Crazy People Do Crazy Things

Donald Trump, in a message (I wouldn’t call it a letter) sent to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, confirmed by several news organizations:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

There’s a simple explanation for this. Trump is in cognitive decline and it’s accelerating from age-related dementia. He lives in an imaginary world that is increasingly cleaved from reality. (Norway, it should be pointed out, is not Denmark, the country of which Greenland is a part.)

Trump’s Venezuela operation was brazenly illegal. But it wasn’t crazy. Venezuela was not a U.S. ally. President Nicolas Maduro lost an election but stayed in power. Venezuela was producing military drones for the hostile regime in Iran, a self-declared enemy of the U.S., NATO, and Israel. Venezuela had a burgeoning alliance with China, the U.S.’s primary geopolitical rival.

What Trump is threatening with Greenland is simply bonkers. Greenland is under no threat from China or Russia because it’s part of NATO, and thus — ostensibly — under the full protection of the entire NATO alliance including and especially the United States. If China or Russia attempted to take Greenland it would trigger a world war led by the United States. Compare and contrast with Ukraine and Taiwan. Ukraine, long before Vladimir Putin invaded, was known to be under threat of Russian invasion. Taiwan has long been known to be threatened by China. These threats have been in our geopolitical discourse for decades because the threats were real (and, unfortunately, came to pass in Ukraine).

No one has ever talked about Greenland being under threat of takeover by Russia or China because there is no such threat. It’s no more realistic than Russia taking over Alaska or China taking over Hawaii. It sounds nuts because it is nuts, and the threat only exists in Trump’s disintegrating mind.

Eight of our NATO allies have made clear, through action, not mere words, their intention to defend Greenland. Trump, obviously angry that our ostensible allies won’t just roll over and accede to his madness, is now petulantly turning to his favorite word, tariffs. If that’s “the hard way”, that’s pathetic. Stand up to bullies and they usually fold.

The threat to Greenland, and thus to NATO — and thus, quite literally, to the entire world — is not that Trump authorized an illegal military operation in Venezuela, so he might do it in Greenland too. Again, what the U.S. did in Venezuela was obviously illegal, and probably stupid, but it wasn’t crazy. Breaking up NATO and starting a war with Europe would be batshit crazy. The threat is that Trump is showing us, every day, that he is crazy. Crazy people do crazy things, and crazy cult leaders surround themselves with cultists. The rest of us need to stop sane-washing this. You cannot make sense out of nonsense.

If Trump declares that the U.S. is laying claim to all of the green cheese on the moon — say, to lower the price of dairy groceries — the news media should not respond with fact-finding articles with headlines like “How Much Cheese Is on the Moon?” They should respond with headlines like “How Many Marbles Are Left in Trump’s Dementia-Addled Head?” But threatening to take Greenland by military force is nuttier than laying claim to the moon’s cheese. Laying claim to non-existent green cheese wouldn’t trigger a shooting war that blows apart the most powerful alliance in military history.