I tend to avoid political subjects being more interested in science, society and trends but this is an exception.
As we witness Trump more and more obviously and outrageously going off rail it is worth examining what's wrong with the American system.
by Ron Unz
I’ve never liked Karl Rove,
but I’ve always respected his competence as a political strategist
given his success in winning two presidential terms for an idiot like
“W.”
Soon after his patron left the White House amid record-low approval ratings, Rove became a weekly columnist at the Wall Street Journal.
Although I’ve almost never read any of the many hundreds of op-eds he
subsequently published, I’ve usually glanced at the titles.
So his most recent piece “Is Trump Trying to Lose the Midterms?” caught my eye, and not only did I read it all the way through but I actually agreed with almost every word.
He opened his column by declaring that he found Trump’s behavior “mystifying.”
A year ago Tuesday, Donald Trump
was sworn in for a second time as president. It’s been a year of rapid
movement, controversy and upheaval. It’s also been utterly mystifying.
Why does the president keep doing things that are against his political self-interest?
He went on to
note that the immigration issue had been a central reason for Trump’s
2024 victory, but the president seemed to be snatching a huge political
defeat out of the jaws of victory:
On the
lost-opportunity front, look no further than the president’s
extraordinary achievement in securing the Southern border. He stopped
the flood of illegal migrants. He was right. We didn’t need a new law,
only a different president.
Yet Mr. Trump
didn’t take a victory lap to publicize the success. If he had gone to
the border, Hispanic and Democratic local officials would have thanked
him for removing the tremendous burden on their hospitals, food
pantries, social services and public safety. That image would have been
powerful and lingered.
Instead, the
White House has turned a major win into a major drag on the president’s
approval: 58% of Americans and 66% of independents disapproved of Mr.
Trump’s handling of immigration in a Jan. 12 CNN/SRRS survey. The
administration’s pledge to focus on expelling violent criminal aliens—“the worst of the worst”—was
widely popular. But Team Trump misplayed its hand by going a good deal
further. Dispatching Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Home Depots
to grab day laborers, or to other places where otherwise law-abiding
illegal aliens congregate, is unpopular. These expanded ICE sweeps are
turning voters against Mr. Trump. In a Jan. 12 Quinnipiac University
poll, 57% of all voters and 64% of independents disapproved of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws.
The Trump
administration made the situation worse by describing Renee Good, the
woman killed by an ICE agent earlier this month, as a “domestic
terrorist” and fomenting further chaos in Minneapolis. In a Jan. 12
CNN/SRRS survey, 51% of Americans said ICE was making cities “less
safe.”
A few weeks ago my own lengthy review of that issue had come to very similar conclusions:
Rove also
sharply questioned Trump’s bizarre determination to acquire Greenland,
with our president repeatedly declaring that if necessary he would
invade and conquer that barren, frozen wasteland:
As puzzling as
his mishandling of immigration is Mr. Trump’s insistence that for
national security, Denmark must surrender Greenland. For weeks he made
it sound as though he might even invade—clarifying only on Wednesday
morning that he won’t go to war with a NATO ally. That he threatened so
long to use force hasn’t endeared him to voters. Eighty-six percent of
Americans oppose taking Greenland by force—including 68% of Republicans
and 94% of independents, according
to a Jan. 12 Quinnipiac poll. And they’re right to. An invasion would
destroy NATO and gravely damage American trade and political ties. Only
China and Russia would have profited.
What makes this
still more confounding is that the U.S. already has a treaty allowing it
to establish military bases in Greenland. Yet Mr. Trump has insisted
America must own the land outright, which even without the possibility
of war is a political loser. Quinnipiac found 55% of Americans oppose
“trying to buy Greenland” while 37% support it.
But even more
peculiar were Trump’s economic policies, especially his constantly
changing tax rates on our three trillion dollars of imported goods and
his attempts to eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve. Most
recently, his administration had begun a criminal prosecution of
outgoing Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump himself had previously appointed to that position.
That isn’t even
the most unhinged moment from the first year of Trump 2.0. Remember
“Liberation Day” last April? He levied tariffs willy-nilly, even on
places with which we have trade surpluses or no trade. For months the
president has attacked the Federal Reserve’s independence to set
interest rates, roiling markets…He called
voters’ affordability concerns a “hoax,” then moments later claimed
he’d address them…On Saturday, he announced a 10% tariff on imports from
European countries that criticized his threats to invade Greenland and
warned he’d raise it to 25% if the Danes didn’t strike a deal by June 1.
