If the Whole World Was a Cake

 It's almost impossible to overstate the madness of the fact that NATO troops are deploying to Greenland right now—not to defend the island from Russia or China—but to deter aggression from the United States. 

For years, the fear with Trump's rhetoric about NATO was that he might repudiate the U.S.'s obligations under the treaty and refuse to come to the aid of other member states if they were attacked from Russia. 

His first year back in the White House has given birth to a quite different fear: the possibility that he might invade the sovereign territory of a NATO ally himself. 

The mere idea is so absurd that most analysts for months refused to treat it seriously. Now, though, Trump in his meandering, doddering rhetoric has returned to the theme so often that he has made it impossible for them to do so any longer. 

So now, European troops are mobilizing to Greenland, apparently in an effort to discourage Trump from attacking his own ally. 

The last time Denmark was menaced in this way was when Hitler's Germany decided to violate the country's neutrality in the opening months of World War II. 

Now, the United States, rather than being the liberator of Europe, has become the Hitlerian power that threatens the nations of that continent with unprovoked aggression. 

And why? To what end? 

As Trump conceded in a recent interview with the New York Times, the United States can already send troops to Greenland under existing security agreements with Denmark any time it wants to, to defend it from Russia or China. 

Why, then, does the United States need to "own" the territory, as Trump says? 

Trump in the interview was explicit: he needs the country, he explained, for "psychological" reasons. 

And what are those "psychological" reasons? Because Greenland is big, and looks even bigger on a map thanks to the Mercator projection? 

The landmass itself is a largely uninhabitable ice-bound wasteland. I don't think Trump could stand to be in Greenland himself for longer than five minutes. 

His desire for the territory cannot be linked to any love of Greenland's culture or people, whose aspirations for self-determination he has repeatedly snubbed, as he has their current elected leadership. 

So what is it? He needs it because it looks big? It's yet another exercise, then, in phallic compensation? 

He needs to gobble up things just because they're close to us? 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: when one is trying to diagnose the motives for Trump's actions, one cannot think in terms of "dealmaking" or even of extortion. That's too generous to Trump. There's not a game or even a "con" here that he's playing. There's no trade Denmark could make that would appease him. 

The only proper way to analyze Trump's decisions is through the lens of infantile narcissism—a level of human functioning considerably below that even of extortion and gamesmanship. 

Trump is a doddering, drooling fool whose ordinary behavior in any given press conference—as the whole world can see with their own eyes—shows that he is not minimally socialized to be in the presence of other adults. 

That's why he wants Greenland. That and that alone. The motives of infantile narcissism. It's big and shiny and he wants it for his own, like some sort of bauble he wants to put in his mouth. 

As he said last Spring: "We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that[.]" 

He said the same thing about Gaza around that time: he wants, he said, to "take Gaza, hold it, and cherish it."

What, at this rate, wouldn't he "take" and "cherish" in this way, if it caught his fancy?

Indeed, "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take / He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all," to borrow a couplet from the poet John Davidson. 

The unbridled Id. The narcissistic infant in us all, that just wants to gobble up all it sees and assimilate it to itself. 

Père Ubu as president.