WASHINGTON — I know what you’re thinking. America made a wrong turn with Donald Trump, driving our destiny into darkness.

But there’s reason to believe Trump is what we’re all about, right from the start: real estate.

Trump, a mogul and dealmaker, aims to acquire Canada, Greenland and Gaza. Are these far-fetched whims? No.

George Washington, descendant of a Cavalier, was a skilled land surveyor. That was his early profession, along with military adventures. He owned miles of Virginia acres, tilled by enslaved people.

Washington enjoyed riding through his property, surveying crops even at age 67. He caught a bad cold outdoors in December 1799 and died within days.

Then came Thomas Jefferson, the third president and also a wealthy Virginia landowner. Stately Monticello, his plantation, was worked by hundreds of enslaved people.

But Jefferson wasn’t content with his own lovely land up on a mountain. The major project of his presidency, as we learned back when, was the Louisiana Purchase from France. A masterstroke of luck and politics, doubling the size of the United States.

What a legacy for Jefferson! Historians sing of thee.

Don’t look now, but Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was another Southerner who eyed expanding the nation’s land in the 1830s. The Trail of Tears, the forced march of five Native American tribes from the rich clay of their ancestral lands to dusty Oklahoma, was his brutal expulsion.

The reason why: It opened more of the American South to slavery.

Jackson owned about a hundred enslaved people as well. He mentored James Polk, the 11th president, of Tennessee, who started the Mexican War and claimed the prize of Texas.

Lacking Jefferson’s brilliance and charm, Polk matched his vast land grab: the Pacific Southwest, including California, upon winning the Mexican War. The U.S. did compensate Mexico for the grand landscape of California.

See the pattern? In fact, in 1845, a newspaper declared “Manifest Destiny” a national motto. The slogan meant that American would become the entire continent.

A little-known politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had opposed admitting Texas, the largest slave state, into the Union in 1845.

Fifteen years later, as president-elect, Lincoln witnessed the breaking up of the North and South over slavery. But note: Lincoln did not frame the Civil War as a struggle over slavery — not at first.

Lincoln’s vision was keeping the Union whole, the slave state and free states together. In other words, our generous expanse of land borders should stay intact.

What Lincoln declared in his lyrical first inaugural address in 1861 was that Southern slavery should stay in place, not spread. He resisted secession, above all. Emancipation came later.

On Lincoln’s watch, the Homestead Act passed in 1862. Again, the refrain of real estate shows up.

The pioneer tales of settling the land near and beyond the Mississippi River form our backstory and legend. The reality was harsh, planting the prairie and building little houses in Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakota Territory.

Thanks to this relentless pursuit, now there is no more beautiful prairie.

The Civil War president dearly wished to see the “West” settled by white homesteaders — not slave labor. The Homestead Act officially gave 160 acres free to farmers willing to work their own land.

Free: the 19th-century forerunner of the mortgage tax deduction.

Addressing the harm done to displaced Native tribes was never part of the plan. The U.S. government’s free handouts to 600,000 homesteaders resulted in bad blood and scars that still fester in Native tribes and reservations.

In 1893, young historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the end of “the frontier.” Nowhere new to go. What was to become of our lust to expand?

But wait! There were yet highways to build all over this land.

Dwight Eisenhower presided over this part of the American myth, the open road.

– And then there was Alaska and Hawaii to take over.

– So Trump, a real estate huckster at heart and in office, fits into a flawed American tradition: a manifesto based on more, more, more.

– Robert Frost put the quest poetically: “The land was ours … in Massachusetts, in Virginia,” reaching westward.

– Trump is no Washington nor Jefferson nor Lincoln — but a reductio ad absurdum.

In a way, he’s history’s revenge on us.

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.