Europe Hopeless When It Runs Into a Flamboyant Manhattan Property Developer

 The unfolding of the Greenland controversy has already become one of the most extraordinary episodes in the entire 237-year history of the presidency of the United States. As regular readers would be aware, I am generally a firm supporter of President Trump and think that in this first year of his second term, he’s had one of the most successful and productive beginnings of a term, probably since Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933. He has closed the southern border, deported millions of illegal aliens, suspended the Green straitjacket that his predecessor placed on American commerce, frightened NATO into paying its share for the Alliance’s defenc,e, attacked wokeness, DEI, bigotry in universities, dishonesty in the media and outright anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party, cut taxes, spurred economic growth, revised tariffs, shrunk the federal bureaucracy, renovated the armed forces, and many other accomplishments. With this, there have come the vagaries of the president’s public personality.

More precisely, he has increasingly starkly revealed his negotiating methods. Whatever the subject, Donald Trump developed at an early adult age as an upcoming businessman the techniques of overstating things, pounding the table, making outrageously provocative statements, taking serious liberties with the truth when not under oath and calling it “constructive hyperbole”, and when he has moved his interlocutor some distance, abruptly accepting the resulting transaction. These techniques originated in his early days as an extremely flamboyant publicity-seeking Manhattan land developer. When he was trying to borrow all of the money for the renovation of the Commodore Hotel and get a spectacular tax break in doing so, he developed the habit of waving a thick dossier in the air and claiming that it contained ”a signed agreement” to complete his transaction. Only after he completed it, did he volunteer that the document had been indeed signed, but only by him and no one else. In the midst of his argument with former New York Mayor Ed Koch, when he said he could renovate the skating rink in Central Park in half the time and at half the cost of the city (which he did), he held a press conference every day even for the most mundane announcements, such as the arrival of shipments of sophisticated conducting pipes for the ammonia to keep the rink frozen.

These techniques are evident in most of his current controversies. Obviously, his Bureau of Peace in Gaza will be utter nonsense until the IDF has completed the military extermination of the Hamas terrorist apparatus. After that the dozens of improbable countries that tentatively signed up for it can help the United States rebuild Gaza. The most astonishing pyrotechnics of Trumpian negotiation have come in the Greenland affair. American presidents since Roosevelt have expressed an interest in the US national security relationship with Greenland. Only recently have the Chinese and Russians begun approaching that vast island comprehensively by sea. And only recently has the concern for its strategic metal deposits become a matter of high geopolitical strategic interest.