Donald Trump is back on his bullshit. After seemingly forgetting about it for several months, he is now once again demanding to conquer Greenland, and potentially also Canada. He is, at least, straightforwardly clear about the motivations for such a patently insane act: his personal feelings. “Ownership is very important,” he told The New York Times. “That’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty.”
As someone who has, alas, spent a disturbingly large fraction of my professional career observing and writing about Donald Trump, I have some comradely advice for the forces of freedom and democracy around the world: Stand up to him. It’s not a guarantee of success, but like all idiot bullies, Trump only respects strength and aggression, and at bottom he’s also a coward. Appeasement will only lead to him coming back for a second helping.
An important political background is that there is no real domestic constituency for conquering Greenland or Canada (or for Trump’s brain-dead trade war for that matter), among either the capitalist class or the public. Even Republicans are overwhelmingly against acts of war on a NATO ally. These are purely the deranged whims of a senile madman.
Trump has returned to power in large part because the American elite is stupid, corrupt, and morally rotten to its very marrow. Preventing this was objectively in the interest of American business, but they either failed to mobilize behind his opponent or, driven mad themselves by social media and right-wing group chats, actively helped him. For a decade now, a critical mass of elites have made an implicit bet that they would not suffer personally from appeasing and enabling Trump, and for a decade they have been correct.
Time to change that calculation. Here are some specific suggestions, in a rough order of increasing escalation:
Punish Trump-supporting billionaires, above all Elon Musk. The oligarchs aligned behind Trump are likely the softest and ripest target for an EU self-defense effort. Individuals like Musk, Larry and David Ellison, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Charles Kushner, and so on should be subject to targeted sanctions: banned from travel to democratic countries, their companies limited or forbidden from operating in democratic jurisdictions, and any property subject to relevant law seized—like the many companies headquartered in Ireland for tax avoidance reasons, or Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin.
In particular, Musk’s Twitter/X should be banned immediately in every democracy, on whatever grounds you can cook up. This would deal a heavy blow both inside America and out to the coordination forum for the global fascist movement.. It would also stop Musk from inciting race riots in countries like Britain. Luckily, his company has been in egregious violation of laws against the creation, possession, or distribution of child pornography and revenge porn that exist in most countries. The company has claimed it has stopped this, but as of last week it was not true. Ban X and Grok and ideally charge Musk with a separate count of child endangerment for every underage girl his chatbot undressed.
For a reach goal, it shouldn’t be that difficult to collapse Musk’s entire business empire. Every part of it is preposterously overvalued, and the core of it, Tesla, is in severe decline. Start pulling out bricks from the Jenga tower wherever you can. Banning Starlink, Tesla, and Twitter/X from the EU might just do it.
As I have previously written, the Republican Party has become reliant on a tiny handful of ultra-billionaires for a huge share of its political fundraising. Just removing Musk—who is already donating massive sums to the GOP for the upcoming midterms—would be a huge setback for the party.
Tank the American stock market. This one is handily made simpler by the extreme concentration of value in American stocks. The so-called “Magnificent Seven,” consisting of Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Tesla, make up about 35 percent of the total value of the S&P 500. Better still, Europe has a massive trade deficit in services relative to the United States, largely due to the very same companies.
So figure out which of these big firms Europe needs the least—I’ll warrant it could survive without Facebook for quite a while—and kick them out. The EU “anti-coercion instrument,” also known as the “bazooka,” is fairly well adapted for this purpose, though as usual it takes forever and requires a ludicrous amount of consensus. As the saying goes, hang together or you shall most assuredly hang separately.
Trump knows absolutely nothing about actual business, but he does have a highly emotional attachment to the stock market. In particular, he likes it very much when Number Go Up. If number were instead to Go Down, he would be very upset, and likely to reverse course.
Deploy James Bond. Trump recently posted personal communications from French President Emmanuel Macron, in yet another of his staggering violations of diplomatic protocol. Trump’s administration has the worst information security in history—conducting extremely sensitive communications through totally unvetted third-party apps on their personal phones—and is also shot through with drunks and sex pests. Task European spies with finding and publishing all the most embarrassing private communications from all these disgusting freaks—in particular, who is screwing whose spouse. Dribble the results out carefully to stoke the largest possible controversy, with bonus points for every time you get Scott Bessent to punch somebody.
Build European strength through economic unity. A Danish pension fund recently ditched its holdings of United States Treasury bonds, which is all to the good. If all Europe were to ditch its roughly $8 trillion in dollar assets, it would probably trigger an economic crisis.
This might hurt the EU worse than the U.S., however. European countries still have a lot of dollar-denominated liabilities, and if they just ditch their dollar assets, they could leave themselves vulnerable to the kind of dollar shortage crisis that happened during the 2008 financial crisis—this time without the Federal Reserve backstop they got then.
A better option, as I have advocated before, is to issue a great deal of EU-backed debt. The world is crying out for some safe asset that isn’t the dollar. Europe could provide that, while undermining the American economy, and also funding European rearmament and economic revitalization on the cheap.
Prepare targeted military action. Nobody except perhaps China could defeat the American military in a straight fight. But America’s numerous former close allies could inflict major reversals on American military power projection without direct battles. The nuclear radar station at Site J in Greenland could be taken out; the one in Britain could be cut off. All the troops in Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan could be kicked out, and all relevant base leases unilaterally abrogated. Learning from Ukraine’s fight against Russia, potential invasion victims should prepare for the most effective attacks on any potential American invasion force, including guerrilla formations to harass occupying troops.
Make no mistake, any of these moves would be painful and dangerous. Hopefully, the most extreme ones would not prove necessary. But the free world must face the fact that the former global hegemon re-elected a deranged madman who must be stopped.