You’re likely forgetting the caliber of person this administration hires/retains.
Oh, he’s drunk all right-- drunk with power. I just came to this thread to post this very thing if it hadn’t been mentioned yet.
Yes, this is really getting scary.
I still find it difficult to believe an actual attempt to invade Greenland would ever happen. It would embroil us in a war with our former NATO allies, absolutely destroy the economy, and cement our status as an international pariah for many many years to come. Part of me feels like this is all just childish posturing, like a toddler having a tantrum because he’s not getting a certain toy he wants. I have a hard time believing even trump is so demented he would actually give the military the order to invade Greenland. And if he did, would someone on his staff be able to talk him out of it? Would the generals follow the order? Invading a NATO ally has got to be the very definition of an unlawful order.
At the very least, it strikes me as emblematic of the Madman Theory:
And it wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit if this is always who Trump was, and what he learned (Roy Cohn), and how he ran his company.
Which obviously doesn’t preclude him actually being barking mad, and getting worse by the day … in Technicolor.
Yeah, like I said, part of me feels like it’s posturing, however childishly and poorly done, rather than a real threat, but that might be just wishful thinking. It’s difficult to believe that the President of the United States may actually be “barking mad, and getting worse by the day”, but all signs point to that.
And once again with him, the sickeningly petty gangster aspect of it all: “your country didn’t give me the Peace Prize, which I richly deserved… so maybe I ain’t feeling too peaceful now, if you get my drift”. Pay the protection fees, or you won’t be protected from the one you’re paying.
It reminds me more of GW Bush: a bunch of Saudi’s attacked us on 9/11, so we’ll invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Nobel is Norwegian, but mostly officed in Sweden, so Trump takes his ire out on … Denmark and Greenland?
Yeah. That makes sense – as much sense as any of it.
Also, the whole charade about Greenland not being able to defend itself … NATO membership isn’t just a shield against an attack by Russia. It commits its members to the same thing if – for example – Greenland were attacked/invaded by China.
As always, the administration understands how uninformed, misinformed, and pathologically credulous its supporters are.
Trump is in dementia. Quite literally, and has been for some time.
His Congressional and other administration enablers either are in denial of this, or think they can use it.
I’ve had no problem believing it since I saw that clip in which he forgot momentarily how to use a microphone and bobbed his head at the microphone stand instead while waving the mic itself wildly in the air away from his face.
He can present relatively normally for selected periods of time if the overall behavior isn’t taken into account. Lots of people with dementia can. I once had a doctor who’d just examined my mother tell me that she was “still sharp as a tack”. I told him that she’d just told him that she was living alone when she’d actually been living in assisted care for several months because she was no longer capable of managing on her own. She couldn’t remember that I lived an hour’s drive away and my sister four hours, or whether the stove was turned on — or how to use a typewriter, which had been as basic a part of her life as a mic is of Trump’s.
Sometimes wars start by accident. People posture, everybody gets nervous, and then somebody shoots an Archduke and the whole world goes to shit.
‘[W]hy [does Denmark] have a “right of ownership” anyway?’ And, ‘There are no written documents…’? Well, Mr. Potato Head, there’s this thing called ‘History’. In 1917, Denmark sold the West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) to the United States in exchange for sovereignty over Greenland. As for ‘no written documents’, maybe they did it on a handshake? (I’m betting not.)
I meant more in a larger sense that it’s difficult to accept that we’re actually at this point, that the President of the United States is “barking mad, and getting worse by the day” and nobody in a position to stop him seems willing or able to do so.
But yes, the fact that trump himself is not only mad with power, but losing whatever grip on reality he may have ever had, is plainly apparent.
The problem with the Madman Strategy, as any philosopher of ethics would tell us, is that constantly “acting” out a way of being leads to that becoming your regular way of being.
As to how come Trump insists on “not getting” that the Scandinavian governments don’t control the Nobel committees, well, just look around him. How many organizations, businesses and institutions that are NOT subordinate to the White House have been scurrying to do his will anyway? That’s what he expects all around.
Just out of curiosity, who decides who gets the Nobel prizes? I always thought it was a committee and not the Norwegian government. If so, why whine to the Norwegian PM?
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Known to be woefully uninformed and intellectually incurious
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Mobster thinking, i.e. find the person in charge (because “of course” there always has to be a single person who can make things happen) and lean on that one person to do what you want
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Hi Opal!
insert tired joke about someone blaming Jewish people for the sinking of the Titanic
The other problem is that this ain’t a strategy. In his first term, maybe it was. Now, it’s just what’s happening.
Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?
I read that joke in the mid-‘70s.
That would be the one. 
Actually; what they are contemplating is similarly stark: cutting off trade with the United States.
Here’s the real sad part
Wow.
My dad was diagnosed with mild dementia a couple of years ago (we think he is on the verge of moderate dementia). He sends me a lot of texts. Some of the texts actually sound reasonably sensible and normal. Some of them sound unhinged and also dragging up grudges from decades ago using “facts” that he is making up because he doesn’t remember the real ones.
…This sounds extraordinarily like some of the unhinged texts I get from my dad.
Some intelligent Europeans are starting to think about where they can hit trump so that it hurts his most sensitive part: his ego. Economic retaliation is fraught with risks, and imposing counter tariffs is silly, as tariffs are a bad idea and rise inflation. Let trump apply them, most of the cost is borne by the US consumer (cite in German), we have better things to do. But what would be a bad defeat for him personally (and that is all that counts for him) would be a Football World Cup boykott by the big European nations. (another cite in German):
Unlike counter-tariffs, for example, the economic costs of a boycott would be minimal for Europe, according to Guttenberg. ‘The damage to the reputation of the US and Trump personally, on the other hand, would be enormous.’ A World Cup without European teams would be largely irrelevant in terms of sport and media coverage. ‘Europe has enormous cultural leverage here,’ says the economist.
Let’s see whether this gets any traction. Many people I talked to said something similar, but people on the street don’t take those decisions.