Hand it over or else
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think tariffs are supposed to be used as aids to extortion.
Trump said Saturday that he would impose a new 10% tariff on Denmark and seven other European countries until “a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”
The other countries affected would be Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland.
Trump said the duties would increase to 25% if a deal is not reached by June 1.
That seems like not so much a tariff as like a bunch of guys with baseball bats and guns holding up a 7-11.
“We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed,” said Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson in a statement. “Only Denmark and Greenland decide on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland.”
Blackmailed or bullied or beaten up.
For others who may be wondering:
Source: UK Department for Business and Trade
So much for the lavish welcome laid on by King Charles and Keir Starmer when Trump visited England just four months ago.
This is a nightmare. How much farther into madness must Trump (and America) plunge before somebody calls for the invocation of the 25th Amendment? I wonder if Putin has the Epstein files, and this is what he’s been holding over Trump all of this time? Putin is the biggest beneficiary if Trump immolates NATO from within. It says nothing good about the United States (or our species) that the fate of billions of people hinges on the psychopathology of one man and his handlers, both American and foreign.
I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter. I think there’s more than enough rotten to go ’round, but who’s really driving this bus of lunacy?
I really don’t understand what’s going on. I know that I’m probably hopelessly naive about all of this. I can’t truly believe that this is all clumsy, blind, blundering, that there’s nobody guiding and controlling this, even if that guidance and control is malevolent and foreign. It actually makes a perverse kind of sense, more so than if this is the result of pure stupidity and toxic narcissism. How does anyone in Trump’s inner circle benefit from encouraging this kind of brinksmanship and extortion of America’s allies? Are some of them in Putin’s pocket as well? How can none of them see that this plays into the hands of both Russia and China? I know that Trump has surrounded himself with talentless sycophants who know fuck all about anything, but Jesus fucking Christ Almighty, doesn’t anyone know how to tell him “No”? Trump is so easily goaded, manipulated, and fickle, it’s not beyond the admittedly limited capabilities of those around him. Can’t they see that they’re going to go down with him if he crashes everything? Are there no adults in the room? If there actually are individuals or “forces” in his cabinet reining him in, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.
I know that Vance is probably waiting until he can serve two full terms himself before he pulls the plug on Trump. Vance can only do that if he serves less than two years as Trump’s replacement, so he might sit tight and wait for another year and a bit before finally organizing an internal coup because Trump has “gone too far.” But at this rate, with the combination of internal and external chaos, there might not be much more left for Vance to be president of.
Paul Krugman had a column about Trump’s Greenland nonsense:
YNnB #3
As many others have pointed out, even if Trump himself doesn’t have a thought out strategy – or even a coherent “ideology” in the real sense of the word – some of the the people around him (Miller, Rubio, Bannon etc.) clearly do. It’s often said that the greatest influence on Trump’s mind at any given moment is whoever spoke to him last. Apparently the best way to get Trump to do what you want him to do is to make it seem like his idea in the first place. This is obviously made a lot easier by the fact that the guy really loves to talk, and that whatever comes out of his mouth tends to be raw, unfiltered stream of consciousness, giving voice to every random thought that goes through his mind at that very moment. Just like you can find a Bible quote to support any position (or its polar opposite), it is always possible to frame your desired policies as the logical consequence of something Trump once said. It has also been suggested that, although Trump is too lazy and impatient to be bothered with things like reports, briefings, or analyses, he does spend an extraordinary amount of time watching Fox News, so if you want him to
knowthink something, your best bet is to talk somebody at Fox into running a story about it. Apart from Trump’s own impulsive nature and tendency to go with his gut, govern by instinct, shoot from the hip etc., his constant flip-flopping is largely attributable to the fact that the voices whispering into his ears are telling him different things. Lately the “America First” faction of the MAGA movement (represented by people like Marjorie Taylor Green) seems to be losing out to the more “Hawkish” wing (represented by people like Rubio).I still don’t think there is any need to assume any larger conspiracies or blackmail schemes to explain what’s going on. Considering the crap Trump has already been able to get away with, it’s hard to imagine how anything could possibly serve as leverage in an extortion racket at this stage. But, more importantly in my view, all this talk about how alienating America’s former allies (obviously the word “allies” should never be used to describe the relationship between Trump’s America and the democratic world unless it is preceded by the word “former” at this point) or playing into the hands of Russia and China is not in the national self interest, only makes sense if you assume that Trump’s idea of the “national self-interest” coincides with ours. Anne Applebaum’s excellent Autocracy Inc. is right up there with On Tyranny and How Democracies Die on my top-four* list of the most enlightening books on the current crisis of democracy. In it she writes [my emphasis]:
From this perspective breaking up NATO (and preferably the EU as well), alienating former “allies” in Western Europe, Canada, Japan etc. is clearly a feature rather than a bug. These countries are now the main forces in the world upholding (however imperfectly) the loathed liberal values (accountability, transparency, democracy, human rights, the rule of law etc.) and hence the enemy. Trump’s America is prepared to make a common cause with regimes like Russia and China for the same reason Russia and China (despite all their significant differences) are prepared to make a common cause with each other. Although the members of Autocracy Inc. (now including the United States) don’t share a common ideology, they all share the same interest in normalizing autocratic behaviors while undermining liberal and democratic values everywhere. For all his glaring contradictions, Trump’s own rhetoric, and that of the MAGA movement in general, has been entirely consistent on this point.
