The Felon Has Become a Tyrant

Historians usually note that the origin of Western democracy traces back to Ancient Greece, specifically Athens in the 5th century BC, with its direct democracy featuring citizen assemblies and randomly selected officials. These concepts evolved through the Roman republican ideals (until Augustus made himself emperor) and later through medieval English parliamentary practices (like the Magna Carta - signed by King John, one of my less savory ancestors). The ancient Greeks had a term to define the type of ruler who trampled on democratic ideas and used fear and threats to support their dictatorial, self-serving agenda: tyrant.  Indeed, the Great Seal of Virginia depicts (Virtue), the state's genius, triumphing over Tyranny, a defeated king with a broken chain, symbolizing Virginia's break from monarchy and embrace of republican ideals and has as its motto, "Sic Semper Tyrannis" (Thus Always to Tyrants).  The frightening reality is that the United States finds itself with a self-absorbed, morally bankrupt, ignorance embracing, greed driven would be tyrant in the White House who poses a clear and present danger to both democracy and the very lives and and liberties of American citizens.  Sadly, most Republicans have chosen to ignore their oaths of office to defend the U.S. Constitution from enemies, both foreign and domestic, either out of cowardice or in the hope of self-advancement and enrichment at the expense of their constituents. The resistance to date against this tyrannical power grab instead comes from some brave Democrats and, more importantly, from every day citizens who oppose the tyrant's oppression. A piece in Salon looks at the tyranny we now face:

Two weeks into the new year, the [Felon's] Trump administration has already deposed a foreign leader, bombed several countries, threatened to invade several more, unleashed a secret police force on the city of Minneapolis — killing one protester, shooting an immigrant in the leg and brutalizing many others — and started a criminal investigation, based on bogus evidence, on the chair of the Federal Reserve. It’s a lot. So perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that Donald Trump giving a two-hour interview to the New York Times has been somewhat ignored. 

That’s too bad. Considering all those events and more, the conversation is an interesting insight into his thinking. As much as we think we know about how his mind works, the [Felon's] president’s interview with four Times reporters showed that he has evolved into something much more dangerous than he was in his first term. 

Many Americans have finally wrapped their minds around the idea that we are dealing with a presidency and political movement that can be defined as authoritarian, and even fascist. But after observing Trump over the past year and seeing how he responds to an interview in which the reporters have the time and opportunity to ask follow-up questions, it is clear that those are not the underlying principles that are guiding this presidency. 

The better definition for Trumpism is an ancient word that should nonetheless be familiar to anyone who recalls the founding ideals of this country: tyranny. Plato saw it as an inevitable consequence of democracy, when a quest for freedom leads to excess and the populace demands a strongman. He defined it, more or less, as rule for himself rather than the common good, maintained under a system of fear and violence, and characterized by repression of the citizenry — particularly those who are educated and ethical — while relying on lackeys to carry out the tyrant’s wishes and whims. 

Plato’s student Aristotle agreed that tyranny was the worst of all possible worlds, but he disagreed that it was the unavoidable outcome of democracy, stressing that the rule of law could mitigate the excesses of the people and tyrant alike. Centuries later, having studied the classics, many leaders of the American Revolution saw King George III as a classic tyrant, and so they fashioned the Constitution around the Aristotelian idea that systems and laws could prevent their new democracy from drifting into tyranny.

The United States has been remarkably lucky that, throughout its 250-year evolution, that assumption had not been seriously tested by any of its leaders until now. Certainly, there have been imperious, corrupt, domineering leaders in our past, but no one has embodied that special brand of ignorance, ego and total self-interest that [the Felon] Donald Trump is bringing to the Oval Office in his second term as president. The rule of law, and our system of checks and balances, have turned out to be quite weak in the face of a man who has no concept of what those are and who operates purely out of greed and self-regard. 

You can see this in [the Felon's] Trump’s character every day. He is not interested in ideology or philosophy. The president believes in himself and himself alone, and he has been so successful at evading all accountability for everything he’s done in his life that he sees himself as invulnerable. That has freed him to rule completely by whim. 

The Times interview, at more than 23,000 words, is a long slog featuring all the usual self-aggrandizement, insults about his enemies — he mentions Joe Biden in derogatory terms 28 times — incessant blaming and whining, and all manner of lies and fantasies that are untethered from the real world. . . . . But there is something new in this interview that we haven’t ever seen so plainly expressed, and it’s important.

