Ready or not, it's a new world.

Trump, on Greenland: "It will be done!!!"

Earlier yesterday, Trump wrote the premier of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. He felt snubbed:

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.

Trump no longer pretends to be a fiduciary. He is the principal. He isn't a steward. He thinks like an owner. In either case, he wants his property to prosper, so Trump may not recognize the distinction. An owner can be utterly selfish. Help loyal friends. Punish enemies. Plunder. Graft. Favors. There is no such thing as a bribe. He is the state.

Trump has cleared the air on some areas of feel-good, civics-lesson mythology in America. 

     -- The "rules based order" is a sham and always has been. Trump ended the hypocrisy and self-delusion. Strong countries do what they want. Stephen Miller said it. It shocked people, not because it was wrong but because it was frank. No more pretending there is underlying moral benefit or fairness. 

    -- NATO is a sham and has been for years. The U.S. was never going to go to war and risk American lives to save the Baltic states from Russia, any more than we are now putting soldiers at risk in Ukraine. Trump said the frank truth about NATO's objection to a Greenland takeover: So what? 

"If it affects NATO, then it affects NATO. They need us more than we need them." 

Maybe Western Europe will spend its own money to build a strong unified military, and they will point it east. On the world's chessboard, Greenland is ours and it is about protecting us.

     -- Admit it: The role of the U.S. as global peacekeeper is too expensive to continue. We are abandoning that role and becoming a hemispheric power. Greenland belongs in our sphere. Trump can sell the Greenland acquisition to Americans as a matter of our security. It is a neglected vacant lot. Greenland has 50,000 residents, so Trump could offer $100,000 per resident for $5 billion, less than the cost of an aircraft carrier. They don't have a jungle to escape into to carry out a guerrilla war. We pacify them by occupying them or we can buy them off. We can do this. 

The American public, in its expression of self-government, gave leadership of our nation to Donald Trump. The levers of power that might constrain him are cowed by him, at least for now. The Democratic alternative to Trump is concentrated in prosperous urban centers. Democrats with presidential ambitions, including Rahm Emanuel and Gavin Newsom, say the Democratic brand is a negative.

Democrats are too weak, too accommodating of mass illegal immigration, too willing to allow public lawbreaking, insufficiently respectful of religion, insufficiently patriotic, too accommodating of niche minorities, and too concerned about climate at the expense of practicality. Democrats are unable to create safe, affordable living situations, even in places where they have overwhelming majorities and full operational control of the government. Democrats may not be able to fix their brand -- or want to. The party's most articulate spokespeople are people who come from those Democratic strongholds; they reaffirm those values and policies. 

With that choice, Americans picked Trump. He is venal and crazy, but he is strong and he promised to undo what people didn't like about Democrats.

By choosing Trump, Americans did not mean to make a profound shift in American foreign policy and its place in the world. But Trump comes as a package. We get authoritarianism. We get cronyism. We get rough deportation of immigrants. We get Trump's view of American empire. 

Like it or not, Americans chose this when they chose Trump.

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