Greenland Gets a Visit from the Creepy Neighbors

 You know, you could imagine a world where the US was a good neighbor, the kind you could borrow salt from in a pinch, the kind that didn't threaten territorial expansion, where Usha Vance could have had a nice little three-day vacation, seen the sights, taken in a sled dog race, mingled with the locals--without being protested. Sure, they might not have been as thrilled to see her husband, but that would only because Jerkwater Dipshit Vance is kind of a pill. 

We don't live in that world now. We live in a world where people went door-knocking to see if anyone wanted to visit with the Second Lady and everyone in Greenland was like, "Hard pass." 

This is why what could have been a nice little weekend became three hours at Pituffik AFB, where VP Vance, with servicemembers as a backdrop, made a kind of creepy speech in Greenland's general direction, with comments that sounded along the lines of, "Nice but very cold place, would be a shame if something happened to it," and "Denmark could never love you the way we could."

JD Vance Follows Orders

 

There's something people don't like about J D Vance, and my personal take on it is that he's very inauthentic in some ways. Even his inauthenticity feels fake. Yesterday, he tried to make invading Greenland seem plausible by saying that Greenland is necessary for the United States for...reasons, and Denmark is a "bad ally." 

I don't think there is a convincing argument in there, because, I mean, what did Denmark or Greenland ever do to us?  (I'll give you a minute. There you go. Exactly.) 

Anyway, the Second Lady is part of an "aggressive" delegation going to Greenland this week because the idea of taking over Greenland being sort of stupid isn't actually going to stop this misadministration. No one is loving the idea--it's sort of an anti-diplomacy.

But unconvincing as it is, JD's job is telling stories. So, this is his story until Trump or Peter Theil or whoever needs another one. 

This Man is Certifiable

 

Trump: "To be honest with you, Canada only works as a state. We don't need anything they have. As a state it would be one of the great states. This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it." pic.twitter.com/oxzF3jzLOC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 13, 2025

With respect to our neighbors to the north, my god. I am just so embarrassed and sorry about this delusional halfwit. I knew he was a halfwit, but he managed to keep the worst of it under his MAGA hat for the benefit of his true-believers. I hope they understand how extremely messed up this crap is now, though.

And if they don't, well, I guess I am sorry for them, too. Because that is just one hell of a low and dangerous level of stupid. 

Today. Trump made comments that NATO needs to help with the US acquiring Greenland, which is not going to happen and is profoundly ignorant, as well as having congratulated himself for filling Lake Tulare with reservoir water intended for future irrigation and fire-fighting. He describes this as "invading LA" which is not even remotely a description of how any of this profoundly stupid and useless event occurred. 

Comments by Trump and his cabinet suggest that his intentions with respects to Canada and Greenland are real, and also folks are charged with drafting a Panama Canal strategy. 

Generational Wingnut Welfare Cases

 

Rep. Brandon Gill: "Listen, I think that the people of Panama, I think that the people of Greenland, I think that the people of Canada for that matter should be honored that President Trump wants to bring these territories under the American fold." pic.twitter.com/T6IJzunB0c

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2025

This obnoxious weird and wrong little man is married to Dinesh D'Souza's daughter.  D'Souza had to apologize for being very badly wrong about the 2020 election. His little son-in-law is just being part of the family--pay him little mind, because little mind is all they have 

Post-script: A lot of the GOP have adopted the "should be flattered" talking point, but to get at why this stupidity makes me furious--it's not a serious opinion. Telling a country "We will economically or militarily threaten you because we want something you have" is,a war of choice--and it amounts to saying "If someone threatens to rape you, you should be flattered." 

TWGB: Putting us on the Map

 

You know, maybe Trump can't end Russia's war in Ukraine with a phone call, or bring the hostages home from Gaza, or really do anything at all in the Middle East except make things worse, and maybe he won't bring down grocery prices and it's a whole lot to think he'll do much about fuel prices, but maybe he and his magic Sharpie can change the map! 

The Gulf of Mexico was the Gulf of Mexico, before there was a USA. If we have a national security issue regarding Greenland, well, we have had an air base there since 1943--Pituffik, formerly known as Thule. (Does he think it went away because the name changed? He seems to have a problem with accepting that military bases can change their name but still exist. His sense of object permanence is fleeting.) 

Canadian Bacon and Trump Ham

 

Honestly, right-wing forces have been working at Trudeau since well before Trump started on this 51st-state nonsense.  This appears to be an appeal to turn out conservative Canadians. It's only part delusional. But along with his renewed Greenland interest--and the observed meddling Elon Musk has been engaging in in Europe, that we seem to have a very disturbing case of two megalomaniac viruses swapping DNA. 

I'm still working on the big picture about this

A Man, a Plan, a Canal--A Dumbfuck (UPDATES)

 

I’m sorry, Panama pic.twitter.com/WmUwtw5jpu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 22, 2024

Just as with Canada, which Trump wants to be our 51st state or first province, whichever the case may be, the dotard who wanted to buy Greenland is looking to expand and retake the Panama Canal. I don't know who put him on this current tip. Maybe some import-export guy from Vandelay with a Mar-A-Lago membership. All I'm saying is, this is the next four years. 