Katie Rogers asked, “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” 

Trump replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”  “Not international law?” Zolan Kanno-Youngs asked.  “I don’t need international law,” the [Felon] president said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.” 

Following that exchange, Trump carried on about how he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ending eight wars and proving, at least in his mind, that he can be trusted to always do the right thing. 

When asked why he feels the need to “own” Greenland rather than use the existing treaties to get the same benefits, he replied that ownership was psychologically important for him and that he’s always been right about everything. He indicated throughout the interview that he sees no constraints upon him by courts, treaties, agreements or laws, signaling that he plans to act where and when he chooses. And if there is any impediment, he will either ignore it or go around it. 

Trump is making billions as president, and he isn’t trying to hide it. . . . . There are dozens of examples in the interview illustrating his belief that he can do anything he wants, and we are seeing that played out every day in Washington and around the country. The president has unleashed thousands of masked, armed officers on the streets of American cities, and they are battering immigrants and citizens alike, creating a climate of fear that he and his followers use to push even more boundaries. He claims they are doing it for the public good, ginning up one phony crisis after another to justify his actions. 

This is not ideology at work. It certainly has a fascistic and authoritarian character, and there are people around him who fit that description perfectly. But [the Felon] Donald Trump is the ultimate decider, and he cannot be said to have any belief in anything but himself. He is ruling by threats and extortion, period. 

We’ve witnessed the capitulation of the Republican Party and institutions such as law firms, media companies and universities, and we’ve observed opportunists playing the system for their own ends — all of which proves that, for all their world-weary skepticism about humanity’s inherent virtue, the founders greatly overestimated the strength of the average politician or the businessman’s ego and ambition. They thought those who were in competing spheres of power would fight for their own prerogatives, but it’s clear that’s actually quite a rare occurrence when it comes to facing down a tyrant. The most ambitious among them just want a piece of the action. 

The real courage is coming from ordinary people on the streets who are facing down Trump’s secret police and brandishing nothing more than cell phones to document the officers’ savage behavior. It may just be that the average citizens who are brave enough to fight for their prerogatives to pursue life, liberty and happiness are the honorable leaders Plato believed were the only ones capable of running a virtuous state. If so, this suggests that while democracy may have its weaknesses, it is also the best hope for saving itself. 

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The Felon's and MAGA's Hatred of Minorities and "Liberal" Women

The Felon has a long history of racism - his company settled a federal lawsuit in Norfolk in the 1970's for anti-black discrimination - and his contempt for and objectification of women, especially smart, educated liberal women, has an equally long history. While the Felon's regime is supposedly fighting "wokeness", its real agenda is rolling back civil rights laws which the Felon recently complained that the milestone civil rights laws from the 1960's have caused "white people to be treated badly."  The Felon's war on so-called DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) through executive orders and agency regulations follow the upside down view that whites face discrimination when in reality that so-called discrimination is merely restraints on whites to mistreat others badly, especially racial minorities.  ICE's cruelty is aimed at anyone with brown skin regardless of their citizenship and even Native Americans have been seized. All of this agenda was laid out in Project 2025 and was sadly ignored by far too many voters.  The shooting of Renee Good last week also shows this racist agenda threatens whites who do not buy into the Felon's campaign of cruelty and discrimination.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's push to to undo civil rights protections:

[O]ne of the key Republican talking points of the [2024 election] cycle: that “wokeness” was sweeping the nation and upending established ways of life, and that [the Felon] Donald Trump would fight against it. Trump has since made clear that he wasn’t interested in just reining in what some people saw as excesses. He was interested in a wholesale rollback of bedrock civil-rights protections.

During his recent interview with The New York Times, the [Felon] president harshly criticized the legislation of the 1960s, which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which bans racial discrimination in voting).

“White people were very badly treated where they did extremely well, and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say, in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases,” . . . it also hurt a lot of people—people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job.”

[The Felon] Trump went on to say that the laws caused “reverse discrimination.” This idea that white Americans are suffering from widespread bias is a core belief of the revanchist right. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, 62 percent of white Republicans said that white people face some or a lot of discrimination. It’s not a mainstream view, though. Overall, fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe that white people face some or a lot of discrimination; roughly three-quarters say the same about Black and Hispanic people, and two-thirds about Asian people.

The idea that early-2020s “wokeness” went too far is more mainstream. Trump’s anti-woke campaigning appealed not only to the MAGA base but also to independents and even some voters who viewed themselves as left of center but felt that Democrats had overreached. The word woke was a useful tool because it had no clear definition . . . . This meant that people could interpret Trump’s rhetoric however they wanted . . . . observers, including my colleague Adam Serwer, warned that this vagueness was a Trojan horse for attacking more popular equal-rights protections.

