Update 1/21/26, 3pm: No doubt in response to my post, Donald Trump canceled his plans to invade Greenland and/or slap tariffs on Europe if they didn’t sell it to him. However, in so doing, he managed to confuse Greenland and Iceland, claim that NATO members were calling him “daddy,” and insult nearly every country in Europe. So the argument still holds.
1.
When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, the introductory writing course was called “Logic & Rhetoric.” One of the assignments was a variation of a classic logic problem involving necessary and sufficient causation. There’s a homicidal maniac on the loose, but a resident of Town A stays too long in Town B to get home before dark, a Town B resident won’t allow them to stay over, and so on. So the person walks home and gets killed. Who is responsible?
A friend of mine insisted the maniac was the only responsible party, and spent most of his 800 words attacking the question itself. Pre-law student that I was, I remember arguing that “maniac” implies a lack of moral responsibility and thus places a burden on everyone else to act responsibly. The maniac is ethically more like a wild animal than a human being; the question is how moral agents must prevent him from harming others.
This post is about Greenland, obviously.
2.
This week, we entered a new phase of Trumpist terror, one marked by the great Freudian sin of the Biblical Ham: seeing the nakedness of the father — the mad king Trump, revealed in all his psychological nudity to a gaping, shocked world.
It’s been clear for some time that the president of the United States is — in addition to being ignorant, narcissistic, prejudiced, corrupt, and shockingly unintelligent — not of sound mind. Various medical professionals have opined that he is showing signs of dementia, and maybe they’re right; that’s out of my lane of expertise. But mythically, spiritually, psychologically, and politically, it is obvious that the American autocrat is now as mad as King George, or Caligula, or You-Know-Who.
It’s been clear for some time, really. Probably my least-predictive post of 2024 was this one, which I wrote after Trump danced silently at a campaign rally for 38 minutes. I predicted, wrongly, that this deranged performance would be Trump’s version of Biden’s debate: the act that showed everyone that he was unfit to be president.
That turned out not to be true, of course. His loyal voters didn’t care, and the swing voters who determined the outcome of the election on the basis of economic concerns weren’t watching. But in retrospect, it was one of many signs that Trump’s mind was deteriorating, a list that now includes falling asleep at meetings, weird digressions and verbal meanderings, and confusions of dates and names. These incidents aren’t just Trump being Trump. They’re signs of mental decline.
But the threatened invasion of Greenland — and the letter Trump just sent Norway’s prime minister — is on a new level. If you haven’t read it yet, the letter reads, in full:
Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.
I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
We don’t have to spend long on the factual absurdity of this letter. The Nobel Prizes are administered by a committee in Norway, not the prime minister. Denmark, not Norway, controls Greenland. Trump did not stop eight wars. There are no threats to Greenland from Russia or China, and America already has a military base and missile defense system installed there. Right or wrong, there are centuries of written documents establishing Denmark’s claims to the island. And finally, threatening war for not getting a peace prize is a wonderfully auto-executing oxymoron, as this popular meme summarizes:
Perhaps most importantly, invading Greenland would blow up NATO, threaten the international order as we know it (especially for places like Taiwan), and permanently damage America’s standing in the world. Indeed, much of this erosion has already taken place, as Trump has threatened punitive tariffs on most of our allies in Europe, who have now realized the United States is too fragile an ally to be relied upon and who may have finally reached a breaking point, as this speech from Canada’s prime minister eloquently sets forth If a madman can gain control of our country this easily, how can America ever be counted on again?
There have been some rationales for the invasion offered by commentators trying to make sense of the madness: maybe the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ of America First necessitates throwing America’s weight around, maybe Greenland’s natural resources would enrich America’s oligarchs and hedge against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, maybe America’s ‘Golden Dome’ defense shield requires the territory, or maybe Trump really is a Russian asset.
But even if these explanations are partially true, the costs so wildly outweigh the benefits that one would have to be out of one’s mind to actually do this. We have no claim to Greenland whatsoever, we have no strategic interests that are not already being met. And anyway, Trump himself said why he wants to invade in his January 8 interview with the New York Times:
When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
This is nuts, right? Psychologically needed for success? Basically, he wants it — he feels a psychological need for it. It seems, unbelievably, that a lot has to do with Mercator Projection: Greenland looks much bigger on maps than it is in reality, and so Trump wants it. And there is no one in his lunatic administration of sycophants who is willing to stand up to him.
3.
Since, like all autocrats, Trump has surrounded himself with lackeys, the moral burden now rests on Congress. It would be easy for Congress to stop this catastrophe from happening, simply by expressly forbidding the proposed tariffs and forbid the use or threat of the military to seize the territory.
Now, wouldn’t Trump just defy Congress? I’m not so sure.
Last Spring, as the lawlessness of the Trump regime began to come into focus, I wrote that we were “waiting for midnight” — for the moment when the White House explicitly defied a court or congressional order and officially declared the end of the separation of powers. That would be a clear constitutional crisis. The Rubicon would be crossed.
This has still not happened. To be sure, there have been acts of defiance: the Department of Justice has released only 1% of the Epstein Files, the regime has attacked lawyers and used the government to punish political enemies, and the White House has dithered on several lower court orders.
But they haven’t openly, flagrantly, and without justification defied a judicial or constitutional order. They’ve not yet said, as President Andrew Jackson probably never said either, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Most of the administration’s lawlessness has taken place in legal grey areas: defining non-existent crises as national emergencies that justify the exercise of vast military or police power, for example, or seizing the president of Venezuela so he could face criminal charges, or propounding preposterous legal theories to end Birthright Citizenship or institute the ‘unitary executive’ with complete control over the executive branch.