Tiresome, innit?

UPDATE: He's talking about Greenland again. For all I know, the Trump Administration will be looking at invading Mexico not just because of the cartels, but if they are going to call Baja "California" then goddamn it....

UPDATE:

“… the United States feels ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” https://t.co/LcNGY8SRX9 pic.twitter.com/Hg3Lo007us

— DrLeoStrauss - same handle @bsky.social (@DrLeoStrauss) December 23, 2024

Well, shit.

Magnets-How Do They Work?

 

Trump: All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets pic.twitter.com/TopK4BRsOq

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 6, 2024

Look, just take a kitchen magnet and get it wet.  It will still work. I don't know what he thinks will happen.  I don't know where this thing came from. Anyway, he thinks gas sells for $8 a gallon. He has said people need to show their ID to buy groceries. He doesn't know how things work, which is why he also says things like he was going to sell US oil and gas to Europe to pay the national debt.  He has a real problem with windmills. He just kind of thinks everyone else also does not know how things work and will also think what he is saying is great and smart. 

He still seems to not know how bills become laws or what branch of government does what or how he got indicted four times. It's very concerning.

Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith were recently swatted. It's really hard for me to reconcile going out of one's way to terrorize people to try and get one's favored candidate for office clear of a lot of very serious charges with that person also being a transparent idiot. 

The Grubby Little Man Still Lost

 

I hate sharing these dumb statements but will make an exception in this case given that the clear intent to keep on lying about the election really clarifies Facebook's decision that is coming this week on his account. pic.twitter.com/iHVaIAjMPr

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) May 3, 2021

The Phantom of Mar-a-Lago urgently wants to flip the term "The Big Lie" from meaning the relentless propaganda of his followers that he somehow actually won his election to meaning the actual reality in which we live--the one where he lost, isn't in office anymore, and is actually just a sad, broken human being who doesn't happen to occupy the highest office in this country. The one where people breathe a sigh of relief some mornings because they don't turn on the tv or log onto social media wondering what atrocity of poor judgment the gilded-toileted orange fucknut has managed while his handlers were passed out from exhaustion. The reality where our allies think maybe we aren't on a slalom down the rugged chute to hell in a leased golf cart. 

The one where he doesn't have executive privilege or immunity.

This looks like something simply sad, but it's really malicious. (Sad is actually Lin Wood, who is pretending that he has seen Trump still in the White House and purports that Biden is dead and/or lost in a landslide. I don't understand what this sort of thing is for, and suspect there is an organic issue going on. Or one hell of an play at an insanity defense for an as yet committed or disclosed crime. Sheesh.)

Right now more than half of Republicans think that Trump probably did win, but there was significant voter fraud. 

There's no proof of that. There never has been proof of serious voter fraud. PACs and what not were preparing the field for claims of voter fraud before the election even took place. The claims of voter fraud seem to be what Republicans want to talk about because they can't address why their policies of, basically, "tax cuts for the rich and fuck everyone else" aren't more wildly popular. But instead of litigating how a party hopes to manage their future with increasingly hopeless lying fuckwits who will do actively nothing except chum the discourse with treats for their Pavlovian-trained audience, I'd like to focus on Trump, because I have been Ahabed and now I can't do anything but hunt the white supremacist whale now. 

He never should have won in the first place, and in the second place, he wanted to offer Puerto Rico and cash value for Greenland, and lied about ever trying to get aid to the island after two hurricanes, and even blocked investigation into why aid was being delayed. For another thing, whatever shakes out from plumbing his campaign (in 2016 or 2020) and its relationship with Russia, he was badly compromised. He was a corrupt real estate developer and reality tv personality. How in the hell was this supposed to make him enough to lead a country? And after four years, multiple failures, a miserable COVID-19 response and a severe economic downturn--all of which he showed no capacity to handle in terms of policy, as he tried to finesse them as PR challenges--was he supposed to win?

The short-fingered vulgarian, the serial philanderer, the grubby little man--this is the Pied Piper of Scamming that the entire Republican party is following so blindly? To give her her due, Liz Cheney is trying to set the party straight. And it isn't because she' s so uniquely upright or honest, but because she understands the grotesque error of letting the party lead with the dumbest possible motherfucker on the planet and fail to reverse course when shit is fucked up. You have to acknowledge failure in order to show you have learned. That's just reality. 

Trump is a grubby little man, and he lost. The Republicans who want to do better than he did should be kicking him in the slats on the way out the door of his fail-basement, instead of trying to give him little awards and hoping he'll play nice. He's a nevershouldabeen. A fluke. He prospers because Republicans are mostly too weak to fail him properly. Again and again and again I will say, the power he has is that which he was yielded by the immature and spineless people (Ryan, McDaniel, McCarthy, and, sadly, McConnell--old enough to know better and too yellow to care) who let him rampage. And the yellow press on the right needs some real looking into for who funds them. Whoever funds Trumpaganda needs shutting down. He's the wedge of an axe against our unity at home. He is our weakest link.

