Acropolis, Rubio trotted out a whole raft of old slogans about how lofty ideals like “heroism,” “honor,” “duty,” “virtue” and “courage” characterize both the culture of “the West” and, by extension, the Trump administration’s supposed reclamation of those “not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.” 

But scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.

The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power. 

Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”

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Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world. 

In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.

But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide. 

You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history. 

But polls show that group is growing smaller every day. Americans aren’t falling for it anymore.

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Greg Abbott is worried. After three terms as Texas governor, the Republican had every reason to believe the office was his as long as he wanted it. But Abbott is now seeing his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, get uncomfortably close to him in the polls. Suddenly, the governor has to be mindful of negative press, something he’s lost practice at in the decade-plus he’s been in office. Abbott avoided a recent campaign stop from Donald Trump, lest he be seen in the vicinity of the unpopular president or Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who appears to be facing an uphill battle in his own Senate race against state Rep. James Talarico. The governor is so concerned about his re-election prospects that he recently reversed his position on data centers, which have grown increasingly unpopular, and is now calling for moratoriums and restrictions on their construction. But one issue Abbott hasn’t budged on is his all-out war on public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools. 

Even in deeply conservative rural and suburban areas, Abbott’s policy is unpopular; a June 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll found that only 33% of Texans approve of his performance on education. As Grose notes, public schools are the heart of many Texas communities, especially when it comes to high school football. (As a native Texan, I can attest that the “Friday Night Lights” lifestyle is real.) Watching the governor concoct elaborate schemes to siphon money from beloved local institutions into unregulated religious programs and homeschooling is enraging people, so much so that some lifelong Republican leaders are announcing they will be voting for a Democrat for the first time ever. It helps that Hinojosa, whose entrance into holding office was being on the Austin school board, has made saving Texas schools the centerpiece of her campaign. 

Considering education is the issue that could sink Abbott, it raises the question: Why not back down? After all, he shifted gears on data centers. But when it comes to this policy, which is undermining and could even start closing beloved local schools, the governor will not budge. To the contrary, he has burned a lot of bridges within the GOP in his war on public schools, backing primary opponents of anti-voucher Republicans in the legislature until he’d tilted the scales to get this done. 

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

When not throwing money at Republican politicians willing to back their Christian nationalist agenda, both Dunn and Farris Wilks preach from the pulpit, pushing religious views that are far right of even most evangelicals. Wilks led the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day Church in Eastland County for 31 years, a congregation where women are apparently forbidden to speak in church. In 2010, he delivered a sermon where he said “our country died” when Barack Obama was elected. “I do believe we live in a nation that will start to vomit some of its people out,” he said of LGBTQ people the following year. Wilks has also preached that all gay people live a “predatorial lifestyle” and “want your children.” 

Dunn has backed efforts to rewrite the Constitution to make it more amendable to his Christian nationalist views, which reportedly includes the belief that only conservative Christians should be eligible to hold office. Like Wilks, he has zeroed in on public schools as the great enemy that must be destroyed. Their main weapon has been funding primary opponents against any Republican who opposes them, which has created a state of fear within the party. Few dare cross them — including Abbott. 

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Through his Midland Bible Church, Dunn founded Midland Classical Academy, which offers a glimpse of his preferred curriculum: anti-science Biblical literalism that will leave kids unprepared for living and working as adults in the real world. The school teaches “the authority of God over every area of life” and structure education along a historical timeline “from the garden to Mesopotamia, from Greece and Rome to the Reformation and beyond.” The intense parental involvement required by the academy sounds incompatible with allowing mothers to have jobs outside of the home. 

Abbott’s war on education isn’t just financial or limited to K-12. Republicans “have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed” in universities, reports The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. The University of Texas at Austin has been strong-armed into eliminating majors in “Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies.” Political science professors have been forbidden from discussing the history of racism or the struggle for queer rights. The censorship has grown so severe that one philosophy professor was told to remove Plato’s “the Republic” because the ancient Greek philosopher mentions homosexuality. 

Abbott himself doesn’t read as a Christian fundamentalist like Dunn or Wilks. While the governor hits his minimum Republican allotment of God talk, he has also managed to evade a reputation as a rabid evangelical, despite his support for abortion bans and for forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms. Part of it is his affect, which feels more old-school Republican than Bible-waving preacher. As a Catholic, Abbott has also managed to keep a discrete distance from the evangelicals who are the backbone of the Christian nationalist movement.

But whatever his personal beliefs, Abbott has emerged as one of the GOP’s most loyal soldiers in a movement to turn America into a far-right Christian nation. His benefactors have singled out public education as the biggest obstacle to an illiberal theocratic agenda — and with good reason. Education is power. It’s not just that kids who learn to read and think critically often leave conservative religions, though that is a big fear driving the war on public schools. It’s also that education empowers the majority of Americans who don’t subscribe to fundamentalist Christianity. 