To be clear, these power grabs are outrageous, and the Supreme Court has acted both reprehensibly and far too slowly in failing to stop them. And Trump has said many outrageous things, most recently in the same New York Times interview in which he claimed he is not constrained by any law other than his own “internal morality.” But despite all the depredations of ICE, DOGE, the DOJ and the rest, the line in the sand has still not been crossed.
Which means Congress could still act clearly and decisively.
Which means it is outrageous that they have not done so.
Which means that Greenland should be added to the list of conditions the Democrats require before continuing to fund the government past January 31: cut ICE’s budget, protect healthcare, and stop the nonsensical invasion of Greenland.
4.
This being Both/And, I want to step back from the geopolitical catastrophe of this moment and reflect on its psychological and spiritual elements.
In the wake of the shooting of Renee Good, many people posted this quote from George Orwell’s 1984:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Turns out, this has also happened already. It happened last Spring, when Trump insisted that clearly photoshopped “translations” of Kilmar Albrego Garcia’s finger tattoos were actually tattooed on his fingers. At the time, I called this “the age of semiotic infinity.” As I wrote then:
The traumas and dislocations of contemporary life — not just the last few months, but the last few decades of technological change, globalization, demographic change, economic dislocation, world-shifting crises of 2001 and 2008 and 2020 — have caused us to look for signs everywhere. Our country is in what Robert Anton Wilson called “Chapel Perilous,” where everything seems to mean something and secrets are nested in secrets.
I want to suggest that, in this light, the Good shooting and the Greenland operation are mirror images of one another. Both invite us to disregard what is obviously true — the president is mad, the mom was innocent — and somehow believe the preposterous instead.
What Orwell could not have anticipated was the omnipresent overwhelm of our age of semiotic infinity: his world had a single telescreen, ours has infinite ones. But it turns out totalitarian propaganda thrives just as much in abundance as in privation.
Of course, Trump has lucid moments, to be sure, but then, so do all parents and grandparents who succumb to dementia or Alzheimer’s. (Trump’s boasting that he recently passed an “IQ Test” which appears to have actually been a test of mental competency was yet another indicator that the man is profoundly unwell.) And now, with Greenland, this incompetence is having catastrophic effects on the global stage. It’s not just verbal gaffes; it’s a (threatened) military attack against our closest allies, for God’s sake. We can see this with our own eyes.
And Congress can too. Over the last year, there have been numerous reports that many members of Congress understand that Trump is both severely mentally impaired and an authoritarian — a terrifying combination, if you think about it. So, we know that they know. And yet, for reasons of political expediency, ideological agreement, or cowardice, most of them — excluding Rep. Thomas Massie, ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a few others — have still, still refused to stand up to him. Ditto Trump’s fawning admirers on Fox News, CBS (where we ‘go to see BS’ - thank you, Nikki Glaser), Newsmax, OAN, and even, in Scott Jennings’s case, CNN.
I don’t have any hope that these self-interested sycophants will suddenly grow a moral conscience. But I can hope that, at some point soon, they will see that it’s in their own interests to wake up from the collective psychosis they have co-created. Paraphrasing Omar El Akkad’s book about the destruction of Gaza, someday, everyone will have always been against this — and when that happens, when this reign of terror is seen clearly by history, a future generation will wonder what the “journalists” and “leaders” who are still backing the Mad King could possibly have been thinking.
I mean, Joe Rogan has done it. Anything is possible.
And the tide is turning. The siege of Minneapolis has enraged moderates and even many conservatives. Some of the largest protests in American history have taken place over the last months. And while Venezuela’s dictator was a legitimately bad dude, there is no bad guy in Greenland.
Some people will never doubt what Trump says. He is their messiah, their grievances are profound and unsolvable, and given enough motivated reasoning, human beings will believe literally anything. But they are not in the majority, and never have been. And so alongside the fears we should all have about Greenland (and Minneapolis), I again find reasons for tentative hope. This is not normal. You are not wrong to doubt your sanity in moments like this; semiotic infinity means the ground is endlessly giving way.
But rest assured — you are not going mad. This is madness.
Thanks for reading. Some more stuff to read:
The Grey Lady has made many questionable decisions of late, but the Times has run some exceptional investigations lately, including this one of the $1.8 billion Trump’s family has made off his presidency and this one of the specific ways he has expanded presidential power.
Of the many (other) takes on Greenland, I liked this one by Daniel W. Drezner the best.
Desmog did a great expose of the role of Paul Singer planting fake “experts” on Venezuela on right-wing media to drum up support for the Maduro operation that he somehow knew was about to happen.
This is an excellent longish-form piece by Don Moynihan on “life under a clicktatorship.” Garbage Day came to similar conclusions after spending four days in Minneapolis.
Rebecca Solnit strikes a defiant and cautiously optimistic note. And Jay Kuo has a good overview of what people are doing to fight back against ICE and Trump.
Please don’t read this depressing, thorough analysis by The UnPopulist about how the Trump regime has eviscerated the Department of Justice.
Finally, in my “other” line of work, I'll be part of a conversation on the meaning crisis with my dharma bud Dave Smith next week — click the image below for registration info. And I’ll be the Teacher of the Month over at 10% with Dan Harris — we’ll be doing some live meditations for paying subscribers and I’ll have a bunch of new meditation material up at danharris.com.
See you next week.
Yes! I look forward to hearing you on 10% Happier. Your voice is always smart and kind at the same time. Thanks for the little bit of hope I hear in your last words. This can’t go on forever.
"SeeBS" -- good one!