Donald Trump vowed his administration would be “taking back” the Panama Canal on Monday, in his inauguration speech following his swearing in as the country’s 47th president.
Trump said that the US had been “treated very badly” by Panama and that American ships are being “severely overcharged”.
He added: “And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China; we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
The remark stood out as one of the most specific on the expansionist ideas he had been floating in the run-up to the inauguration, and was in line with one theme that Trump repeated throughout his 30-minute speech: the fulfilment of “manifest destiny” and American exceptionalism.
The idea was channelled implicitly, with calls to expand American power by retaking the Panama Canal, and more explicitly by calls to carry “our flag into new and beautiful horizons, and we will pursue our manifest destiny entered the stars launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”.
However, he did not mention TikTok during his 30-minute speech, and spoke about the need for tariffs in general terms.
More from our reporting
Reporting by Robert Delaney, Mark Magnier, Khushboo Razdan, Laura Zhou, Igor Patrick, Bochen Han, Kawala Xie, Ralph Jennings and Finbarr Bermingham. All times given in blog entries are Eastern Time (UTC-5, HKT-13).