First Draft – Trump 'Still Wants' Greenland
Our president isn't done trying to steal land, another Dem win gives the GOP and Trump another reason to sweat, and the terrible Epstein files keep coming.
It’s Feb. 2, which means… it’s Groundhog Day. The 1993 Bill Murray movie of the same name popularized the idea of a ‘time loop,’ or basically having to re-live the same awful day every day… which kinda feels like a metaphor for having to live through the current Trump presidency.
Good morning! It’s Swin, filling in for today’s ‘First Draft.’ I was planning to announce the launch of Zeteo’s flagship new YouTube show, “Fireball-Shots Mondays, With Swin,” then I thought too many of you would take me seriously. Instead, in honor of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello’s concert for Minneapolis, I’m flagging one of my favorite covers of all time, also by Springsteen and Morello: their 2014 live version of “Stayin’ Alive.” I like to think of the content and style as a prophetic anthem for the times we are living through today.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the president isn’t done terrorizing Greenland, Trump’s corruption intensifies, an Ohio city prepares for a possible ICE invasion, and Israel kills dozens in the deadliest day for Gaza in months.
Trump Isn’t Done Terrorizing Greenland
There is a maximal glut of crises going on in the world and within our borders at this very moment, so it’s easy to forget the otherwise unforgettable. One reason for this is our morally decayed and physically decaying imbecile president can’t pick a lane.
Attention paid to his elite-pedophilia-related government cover-up is shifted away to gawk at his scandalous invasion of Venezuela, only to have that news cycle supplanted by intense focus on his administration’s killing spree in Minnesota, only to have that briefly interrupted by the recurring international guessing-game of: “Is He Bombing Iran Again Today?” With such a cavalcade of horrors occurring in the span of roughly a month, who has the time to remember that Donald Trump is presiding over a measles comeback, trying his damnedest to rig elections and jail people who piss him off, jacking up millions of people’s health insurance costs for no good reason, and lining his pockets all while making a broken economy markedly shittier, along with so much else.
You may have even forgotten that just last month, the Trump administration was threatening to take over Greenland by military force and pushed us to the brink of setting off a grand-scale economic war against our European partners that would have tanked the global economy. It was the most Mad King thing that Trump had done in a year defined by voluminous Mad King-style actions and policies. The crisis was real, the commentators and politicians claiming the Greenland matter was a silly “distraction” were dead wrong, and several of our NATO allies deployed troops to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, as if the United States was a mortal foe, and not an allied leader of the free world that it is on paper.
In the time since the crisis – or at least this round of it – peaked last month, Trump declared a “framework” was struck for a future deal on Greenland. With the specter of America’s economic self-detonation looming large, he paused his war, both literal and tariff-related. Suddenly, US and European officials are making nice again in public, albeit very nervously. NATO gift-wrapped Trump a temporary, face-saving reprieve from his own blundering imperialism.
But the damage has already been done – and the threat has not actually gone away. It, like Trump at a meeting, is only napping.
“He still wants it,” a US official tells me, citing conversations since late last month with members of Trump’s national security team. Additionally, one Trump administration official relays that the president is willing to negotiate, but that Trump has recently expressed some wariness that the Europeans are trying to placate him with the military-base status quo that the Americans already enjoy on the territory. Other Trump advisers tell me that, when it comes to Greenland, the president is willing to take his foot off the MAGA-imperialism gas for now, but that little has changed with Trump’s desire. In recent conversations, since the crisis temporarily cooled, Trump has said he still believes Greenland should be an American territory, no one else’s, and that he wants it figured out by the end of this term in office, his advisers recount.