Donald Trump goes round the bend and back again
Amid Donald Trump subverting muslim representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib by getting Benjamin Netanyahu to prohibit their entry into Israel, his unclear connections to the late Jeffrey Epstein, a couple mass shooting gaffes, a stuttering economy possibly at the edge of recession, enflamed tensions with Iran, a ham-fisted trade war with China, and several dozen other major political blunders, Trump has perhaps given the clearest sign yet that he’s thoroughly mad. He wants to buy Greenland.
No, seriously. Trump wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, under which Greenland is an autonomous territory but not a sovereign country. As some have noted, including the Guardian, Harry Truman once tried buying Greenland and the US in fact bought the US Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. If a normal president wanted to buy Greenland, it might seem highly unusual, but not enough to label him or her insane. With Donald Trump, however, it’s another story.
One must try and emulate the mind of Trump to try to fathom the reasons for buying Greenland. Insert Trump Tower jokes here. Instead, perhaps, his intentions are more nefarious. Think about it: say we do buy Greenland for some stupid reason. What does Greenland have? Natural resources and land. Sucking the natural resources from Greenland, including soon-to-be-rare freshwater and always popular fossil fuels, would be akin to a sci-fi movie in which aliens come to earth to drink our pancreases through our belly buttons because they ran out of drinkable pancreases on their homeplanet.
Alternatively, Trump could use the land for military purposes or as a bargaining chip. Russia, a nation with an enormous chip on its shoulder and to which Trump has a strange allegiance, once sold us Alaska. Russia probably regrets that a lot. Imagine if Trump bought Greenland and then sold it to Russia for some profit. He’d try to spin it like he’s a business genius, when in fact he would single handedly put Europe at exceptional geopolitical risk.
I will reiterate that these are merely hypotheticals, but they should be considered a warning. Trump is clearly unstable, and as such, makes hideously poor decisions. His interest in buying Greenland is, if nothing else, a bellwether of his goliath ego and flippancy with the power of the presidency.
Democracy thrives in snarkiness