After taking office, [the Felon] Trump did move to push back on DEI initiatives (in the federal government and in private universities) and transgender-athlete participation in sports . . . . But [the Felon] Trump has also gone much further than that, working to undermine structures that were in place long before DEI or woke became familiar terms. This broader project is one that keen observers of the plans laid out in Project 2025 would have known to expect—but that many voters may not have intended and may not endorse.

In April, Trump issued an executive order that throws out the theory of disparate impact, an approach that allows policies to be assessed not just on whether their intent is to discriminate but also on whether their effect is discriminatory. Disparate impact has been a core tool for civil-rights enforcement for decades. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been hollowed out . . . Last month, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission posted on X to solicit complaints: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” The administration is even trying to erode the foundational post–Civil War constitutional amendments.

Alongside these policy moves to undermine civil-rights protections, the administration has also resorted to old-fashioned racist rhetoric. The Department of Homeland Security has consistently published winking nods to core racist texts in its advertising materials, including the white-nationalist screed Which Way Western Man? My colleague David Frum reported earlier this week on a DHS post that alludes to a song popular on the far right. Quoting the song, the post read, “We’ll have our home again.”

Trump’s new frankness about the most basic civil-rights laws shows another way in which he hopes to restore MAGA’s sense of home: His administration is going to reclaim the pride of white people who believe that their country has left them behind, no matter who gets treated badly in the process.

As for "liberal" women, a column in the New York Times looks MAGA's the contempt for this demographic:

If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.

This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen . . . . wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.

One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, most Americans have seen videos of the shooting, and only 30 percent believe it was justified. A plurality of Americans say ICE is making cities less safe, and more people support than oppose abolishing the agency.

In the face of such widespread public revulsion, the administration and its enablers have been trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis. That’s why the Justice Department pushed for a criminal investigation of Good’s partner, Becca, leading six federal prosecutors to quit in protest. For authoritarian leaders, lying itself isn’t enough; they must act as if their lies are true. And the lies go far beyond Renee and Becca Good to smear the entire movement of which they were a part.

Conservatives aren’t wrong to see furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation. . . . . . CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health.

They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.

To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. . . . . His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Falluja.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. . . . . no normal administration would contemplate a military response to such small-scale disorder. Trump doesn’t want to crush just criminal defiance, but the civil defiance that he wishes he could criminalize. . . . . it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets.

For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug.

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Something Is Rotten in the State of America

If it wasn't clear before - although it should have been perfectly clear - the United States as a dangerous psychopath in the White House who is poised to attack an ally of two centuries for seemingly no real reason other than to perhaps satiate his sick ego, generate yet another distraction from the Epstein files which have not been released as required, or perhaps to follow orders from Vladimir Putin.  The United States is in a crisis that ranges from masked ICE agents attacking American citizens and creating domestic violence to destroying the NATO alliance.  Sadly, one individual who surrounds himself with equally evil and unhinged sycophants is responsible for the crisis. Frighteningly, congressional Republicans who could end the nightmare continue to sit on their hands and do nothing even as the Felon's unfitness for office becomes ever more glaring.  Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev's boast that America would fall from within seems ever more accurate as the Felon destroys the nation from within both with ICE - his secret police force - and threats to invade Greenland - where treaties already allow American bases and troops without any need for conquest - and other allies.   Meanwhile, the latest polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of the Felon's policies. A long column in the New York Times looks at the foreign policy disaster:

I want you to remember the name Mark Peters. In 2009 he was on patrol in Afghanistan when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. The incident was captured on video and can be seen in a 2014 documentary series called “My War.”  The footage is horrifying. You can see the explosion, then you hear shouts of anguish and desperate calls for mine clearance so that medics can reach the wounded soldier.

Mark Peters is Danish. He lost his lower legs fighting in defense of the United States. I learned about him when I read this moving account of Danish deployments by Todd Johnson, writing for War Room, a journal of the Army War College.

Denmark answered the call after the 9/11 attacks. It deployed thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, and it lost more soldiers, per capita, in Afghanistan than any NATO nation aside from the United States. There is no more profound way to stand in solidarity with an ally.