On Tuesday, he suggested he’d send Americans $2,000 “tariff rebate”
checks without congressional approval.
In recent
months, Trump had bombed and attacked some nine different countries, in
each case without any Congressional approval. But Rove noted that he
nonetheless seemed outraged that he hadn’t been awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize for his actions:
Last Thursday,
he accepted Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s gift of
her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal as if he had earned it…And in a missive
almost too over the top to believe, he recently tried to bully the
Norwegian prime minister because the Norwegian Nobel Committee hadn’t
awarded him the Peace Prize. Because of the perceived slight, Mr. Trump
wrote, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
Considering all these facts, I doubt that too many intelligent Americans would question Rove’s conclusion:
The Trump
presidency wasn’t normal even in his first term, but something is
different now. Americans are increasingly unnerved by the president’s
rambling appearances and late-night screeds. Whether it’s age or
advisers who can’t check his worst instincts, Mr. Trump is acting in
ways no American president has. His downward spiral has led 58% of
Americans and 66% of independents in the CNN/SRRS poll to describe his
second term as “a failure.” If his team can’t turn things around, he’ll
help defeat his party this fall and damage the country for years.
Rove’s appraisal of Trump’s presidency was hardly unique. Just a few days earlier the first two pages of the Journal‘s Weekend Review section had published “Is Trump Losing Joe Rogan, America’s Most Important Swing Voter?” As our country’s most popular podcaster, Rogan’s support had been a crucial element of Trump’s upset 2024 victory:
In February
1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously lost Walter Cronkite when the
renowned news anchor told Americans he could no longer accept the
president’s assurances about the war in Vietnam.
This week, President Trump may have lost Joe Rogan for the prosecution of his own war—this one on immigration…
…As Cronkite was in his time, Rogan is now an essential barometer of national sentiment in a fractured and suspicious age…
The three-hour
audience he provided Trump on the eve of the 2024 election, and his
subsequent endorsement, is regarded by many as a pivotal moment in that
contest. Certainly, Trump seemed to think so, inviting Rogan to the Oval
Office.
Earlier this
week, though, the podcaster recoiled when faced with the particulars of
Trump’s signature campaign promise to undertake the largest deportation
of illegal immigrants in American history. In particular, Rogan appeared
shaken by the death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman who was
shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent under
contested circumstances…
Later, Rogan
would invoke the Nazis when describing the masked and militarized ICE
agents roaming Minneapolis streets. “Are we really going to be the
Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” he asked…
Video Player
“He has a huge
audience, and a lot of people listen to him, both directly and
indirectly,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning New
America think tank, observed. “So when he says ‘enough with this ICE
brutality!’ he is clarifying an uncertain and possibly ambiguous moment
for many people, and coming down firmly on the side of civil liberties”…
Rogan was put off by masked and militarized ICE agents roaming Minneapolis streets
Guests on “The
Joe Rogan Experience” range from UFO enthusiasts, Hollywood A-listers
and scientists to fellow comedians of varying degrees of fame. In one of
his most famous episodes, he enticed billionaire Elon Musk to smoke a
joint, provoking a noticeable dent in Tesla’s share price. Rogan’s
podcast has also served as a breeding ground for a generation of younger
stars, including Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, who popularized the “manosphere” and infused MAGA with youth and testosterone…
Rogan is a UFC commentator and Trump a fan. The UFC chief executive, Dana White, told Rolling Stone that he made it a mission to bring Rogan on board MAGA before the 2024 election.
Rogan’s Trump
interview—which was released less than two weeks before Election Day—has
been viewed 61 million times on YouTube, and prompted Democrats to
lament how they lost the podcaster. When Trump celebrated victory, White
joined him on stage and thanked “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”…
Yet even before
Rogan’s comments this week, there were signs that he was growing uneasy
with the president’s maximalist second term. He questioned the
snatch-and-grab operation to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro,
objected to the renaming of the Kennedy Center, accused the Trump
administration of trying to “gaslight” people over the Jeffrey Epstein
files and called out Trump for mocking Hollywood producer Rob Reiner
after he and his wife were found dead in their home.
