President Trump’s talk about taking over Greenland and converting Canada into the 51st state has slipped from absurdist distraction into a more concrete stupidity that opponents should take more seriously — not least because such musings represent a possibly damaging line of attack against our demented chief executive. In a way that wasn’t initially clear, the synergy of these two ideas amounts to a mass of craziness greater than the sum of its land-grabbing parts.
It’s possible you’ve seen some of the stories from mainstream outlets that have taken at face value Trump’s talk about acquiring Greenland, by monetary hook or Marine expeditionary crook. Some have ascribed a strategic logic to Trump’s talk — untold mineral wealth buried beneath the ice! New strategic sea lanes opening up due to climate change! — that seems unlikely to me, which is not to say that advisors who believe such things didn’t put the Greenland buzz back in his ear. Rather than representing a well-thought-through conception on Trump’s part, I think what we’re seeing here is a perilous convergence between his inherent grandiosity and extreme insecurity, on the one hand, and the logic of a MAGA-infused neo-imperialism that sees the U.S. as necessarily dominating its “natural” sphere of influence, i.e. North America, that parallels and rationalizes his psychological impulses. (As many have already pointed out, the U.S. is already well able, through its alliance with Greenland’s owner, Denmark, to use Greenland for military purposes, rendering a potential acquisition in a still-harsher imperialist light).
The idea of massively expanding the size of the United States appears to have a primal appeal for Trump. But this impulse is not really separable from the fact that any acquisition of Greenland requires bullying its current owner, Denmark — which allows Trump to express and enjoy his own sadistic impulses against a country that he sees as powerless to resist him. Trump has been indulging his feelings of supremacy both publicly and privately, through comments to the press, on the one hand, and with a pre-inauguration phone call with the Danish prime minister, on the other, in which Trump reportedly took an aggressive tack that left the Danes deeply unsettled. He has also threatened to impose tariffs on Denmark to force a sale of Greenland.
Trump’s recent but persistent comments that Canada should join the U.S. are more obviously outlandish, given that our neighbor to the north is a sovereign nation whose population of 41 million edges out that of California, our most populous state, and whose leaders have indicated that their country is not interested in a merger. Unlike the Greenland gambit, these northern takeover dreams appear to be rooted far more in Trump’s own internal cogitations, divorced even from the fever dreams of MAGA or far-right “logic.” But it is precisely because his Canada talk is so bonkers — why does this guy keep talking about something that isn’t going to happen?! — that those who oppose Trump should not just dismiss it, but tie it together with his only-vaguely-more-plausible Greenland dreaming. Because a Canadian merger is so obviously crazy, attacking such talk can do double-duty by also helping to disparage and derail his Greenland agenda. And we should note for the record that U.S. public opinion already appears to be against these ideas: some 28% supported trying to buy Greenland, with 47% opposed, while only 18% supported Canada becoming part of the U.S., with 60% opposed. Democrats would hardly be howling into the (Arctic) wilderness, but building off existing public reservations.
Democrats and other opponents of Trump don’t need to worry overmuch about nuance here. Trump’s talk of gobbling up our northern neighbor and Greenland should be talked about as the batty ramblings of a senile uncle. They are a combination of newly-revealed but quite logical MAGA desires to beat up on other nations with which we share a hemisphere, and Trump’s unhinged mind seeking a path to self-aggrandizement. If Trump’s initial talk about Canada becoming a state seemed silly and dumb, his continued references to the idea, even after clear pushback from Canadian leaders, seems outright stupid. To be blunt: he sounds like a moron, and he’s making the rest of us look bad. In the case of Greenland, Trump also sounds dumb, but also increasingly dangerous. The idea that the United States would threaten and bully a close ally for pointless ends isn’t just wrong on principle — it sends a clear message to our other allies that the United States no longer prizes loyalty to its friends.
Indeed, the larger message in Trump’s Greenland talk is one that his opponents should seize on: Donald Trump is incapable of distinguishing friend from foe, daydream from reality. Democrats should hit on this basic idea: that Trump is not only incapable of distinguishing friends from enemies, but actually sees friends as enemies (Denmark, Canada), and enemies as friends (authoritarian dictators, homegrown insurrectionists). His idées fixes are our national nightmares, and none of us needs to act like this is OK — certainly not members of the political opposition, some of whom he has literally vowed to prosecute for fictional crimes. In his dreams of northern overexposure, Donald Trump is validating a toxic indictment against him: that he’s both an authoritarian and mentally ill. And based on how easy it is to goad Trump, it’s quite plausible that making fun of his Canada talk in particular could lead him to escalate his idiotic rhetoric, which is almost guaranteed to become more unhinged and less appealing. The added benefit would be to arrest any possible rise in public support, as Trump’s unchallenged repetition of his inane plans might build them some measure of plausibility and normalcy.
Americans have not yet begun to fully see, let alone come to grips with, the degree to which a second-term Trump essentially thinks that he’s just been elected king of the world. This Greenland and Canada talk is of a piece with such fantastical notions of himself, and offers a preview of more extremism to come — but with it, more opportunities to make him pay dearly for his fantasy-world overreach. I’ve seen people compare his Greenland demands to the derangements of a Roman emperor naming his horse as a senator, and I don’t think this is far off the mark. MAGA loyalists may be willing to keep sucking down the crazy orange juice, but a canny opposition should be able to start galvanizing a majority against such obvious insanity.