“America has no permanent friends or enemies,” Henry Kissinger is often quoted as saying, “only interests.” That statement, championed by proponents of realpolitik, is true only if you emphasize the word “permanent.” Over the long sweep of time, allies can certainly become enemies, and enemies can become allies.

Consider France and England. They fought each other in a series of wars sweeping across hundreds of years. But they’ve been friends and allies for more than a century, fighting together most notably in World War I and World War II. Despite tensions, they stood watch together as NATO allies, defending Europe and the free world for the entire duration of the Cold War.

I don’t know if they are permanent friends, but they are friends — to the incalculable benefit of both nations.

The better expression, the one that accurately reflects the national interests of the United States, is that while any given friendship isn’t permanently guaranteed, our country has a permanent interest in maintaining international friendships and alliances. When we lose partners in alliances (much less the alliance itself) we are weaker and more vulnerable — no matter how much we try to bulk up our independent military and economic strength.

I am writing about all this because the Trump administration may be on the verge of the most catastrophic national security mistake of my lifetime. It is attempting to bully Denmark into surrendering Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, to the United States.

On Jan. 9, President Trump said that if America can’t acquire Greenland “the easy way” then it would resort to the “hard way.”  “We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not,” Trump said, “because if we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.”

One would be tempted to simply make a moral argument against bullying (and possibly even attacking!) Denmark. Danes are such stalwart allies that they long ago granted America sweeping access to Greenland to bolster our own defense.

As The Times explained last week, a 1951 agreement grants the United States the ability to “construct, install, maintain and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements and operation of ships, aircraft and waterborne craft.”

Denmark resisted Nazi occupation in World War II. It’s a founding member of NATO, and it followed through on that commitment, as noted above, fighting by our side in Afghanistan. It even fought in Iraq, a non-NATO military mission. More recently the Danish Navy deployed a frigate to the Red Sea, where it fought alongside the U.S. Navy against Houthi rebels.

In the mercenary calculus of Donald Trump, morality is meaningless — unless it’s his morality, of course, and his morality places no constraints on his will to power and his greed.

And so it’s also necessary to oppose seizing Greenland using the words that MAGA will understand. Bullying Denmark will make the United States weaker and perhaps even poorer. It’s not just wrong to turn on our friends; it’s stupid, and that stupidity is spreading across the length and breadth of American foreign policy.

The best description I’ve read of Trump’s flawed approach comes from Kori Schake, a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Writing in Foreign Affairs last June, she noted that “since the end of World War II, American power has been rooted mostly in cooperation, not coercion.”

“The Trump team,” she argued, “ignores that history, takes for granted all the benefits that a cooperative approach has yielded, and cannot envision a future in which other countries opt out of the existing U.S.-led international order or construct a new one that would be antagonistic to American interests.”

The history is indeed quite clear. When NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced off against each other during the Cold War, it was a confrontation between an alliance and an empire.

The alliance was a voluntary union of liberal democracies. There was nothing voluntary about the Soviet empire. Soviet troops in Warsaw Pact nations existed not just to confront the West, but also to enforce Soviet control.

But that’s the way it works with empires. They’re almost always weaker than they appear because much of their strength is diverted into domination, into maintaining a hold over people who dislike or actually reject their rule.

Trump favors the failed Soviet approach. The Western Hemisphere is his version of the Warsaw Pact. He wants to transform it into a region that exists under American domination, where nations conduct their foreign and even domestic policies under a watchful American eye, always mindful of the awesome power of American arms.

Our historic allies, meanwhile, are treated like actual or potential enemies. Denmark is facing overt American threats, but the administration’s ominous language extends well beyond Denmark.

In an interview last year with the news outlet UnHerd, Vice President Vance raised the possibility of Britain and France becoming enemies to the United States. “France and the U.K. have nuclear weapons,” he said.

The United States is the most powerful nuclear-armed nation in the world, and it is already being “overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas” — and one of those ideas is threatening to use that awesome might to extort (or attack) an ally.

What’s more, empires are expensive — more expensive than the United States can afford. Last week, Trump proposed a remarkable surge in military spending, to $1.5 trillion annually, an almost $600 billion increase over 2026. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has calculated that Trump’s proposal could add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

[A] RAND Corporation study found that the United States contributes 39 percent of the total, collective allied defense burden across the globe. If you separate yourself from allies, there is less military force available for defense, and you either have to be comfortable with the additional vulnerability or find the funds to shore up the weakness.

On Tuesday, the prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, issued a clear and unequivocal statement rejecting the American bid to own his island. “We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” Nielsen said. “And if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the E.U.”