If Wilks, Dunn and other far-right billionaires can break public schools, leaving the only options as religious education or none at all, they will turn America into a hellscape. Modern people need education to hold down decent-paying jobs, and civic participation depends on the ability to read, write and reason. A population without the benefits offered by public education would largely be left intellectually, financially and spiritually impoverished — and easier to control.

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Forty years ago, the United States added territory for the last time.

On Nov. 4, 1986, the U.S. entered into political union with the Northern Mariana Islands, a tiny archipelago in the western Pacific that most Americans could not locate on a map. After more than two centuries of astonishing American growth, this mostly forgotten act completed the nation’s current borders.

The anniversary is notable in light of the recent security agreement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland. After repeatedly calling for American ownership of Greenland, President Donald Trump now appears prepared to accept expanded American rights there without acquiring sovereignty. The agreement illustrates a historical pattern: The United States no longer needs to annex land to achieve its strategic objectives abroad.

Previous generations of Americans assumed that their nation’s growing power would naturally lead to more territory. And for a time it did. But as the U.S. became the world’s dominant country in the 20th century, its expansion on the map slowed, then stopped.

What changed?

In its early years, the country bounded across a continent with the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of California. Generations of Americans debated not whether the nation should grow, but where. More land led directly to more wealth and power as the country scooped up farmland, mineral resources and harbors. The expansion came at an enormous cost to Native Americans, who were displaced and deprived of their sovereignty, and to Mexicans, whose country lost half its territory.

America’s expansion slowed in the late 19th century as it became more selective, taking some territories while passing up others. By this time, the nation was big enough that it wanted the most valuable land, not just any land. International conditions were also changing. Most of the world was now divided by fixed borders into independent states and their colonies, and international respect for those borders was growing. The U.S. increasingly exerted control over nearby countries through military interventions and pressure on their governments, but not annexation.  

After World War II, the U.S. increasingly relied on military alliances, overseas bases, trade and international institutions to project power. Territorial acquisition was no longer necessary to achieve the objectives that earlier generations had pursued through expansion.

So how did the Northern Marianas become the exception?

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After America defeated the Marianas’ colonial ruler in the Spanish-American War, it wanted a base to project power over the western Pacific. So it annexed the southernmost Mariana island, Guam, in 1898. But America declined to take the northern islands, seeing little additional strategic value in them. By this time, America’s territorial growth was winding down.

The Northern Marianas passed from Spain to Germany to Japan, and then back to the U.S. when it captured them, along with other Pacific islands, in World War II. After the war America governed all of these islands temporarily under a United Nations trust while their residents decided their political future. After years of negotiations, most of the territory eventually chose independence as three new countries with strong defense ties to the U.S. The fourth region was the Northern Marianas.

Already closely tied to Guam by culture, kinship and trade, the majority of residents wanted to follow their neighbor’s path as a U.S. territory. Washington didn’t strongly push for this outcome, but it accepted the islanders’ decision and Ronald Reagan completed the process in 1986. After a history of aggressive expansion and conquest, this was a rare example of a territory joining the U.S. through its own free choice, rather than being pursued.

The islands became a self-governing U.S. commonwealth, similar to Puerto Rico, and eligible residents gained U.S. citizenship. They are part of the country, but not a state. Today the islands are home to fewer than 50,000 people and are best known for beaches, diving and some World War II battlefields.

America hasn’t added territory since, and for decades there was little reason to think it would. But Trump upended that understanding during his first term when he proposed that the U.S. buy Greenland. After his return to the White House in January 2025, he has talked about even more annexation targets, including the Panama Canal and Canada.

But Trump’s renewed interest in territorial expansion has collided with a world in which established borders are much harder to change. The international opposition to his Greenland proposal is just one of the difficulties of annexation today. The Greenland security agreement demonstrates another way forward. Rather than annexing the island, the United States appears poised to secure many of its strategic objectives without changing any borders.

Earlier presidents acquired territory because sovereignty itself delivered things they wanted: minerals, ports, military positions and control over trade routes. The modern United States can gain those advantages through military bases, defense agreements, trade relationships and alliances, without assuming responsibility for governing another population.

The Northern Marianas may seem like an unlikely place for the story of America’s growth to end, but it is precisely their isolation and lack of global power that allowed them to quietly buck the trend. Unlike Greenland, no countries objected to their joining the U.S. Unlike the Panama Canal, they aren’t crucial to the global economy. And their small population and longstanding ties to Guam made it easier to integrate them into the nation.

Forty years later, Trump is still talking about taking territory. But whether he acknowledges it or not, the president is operating in a world where the conditions that once made annexation attractive and feasible have largely disappeared. It still looks like the distant Northern Marianas will be the final act of America’s long story of territorial growth.

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