Pining for the Fjords 3: The Transcripts

Taylor mentions that the “Sec of Defense & State, CIA Director & NSA sought a joint mtg w/ Trump to convince him to release the aid, but scheduling the mtg was difficult. One reason? “It was about the time of the Greenland q, purchasing Greenland, which took up energy in NSC”. pic.twitter.com/2mRaXhO9ha

— Bianna Golodryga (@biannagolodryga) November 6, 2019

There's a whole lot of things about these transcripts from the closed-door depositions to think about, but here's just one of those them: people really did expend energy on the "buying Greenland" thing. It was taken seriously. To the extent that Trump has a foreign policy, it seems to rely heavily on "What amusing caper has Trump decided to waste time on now?"

I'm also more certain than ever that Trump really has asked more than once about the dropping a nuke into a hurricane thing.

But sure, whatever. At a Trump rally last night, Sen. Kennedy said Speaker Pelosi is "dumb" whilst standing next to Mr. Stable Genius Windmill cancer guy. With, one might add, no obvious sense of shame or possibly even awareness.

Pining for the Fjords 2: Makes Sense to Them!

I thought it might just be a one-weekend weirdness kind of story when Trump's Greenland obsession came to light, although it was cute, at first, watching the slightly-blitzed Larry Kudlow defend it in all seriousness. It took a bit of a turn when he postponed his trip to Copenhagen and then put the Danish PM on blast, but Darn it all! He had apparently been thinking about this thing for a long time. Why, it's prime real estate!

(The joke about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland is a bit dark, though.)

But now that it's become a diplomatic incident, apparently, the Republican party thinks this is definitely very legal and very cool, and are fundraising off of it. I guess it's life-support-system for an Adam's apple, Senator Tom Cotton, though, who really takes the old birthday cake by admitting to be the person who gave Trump this tremendous brainstorm.

Oh, Tommy. What kind of super brain genius is going to take you seriously now...

Ah, right. He's still after a Trump cabinet position. Loyalty! He shows it!

Yeesh. I really did not think I'd still be blogging about this.

Tilting at Windmills all Day

It would strain the credulity of any person living a mere five or six years ago to imagine the kind of extraordinarily and bizarrely stupid day we have had the exceptional weird fortune to witness, and it would blast right past every firewall of the belief system of those people to imagine that, of all the unfathomable sheer stupidity witnessed today, so much of it would be just another fucking weekday under the ruling auspices of Mad King Donald that we'd just shrug it off.  It wouldn't be a DEFCON 1 emergency. Helicopters wouldn't be circling overhead at the White House. It's just....

Tuesday.

It's just a fucking Tuesday around here, anymore. Not even Thursday, people. Not even newsdump Friday.

It's just one of those days when the orange-tinted dingus is in rare form and accuses two congresswomen of being profoundly anti-Semitic, mocking one of them for tearing up because she will not be visiting with her grandmother due to a profound personal principle regarding the dignity of her kin. It's one of those days when he then turns around and accuses US Jews of being "disloyal" if they vote for Democrats.

But gosh, he sure said a lot of things today (recorded in this thread by Aaron Rupar, who at this stage, has seen an awful lot), such as reiterating that he really could have ten million Afghanis killed, if he so minded ( he still is not so minded) and offered a repeated belief he has that Afghanistan is why the Soviet Union is now Russia, and that Russia should be in the G-8, and it's only a G-7 and not a G-8 because Putin "outsmarted Obama" which I guess is a weird way to phrase "annexed Crimea" but fuck it, he was rollin'. He also offered an opinion about Kashmir (it's complicated).

Uh, and he's not going to do the background checks thing because the NRA owns his ass (still!) and also the economy is just fine, so people should stop saying it isn't, but in the meantime, yes he would very much like a payroll tax cut, maybe lowered interest rates, you know--a spiff. Which doesn't sound half nervous at all!

And any of those things would have been "Wow! He does not know what he's talking about and says things anyway--is he ok?" Except this is the new normal, right? And then he does this:

He cancels a meeting with the PM of Denmark because she is not going to let him buy Greenland. And if he's not going there to buy Greenland, what is he even going there for? To look at windmills? Because he's Donald Fucking Trump, and he hates windmills. Everyone knows that!

Andy Kaufman never had such dedication to a cringe bit. If this is a joke, damn. 

But if this is not a joke....

Also, damn. 

Pining for the Fjords?

Dana asks Larry Kudlow about purchasing Greenland "The President knows a thing or two about buying real estate" #FNS pic.twitter.com/HeaxR49JuU

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) August 18, 2019

I know that the thing I should be dinging Larry Kudlow over is his irrational exuberance (he's, um, coming off like he's tripping harder than Santana at Woodstock) regarding the economy on his chat show tour, which is deeply worrisome, because he famously didn't think we were headed for a recession in 2007/8 either, but I think the pretending Trump wanting to buy Greenland isn't totally batshit on Dear Leader's Favorite Channel is just about the damnedest Through-the-Looking-Glass shit I'm arsed to deal with this morning. As with the TV not working when the wind stops blowing and how tariffs work, I feel like people tried to explain the problems with all of this to Trump and he wasn't taking no for an answer, so, welp. Now they're stuck with it.

He's nucking futz, people. But he also seems to be a carrier.