A Blessing in Disguise – The Dispatch

Today seems like a ripe moment, being the anniversary of the president’s inauguration, but I’m not going to write it—and probably never will, for two reasons.

One is that a column like that can only be written once. I’d want to save it for when Trump does the worst/craziest thing he’s ever done, and one never knows when that might be. 

I could have written it after he and his deputies reacted to ICE killing a woman in Minneapolis by insta-labeling her a domestic terrorist. But then I wouldn’t have been able to write it after his lowlife Justice Department henchmen joined the effort to destroy the Federal Reserve’s independence. 

If I had written it after that, I wouldn’t have been able to write it after Trump slapped new tariffs on European countries—which will be paid by Americans—simply because those nations refuse to gratify his “psychological” need to own Greenland.

And if I had written it after that, I wouldn’t have been able to write it after the president told the prime minister of Norway that he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace” in Greenland because the Nobel committee denied him the peace prize.

Celebrate my peacefulness or I’ll declare war is a Strangelove-ian absurdity that will be hard for even Trump to top, but one never knows. If I write the “I told you so” column today, what do I write if he attacks Greenland next week? Or sends troops trained for arctic combat to battle protesters in freezing Minnesota? Or declares the midterm elections canceled?

At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they?

The other problem with an “I told you so” piece is that I did not, in fact, tell you so.

I told you many times that the president was a fascist and would govern as one in a new term, having surrounded himself this go-round with authoritarian ideologues and degenerate yes-men. But the weak link in that argument was always foreign policy: Is there truly such a thing as an isolationist fascist?

Fascists are militaristic, expansionist, and imperialist, driven by grandiose delusions of messianic invincibility. They don’t babble about “ending endless wars,” as Trump did as a candidate. They babble about starting them.

I should have foreseen the turn he would take—character is destiny—but I didn’t. The closest I came was predicting that he would destroy NATO in his second term, but the likelihood of that was an open secret. And there was little wisdom in assuming that he’d end the alliance by withdrawing from it when he now seems likely to end it by waging war on it, either via trade policy or otherwise.

No “I told you so” column today, then. I prefer to focus on something more upbeat for the inaugural anniversary, like how the president’s insane designs on Greenland are a moral and political blessing in disguise.

The moral case is straightforward. Contemptible people deserve contempt, but contemptible Americans have received shockingly little of it from the rest of the world so far, despite having foisted a domineering cretin on the planet—again.

We reelected a criminal and coup-plotter, then did nothing as he spent a year unwinding the Pax Americana and attacking the civic foundations that have made America exceptional. Yet no nation has severed ties with the United States in protest. (Not fully, at least.) Global investors continue to treat the U.S. stock market as a safe haven. The closest thing to an international boycott is Canadians opting to vacation in places whose leaders don’t post antagonistic trash like this on their social media accounts.

We’ve gotten off awfully easy.

The Greenland gambit seems likely to me to be the moment when Americans at last begin to suffer reprisals for having handed their country over to Donald Trump a second time, potentially in the form of punishing retaliatory European tariffs but more intangibly and consequentially in the form of 80 years of goodwill going up in smoke. After this, there’ll be no way to maintain the illusion that Americans are still the good guys.

“Never in my life have I so thoroughly sided with Europe in a disagreement with the United States,” Jonah Goldberg wrote a few days ago about Trump’s Greenland tariff threat. “They are right and America is in the wrong here. The White House is behaving dishonorably, and the legislators who know it but do nothing are cowards.” The moral calculus will never be clearer than it is now: Americans elected a would-be Putin, he’s zeroed in on his very own Crimea, and no one here at home is doing a thing to meaningfully check him.

“We are about to see the free world stop referring to the great unraveling as a Trump problem. They will soon understand that it is an America problem,” Jonathan Last wrote today of the Greenland extortion. That’s correct, and long overdue. When the president extorts the Nobel Peace Prize from its rightful recipient and stands next to her in the Oval Office holding it proudly, grinning like he just won the Olympics, that’s not a problem with him. That’s a problem with us, for tolerating a spectacle so grubby, pathetic, and depraved from our leader.

Lots of foreigners hate Trump, of course, and they have for a long time. He deserves it. Now, I suspect, foreigners will begin to hate Americans, too, and that will also be deserved. He got more votes than his opponent did this time, January 6 notwithstanding, and has seen nearly every civic and corporate institution that might have restrained him offer craven compliance instead. Now, it’s obviously not true that every American supports Trump, but I suspect this nuance is meaningless to the average foreigner: They’re not obliged to qualify their judgments about the national character of a people in a democratic country that’s made a mistake as egregious as we have not once but twice.

