To Use a Nuke, To Buy Greenland…
President Trump pressed the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland for its natural wealth during meetings in the Oval Office, as well as to reporters. His advisers were highly skeptical that a purchase of the world’s largest island could ever happen, but they agreed to investigate the possibility. Trump’s planned state visit to Denmark to meet with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Queen Margrethe II and the leaders of Greenland and the Faroe Islands was cancelled due to the incredulous response of Greenland’s officials and his apparent inability to face them all in an official capacity in the wake of the publicity. He knew they were laughing at him, but he also knew they were pissed-off. “It’s never nice to be treated as a commodity,” said Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament.
‘Greenland, a nation of 56,000, has a shared history with Denmark since the first Vikings settled there a millennium ago. If that relationship were to change, it would not be up to Denmark and certainly not up to an American president’s “impulse,” said Henrik O. Breitenbauch, an expert on Greenland and the head of the Center for Military Studies at Copenhagen University. “You don’t just trade people and countries,” Mr. Breitenbauch added…Martin Breum, the author of “The Greenland Dilemma,” said Mr. Trump’s idea is “an absolutely radical break” with settled foundations since World War II. “It’s questioning a power relation more than 70 years old,” he added. “When small nations wake up to the world’s superpower threatening to unroot that relation, it’s not something to take lightly.”’ (Martin Selsoe Sorensen, Aug. 16, 2019, New York Times)
The Idiot-in-Chief was fixated on buying Greenland for months (or trading Puerto Rico for it), much as he was fixated on being able to ‘use’ America’s ‘nukes’ for the entire first year of his so-called presidency, harping on it and coming back to it constantly no matter how many times Mc Master, Tillerson or some Pentagon official would explain nuclear war to him. He would complain, “Why have we got nukes if we can’t use them?” All these obsessional comments, queries and complaints are on record, all in the minutes and meeting notes, although on the matter of ‘buying’ Greenland he was also on the record publicly, as well as with his complaints that the Greenland government was being ‘mean’ and ‘disrespectful’ in declining and mocking his offer to ‘buy’ their country:
In the latest only-in-Trumpland episode skating precariously along the line between farce and tragedy, the president of the United States on Wednesday attacked the prime minister of Denmark because she will not sell him Greenland — and found the very notion “absurd.”
Never mind that much of the rest of the world thought it sounded absurd as well. Amid a global laughing fit, Mr. Trump got his back up and lashed out, as he is wont to do, and called the prime minister “nasty,” one of his favorite insults, particularly employed against women who offend him, like Hillary Clinton and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
All of which might be written off as just another odd moment in a presidency unlike any other. Except that attacking Denmark was not enough for the president. He decided to expand his target list to include NATO because, as he pointed out, Denmark is a member of the Atlantic alliance. And he chose to do this just two days before leaving Washington to travel to an international summit in France, which also happens to be a NATO member. (Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland Seemed Like a Joke. Then It Got Ugly,’ Aug. 21, 2019)
Let us just sit with that for a moment. Let us marvel at his mind-boggling stupidity and wonder at his reasoning process. Let us deliberate upon the degree to which he would have thought this through — how he would have bargained for the sovereignty of a nation state being somehow dissolved and replaced with another one with the exchange of an undisclosed sum — how he would have planned for an established nation being offered for sale, purchased, turned into a commodity. To whom would payment be rendered? The Government? The Prime Minister and his cabinet? Denmark? The people of Greenland? How would that work?
What about the sovereign will of the citizenries involved? In the event of a trade for Puerto Rico, which he also floated, saying that Puerto Rico was “dirty” and that its people were “poor,” would all those Americans who live there suddenly become Greenlanders? Does that mean they’d suddenly have universal medical care? Would they trade their own Portuguese, Spanish and African ancestors for new, Viking ancestors and vice versa? What about the nationality of the citizenry of Greenland, for example? Would they suddenly become Americans? How might they feel about that? Greenland being a parliamentary democracy, would they have to vote on it? Would an opinion poll be taken?
Of course, of course, I know, I know... Before you object and try to make me understand, I know that he doesn’t think, he doesn’t reason, he doesn’t ever think anything through. But, even more critically given his possession of the codes for those disputed ‘nukes,’ or his command of the presidential podium for making America look Mad magazine/Superman Bizzaro World level stupid and insane, is his apparent inability to ‘get’ that people live in these places — that they have hearts and minds, preferences and opinions. They have histories. Their ancestors are buried in their countries of residence, their homelands. They have rights, human, civil, legal and other. They have sovereign wills. They have a say.
All indications point to the inevitable conclusion: Donald J. Trump doesn’t actually know what ‘countries’ are. He is incapable of parsing what is meant by ‘nation.’ He has one model of social organization in his brain, and one alone — the one his father taught him was the only arbiter of human value — the small family owned company or corporate entity under sole proprietorship. This is what explains his catastrophic failure as a president in attempting to run the country as if it is just another version of The Trump Organization, with its many bankruptcies, scandals, law suits, court losses, corporate crimes and failed marketing strategies for bogus products and services.
Worse, his mental illness makes it impossible for him to comprehend that there are people who are not either him or subordinate extensions of him. He is incapable of realizing that there are valid persons, people who are ‘other’ than himself, at all.