Immigration,
though, may stand apart, as an issue that was the fulcrum of Trump’s
campaign. In the president’s telling during his epic rallies, illegal
immigrants are to blame for everything from housing shortages to rampant
crime and economic decline. To often thunderous applause, the
then-candidate promised to mount the largest deportation in American
history.
So what changed for Rogan?
Part of it may
be the video. The gruesome footage of Good’s killing has gone viral,
like that of Floyd before her. It has also been accompanied by clips on
social media of masked ICE agents who look as though they’re in a
foreign war zone—not Minnesota.
“I mean, when
people say it’s justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she
was kind of turning the car away,” Rogan said, appearing to reject the
administration’s attempt to portray Good as a domestic terrorist seeking
to run over an ICE agent.
On Saturday
morning the latest killing by ICE agents in Minneapolis claimed the life
of a 37-year-old American citizen under circumstances that seemed even
more outrageous and illegal, with all the facts laid out in a very
convincing video by an experienced combat veteran:
Video Link
As acclaimed
journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in his own discussion of the incident,
not only were the facts absolutely clear-cut in this particular case,
but it was equally obvious that all the government officials were
blatantly lying. Greenwald particularly condemned the “Israelization” of
American society, in which anyone killed by the government is
immediately denounced as “a domestic terrorist.”
One of the main
excuses provided by Trump’s minions was that the victim had possessed a
perfectly legal handgun for which he had a permit, a handgun that he had
never touched let alone attempted to draw. For many decades
conservatives had always expressed their fervent support for the Second
Amendment, so Greenwald noted how strange it was that so many of them
had now totally reversed their position on that issue.
Video Link
Personally, I
find it absolutely hilarious that huge numbers of dim-witted
right-wingers have now loudly declared that government agents should be
authorized to summarily execute any American citizen who exercises his
legal right to own and carry a handgun.
Obviously, the
video-recorded killings of American citizens on the streets of
Minneapolis for employing their own constitutional rights represents
only an extreme example of our current situation. Indeed, this is merely
the visible tip of what is likely a very large submerged iceberg of
other such crimes and illegalities.
For example, a video aired on the Young Turks
channel reported the story of a 17-year-old American citizen working at
a Target store who was abducted by a squad of masked ICE agents,
hustled into an unmarked van, tortured or badly beaten, then left
terrorized in the parking lot of a local Walmart.
Video Link
Vice President JD Vance is a graduate of the Yale School of Law, and according to his public statements
all ICE agents are completely immunized against investigation or
prosecution by local authorities for any crimes they might commit,
including beatings, torture, or murder. Furthermore, since they are
masked and displaying no names nor forms of personal ID, simply
identifying the ones who were accused of committing any such crimes
might be quite difficult.
All of this has
fully confirmed the prescient concerns that Andrew Anglin had raised six
months ago, which seem to be coming true far more quickly than anyone
had ever expected:
I also find it
noteworthy that most of these ICE agents seem to wear no standard issue
uniforms, but merely various forms of semi-military-style clothing or
gear, making it difficult to even determine whether they are actually
the government agents that they purport to be.
For example, that same Young Turks
video also mentioned that there seem to be a growing reports that
masked individuals claiming to be ICE agents have begun abducting young
women from local city streets, hustling them into unmarked vans, and
sexually assaulting them, with many but not all of the victims being
Latinas. It’s obviously difficult to know whether these perpetrators are
actually legitimate ICE agents exploiting their positions to obtain
some extracurricular fringe benefits or merely criminals pretending to
be in that category.
As these stories
increase in number and begin circulating, I think that support for ICE
and the presidency that enabled its outrageously rogue behavior will
continue to decline.
Although the
immigration enforcement policies of the Trump Administration seem
extremely counterproductive or even disastrous, not least from a
political perspective, support for ICE agents and their recent shootings
still seems quite strong in the comment-threads of our own very lightly
moderated website.
I think this is
mostly due to the natural tendency for despairing, unhappy individuals
to see things that aren’t actually there and continue to believe
whatever they want to be true.
As many might
remember, during the first term of President Donald Trump there was a
widespread tendency among his ardent supporters to claim that many of
his seemingly stupid, incompetent policies were actually subtle moves in
a deeper and brilliant political strategy. According to them, Trump was
playing 3-D chess while his confused critics could only comprehend
checkers. Indeed, that sort of defensive excuse became so common that it
was soon regularly ridiculed by sarcastic responses that Trump’s
obvious failures constituted devious steps in his 27-dimensional game of
chess.
