From Smirking Chimp
With America's infrastructure crumbling, its stature on a global scale dwindling, racial and social tensions on the rise, it's hard to believe the president of the United States might have a serious notion to purchase Greenland, but it's been all over the news the past few days.
Denmark owns the 811,000-square-mile island in the North Atlantic, and a high-ranking government official quickly responded to Trump's query by saying that Greenland is "open for business, but it's not for sale." Greenland is home to 56,000 people, mostly Innuits, and its major industry is fishing. The news of the president's interest in buying Greenland originated in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
According to NBC News: "NBC News confirmed that Trump had expressed interest in buying the island, which has natural resources including coal and uranium and already houses an American airbase, part of the U.S.'s ballistic missile early warning system.
"It's not clear how much the United States would offer for Greenland, and whether Denmark would be amenable to a sale. The U.S. has looked into buying Greenland twice previously, in 1867 and then 1946, when President Harry Truman offered $100 million but Denmark declined to sell.
If Trump is serious about being reelected, his fancies for buying Greenland should have never come to be. When he's not picking a fight with some big-name politico on a national level, he's downgrading a whole race of people. None of his promises have seen the light of day. Even his dreams of building a wall between the United States and Mexico is at a standstill. Yet, his base remains between 40-to-45 percent. They must take the news of the importance of buying Greenland as if God ordained this to be a matter of utmost importance.
If he wants to sweep the Rust Belt come 2020, Trump had better make good on his promises to bring coal jobs back to Kentucky and West Virginia, auto-making plants back to Michigan, steel jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania. Plans to develop Greenland into some industrial catastrophe is not a good way, right now -- sitting a little more than 14 months out from the 2020 election, to focus his child-like fascinations around.
Why not buy Iceland, instead? There are tons of things you can do in and around the major city of Reykjavic. Take a full-day tour of a glacier lagoon. Take a whale-watching tour. Try some dry-suit snorkeling. Go on a day trip to nearby Landmannalaugar and drive past Mount Hekla, Iceland's most active volcano. Reykjavic might be a wonderful place to perch a 56-floor Trump hotel.
Yes, just when things couldn't get any weirder with Donald Trump, they do. In a Jim Traficant-like way, Trump is getting more and more unhinged with each passing day. He'd be much better off to see that something gets done on the background checks of guns, the red-flag rule, closing the boyfriend loophole or any other thing he can throw into the mix of the guns gone wild in the wild, wild west of America than to have any silly notion of purchasing Greenland from Denmark.
Things are bad in this country right now. Such silliness about buying Greenland is not welcome to the overall scene of political balderdash the Trump's off-script, rambling trek of his 24-hour news cycle. It will be nice to get a democrat in the White House, along with a Democrat-heavy Senate, that can focus on real issues and get things done. Hurling insults at one of his political opponents at one of his sundry political rallies aside, it's a real hard-sell to see the validity of buying Greenland. Even members of his base must be shaking their heads at this news. If they're not, they certainly should be!
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