{"id":43634,"date":"2026-01-21T10:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=43634"},"modified":"2026-01-21T10:00:53","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:00:53","slug":"i-doubt-greenland-will-sink-this-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2026\/01\/21\/i-doubt-greenland-will-sink-this-president\/","title":{"rendered":"I Doubt Greenland Will Sink This President"},"content":{"rendered":"

But it’s possible, and Erick Erickson knows it<\/a>\u00a0as he responds to the European Union rallying to defend Greenland, causing Trump to tell the Norwegian Prime Minister off<\/em>:<\/p>\n

And there is no Trump Derangement Syndrome here except from his most ardent supporters who feel compelled to justify, explain, and defend every single thing Trump does, no matter how crazy. You can read the texts for yourself. It\u2019s the ramblings of an obsessive eighty-year-old who just cannot let something go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those supporters are probably composed of trouble-makers, posting with a malicious grin, and folks who’ve gained some social stature because of their connections to the President. This latter group are typically now working in government and are addicts of power<\/em>, their conceptions of how the government should be run and the policies it pursues composed of theories of how humanity works which are, to be polite, inaccurate.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Today I was watching Tasting History with Max Miller’s<\/em> episode for the week<\/a>, in which he gave a very light history of English workhouses from, oh, the 17th century to the start of the 20th century, and I was struck by the similar attitudes of the GOP<\/em><\/strong> over the last maybe 60 years, and Miller’s description of the work houses through the eyes of the elite:<\/p>\n

The welfare queen<\/a>, for the GOP<\/strong><\/em>, and a worry that the poor will get themselves sent to the workhouse in order to get free, delicious meals, for the English elite of the cited period.<\/p>\n

This lack of understanding of how the bulk of humanity works, and what they want, seems to be a common theme, even a plague, for those who oppose charity, although it defeats me as to whether it’s a cause or effect. But it remains true that modern polls and experiments, such as universal basic income<\/a>, show people do<\/em> want to work and not laze about. It may be an example of confirmation theory, as it’s certainly a bias that I suspect many “successful” people pick up, thinking their success has been due to their hard work, discounting the usual factors of random chance, or luck<\/em> as we call it, that have served them.<\/p>\n

Andrew Sullivan is thoroughly tired, and a little frightened, of the Greenland tilt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The essence of tyranny is the imposition of one man\u2019s will on an entire polity \u2014 with no checks, balances, or even reasons cited to back him up. It is, to coin a phrase, a triumph of will. In fact, you could argue that a tyrant aims for exactly such a demonstrable act of pure solipsism as soon as he can pull it off \u2014 against all elite and popular opinion and common sense \u2014 because it proves by its very arbitrary irrationality that only he matters.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why President Trump\u2019s threat to the sovereignty of a NATO ally, Denmark, is a red line.\u00a0No one<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 neither Greenlanders nor Americans \u2014 wants what is an insane idea. No one needs it. No reason can be given for it. And yet Trump keeps insisting, like a mafia boss, that he will take it. He must be stopped.<\/p>\n

The reasons given have changed, as they do when they are being invented on the fly to justify something already decided and totally bonkers. We were first told that this was about national security, because the Arctic \u2014 thanks to the climate\u2019s rapid heating of the North Pole \u2014 is becoming a far more disputed part of the globe, with more valuable shipping lanes and military activity. Russia and China have their eyes on it. And so should we. …<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s left to defend the madness? According to Trump, the \u201cpsychological\u201d benefit of \u201cowning\u201d the place. The best way to understand that, I think, is simply that Trump wants, like all tyrants, to expand the footprint of his domain. We missed this in the first term. [The Weekly Dish<\/strong>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not everyone. My friend Lisa called it pathological narcissism a few days after Trump announced his first candidacy, and from that it’s not hard to deduce his frantic grasps for power, for respect, for legitimacy.<\/p>\n

None of which he attains.<\/p>\n

Now he’s working on legacy, and only the howls of the power-addicted support him. It’s not as if he’s attracting new supporters with his antics. But will that matter? Someone has to remove him; who can, and will, bell the cat?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But it’s possible, and Erick Erickson knows it\u00a0as he responds to the European Union rallying to defend Greenland, causing Trump to tell the Norwegian Prime Minister off: And there is no Trump Derangement Syndrome here except from his most ardent supporters who feel compelled to justify, explain, and defend every \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43639,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43634\/revisions\/43639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}