Thus, Trump had
won the Republican nomination and the presidency based upon his promise
to “build a wall” against immigrants from south of the border, but no
wall was ever built. Trump had promised to improve our relations with
Russia, but after absurdly being accused of being a Russian intelligence
asset, he backtracked and did nothing. Trump cycled through numerous
chiefs of staff and other top administration officials, hiring and
firing them in rapid succession. But during all that time, many of his
devotees continued to interpret all these failures and erratic actions
as clever moves in a breathtaking strategy that would ultimately
checkmate his opponents.
As his 2020 reelection campaign approached, these foolish beliefs became the nucleus of the bizarre QAnon movement,
whose advocates urged doubters to “trust the plan.” The QAnon
supporters claimed that Trump was gradually laying the groundwork not
merely for his own reelection, but for the total defeat of the nefarious
secret political elites who for generations had actually ruled our
country from behind the scenes. These fearsome enemies were often
characterized as being Satanic pedophiles, who had infiltrated and
controlled nearly all our powerful institutions.
In early 2020, a
disgusted White Nationalist named Brad Griffin who blogged under the
pen-name “Hunter Wallace” published a good piece summarizing all of
Trump’s numerous betrayals and failures, while ridiculing the so-called
“Q-tards” who continued to still support him in worshipful fashion.
- Trump’s Chumps
Brad Griffin • Occidental Dissent • February 6, 2020 • 2,500 Words
Just as Griffin
argued, there actually turned out to be no such “plan” and Trump’s
political enemies used their near-total control of the electronic and
social media to ensure Biden’s victory in 2020 and drive Trump from the
White House.
Believing that
the election had been stolen from Trump by ballot fraud and rigged
voting machines, a huge number of enraged Trump loyalists, many of them
ardent QAnon followers, traveled to Washington to support their hero,
and hundreds of the most determined of these stormed the capitol
building in January 2021. A woman named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead,
several others died in the violence and confusion and many of the rest
were eventually tracked down, arrested, and imprisoned. The anonymous
“Q” commenter who had misled them all soon vanished from the Internet,
and the gullible Trumpists gradually recognized that they had all been
tricked and deceived.
Yet against all
odds, Trump somehow managed to revive his fortunes and stage a political
comeback, more through the stupidity of his Democratic enemies than
anything that he himself did. Their vindictive legal prosecutions of the
defeated Trump made him a hero and a martyr in the eyes of most
Republicans, giving him the media oxygen and sympathy votes that allowed
him to easily recapture the Republican nomination in 2024.
During the
previous four years, the insane “open borders” policies of President Joe
Biden and his administration had allowed an unprecedented 10 million
unauthorized foreign migrants to enter this country. That disaster,
together with growing evidence of Biden’s obvious senility, completely
doomed his reelection chances.
Facing certain
defeat in November, the Democratic Party leadership forced the
already-nominated Biden off the ticket, a political maneuver previously
unknown in American presidential history. But they foolishly chose to
replace him with his totally unqualified and equally unpopular Vice
President Kamala Harris, whose elevation did little to improve the
prospects of the Democratic ticket.
The result was
that Trump won a victory that November, returning him to the White
House, and although his plurality in the popular vote was rather narrow,
it was the first that he had ever enjoyed.
During his first
term, many members of the American political establishment had been
terrified by the horrors that a seemingly loose cannon like Trump would
unleash. But instead he did little or nothing, having been quickly tied
up in knots by the Russiagate investigation. Indeed, Trump did so few
major or newsworthy things during those four years that I only very rarely even discussed his activities in the dozens of articles I published during that period.
With Trump now
eight years older, most expected that this second term would merely be a
repeat of blustery words and angry tweets without any associated
actions. But instead the last twelve months have seen Trump become one
of the most consequential presidents in our entire history, successfully
intimidating Congress into near total submission and using waves of
legally dubious executive orders to grant himself essentially
monarchical powers, powers far greater than those that any previous
president had ever attempted to exercise.
