Take Trump’s Greenland Obsession Seriously
Trump’s thirst for expansion isn’t a sideshow. It’s the foreign-policy expression of his core political impulse: bullying.
Donald Trump is a felon. But he’s hopeful the Supreme Court may yet spare him the indignity of ever becoming a sentenced felon. Although Judge Juan Merchan plans to recommend unconditional discharge for Trump—not a bad deal after conviction on 34 felonies!—Trump is pushing for the courts to cancel his sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday, altogether. After an appellate court rejected that argument Tuesday, Trump’s team immediately appealed to SCOTUS, which has signaled it may move expeditiously to consider his request. Happy Wednesday.
It’s Not Just a Sideshow
by Andrew Egger
If it wasn’t clear before his latest free-wheeling press conference yesterday, it sure is now: Donald Trump has territorial acquisition on the brain.
He wants to go get Greenland, which he says the U.S. needs for “national security reasons,” and is prepared to “tariff Denmark at a very high level” until they consent to fork it over. A delegation of MAGA meatheads led by Donald Trump Jr. jetted off to Greenland this week to inspect the merchandise.
The elder Trump wants to retake the Panama Canal from Panama, too. He says he isn’t ruling out the use of military force to take either territory.
He has designs as well, he suggests, on annexing Canada as the 51st state: “You get rid of that artificially drawn line . . . it would also be much better for national security. Don’t forget, we basically protect Canada.” And he thinks Mexico gets a bit too much credit for its gulf: “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said. “What a beautiful name.”
As we lurch back into the outrage-a-minute pace of a Trumpified Washington, the critics are dusting off their old stock responses. In this case: sternly castigating reporters and one another against paying much attention to any of it. It’s all just theater! A shiny object to distract us from the real story of the alarming work Trump is doing behind the scenes!
Let’s cede that there’s something to this. Everyone knows Trump relishes the rope-a-dope. Deliberately kicking up barmy controversies is one of his most tried-and-true strategies for keeping himself the center of attention. Lately, he’s even taken to monetizing the strategy. About an hour after the press conference, I got a marketing text from Truth Social, the platform Trump owns: “Trump said what about Greenland?! Get the latest scoop on Truth Social.”
But saying “Trump wants everyone paying attention to this” is one thing; saying “Trump doesn’t actually mean the things he’s saying about this” is another. And there’s little reason to believe that Trump—re-elected, re-emboldened, utterly validated in his “bullying works” approach to life and politics—is kidding about any of it.
Certainly other nations—our allies, in theory!—don’t have the luxury of assuming he is. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has found it necessary in recent days to strike the posture and tone of someone trying to soothe a large, angry animal. In interviews this week, she stressed that the U.S. is “absolutely our closest ally” and that Denmark welcomes Trump’s focus on the Arctic. “We have a clear interest that it’s the U.S. that plays a large role in that region and not, for example, Russia,” she said.
“On the one hand, I am pleased regarding the rise in American interest in Greenland,” she told Danish broadcaster TV 2 yesterday. “But of course it is important that it takes place in a way where it is the Greenlanders’ decision what their future holds.”
The important thing to understand is that Trump’s interest in aggressive national expansion isn’t some odd and inexplicable sideshow to his politics. It is his politics. It’s the blossoming of the same deep, central impulse that’s driven him throughout his first election and his return to the presidency: Whom can I dominate, and who is going to stop me?
Trump enjoys making Denmark’s prime minister swallow his rants and don a fixed grin while talking about their valuable partnership. It’s the same reason he enjoys making tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg kiss the ring. He delights in the fact that those around him fear his power—and not only that, but that they perceive he will wield it arbitrarily. He loves that they know the old ties—allegiances, treaties, laws, norms—will not protect them. If they are to prosper, they must pay obeisance to the king.
How To Capitulate
by William Kristol
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
How do you capitulate to power? Gradually and then suddenly.
If you’re an unimaginably wealthy and powerful billionaire, you start by spiking an editorial in a newspaper you own. You then visit the president-elect and publicly bend the knee. You donate a relatively modest amount—$1 million—to that president-elect’s inaugural fund. You then spend $40 million for a “documentary” on the wife of the president-elect.
Submission occurs gradually and then suddenly.
If you’re an undistinguished but ambitious young federal judge, you start by slowing down an open-and-shut case against the presidential candidate who appointed you. You then decide that the long-established practice of appointing special counsels is unconstitutional. You then reach into the internal workings of the Justice Department to try to prevent the attorney general from releasing a report by that special counsel.
