Many people still
don't have the stomach to follow politics these days after the disappointment of the last election and the return of the
Trump three-ring circus to Washington. It's depressing and nerve-wracking, even if you just hear snippets in passing or read a few paragraphs of a news story about
billionaires at Mar-a-Lago or strange D-list celebrity political figures being lifted into positions of great responsibility. There's only so much you can take.
But I do wish that everyone could bring themselves to watch at least some of the president-elect's
press conference on Tuesday. Yes, much of it was the standard lunacy about showerheads and whales and windmills. He always plays his greatest hits. But he's got some new material that I think people should be aware of.
His recent comments about
Mexico,
Canada,
Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of
territorial expansion.
In that typically crazy press conference on Tuesday, he made the startling announcement that
he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His loyal hatchet woman, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
promptly announced legislation to do just that so that the government could get to work changing all the maps. The fact that
the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since before there was a United States of America makes no difference. Trump wants it and he's going to make it so.
And when asked in the press conference if Trump actually planned to seize the Greenland, and the Panama Canal as well, Trump said it was necessary for national security, the same rationale Vladimir Putin used to invade Ukraine which
Trump called "savvy" and "genius" at the time. It is quite clear that Trump is serious about this. When asked directly, he would not rule out using the military to accomplish his goal.
He is also quite serious about
using U.S. troops to stage military operations in Mexico, ostensibly against the drug cartels. And for all of his "joking" about Canada being the 51st state as a way to emasculate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he conceded that he only planned to use
economic force to bend Canada to his will, which was very restrained of him.
With Trump saying that the U.S. needs Greenland and the Panama Canal for national security reasons it's pretty clear that they are laying the groundwork for military action. (Nobody is going to "sell" either of them.) I doubt that there will be any serious actions, economic or otherwise against Canada because America does lots of business with them. But Trump is stirring up a tremendous amount of resentment for no good reason. And we have every reason to believe that he's serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don't be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion.
He wanted to do it in his last term.)
Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn't even a "vibe" in last November's election.
Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin's Ukraine invasion which he thought from the beginning made perfect sense. His Defense Secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, put it in terms Trump probably liked very much. He called it "Putin's give me my **** back war":