Donald Trump has long sought to make anything he controls bigger.
President-elect Donald Trump is still a week away from taking office, but his musings about coercing Canada to join the United States while acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal — declining at one point to rule out the use of military force in those two particular cases — have made for a surreal prologue to his second administration. It’s a fixation that has set world leaders on edge and forced congressional Republicans into the odd position of insisting that the incoming president is not planning to storm the Arctic.
“The United States is not going to invade another country,” Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said yesterday on “Meet the Press.” Trump, Lankford insisted, was simply making “bold” statements intended on getting “everyone to the table.”
Whether the words are a negotiating tactic or something more, the president-elect’s expressed desire to expand the nation’s footprint reflects an urge that has animated much of his career in the public eye: to make whatever he controls as big as possible.
In that sense, Trump’s talk of taking control of Greenland and seizing Canada by “economic force” can be viewed less as an articulation of a foreign policy objective than as an extension of an ethos that goes back to his single-minded efforts to expand his businesses through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s.
In tonight’s newsletter, we’ll explain why.
Painting other people’s houses
The prime minister of Greenland says the territory wants to work more closely with the United States on certain issues, but Greenlanders, like Panamanians, have expressed little interest in actually handing their territory over to Americans.
As a businessman, Trump, though, has often paid little mind to the people standing in the way of his desired expansions, although they have sometimes found ways to stop him.