Trump’s Mad Magical Thinking
Greenland? Yep, we’re all talking about Greenland again, a place that never crossed one’s consciousness, except perhaps as the setting for some dour, subtitled BritBox procedural in which a female cop, swathed in a puffer coat and enormous webbed snowshoes, crunches through the ice, looking for a serial killer. Who knew that Chinese and Russian ships had been circling this Arctic outpost with such threatening military intent? Except they haven’t. According to Denmark's Joint Arctic Command in Greenland, there are no menacing sightings of Russian or Chinese destroyers. Yet.
Hand it to Trump. His surreal gift is the ability to force the entire world to enter his mad, magical thinking and give it serious credence. In his first term, he monopolized the obsessive conversation of every thinking person and every media outlet in the United States. Now, Trump derangement syndrome has gone global (except the derangement is his.) His serial insanities have supplanted national headlines in countries that once thought of his antics as an American aberration. While business leaders at Davos this week celebrate not having to pretend to care about climate change anymore, European heads of state, hoping to confer about the fate of Ukraine, will instead be huddling about the national security crisis wrought by Trump’s incomprehensible obsession with Greenland.
Is this Trump’s backdoor way of killing NATO, dreamed up by his pal Vladimir Putin? “Europe’s at a total loss. It’s a pleasure to watch,” wrote a Russian pundit in Moskovsky Komsomolets, a daily Moscow paper. Has Trump misabsorbed some greatest-hits history lesson about President Andrew Johnson’s purchase of Alaska—seven million dollars for all that undeveloped real estate! One suspects Greenland, three times the size of Texas, calls out to Trump’s predatory developer instincts with more potency than the stated reason of geopolitical strategy. Equidistant between Moscow and Washington, Trump says the island is critical as a site of the new anti-missile defense system the Golden Dome. (Or, wait, is the Golden Dome the Trump ballroom?) But he also said the military action against Venezuela was about a war on drugs.
Because I Can
Surely, it cannot be that the Greenland grab simply satisfies Trump’s compulsion to seize, bully, and flaunt imperial leverage. Apparently, the answer is yes. Buried in that lengthy NYT Oval Office interview with Trump was an unusually reflective reply. When asked whether Greenland was psychologically important to him personally, or to the United States, he responded, “Psychologically important for me.” Holy crap.
This infantile pathology was writ large in Trump’s weekend text to the sober Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, declaring that he was no longer interested “purely” in peace, due to being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, despite “having stopped 8 wars PLUS.” Never mind that the coveted honor is awarded by an independent committee, not a national government, or that Greenland is part of Denmark, not Norway. Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen—they are all the same on Trump’s “whatever” map of boring cold-weather capitals. Wasn’t it bad enough that he had already accepted the abject tribute of Venezuelan hero María Corina Machado gifting him her own treasured Nobel? It hurt my heart to see that picture of him holding up the framed medal, repurposed with his name above it, and grinning at her desperate bargain for a democratic future in Venezuela.
At this point, Trump has cast off any dwindling inhibitions or pretense of presidential propriety. His stipulation that nation members of the new Gaza Board of Peace must pay a billion dollars for membership in perpetuity, as if they are top-tier Mar-a-Lago applicants, was a vomitous expression of diplomatic profanity. And offering a board seat to Putin, butcher of an estimated 500,000 killed or wounded in Ukraine, was nothing short of obscene. Trump sees himself as a world-conquering emperor, but, as Ukraine has shown, he should not underestimate the power of righteous rage when sovereignty is about to be stolen. How’s this for magical thinking? Greenlanders, toughened by their life in an Arctic redoubt, put on their big-boy sealskin pants and, with a glorious surge from the allies, find a way to put Trump’s northern lights out.
Worst season of Homeland, ever. The characters are poorly written and the plot is moronic. The President, in particular, is laughable. The ratings will be terrible.
As Jane Goodall said in her last interview before her death.." I would like to put Trump, Musk. Netenyahu and all their acolytes on a Musk rocket and send them off!