Madness

Greenland.  Denmark has been a long time and strong ally of the United States(1).  We've had military bases and other presence on the island since the Second World War.  If the U.S. wants to expand its linkage with Denmark and Greenland for security, including resource issues, we would be able to do so.

Instead, President Trump, needlessly and recklessly, is pursuing the acquisition of Greenland, and has now threatened tariffs on any country that disagrees with his push to acquire that icy land.  This is lunacy. He has only one mode of operation; sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't, but there is never any overall coherence, other than being tied to his need for self aggrandizement.  MAGA is whatever Trump does at any particular moment, nothing more, nothing less.(2)  He has no check engine light.  He will keep pushing for whatever he is obsessed with in the moment, regardless of the law, the constitution, or long term implications.  The only way to stop him is a punch in the face, repeated frequently.  China's effectively done it with the result that Trump's economic policies are now tougher on our allies than on our enemies.

There are things that, at a policy level, I agree with Trump on, but the overall chaos, repeated reversals by the president, the number of incompetent personnel he has appointed, his inability to persuade anyone on the fence, and the lack of thoughtful strategy means that little of what he is doing is sustainable (3)  Not that he cares.  He lives in the moment, in his own reality show.

And then there is the corruption.  Pardons given out in exchange for contributors or payments to Trump intermediaries. Actions to pump the value of the Trump family's crypto currency investments.  The golf course and other investments in Qatar.  And it's blatant.  In May 2025, Donald Trump Jr was to appear on a panel titled "Monetizing MAGA" at an investment conference in Doha until somebody finally realized that it was a bit over the top and changed the title.  Yes, the Biden family was also corrupt, but so what?(4)

His disinterest in the future outside of himself and his family means that when he leaves office the Republican party will be a hollowed out shell.  The primary occupation of likely successor JD Vance is playing with his online friends while he decides what he wants to be when he grows up. 

As for the Democrats, we are witnessing the derangement of the entire party apparatus and its supporting institutions.

There are no adults in the room.   

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(1) Denmark is also the only western European country without a surging right-wing anti-immigration party because the existing centrist government has taken strong action to control its borders, insist upon immigrant assimilation, and deports those who are a danger to the country. 

(2) That's why I have not wasted any time reading the new National Security Strategy (NSS).  Trump hasn't read it so why should I?  Regardless of what is in the NSS, our foreign policy will be whatever Trump says it is at any particular moment in time. 

(3)  In the case of Greenland, acquisition requires approval by a 2/3 vote of the Senate and approval of the purchase appropriation by House and Senate. Good luck with that, though I am sure that Trump will take the position he can do it by Executive Order.  He's also threatened military action which he cannot do without Congressional approval, which he will not get.  I am sure he will take the position that it is a national security emergency that does not require Congressional approval, but attacking a NATO ally that poses no threat is different from Iran and Venezuela, which is why Trump has no legal authority under existing legislation to impose the tariffs.  Not that he cares.  The only thing that matters to Trump is can he get away with it.  While I think it unlikely Trump would take military action he is unpredictable enough that it cannot be ruled out.  If he does so without Congressional approval he should be impeached and convicted.  

(4) UPDATE:  From the Feb 2, 2026 edition of The Scroll from Tablet Magazine.  I'll quote the whole thing because it illustrates the scope of Trump family entanglement with foreign interests.  This doesn't even touch the pay to play aspects of domestic pardons granted by the president.

It is an open secret by now that President Donald Trump’s family members and associates, including those who serve in his administration, freely mix their personal financial interests with U.S. foreign policy. A weekend report in The Wall Street Journal offers a window into how this process has played out with the United Arab Emirates—suggesting, at best, major conflicts of interest and, at worst, corruption on a scale that would make Hunter Biden blush. 

 The Journal reports that on Jan. 16, 2025, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, a company controlled by the Emirati royal and national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan paid $500 million for a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm launched before the election by Trump’s son Eric and special envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach. According to WLF corporate documents and “people familiar with the matter,” half of that sum was paid up front, directing $187 million to entities controlled by the Trump family and $31 million to entities controlled by the Witkoff family. An additional $31 million went to an entity controlled by WLF cofounders and crypto scammers Zak Folkman and Chase Herro. “At the time of the investment,” the Journal notes, “World Liberty had no products,” and the deal granted the Emirati company no rights over WLF’s future crypto token sales, up to then WLF’s only source of revenue. 