* The fourth one being Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, released 8 years before Trump was elected in 2016, and not even about authoritarianism per se, but crucial to understanding how the intellectual immune system of the nation (and the world in general) could atrophy to the point where someone like Trump could ever be electable in the first place.
Considering the fact that Trump has already tried to overturn an election, I don’t think you have to be particularly “hysterical” or “paranoid” or suffer from “TDS” to suggest that they’re not worried about going down with Trump because they don’t expect the MAGA movement to be out of power ever again, with or without the support of the electorate. Even if they fail to stage a coup d’état, the toothless response to Trump’s first attempt has probably also emboldened them to think they can get away with anything, and I can’t honestly say that anything we have thus far seen from Democrats fills me with confidence that they [i.e. Trump’s cronies] are wrong to think so. Even if the country as a whole enters the “failed state” category, they personally expect to be able to emerge from the wreckage more stinking rich than ever just as long as they remain in the good graces of the Kleptocrat in Chief, like the oligarchs who between them have divided the spoils from the looting of the Russian state [1].
Apparently there were still some adults in the room during Trump’s first presidency, and they did succeed in reigning him in to some degree. Obviously they have all left on their own initiative or been purged at this point.
Re. Vance, for all his cynical opportunism and lack of any moral principles, I would be very surprised if he ever tried to openly dispose of Trump. I have no idea what “charisma” is supposed to mean, but apparently Adolf Hitler, L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Donald Trump all had/have it while Vance does not. It has been suggested that Trump is the only one currently holding the many competing factions of the MAGA movement (the Zionists, the anti-Semites, the isolationists, the christian nationalists, the white supremacists, the “tech bros”, the “manosphere” types etc.) together. I seem to remember someone at the Bulwark (Sarah Longwell?) saying that a significant percentage of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 were attracted to him specifically because of January 6th, and that most of these same people were “Trump or nobody” voters, meaning they wouldn’t vote at all unless the orange one was on the ballot. I suspect Vance is hoping to inherit a fully established dictatorship in which he never has to win an election to rule, either because Trump personally nominates him as his successor [2], or, more likely, because the rest of the MAGA colalition (or whichever faction comes out on top) decides to unite behind him as the most obvious choice, the next in line, Trump’s natural successor by virtue of being the vice president, or at least as a compromise, the lowest common denominator etc.
[1] I am currently reading up on the subject of kleptocracy, money-laundering, and the role of anonymous shell companies, tax-havens, offshore bank accounts, etc. in undermining democracy. I may write a longer post about it in the not too distant future.
[2] Probably not going to happen. As others have pointed out, it’s not in Trump’s nature to voluntarily step aside and let somebody else take steal the light.
Dammit, YNnB, you really got me started now! ;)
Same in Mao’s China where the disastrous effects of things like the “Great Leap Forward” were always blamed on unfaithful underlings who abused the chairman’s trust and good intentions for their own self-serving ends. The more people were made to suffer as a direct consequence of the chairman’s policies, the more that very same suffering would be blamed on a failure to realize those very same policies fully enough. On the same note, when several leading members of the People’s Temple defected, a few years before the infamous Jonestown massacre, most of them still couldn’t bring themselves to identify Jim Jones himself as the main source of the horrific abuses going on inside the cult, but blamed everything on the self-serving actions of unfaithful, mostly female, staff-members who were actually among the saddest victims of Jones’ reign of terror.
As we can read In Peter Pomerantsev’s biography of British propagandist Sefton Delmer, Joseph Goebbels’ main rival during WW2, there are some practical lessons to be learned from all this. Delmer dismissed the prevailing approach of trying to appeal to the better angels of the German people’s nature as preaching to the choir and a waste of time. Rather than seeing the Nazis as innocent victims brainwashed by propaganda, Delmer thought propaganda was effective because people actually enjoyed it and wanted it – because it gave them permission to be their worst selves as well as (you know what’s coming), an identity (ugh!), a community (double-ugh!) to belong to etc. Instead of appealing to any higher ideals, Delmer’s focus was on driving a wedge between the Nazi party (“Die Parteikommune”) and the individual (especially in the military). While “Der Führer” himself was already treated as a sacred figure and pretty much untouchable at this point, the local party officials, the SS, the Gestapo etc., could be attacked and portrayed as corrupt and decadent traitors engaging in a life of luxury and outrageous sexual depravity while the heroic soldiers were fighting and dying for the Fatherland on the front. To make the attacks appear to come from the inside the German army, Delmer created the character known as “Der Chef” (supposedly a disgruntled military officer; in reality a pre-internet “sock-puppet” and a “troll”) who was hosting one of Germany’s most popular radio stations (actually broadcast from London) at the time.
Interestingly, Delmer’s goal was not to make Germans outraged by the corruption but to encourage them to be corrupt themselves, neglect their duties, sabotage military equipment, feign illness to escape combat etc. People were supposed to think “If our leaders can be that corrupt and self-serving, why not me?”. Incidentally, Russian corruption has been exceptionally useful to the Ukrainians in the current war, diverting vast amounts of money and resources away from the War effort and into the pockets of unfaithful servants.
To bring it back to Trump, it has been suggested that Marjorie Taylor Green’s defection has been more devastating to the MAGA movement than anything Democrats could possibly have said or done, precisely because she was able to attack Trump in MAGA terms, as not being MAGA enough. Realistically though, hardcore MAGA-supporters are probably not going to start abandoning Trump in droves for any reason at this point. Like Hitler, he is already close to untouchable. But Trump is not going to live forever, and Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Bondi etc. may still be vulnerable. Sefton Delmer may have a thing or two teach us in this respect.
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