We’ve reached the point where the prime minister of Greenland, offered the chance to join the most prosperous and powerful country in history, feels obliged to say, uh, no thanks, we’ll stick with Denmark. And who can blame him, particularly in light of Trump’s reaction to his preference? Given the choice, what decent individual would want to make common cause with rotten, fascist-enabling Americans and their corrupt Putinist leadership rather than with the Danes?

It’s notable to me that several top Catholic clerics have felt moved in the last 24 hours to speak out in stark moral terms about the president’s designs on Greenland. One went as far as to remind U.S. soldiers that it’s morally acceptable not to follow orders that would violate their conscience. It’s not unheard of for bishops and cardinals to object to policy, especially on immigration, but I’ve never heard one complain in toto as Cardinal Joseph Tobin did that a presidential administration is advancing “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”

He’s right—and in this case, I did tell you so, more than once, that Trumpist postliberalism is less a policy project than a moral ethos. (“Do unto others whatever you think you can get away with doing.”) The rest of the world is finding out. There will be consequences.

It’s fine as an American to hate all of this and fear the repercussions as lesser powers begin to demonstrate that they have leverage too, particularly when they act in concert. I can’t fathom what it must be like to be a parent, raised in a country you were rightly proud of, now facing the reality that your children may well live out their lives in one they’re ashamed of. (Ashamed, that is, if you raised them right.) But don’t let your exasperation blind you to the fact that we chose this. We squandered American exceptionalism. We’re not fit to lead the world.

We deserve to be despised for it. There is no way around that. The only dignity left to us as citizens is accepting the moral righteousness of our comeuppance.

Contemptible people deserve contempt. The president’s Greenland play will ensure that we get ours. Just deserts: What’s not to like?

The other virtue of his Greenland folly is that it’s a relatively costless way to alert “soft” Trump voters, the swing contingent that backed him reluctantly in 2024, that the president is a lunatic. Whatever benefit of the doubt they were still giving him might be up in smoke shortly, with three years still on the clock. And the sooner it happens, the better for all of us, I think.

The word “relatively” is doing a lot of work here, I concede. Treating Greenland like Crimea is likely to finish off NATO, which sure doesn’t seem costless. But let’s be real: NATO was more or less finished anyway. As I write this, the president is posting anti-NATO propaganda on social media and trying to cobble together some sort of 21^st-century authoritarian Warsaw Pact as a counterweight to postwar institutions like the United Nations. He’s a pro-Russian fascist. The alliance was on borrowed time.

If you support NATO, the most you could realistically hope for from a Trump second term was that its demise would occur in the most humiliating, discrediting way possible for the president, seemingly engineered to make the average American recoil and detest him for it. That’s what we’re getting.

His text message to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend, threatening war over Greenland out of spite over his Nobel snub, transformed this episode from a familiar case of a power-mad nationalist with a personality cult getting hungry for land to something somehow weirder and more disturbing. I like the analogy Vox’s Benjy Sarlin offered: “What would you think if you heard that some random actor was sending repeated violent threats to the Academy after they didn’t get an Oscar nomination and couldn’t focus on anything else? ‘Wow, they’re really competitive?’ This isn’t a geopolitics story.”

It isn’t. This is no longer about rare earth minerals or Russia and China threatening the Arctic or whatever cockamamie pretext Trump is offering today for menacing Greenland. This is about the president having psychological problems so severe (I told you so!) that he can’t manage to obscure them even during a high-stakes international dispute that the planet is watching intently. No diplomat in full possession of his faculties would admit to letting personal grudges drive his foreign policy, particularly an episode that risks putting troops in harm’s way, even if it was true. The fact that Trump did admit to it leaves us with only one conclusion.

“The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed. That’s not true in terms of its political impact or the amount of doubt it will cast on the president’s competence, but I do think it’s an apt comparison in the sense that no one who’s aware of either incident will look at the man in question the same way again. After his debate with Trump, no fair-minded person could deny that Joe Biden was too elderly to carry out his duties. After his message to the Norwegian leader, no fair-minded person can deny that the president is too juvenile to carry out his own.