And what was Trump’s response? “I disagree with him,” he said, “I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him.”

Only 17 percent support acquiring Greenland, and a mere 4 percent support taking it by force. But those numbers will be cold comfort if Trump acts anyway.

It is often said that might does not make right; it is less well understood that right can make might, as Abraham Lincoln once said. Voluntary alliances of liberal democracies have proven to be the strongest military and economic forces in the world. This was true in World War I. It was true in World War II. And it was true in the Cold War.

If we break those alliances, we are smaller and weaker. If we break them for pride and power and greed, then we don’t just break an alliance; we break our own character. We diminish ourselves in every way that matters, and no amount of newly sovereign frozen ground can obscure our national shame.

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Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe

The Felon campaigned promising to lower consumer prices and to keep the United States out of foreign wars.  To date, prices have continued to rise - in part due to the Felon's insane tariffs - and the Felon appears obsessed with creating armed conflicts in Venezuela, maybe Iran, and in Greenland of all places.   The latter obsession for supposed "national security" reasons ignores the reality that the Untied States and Denmark already have treaties for mutual defense and that the United States had a sizable number of troops and assets in Greenland until the United States unilaterally reduced its own presence in Greenland.  Simply put, there is no need for the United States to own Greenland in order to defend from Chinese or Russian threats. Yet, thanks to the Felon's deranged bellicose claims and threats we now see NATO troops from Denmark, France, Germany and Baltic nations being moved to Greenland to defend against the Felon's threatened invasion. One has to  wonder what is driving the Felon's actions because no one would be more thrilled to see NATO disintegrate more than Vladimir Putin (who I personally suspect has his own copies of Epstein documents or other "kompromat" on the Felon). A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at the disaster the Felon may be about to set in motion that would not only severely damage the United States' global security but also threaten the very lives of every day Americans should the resulting military hostilities spread.  This combined with ICE's terrorizing of American cities underscore that it is time for congressional Republicans to act to remove the Felon from office. Here are article highlights:

[The Felon] Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. . . . . Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.

But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.

Greenland, of course, is important to the security of the United States—as it is to the entire Atlantic community and to the free world itself. This fact might be new to Trump, but Western strategists have known it for a century or more, which is why the United States has had a military presence in Greenland for decades.

During the Cold War, America and its allies were determined to defend the sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom (often referred to at the time as the “GIUK” gap), the North Atlantic passages through which the Soviet Union could have sent submarines from its Arctic bases toward NATO convoys trying to reach Europe. America and Denmark have always worked closely in the Arctic region, and even once had a secret “gentlemen’s agreement” under which Denmark declared Greenland off-limits for the stationing of nuclear weapons, but would look the other way so long as the United States kept the presence of any such weapons quiet and unacknowledged.

The Cold War is over, but Greenland is still an important part of North Atlantic security, which is one of many reasons Denmark and the United States and other North Atlantic nations are part of a thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But for the Trump administration, NATO—another of the president’s hostile fixations—is not enough to guarantee America’s safety. Trump, like the mad president in the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, seems to believe that the United States must absorb Canada and Greenland and create some sort of Atlantic co-prosperity sphere stretching from Alaska to Norway, a ring of ice and iron that would stand as a tribute to the imperial ambitions of America’s 47th president.

When voters returned Trump to office in 2024, his electoral affirmation seemed to strengthen his determination to do all the things that the responsible adults in his previous administration told him he couldn’t do the first time around.

At this point, Trump is so consumed with acquiring Greenland that he has implied that he would use force against an old American friend, if that’s what it takes to get the island.

As Trump’s rhetoric has escalated, other administration officials have tried to clean up his remarks, but with little success. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully met with members of Congress to reassure them that Trump intended only to offer to buy the island, but the next day, the White House issued a statement reaffirming that “utilizing” the military “is always an option.” The same week that Rubio was on the Hill, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on January 5 scoffed at the idea that seizing Greenland would lead to armed conflict, . . . .

The president’s obsession with Greenland is especially dangerous because it has no real constituency: Trump is determined to get the island, it seems, only because Denmark and the rest of the world are telling him that he can’t have it. As is so often the case, telling Trump not to do something makes him more determined to do it.

This morning, Denmark sent an advance military command to Greenland in preparation for sending yet more Danish forces to the island. Danish lawmakers told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker last week that the timing of this deployment is not a coincidence and represents an attempt to create a “credible deterrent” on the island—presumably to the Americans.