Although Karl Rove’s WSJ
column had given considerable attention to the political insanity of
Trump’s immigration policies, the strategist had suggested that our
president’s economic and tax policies might have been even more
“unhinged” and I can’t dispute that.
We annually
import more than three trillion dollars of foreign goods, and Trump’s
many Imperial Decrees have changed our tariff tax rates on these, doing
so at weekly or even daily intervals, always based upon his personal
will or personal whim. There have been countless absolute monarchs and
mad dictators, but I’ve never heard of one who ever behaved in such
cavalier fashion, so it seems unlikely that any major country in the
entire history of the world had ever so frequently changed its trade or
tax laws.
Most recently, Trump claimed the authority to control the financial activities of every corporation in America, including its dividends, buybacks, salaries, and bonuses:
An executive order
posted Wednesday evening said companies “are not permitted in any way,
shape, or form to pay dividends or buy back stock, until such time as
they are able to produce a superior product, on time and on budget.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would limit executive pay to $5 million, but the dollar figure wasn’t included in the executive order.
Around the same time, Trump gave a wide-ranging two-hour interview to four New York Times
journalists, and his own statements were of similar boldness. He
declared that he had no regard whatsoever for international legal
niceties or normative traditions and was only restricted by his own
personal morality, as he chose to interpret it:
And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.
Asked by my
colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American
military might, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My
own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
This seemed an
alarming indication of megalomania, far beyond anything I’d ever seen
expressed by any petty Third World despot, let alone by the elected
leader of a top world superpower.
Trump’s total
lack of introspection or willingness to seek objective advice has
naturally sometimes led him into dead-ends. Although he successfully
kidnapped the president of Venezuela in a commando raid, his stated
intent was to gain control of that country’s oil reserves, which he
claimed were the largest in the world. But most of those huge reserves were merely a statistical fiction,
with estimates of the crude that is actually available for economic
recovery being more than 90% lower than that absurdly exaggerated
figure. So Trump’s gross violation of international law had produced
little economic benefit.
Moreover, Trump
had expressed his total confidence that under American control
Venezuelan production could quickly be dramatically boosted. But an important story a few days ago in the WSJ explained
that none of the major oil companies wanted to go into Venezuela and
invest the many tens of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild that
country’s decrepit oil infrastructure. Not only would any such project
be extremely risky, but since Trump had been promising to reduce oil
prices to $50 per barrel, any such oil that eventually did become
available would be uneconomical to extract. That was obviously a major
problem for Trump.
But as I joked at the time,
our president might have an obvious solution, based upon the same
methods he had used with such effectiveness a few weeks ago. Trump could
just send out his Delta Force commandoes to kidnap all the oil company
CEOs and hold them hostage until their companies agreed to invest at
least $100 billion in Venezuela!
Immigration
raids and tariff hikes, no matter how counter-productive or irrationally
designed, were at least part of normal politics, and I suspect that
many of the voters who supported Trump in November 2024 had done so in
hopes that he would implement these measures.
However, I doubt
that a single American voter had chosen Trump because they hoped that
he would decide to invade and conquer Greenland.
I’ve been
following American politics for nearly a half-century, and during many
of those decades our public life has been heavily dominated by extremely
militaristic and aggressive factions such as the Neocons. But in all
those years, I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting that Greenland had
any strategic or economic value whatsoever, merely being a barren,
frozen wasteland that was home to a few tens of thousands of
impoverished Eskimos, though these days the politically-correct have
demanded that they must always be called “Inuit.”
Karl Rove had also spent his lifetime in politics and was just as puzzled as I had been.
Perhaps Trump
and his closest advisors are such geopolitical geniuses that they have
discovered something that no other American strategic thinker had ever
noticed throughout the entire twentieth century. But then again, perhaps
not.
Prof. John
Mearsheimer is one of our foremost figures in the Realist school of
foreign policy, and when he was recently asked why Trump wanted
Greenland, he began laughing, almost uncontrollably.
Video Link
In describing
Trump’s recent foreign policy endeavors, including those involving
Greenland, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs applied a wide range of
characterizations, including “delusional,” “unhinged,” and “crazy,” and
behaving like a three-year-old. He suggested that no president in our
national history had ever acted in such a manner:
Video Link
As the longtime
chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence
Wilkerson had regularly participated in the highest decision-making
circles, and he described Trump’s behavior at Davos as something out of
an “insane asylum.”
