Can Trump Be Duped Into Dropping His Greenland Obsession?

Thom Tillis, hoping to change the president’s mind, is blaming the Greenland idea on Trump staffers giving bad advice. Good luck with that.

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

WHEN YOU’RE WORKING WITH A MAD KING, as courtiers have done throughout history, one of the challenges is to steer him away from his worst ideas while pretending that the ideas aren’t his.

This is what Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is now trying to do about Donald Trump’s nutty obsession with seizing Greenland.

Twice this week, Tillis has gone to the Senate floor to blame the Greenland fantasy on Trump’s advisers. On Monday, Tillis pinned it on Stephen Miller, calling it a dumb idea that “some deputy chief of staff thinks was cute to say on TV.” On Wednesday, Tillis blamed it on “whoever told the president that this was a viable path.” The senator huffed that “the amateurs who said it was a good idea should lose their jobs.”

A good adviser, said Tillis, would have informed Trump that NATO was “the most important alliance in the history of the United States,” that taking Greenland would “destabilize” the alliance, and that “at one point we had seventeen military installations in Greenland, and they’d be happy to have us back.” Somebody, he demanded, “needs to tell the president” these things.

All of this is ludicrous. People have been telling Trump these things for months. They’ve said it to his face, on camera. And he has made it clear that he doesn’t give a damn.

Last Wednesday, in an Oval Office interview, reporters for the New York Times told Trump that taking Greenland might destroy NATO and that under a longstanding written agreement with Denmark, the president could “send as many troops as you want.” Trump dismissed the Denmark agreement, and he said NATO’s feelings hardly mattered because it was impotent without the United States.

Two days later, at a roundtable with oil executives, another reporter reminded Trump that under the Denmark agreement he could legally expand the U.S. military presence in Greenland. On Sunday, in a press gaggle aboard Air Force One, he was told again that seizing Greenland might end NATO. He blew off these warnings, too. “They need us much more than we need them,” he scoffed, referring to the Europeans.

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, a reporter brought up another one of Tillis’s favorite points: That “Denmark fought alongside the United States” in Afghanistan. Trump signaled that he had heard this argument many times and was sick of it. “Thank you for telling me that, I appreciate it,” he deadpanned.

Clearly Trump is aware of all the points Tillis thinks White House aides should make to him. But he remains unpersuaded. Why? Because Trump—not Stephen Miller or some other rogue adviser—is the one who’s obsessed with taking Greenland. This is obvious because Trump has been fantasizing about it for eight years and because he keeps connecting it to his love of real estate.

“Ownership is very important,” Trump explained when the Times reporters asked him why putting more troops in Greenland wouldn’t be enough. “You need ownership,” he repeated four days later on Air Force One. “You really need title, as they say in the real estate business.”

In his session with the Times reporters, Trump eliminated any doubt that his Greenland fixation was personal. Owning the island was “psychologically needed for success,” he insisted. One of the reporters pressed him: “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?” Trump replied, “Psychologically important for me.”

So why does Tillis keep blaming Trump’s behavior on bad staff advice?

The answer lies in a story Tillis told later in his Wednesday remarks from the Senate floor. He was annoyed that Trump had just proposed to cap credit-card interest rates at 10 percent. Tillis opposes the cap, but he congratulated Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, on somehow inducing Trump to support it. “Good on you,” Tillis told Warren with rueful admiration. “You convinced the president to embrace your policy.”

That’s how Tillis sees Trump: With the right persuasion and flattery, you can get him to do anything. So if he keeps pretending that the idea of seizing Greenland came from some nefarious or dimwitted adviser, maybe he can get Trump to disown the idea and back away. And if Tillis can pull that off, good on him.

But it’s telling that no Republican senator dares to confront the megalomaniac who’s actually behind the idea. Not even Tillis, who says he decided not to seek re-election so he could “speak truth” to Trump.

Tillis is right that the scoundrel who called for seizing Greenland should lose his job. But Republicans in Congress know exactly who that scoundrel is. And they decided long ago, even when he tried to overthrow our government, that they would never stand up to him.