Remarkably, Trump himself has gone out of his way to frame his interest in Greenland as a mental quirk. When reporters from the New York Times asked him why he wants the island, he answered, “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” When they pressed him to clarify whether he meant it was psychologically important for America or for himself, he replied, “Psychologically important for me.”

That’s the only way to rationalize what he’s doing, as a compulsion, since the supposedly rational “strategic” arguments he’s offering for taking Greenland get flimsier by the day. If this is all about reducing Chinese influence in North America, why is he driving Canada into Xi Jinping’s arms? If it’s all about reducing Russian influence, why is he working to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin internationally? For cripes sake, even the proto-fascists of Europe’s nationalist right are freaked out, doubtless fearing the electoral blowback they’re about to get for their own Trumpishness.

Whether to help him cope with the narcissistic anguish of losing the Nobel or with the kleptocratic anguish of not being allowed to seize a largely undefended island off his coast, the president needs Greenland to soothe whatever mental affliction he’s suffering from. And the clearer that becomes to Americans, the likelier it is that they’ll view future fascist White House gambits through the same lens: “Oh, I get it, he’s nuts.” Once you realize which side of the debate over Trump Derangement Syndrome is truly deranged, the benefit of the doubt over sending the 101^st Airborne to Minneapolis to confront “antifa” is gone.

And that’s a blessing, just as it’s a blessing that the president chose the least favorable political turf to fight on in making his long-awaited move against NATO. Only 17 percent of Americans favor acquiring Greenland, while a scant 4 percent support doing so militarily; no politician in his right mind would choose an issue as dodgy as that for a showdown over the future of the Western liberal order, yet here we are. Decide for yourself what it says about the rightness of Trump’s mind.

The Mad King is discrediting himself in the eyes of all but his most devout supporters. It should have happened 10 years ago, and for some of us, it did. (We told you so.) Better late than never.

That’s too optimistic a note to end on, so let’s wrap up with something more glum. I doubt that Congress will do anything to end Trump’s bullying of Denmark and Greenland, whatever the consequences might be for American global influence long-term and the economy short-term.

Some Resistance types spent the weekend theorizing that This Time Might Be Different, and I understand why. Congressional Republicans have traditionally shown a bit more backbone toward Trump on foreign policy matters, true to their Reaganite roots. It’s not inherently crazy to imagine a critical mass of them joining Democrats to form a veto-proof majority on a bill that would, say, deny the use of federal funds for military operations against a NATO ally.

Chuck Schumer could even make it easy for them by threatening to shut down the government next week if such a provision isn’t included in the omnibus bill that’s working its way toward Trump’s desk. Slipping it into must-pass legislation, with the polling on Greenland lopsidedly opposed to what the president is doing, would make it relatively easy for Republicans to give in.

But then they’ll be primaried, you say. Will they? Over a 4-percent issue? They’re all going to be primaried if they all vote for it? Are they also all going to be primaried for voting to release the Jeffrey Epstein files over Trump’s issues?

I have no compelling tactical argument for believing that congressional Republicans will refuse to cross Trump over Greenland, only the dreary experience of 10 years of utter civic corruption. Ted Cruz half-joked in 2016 that we might wake up one day to find that a maniacal President Trump had nuked Denmark; a decade later, he’s on Fox News belching out manifest-destiny justifications for bullying the Danes into coughing up territory. Thom Tillis, who’s retiring and thus has nothing to lose by angering MAGA, still couldn’t bring himself to criticize Trump directly over Greenland in an interview this morning, instead blaming the “bad advice” the president is supposedly getting.

No one, with the possible exception of Stephen Miller, is egging him on to blow up NATO for the sake of acquiring an island that we’ll probably give back in a few years, even if we take it. That’s all Trump. It’s “psychologically important” to him, you see.

Congressional Republicans will never rise to the occasion. They’re not built for it. Unlike federal judges, they have to answer to voters—and they know their primary voters are postliberals who will resent them for not letting the president fulfill his Putinist fantasies. And unlike the military, which might soon be forced into its own reckoning with the commander in chief’s illegality, they have no honor. No oath, no sense of patriotic duty, no constitutional obligation will lead the average House or Senate Republican to choose what’s right over staying in the good graces of an imperious fascist vampire.

When Americans look in the mirror, they shouldn’t see George Washington. They shouldn’t even see Trump. They should see Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, and the countless other grasping cowards and scumbag careerists who midwifed the destruction of what made our country noble. That’s who we are, and it’s why the world will be justified in despising us. Happy anniversary, suckers.