President James K. Polk has returned to the White House as commentators find the thread of his themes in the man who brought him back — President Donald Trump.
For those who slept through history class, Polk was America’s 11th president from 1845 to 1849, when the phrase “Manifest Destiny” was being played out across North America by a president who knew what he wanted and would stop at nothing to get it.
Trump has sounded expansionist themes that put America’s stamp as far as it can reach. He has talked about acquiring Greenland, restoring U.S. control of the Panama Canal, and taking the lead role in redeveloping Gaza. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” In a world where wars are fought with money and not muskets, he has battled anyone and everyone he sees as a threat to American dominance.
And in the midst of these battles, he recalled someone else who had expanded America: Polk, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In February, Trump swapped a White House portrait of Thomas Jefferson for the Polk portrait in the Capitol. It now hangs in the Oval Office.
Trump has said he admired Polk, who added the Oregon Territory, Texas, California, and much of the American Southwest to the U.S.
“He got a lot of land,” Trump told White House visitors not long after the painting arrived in the Oval Office.
Polk’s acquisition of land from Mexico was “one of the largest land grabs in world history,” historian Hampton Sides, who wrote about Polk in his book “Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West,” said.
“He wanted it all, and he got it all in one term, which was kind of extraordinary if you think about it,” he said.
The Painting That Defines Trump’s Foreign Policy
Trump replaced Thomas Jefferson’s portrait with one of James K. Polk, the president behind America’s largest territorial expansion.
“He got a lot of land,” Trump reportedly told visitors, admiring Polk’s Manifest Destiny… pic.twitter.com/1NXz5BmP2C
— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 13, 2025
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said aspiring to greatness is not a sin.
“President Trump is unafraid to propose new, bold ideas in his effort to put America first, and everything he says is true — Greenland is superbly strategically located in the Arctic; the Panama Canal should no longer be run by the Chinese Communist Party; and Canada has been ripping off American farmers and workers for decades. Where’s the lie?” she said.
Historian John Pinheiro, director of research at the Acton Institute, told the Wall Street Journal the men share a common vision.
“Polk had a vision of a bicoastal nation with commerce with Europe on one coast and Asia on the other,” Pinheiro said. “If [Trump] and Polk have anything in common … it’s looking next door.”
Days before Trump was sworn in, commentator Rich Lowry looked at Trump’s initial comments and saw the connection to Polk, according to a piece Lowry wrote in National Review, noting Polk “added more than 1 million square miles to U.S. territory and extended the country all the way to the Pacific, making him the most successful president not celebrated as part of the American pantheon.”
He said both men share the “American geopolitical voice that seeks dominance in our immediate environs and that is highly sensitive to overseas powers — in this case, China — on our periphery.”
Although Lowry said his preference is to grow by deals rather than Polk’s methods that included war, he added, “maybe his portrait in the Oval would send a message.”
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Amazon’s promo for “The Political Underdogs” by Alexandre G. Bojko, which explored the Trump-Polk connection in 2020, said that among other connections, both “ were workaholics in their early and presidential lives and rarely compromised on any political issue.”
“They listened to the pleas of the American ‘common’ man electorate and proved the political establishment wrong when Election Day came. Both men contributed to a national rebirth that made the United States economically stronger. But most importantly, both James K. Polk and Donald J. Trump became strong patriotic leaders despite being political underdogs,” the promo said
Yep here it all is
“James K. Polk expanded the U.S. more than any other president. Now his portrait hangs in the Oval Office, a signal that President Trump’s ambition to take over Canada, Greenland and other territory is more than just talk.”https://t.co/jwveKGOnsX
— Brian Winter (@BrazilBrian) March 13, 2025
Trump made the parallel explicit in his inaugural address.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said.
“Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close,” he said.
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