The Sovereign State of Mine, Mine, Mine

The Sovereign State of Mine, Mine, Mine

            Yes, you heard that tight, Donald Trump is having a temper tantrum over a place he’s never been, has only 50,000 indigenous inhabitants (the size of Sheboygan, Wisconsin), and has only one and a half golf courses, one of which appears to be on a glacier or something similar.  What it does have is a lot of land, with less and less ice and something called rare earth minerals.  Oh yeah, the place is Greenland, the largest island in the world, bigger than at least three continents, the same basic size and shape of all South America, and a place that is getting greener by the day.  The problem stems from a planned state visit the Trump White House requested with the Queen and government of Denmark, a valued NATO ally.  Like most of these visits, there was no stated purpose other than diplomacy and relationship-building.  When Trump announced over the weekend that he wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark (Greenland is a protectorate and semi-autonomous, not a territory of Denmark), Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the young female leader of Denmark was forced to announce that Greenland was decidedly not for sale. She said the suggestion was absurd in an era when countries do not “buy” territories that are inhabited.  The initial comment from the White House was quite civil and understanding that owners can always choose to not sell if they don’t want to sell.  But then the real Trump appeared amid the helicopter rotor wash, and called Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen a nasty person, his go-to denigration for women who put him in his place and make him look or feel stupid.

            We just learned that one billion tons of ice melted in Greenland this summer.  Does Donald know about this?  Has he realized Mar-a-Lago is going into the Mar and the Lago simultaneously in a few years?  I knew a guy who was a mover and shaker in the liquor business.  He was fundamentally a marketing guy and he claimed alcohol was a marketing business.  He did a deal for fifty years with somebody (Canada, Greenland, both?) to own all the iceberg flow coming down from Baffin Bay through the Davis Strait.  Really.  He did it as a play on fresh water.  He thought he might be able to sell an iceberg or two to the Middle East, but that was the central play.  He claimed that icebergs were made up of pre-industrial water.  He wanted to bottle it and cut up ice cubes for sale on the theme of it being the purest water and ice in the world. I wonder if he had liability for icebergs that got away from him and disrupted shipping in the North Atlantic?  Does one brand icebergs the way one does sheep?  How do you know which icebergs are your icebergs?  It sounds like a deal Trump may have heard about and wanted in on.  He doesn’t drink alcohol but branding ice sounds like a Trumpian play.  Imagine icebergs with a gilded T on their side.

            The point is that Donald J. Trump is yet again stuck in another dead end in his favorite place, Crazytown.  I’m guessing that to get the narrative off the impending recession, and to try to avoid any more racist accusations (even he now knows he can only step on those toes so often), he asked himself late the other night where he could cause a commotion and not be accused of being either a racist or a gun-loving Wayne LaPierre NRA supporter.  I’ll bet his mind went to Scandinavia and he was trying to remember the names of the states in that country, not remembering that Scandinavia is not actually a country.  He glanced at his calendar and saw Denmark was a place he was going to visit.  Then, on Fox and Friends he saw a piece about the melting glaciers of Greenland.  Aha! Trump can be the savior of Greenland and what better way to save Atlantic City than to buy it.  So, let’s buy Greenland.  Who owns Greenland?  He probably picked up the phone and dialed on his unsecure cell line and asked the operator for Greenland.  “Hello, Greenland, who owns you guys anyway?”  “Denmark?  You say Denmark owns you?  Perfect.  Thanks, and good luck with that ice melt thing, I’ll be working on that for you.”  Some guy called Joseph Greenland in Sheboygan, Wisconsin is still wondering what hit him.

            Then he was going out to the Marine One helicopter on the White House lawn, which is the most Presidential thing he does, and he stopped for the reporters.  He was loving this approach to press releases.  The White House briefing room was so stuffy and ever since Sarah Huckabee Sanders left the place just wasn’t the same.  And the best news was that if some idiot Fake News guy tossed him a question he doesn’t like, he can blame the rotor wash for mangling the issue before he could mangle it.  So, he started the Q&A and he immediately got into the whole thing about Israel again and he politely explained that any Jew who voted Democrat must be anti-Israel (that should help swing more Jewish voters his way, right?).  Why were they immediately accusing him of being anti-Semitic?  “No, I’m not a racist, you’re just stupid and a tool for the Democrats!”  He sure told them off.

            So that, children, is how we got to own Greenland.  President Donald J. Trump traded California, Oregon, Washington, Baltimore, Puerto Rico and Albany for Greenland.  It was a good trade because he ended up picking up votes in the trade and got rid of all those wildfires and hurricanes and already had a plan for selling the melting glaciers to his pals in Saudi Arabia and the rest to all the Trump hotels as branded Trump ice cubes.