 A few months later, in May, the Trump administration approved the sale of 500,000 Nvidia artificial intelligence chips per year, including state-of-the-art Blackwells, to the UAE. Under the Biden administration, these sales had been blocked due to fears that the chips could fall into Chinese hands. In particular, there was bipartisan concern about G42, an Emirati AI company owned by Tahnoon, and its China-born CEO, Peng Xiao. “G42’s CEO Peng Xiao operates and is affiliated with an expansive network of UAE and [People’s Republic of China]-based companies that develop dual-use technologies and materially support PRC military-civil fusion and human rights abuses,” a report from the Republican-chaired House Select Committee on the CCP had warned in 2024. Under the deal announced in May, G42 will annually receive 35,000 Blackwells, which are prohibited from being exported to China. 

 Indeed, G42 now appears to be deeply enmeshed in WLF’s corporate governance. Under the deal, a Tahnoon-owned company called Aryam Investment 1—registered in Delaware and Abu Dhabi in December 2024, a month before the deal—became WLF’s largest shareholder and the only investor outside the company’s founders. The deal placed two Aryam executives on WLF’s five-member board. Both of these “Aryam executives,” however, were also executives at G42, which jointly manages Aryam with the Tahnoon-owned investment firm MGX. One of them was Peng. G42’s head of crypto and blockchain and an adviser to the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, Fiacc Larkin, joined WLF in January 2025 as its “chief strategic advisor.”

 After the initial January investment, the Trump and Witkoff families subsequently made other deals with Tahnoon-owned entities, even as Tahnoon was lobbying for access to U.S.-made chips. In May, Zach Witkoff announced at a crypto conference in Dubai that MGX would be using WLF’s stablecoin, USD1—a crypto token pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar—to make a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange Binance, in a project to be managed by G42’s Larkin. The deal, which overnight made USD1 one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies, meant that WLF could earn an additional $80 million per year just by investing its $2 billion cash pile in U.S. Treasurys. 

 Following the investment, the UAE also began lobbying for Trump to pardon Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had pled guilty to financial crimes including money laundering and spent four months in U.S. prison in 2024. (A lawsuit filed in November 2025 under the Antiterrorism Act accuses Binance of “knowingly moving at least $50 million for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations” since the Oct. 7 attacks, as well as helping Venezuela and Iran evade U.S. sanctions.) Zhao, who lives in the UAE and has cultivated close ties with the Emirati royal family, was pardoned by Trump in October 2025—which may or may not be related to his son’s business ties with Zhao’s company. The Journal reported in August that WLF had generated $4.5 billion since November 2024 in large part due to “a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance.” That platform, PancakeSwap, tried to increase the usage—and therefore the value—of USD1 by offering payouts to top users of the currency. Many of those users, according to the same report, communicated with one another in Chinese. 

 The same overlapping set of companies was also involved in the Trump administration’s TikTok deal, which we criticized last week for allowing the platform’s Chinese former parent company, ByteDance, to retain a major ownership stake in TikTok US while potentially leaving the TikTok algorithm under the control of the Chinese. Under that deal, MGX received a 15% stake in TikTok US, as did Silver Lake, a U.S.-based private equity firm that is a major investor in G42. G42, meanwhile, is a former investor in ByteDance, having sold its $100 million stake in the company in February 2024, as part of a bid to convince the Biden administration to allow it to purchase AI chips. 

 All of this is, of course, fairly shocking. But what is potentially more concerning are the backroom deals we don’t yet know about. The UAE, though imperfect, is at least somewhat aligned with U.S. foreign-policy interests. That’s far less true of Qatar, which has done billions of dollars’ worth of business with the Witkoff family and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Russia, which has sold Witkoff on the idea of big deals in the future; and other deep-pocketed and unscrupulous actors ranging from Saudi Arabia to China and Turkey. We are learning about these deals with the UAE a year after the fact, and only because of some impressive legwork by the Journal. We can only imagine what else might be out there, waiting to be discovered when the Democrats take back the House.