This Greenland shit is epic enough for me to take a little break from my sabbatical to offer some snark. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was so “nasty” towards our president over his harebrained idea to buy Greenland that Trump stomped his feet on his own toys and cancelled a scheduled September 2, 2019 visit to the land of the Danes. Then the Danes were like, why didn’t you offer the Queen of England a ten-spot for Canada? And then they got all huffy about Trump standing them up, as if they really want his ripe ass stinking up their beautiful country.
Queen Margrethe II had extended the invitation, so it’s really her who is getting blown off here, irrespective of what Trump says about Frederiksen’s tone. The people of both Denmark and Greenland treated Trump’s idea as a joke because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe he is serious. But, of course, the only reason anyone knows about our president’s desire to buy Greenland is because some staffer got so exasperated having to listen to him drone on the topic for the umpteenth time that he leaked the story to a bigfoot reporter.
At that point, Trump has a choice. He could have said it was “fake news” and tweeted something about how he’s not going to do a damn thing about gun violence. But he decided to own the story and make his case for the purchase of Greenland.
That just invited widespread mockery and disbelief. It also inspired a bunch of GoFundMe campaigns–some to help Trump raise the required money and some to save Greenland from his clutches.
Like most of the rancid things that find life in the president’s brain, this idea couldn’t survive five minutes of contact with reality. But even if Denmark were inclined to sell one of their most valuable assets, it would be like buying the ice in a freezer that has broken. That’s something Trump would absolutely do, but it’s not something anyone else would respect.
Anyway, he canceled the trip because he’s a stupid, immature man.
It drives me crazy that we are going to spend the last few years that the planet is inhabitable discussing the mental follies and emotional immaturities of this one deranged, fucked-up man. In two years he’ll be gone, and we’re going to realize that we have one hell of a mess to clean up. Not just from 4 years of Trump, but from 40 years of neoliberalism. We are also going to realize that we spent two crucial decades focused on navel-gazing narcissistic sh*t that our descendants aren’t going to care one whit about.
Brings to mind Rule #5 from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Here’s hoping that the DNC, as well as every serious Democratic presidential campaign, has a handful of staffers who are taking note of what kinds of ridicule throw Trump off his game.
So, what seems to have gotten under his skin with Greenland is that the prime minister (a woman)—speaking in a calm, professional tone—called his idea “absurd”.
By contrast, men challenging Trump to feats of strength (Cruz, Biden, etc.) may or may get under his skin, but it doesn’t knock him off balance.
Another of Alinsky’s rules (#3) is “”Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Trump’s “expertise” includes dealing with affluent, credentialed (white) men as opponents. It doesn’t include—to the same degree—dealing with talented, independent women.
That doesn’t mean the Democrats should choose a nominee on that basis. It does mean that whoever the nominee is should be as skilled (and prepared) as possible at getting Trump off balance, so that he makes more and more outrageous mistakes, weakening his own campaign and the campaigns of his allies.
Actually, it seems as though there is one conclusion which can be strongly inferred from your analysis….
Yeah, I suppose you could conclude that Warren—or Harris, or Gillibrand, or Klobuchar—would be able to take advantage of that weakness.
But I think the more general point is the important one. If, say, Biden—or Sanders, or Buttigieg,etc.—ends up as the nominee, he’d be making a tactical mistake to attack Trump at one of his strong points. So, no challenging to feats of strength and manliness (unless you’re in a position to win convincingly and repeatedly). And don’t try to attack Trump the way PM Frederiksen.
Instead, find another one of his (many) weak spots and attack there.
He should offer every citizen of Greenland 1,000,000 apiece. Every man, woman, and child. 1,000,000 each if they become a state.
It would be a great deal for everyone.
.
As the hopeless war ground on to its inevitable conclusion, the insomniac dictator Hitler would gather his bunker idolators (mostly hapless young female secretaries) around a table in the Fuhrer Bunker below the Berlin Chancery to gas on about his infallible plans for victory, racial theories, cultural elevation and the evolution of nations. In typical Germanic fashion, much of this gaseous claptrap was set down contemporaneously by sycophants and (wittingly or unwittingly) saved for posterity. Known to historians as Hitler’s “Table Talk”, it has been argued to provide critical insight into Hitler’s deranged and idiotic thinking, as well as explaining (to such a degree as is possible) much of the basis for Nazi “ideology”. (There is always the possibility that Hitler was merely posing for a Nazi audience, but the idiocy of the content is wonderful, whether a pose or not).
As a fellow deranged narcissist, Der Trumper much prefers to gas on about the fantastical fantasies of his glorious future (as well as his visionary prophecies) rather than deal with the chaos, crisis and looming calamities that his incompetent and vicious misrule has produced. The “Greenland, USA” boobery fits this pattern, and I will wager that this is only the tip of the iceberg of Trumper’s Table Talk–we just haven’t had the rest leaked to us by the captive audience that gathers each day to hear Der Trumper’s pontifications. Der Fuhrer’s Table Talk was only found after his bunker had been overrun by the Russians and British intelligence officers heard of its shadowy existence, and likely we’ll have to wait some years before the National Trumpalist rats sitting around the the oval table in WH basement leak all Trumper’s daily nonsense out, drip by drip.