More than the zaniness, more than the grandiosity, more than the sheer what-the-fuck quality, what should have been most remarkable about President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland is how the idea completely ignored the concept that Greenland residents should have any say in the matter — through, say, a democratic mechanism such as a vote. It’s fair to say that democracy was far from the president’s mind when the idea began to percolate in his tuna melt sandwich of a brain; instead, what dominated was a combination of avarice and vainglory. “The world works by rich people buying things” seems to be a fair summary of the president’s world view. But the fact that nearly all the criticism focused on the silliness and randomness of the notion is a little bit of an indictment of the rest of us, too; because at this point, we should be far better attuned to violations of democratic procedure, whether at home or abroad. The sickness of the idea that the United States could just go ahead and purchase a people’s land without their having a say in the matter should have been much farther up the list of public outrage than it was: not only for its own immorality, but as another sign of the president’s inability to comprehend our own country’s democracy.