As my colleagues Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire reported recently, Danish officials are concerned that Trump will simply issue a late-night proclamation that the United States owns Greenland and then dare anyone to contradict him. . . . .Trump declaring himself Lord Protector of Greenland might not have much impact.

But Trump might then try to enforce his claims. He could start by ordering the U.S. military to treat Greenland as sovereign U.S. territory. And such an order, which would be illegal but would likely be fulfilled by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, could set in motion a disastrous chain of events.

Assume, for example, that Denmark closes Greenland’s airspace to U.S. flights in order to assert its continued sovereignty (and to prevent Trump from sending more troops to the island). Trump might then order the Air Force to ignore any directions from local authorities—because, of course, Greenland would now be American airspace—and to treat all such encounters as potentially hostile. Or imagine that Denmark, following some intemperate claim from Trump, demands that U.S. forces in Greenland remain confined to their bases, and Trump, incensed at the insult to his putatively unlimited power, tries to force the issue and tells American servicepeople to act as the island’s de facto police, including suppressing any demonstrations or resistance from the population.

Either by design or accident, members of the American military might end up confronting Danish forces, men and women with whom they have trained for years and may have served in Afghanistan. Someone might be killed. The death of a Greenlander, a Dane, or a member of any other military there as a show of support for Denmark—Sweden has already sent troops to Greenland and Britain is considering similar moves—would incinerate the NATO alliance. Then the real nightmare begins.

The United States is already overstretched around the world because of Trump’s chaotic threats and impulses. Ships that should be in the Gulf or near Europe or Asia are paddling around in the Caribbean because of Trump’s operation to remove the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power. The president has threatened to attack Iran, again, if the regime in Tehran continues to kill its own citizens, and U.S. forces would have to dart back across the world to undertake new assignments in the Middle East. Of course, such a move would undermine Trump’s ongoing warnings that he might strike Mexico and Colombia.

As the American military chases Trump’s ever-changing Sharpie lines across the world’s maps, the West’s enemies will be tempted to take advantage of the fact that the United States has obliterated the most powerful alliance in history while scattering American forces around the globe in showpiece operations that have more to do with Trump’s vanity than with sound strategy. They have surely noticed that the U.S. defense and intelligence services are in the hands of unqualified loyalists, and that so far Trump’s plans for improving the battle readiness of the American military are mostly limited to pictures of make-believe battleships that will never be built.

If NATO collapses because of bullets fired in Greenland, Russian President Vladimir Putin might well assume that he could bury the Atlantic Alliance once and for all by attacking NATO’s Baltic members. As the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who founded the analytical firm Eurasia Group, said on social media this week, “Nobody wants the United States to take control of Greenland (and, accordingly, destroy NATO) more than Putin.” . . . . Putin has taken ghastly losses in Ukraine, but he has enough of an army left, backed by drones and other assets, to pummel the Baltic states and grab pieces of territory that may have no strategic value but whose capture would serve to remind the world that the United States—the new masters of Greenland—will not save Europe.

Other nations, however, are unlikely to sit by, especially neighboring NATO countries such as Poland and Finland. Should they come to the aid of their Baltic allies, at least some other European nations would likely support those efforts, and the result would be a broader European conflict involving some of the most militarily capable states in the world. For the first time in almost a century, the continent would be at war, this time one involving multiple nuclear powers. U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam, and with each day of violence the chances would grow of a cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation by any of the combatants.

Meanwhile, a world away from Europe, China might wonder if America has finally tied itself in enough foolish knots to put the conquest of Taiwan within reach, especially with Trump’s “Golden Fleet” nowhere in sight. And although no one should try to predict what North Korea’s bizarre dynasty would do, South Korea and Japan would have to begin planning for the risks that will come during, and after, America’s voluntary strategic immolation, most likely with crash programs to develop nuclear arms.

And all this could happen—for what, exactly? The vainglorious demands of one man who can’t read a map?

Concerned leaders in both parties should explain to the citizens of the United States how much peril Trump is courting. His obsessions could lead not only to the collapse of their standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live. Congress, of course, should have stopped Trump—on this as on so many things—long ago. . . . . Yesterday, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the NATO Unity Protection Act, which explicitly prohibits using Federal funding “to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent.” This is one case where the MAGA base, which claims to hate foreign adventures, might forgive the GOP for opposing Trump.

Most Americans probably couldn’t care less about Greenland, but they will be forced to care—tragically, too late—if Trump’s gambit engulfs the world in flames.