Video Link
These are all
individuals of enormous public credibility and stature, and I’m pleased
that they are now willing to speak so plainly about the predicament
faced by our unfortunate country.
Over the last
year the titles of my own articles on Donald Trump had already included
phrases such as “Looney Tunes…Mad Emperor…President Caligula.”
Individuals all
across the ideological spectrum are gradually coming to this same
disheartening conclusion. Greg Johnson is a prominent White Nationalist,
and back in 2016 he had published articles hailing Trump as the long-awaited God-Emperor of the Alt-Right movement, though by April 2017 he had grown disillusioned. My impression was that he supported Trump in 2024 though without much enthusiasm.
But then a few days ago he published “Time to Replace Trump,” an article in he repeatedly used the word “insane.”
Trump
threatened to take Greenland by force and to impose U.S. tariffs on
several European countries (including Norway and Finland) that opposed
Trump’s Greenland Grab…
My reaction was
summarized by a Trump supporter who shared Trump’s message with me: “I’m
beginning to think the Dems are right that Trump is insane.” When I
looked at X, it was clear that a lot of other people felt the same way.
It wasn’t noteworthy that Leftists agreed, since they are stopped
clocks. What was noteworthy is that people on the Right were drawing the
same conclusion.
Why does Trump’s message seem insane, i.e., detached from reality?
First of all,
Trump seems unable to grasp the fact that the government of Norway does
not award the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he has been informed of
this.
Second, the
argument that since an organization in Norway did not award Trump the
Nobel Peace Prize, Trump no longer needs to think purely of peace (in
relation to Denmark, no less), sounds like narcissistic rage and lashing
out.
Somehow most
people manage not to attack their neighbors without the bribe of the
Nobel Peace Prize. But Donald Trump is different. Unfortunately, he is
different in a bad way. He is acting like a gangster threatening war if
he is not appeased with shiny trinkets.
This sort of
narcissism is not abnormal for a spoiled child or a man slipping into a
second childhood. But it is abnormal for a fully functional adult. What
makes it seem insane is that a fully functional adult would know that he
should hide such feelings. Trump feels no shame or need for
concealment. This is a sign that he is out of touch with reality…
It seems insane
to threaten war and economic sanctions to get something we already
have, especially since it alienates our European allies, demoralizes
Trump’s supporters, and emboldens his enemies.
As for Greenland itself, a frequent commenter on our website passed along some plausible-sounding things he’d heard about that large, desolate island:
Another thing that comports with your arguments about Greenland – it is one of the coldest places on Earth.
I spoke with
someone today who had a relative in the US military who was stationed in
Greenland in the past. This person said that Greenland is simply way
too cold for drills and other oil/mineral extraction equipment to
operate for most of the year. He said most residents of Greenland can
only take showers for 6 months of the year because it is too cold to run
water for the other 6 months.
In addition,
this person said that the American military servicemen on the island
file an inordinate amount of injury claims due to the cold/harsh climate
conditions in Greenland, which makes it very hard to work there (I
assume the same is true for non-military workmen there). He said that
this is one of the reasons why the US military only sends a fraction of
the military troops that they’re permitted to under the existing
Greenland agreements — there’s just no point in sending US troops there.
He joked that if Russia or China fired off a few nukes from Greenland, the missiles might freeze before they could be launched.
Our standard world maps employ the Mercator projection
to present the elements of our spherical globe on a rectangular
display, and this severely inflates the apparent sizes of those
landmasses such as Greenland that are closer to the poles.
So I strongly
suspect that our ignorant president looked at one of these and
mistakenly assumed that Greenland was far larger than it actually is and
that its acquisition would expand our national territory by some
enormous amount. A map displaying more accurate sizes might have
considerably reduced his enthusiasm:
Indeed, if he’d
been shown one of those latter maps, he might have diverted his plans
for territorial expansion in a far more fruitful direction as I explained in a comment of my own:
I still say that Trump should have instead announced he was going to conquer and annex Antarctica:
(1) It’s many
times larger than Greenland, so large it would have more than doubled
the size of the U.S., making our country the largest in the world, well
ahead of Russia.
(2) It’s an actual continent. So Trump would be forever known as the only American president who conquered an entire continent.
(3) Everyone likes penguins and they could have replaced the bald eagle as our national symbol.
