A recent protest in Copenhagen over Donald Trump’s threat to seize Greenland (photo by Jens Cederskjold)
It’s time to say it: The president of the United States has lost his mind.
That is not hyperbole. I (and many others) have often referred to things Donald Trump has done or said as insane, deranged, mad, or unhinged. He has always been ignorant and petty and vindictive and cruel and bigoted. But this is different. Something has broken in his brain.
Is it dementia? Is it an adverse reaction to the medications he is taking? I have no idea. I am not a psychologist, and I am not offering any specific medical diagnosis. But I’ll say it again: The president of the United States has lost his mind. This is not just a national emergency, it is a global emergency.
Nothing is assured, but over the last few days it has become a real possibility that Trump will literally take the United States to war against our European allies. It would be bonkers for almost any reason, let alone the impossibly stupid reason for which he is doing it. He wants to seize Greenland against the will of not only the people who live there but the American people as well — because he’s obsessing about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and because it looks really big on the misleading map he saw, and because he wants to destroy NATO, and because he is desperate to show how big and powerful he is.
We can debate just how much importance each of those factors plays in the discordant cacophony clanging about his fevered mind. But this crisis is escalating, because one of one disturbed man’s increasing disconnection from reality.
Trump seems to have first gotten the idea of acquiring Greenland from his friend Ron Lauder, the cosmetics heir, late in his first term in office. Early in this term Trump began bringing it up again; he discussed it in a speech to Congress on March 4 of last year, saying “One way or the other, we’re going to get it” as J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson chuckled behind him. He even sent Vance on an embarrassing little trip to the island, so he could be photographed gazing determinedly at snow while the locals looked on in puzzlement. But most people treated it as though it were just another of Trump’s stupid ideas, like dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes. Surely he’d forget about it and move on. Which, for a while, he did.
But now it’s back, and he’s actually serious. The people of Greenland have no interest in becoming part of the United States (in a recent poll, 85% of them rejected the idea), and Denmark has no interest in handing it over. The American people think it’s absolutely ridiculous; in this Quinnipiac poll, not only does a large majority oppose “trying to buy Greenland” — which could only happen if Denmark wanted to sell it, which they don’t — but even more strikingly, respondents oppose using military force to acquire it by a remarkable 86-9%. The idea is about as popular as Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, our European allies have said they stand with Greenland and Denmark, so Trump is punishing them with tariffs on their goods — which of course means he’s raising taxes on Americans to stick it to Europe. For their part, the Europeans are considering retaliatory tariffs, and are beginning to sound fed up:
So Trump has now resorted to the threat that he’ll take Greenland by force. Which would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, obligating all NATO countries to come to Denmark’s defense. Congrats, we’d now have World War III.
And he sent this letter to the Norwegian prime minister:
Read that and tell me that the president of the United States has not lost his mind.
As many informed analysts have pointed out, there’s nothing we can get from Greenland by taking it over that we don’t already have. We have a military base there, and under the terms of a treaty we signed with Denmark in 1951, we can put as many more as we’d like. If we want to dig through the permafrost looking for minerals, that too can be easily arranged. Moreover, as almost no one seems to care about, it’s just wrong to invade a foreign land and take it over when almost no one there wants us. Invading Greenland would be wrong for the same reasons it was wrong when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
So what is Trump thinking? Here’s how he explained it in a recent interview with the New York Times:
President Trump:
Really it is, to me, it’s ownership. Ownership is very important.
David E. Sanger:
Why is ownership important here?
President Trump:
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, that you can have a base.
David E. Sanger:
So you’re going to ask them to buy it?
Katie Rogers:
Psychologically important to you or to the United States?
President Trump:
Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.
It’s like a gangster showing up at your house and saying “I need you to hand over your house to me. It’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. Or I’ll kill you.” This is not a well man.
Democratic leaders in Congress have convinced themselves that since Americans care a great deal about affordability, the answer to every question about anything should be “That’s a distraction from the real issue: affordability.” But right now the president of the United States, among all the other terrible things he is doing, is literally dragging the country toward a world war, and not against our enemies but against our friends.
They need to start saying this loudly and repeatedly:
Donald Trump has lost his mind. He is unstable and reckless, and his cabinet must invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office.
Many Democrats will say “But that’s not up to us. His cabinet would never do that!” They would say that because they are terrible at politics. The point isn’t that they could actually persuade the collection of simpering goons with which Trump has surrounded himself to remove him. The point is to get everyone focused on this crisis, to get the news media talking about it, to change the operative question from “Should we invade Greenland?” to “Has the president lost his mind, and if so, what should we do about it?”
We’ve all seen how Trump is a different person than he was in his first term, with all of his worst qualities intensified and exaggerated. He’s angrier, less coherent, more resentful, more distractible, more hateful, and more impulsive. Whether it was one event or the accumulated degradations of age, the unavoidable fact is that the most powerful person on earth is no longer of sound mind. We can’t avoid it any longer.
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