US foreign affairs committee lauds Trump’s expansionist rhetoric

The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is honing its message on President-elect Donald Trump’s statements on Greenland and global American expansion — stressing that the panel is very much in his camp.

On Wednesday the committee published — and then deleted — a post on X plugging on Wednesday Trump’s musings about acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

“Our country was built by warriors and explorers. We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon. President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams,” the committee account wrote, accompanying a screenshot of a New York Post cover titled “The Donroe Doctrine.”

The committee said the deletion was far from an effort to dial back. It re-posted the graphic after altering the New York Post cover to say “The Trump Doctrine” and saying “This was taken down because we wanted to fix the graphic to reflect that President Trump’s America First vision is worthy of being called by its own doctrine.”

The provocative social media posts could preview how HFAC, historically a bastion of bipartisan cooperation, is slated to become much more MAGA-fied under its new chair, Florida Rep. Brian Mast, a major supporter of Trump. Democrats on the committee worry that Mast’s takeover of the committee will derail that bipartisanship.

Trump has drawn fire over his repeated push to acquire Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and the Panama Canal from the central American country, as well as his jabs at Canada in which he has called it the 51st state. “It’s bananas. It’s insane,” Democratic Representative Jim Himes told CNN after Trump in a press conference on Tuesday refused to rule out using military or economic coercion to acquire Greenland.

A spokesperson for the House Foreign Affairs Committee declined to comment.