Currying favor occurs gradually and then consistently.
If you’re one of our two major political parties, you first go along with the presidential nominee of your party, however distasteful he is. You then support him as president while still expressing some reservations. But the reservations recede, and you stick with him through his attempt to get a foreign country to help with his re-election.
You then downplay his efforts to overturn the election and stop the peaceful transfer of power: ”What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” You object briefly to his actions on January 6th, but vote overwhelmingly a week later in the House against impeachment, and a month later in the Senate against conviction. You nominate him for president a third time and support him unreservedly. Now you eagerly seek to confirm his nominees, however unqualified, and say not a word against any of his agenda, however irresponsible.
Appeasement occurs gradually and then thoroughly.
There was one person who understood this all along. As he explained twenty years ago: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
This has been our president-elect’s guiding principle. Our country hasn’t yet proved him wrong.
Now that he’s set to go back to the Oval Office and once again actually be president, the appeasement, the submission, the capitulation will probably get worse.
And it will probably work, at least for a while. The billionaire will get richer. The judge may get promoted. The party will enjoy all the perquisites for power. They and many others will be far better off for having bent the knee than if they had taken a different course.
Still, there is a different course. When I quoted Hemingway above, I thought of John McCain. He loved Hemingway, and often quoted his favorite Hemingway character, Robert Jordan, from For Whom the Bell Tolls. “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.”
Is it too much to hope that we might turn the corner at some point soon, and see, in the spirit of John McCain, more fighting and less capitulating?
Quick Hits
LET IT GO, JOE: President Joe Biden, in one of his last interviews in office, said that he believed he could have won re-election had he chosen to stay in the race. “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden told USA Today’s Susan Page. He said he was basing that view on polling he’d reviewed. Our own Will Saletan has thoroughly debunked this claim when it has occasionally popped up before, so we won’t dwell too much on it, save to say it’s not entirely reality-based. Notably, Biden also said he wasn’t sure his health would have allowed him to serve a second term—a recognition that underscores the irresponsibility of his team’s prior admonishments of coverage of his infirmities. Biden said he was considering issuing preemptive pardons for political figures being targeted by Donald Trump. He also revealed that, in his post-election conversation with Trump, he told the president-elect not to go down the vindictive path. Did Trump agree?
“He didn’t say, ‘No, I’m going to . . .’ You know,” said Biden. “He didn’t reinforce it. He just basically listened.”
THE L.A. BLAZE: Jaw-dropping scenes across southern California, where raging wildfires spread by strong Santa Ana winds have erupted across thousands of acres, burning forests and homes and forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. The unpredictable nature of wind-spread fire—gusts can carry embers over a mile, where they can land and start new blazes—has stymied firefighting efforts and thrown evacuations into particular chaos. Some evacuees have abandoned their cars to flee the flames on foot, worsening the gridlock; reporters have captured footage of authorities bulldozing abandoned cars to clear roads for emergency vehicles.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency yesterday, with President Joe Biden, who is currently in California, saying his administration “will do everything it can to support the response.” President-elect Donald Trump has not commented on the blaze, but has routinely threatened to cut off disaster funding for California fires in the past, most recently threatening to do so if the state would not permit more water to be diverted to its farmers.
ANOTHER, MORE HELPFUL FIRE: J. Ann Selzer, the vaunted Iowa pollster whose last survey of the cycle predicted a Kamala Harris victory in the Hawkeye state that never materialized, has become the target of perhaps Donald Trump’s most egregious and ridiculous act of retaliation since his reelection—a lawsuit alleging that her polling miss amounted to “consumer fraud” and “election interference.” Now, Selzer, who has announced her retirement from polling, has a powerful new ally in her corner: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which announced Tuesday it will defend her in the lawsuit.
The first-amendment organization, known as FIRE, is best known for its decades of work protecting students’ speech rights on college campuses, but has expanded its focus in recent years to defending speech more broadly.
“This is America. No one should be afraid to predict the outcome of an election,” FIRE wrote in a post announcing the news. “That’s why we refuse to let Donald Trump abuse the legal system to punish Selzer for speech he dislikes.”
Cheap Shots
What ought to be taken seriously, too, is that Trump is a madman, a sociopath, a monster, and that our constitutional democracy is in grave peril. We'll soon find out that voting by tantrum has consequences.
"Is it too much to hope that we might turn the corner at some point soon, and see, in the spirit of John McCain, more fighting and less capitulating?"
Yes, Bill, it is too much to hope for.