Visiting the border wall at Alamo, Texas is the perfect culmination to this presidency. It displays maximum violence to the people whose families they separated, called rapists, and labeled animals, while wrapping the action in a narrative of sacrificial martyrdom.

There’s a long history to the work of the violent securing borders through understanding yourself as victim. It goes back to the early church, where theologians like Tertullian pitched violent death as productive, because “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.”

After Constantine, this sense of redemptive violence fueled forceful evangelism in medieval Europe, where scholars like Weinstein and Bell have argued that “wherever Christianity encounter a frontier it had need of martyrs.” https://www.amazon.com/Saints-Society-Western-Christendom-1000-1700/dp/0226890562

It came to the area we now call the U.S.-Mexican border through Catholic missionaries, mainly Franciscans and Jesuits, who understood their service to Iberian empires as necessarily entailing Native and priestly suffering, because “missions must begin with blood.”

If you want to follow the story of how martyr narratives served to justify the colonization of this region and rationalize the expansion of “Christendom,” have I got a book for you. https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294190/missions-begin-with-blood/

Along with other cries to memorialize sacrifice from the Boston Massacre to “Remember the Maine!”, the Alamo story has allowed the U. S. to grow its territory through force and the dispossession of others (usually Indigenous people), while telling itself a tale of innocence.

The story of the Alamo — from the romance of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett’s doomed final stand to the national shrine that it became — helped justify the taking of western lands, by positioning Mexico as the barbarous, bloodthirsty empire and Texans as plucky freedom martyrs.

So, even though he’s not visiting “the Alamo,” the choice to culminate a presidency that began by attacking Mexicans, was fueled by the dehumanization of immigrants, and stained by the destruction of Indigenous land, is the ultimate clothing of raw power in the robes persecution.