ODENSE, Denmark — The astonishment in Denmark over President Trump’s apparent desire to buy Greenland turned to bewilderment and anger on Wednesday after the American leader abruptly scrapped a state visit because the Danes have no desire to sell.
The cancellation was a rare snub of Denmark’s head of state, Queen Margrethe II, who had extended the invitation to the president and would have hosted him and the first lady.
News that Mr. Trump is not coming “came as a surprise,” the Royal House’s communications director told the state broadcaster, adding, “That’s all we have to say about that.”
Others, however, had more to say. “Is this some sort of joke?” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former prime minister, wrote on Twitter. “Deeply insulting to the people of Greenland and Denmark.”
This Greenland episode should be the final straw. It is the equivalent of Trump giving a rally speech and mooning his audience, or worse. It should not merely prompt the Republicans to beg Nancy Pelosi to start a formal impeachment but to prompt a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future to visit Mike Pence during a fever dream to show him why he has to invoke the 25th Amendment.
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You can say this is a diversionary tactic to take attention away from the train wreck his presidency has become and the Hindenburg disaster looming in the future. If it is I think he stumbled onto it and grabbed it as a cause célèbre because it takes his mind off of his own troubles and is a way he can be both a narcissistic grandiose blowhard and a bully t the same time.
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His infatuation with the idea of buying Greenland is unadulterated narcissism.
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The closest thing Trump has done to making a joke ever is the tweet with the Trump tower. It was obviously made for him, and probably was not even something he thought of doing. However it shows rare self-awareness and truth telling in his text:
The key words here are “to do this to.”
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This implies that at some level Trump knows that his Trump towers, his Trump branding on everything from vodka to steaks to items I hadn’t known about until I read this article in Business Insiderer: a deodorant and a personalized vitamin kit that was determined by urine test are all tacky ridiculous exercises in self-aggrandizement as much as they are shameless attempts to make money off of his celebrity without doing any actual work.
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History will describe Trump who sold himself as a kitschy product that he managed to con enough voters into buying to elect him president with a little help from Vladimir Putin.
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This could be a joking matter except it is yet another piece of evidence that Trump is psychogically unravelling. In “The Fix” column in today’s Washington Post Aaron Blakes OpEd it titled “Trump goes full parody on Greenland.”
It sounds like the stuff of parody — the kind of thing Hillary Clinton or one of Trump’s 2016 GOP primary opponents would have invented out of whole cloth to emphasize the potential ridiculousness of the Trump presidency.
This could be a joke except that while no doubt people across the world are laughing it the laughs aren’t with us, they are at us. For example this is the headline in the U.K. Sun:
It was also covered in every British paper I could find. Here’s the Sun story “Donald Trump leaves Twitter in hysterics with joke pic of enormous golden Trump Tower in tiny village in Greenland.” The Guardian, The Independent, EuroNews and others covered it in a similar way. All over the U.K. and Europe Donald Trump is being mocked and people are wondering what is wrong with the Americans that allow him to continue in office.
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This isn’t merely a hair-brained scheme as Joe Scarborough called it this morning which is noteworthy because it further diminishes our standing among our allies. It is alarming because it proves we have a president who is careening towards being delusional.
And then there's this: Trump Inflating Scottish Golf Resorts’ Value By $165 Million, Per UK Filings, which is a violation of the Ethics in Government Act punishable by up to a year in jail.
UPDATE:
Currying favor with the boss: