Great Googamooga
How the hell did we survive four years of this deeply insecure man-child once? How did Americans get crazy enough to give this unstable knot of personality defects four more years in the White House instead of in jail?
Anne Applebaum’s account of her visit to Denmark has me waggling my head like a Lonney Tunes character. She writes that “a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.” And yet Donald Trump apparently called Copenhagen on Wednesday and demanded Mette Frederiksen do a real estate deal with him. It’s Kafkaesque.
Trump the Transactional seems to have generated a political crisis in Scandinavia even before his inauguration.
“In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion,” Applebaum writes. It’s not as if anything Trump might want the U.S. to do in Greenland is not already doable.
A former Danish diplomat related a story from 1957. The American ambassador sent the Danish prime minister a note that the U.S. was considering storing nukes at their Greenland base. Would the Danes like to be notified? Since it was not a specific ask, H.C. Hansen’s reply was:
“I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.
The Danes are faithful trade partners and allies who lost a larger proportion of their population fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan than we did. One diplomat asked Applebaum what the Danes did wrong:
Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.
Windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland, Applebaum laments. The Russians are crowing over the similarity between Trump’s territorial ambitions in Greenland and Vladimir Putin’s imperial designs on Eastern Europe. Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere just smile, nod, and say, “Yes, sir. How high?”
One year shy of 250 years old, the United States is the world’s most enduring democracy, yet still in its adolescence. Many of the world’s greatest creatives do their best work as adolescents, or as recent ones. The Beatles began in their teens. Steve Jobs launched Apple at 21. The U.S. has led the world in technological advancement and politically for a century. But plenty of adolescents never survive their teens.
We were lucky once. And now?