Why Greenland?

On Trump's latest string of preposterous plans.

Ugh. I guess I need to talk about Greenland.

I’ll start by recommending David’s excellent item yesterday, which dealt with the practical problems journalists have in dealing with Donald Trump. It’s very good.

So: I organized my old class about the presidency around the question of why presidents do the things they do, and one of the key points I wanted to get across – back when we had normal presidents – is that most of the things they do are not personal.

Sometimes presidents do what they do because they are acting out of national interest. An obvious example is Franklin Roosevelt fighting against Japan after Pearl Harbor and against Germany after that nation declared war. Any president, we think, would have done the same. To be sure: It’s really perceived national interest, and that creates some room for personal choices, but often those perceptions are so widely shared that the president’s decision isn’t personal.

Or sometimes presidents might be acting on behalf of their party. Any Democrat who could have been nominated by Democrats in 2008 would have pushed for the Affordable Care Act in 2009. Any Republican nominated after 1978 would have pushed for tax cuts for the wealthy upon winning.¹

Sometimes it’s because the bureaucracy, or the courts, or Congress has maneuvered the president into doing something. Sometimes it’s because the president is trying to maneuver one of those institutions into doing something.

Sometimes presidents do things, from attending summits to pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys simply because that’s what presidents do. That could be because the Constitution says so, but in most cases it’s because some president did it and it became part of the office and now there would be real costs to defying expectations.

And of course presidents do things because they’re popular and therefore might help them get re-elected.

None of those really have anything to do with the president’s personality, or even in most cases anything personal at all.

It’s even true for many things that Donald Trump did in his first term as president, and much of what he’ll do now.

But, more than any other recent president – most likely more than any other president ever – it’s not true of many things Trump does. Which gets us to the Panama Canal. And Canada. And Greenland.

The problem with attributing something to a president’s idiosyncrasies, however, is that it immediately forces the question: Exactly what is going on? What’s the pattern that this otherwise-inexplicable action fits?

The problem with Trump’s Greenland thing is that it’s consistent with a whole lot of potential explanations, which you’ll hear various pundits assert with total confidence. David had some of these, but I’m going to try to list all of them.

Dominance games. Trump will say something outrageous just to force those around him to treat nonsense from him as if it was brilliant. If this is the motivation, the stupider the idea, the better!

Distraction. A popular theory: Trump, people say, will say outrageous things to distract from some other controversy. On the surface, that seems unlikely here, given that presumably the president-elect would rather highlight popular things he ran on than this meshugana idea. Still, all that matters is if Trump thinks that it plays well for him, not that it really does.

Mad man theory. The idea is that Trump is deliberately acting irrational because it will give him leverage in negotiations with other nations; the same could be true in domestic deal-making as well. Now, it’s true, as Dan Drezner writes, that if that’s what he’s been up to it’s been thoroughly unsuccessful so far. But yeah, that could be what he’s trying to do.

Having fun. Some people speculate that he’s just trolling everyone. “Trolling” is used lots of ways, but the core idea to me involves saying something outrageous because one gets enjoyment from seeing people react to it.

It’s the attention. Closely related, but simpler: He mostly just likes people to pay attention to him, and knows that saying nutty things will accomplish that.

Someone is messing with him. Okay, I haven’t seen anyone say this. But I will: Maybe someone close to him wants to subvert him and some of his policy plans by distracting him with nonsense, and Trump has fallen for it. Who knows?

He’s nuts or he’s lost it. The quote from Bananas is always relevant; the rebel leader assumes office and then gives a completely crazy speech, because…he’s actually gone crazy. Unlike the Republican Party, however, the rebels get rid of their leader.

Stupidity and Ignorance. I’m generally a fan of the adage that one should never attribute to evil anything that can be explained by stupidity. I’m not saying Trump is just a yahoo who knows nothing whatsoever about government and policy despite having served four years as president…but I will say that I’ve pretty much never heard him say anything that would disprove that assertion. The theory here is that Trump is utterly sincere: He really thinks that Greenland is up for sale and that the US could and should buy it, and once he gets that notion in his head no one can convince him otherwise.

All of these are at least plausible, and unfortunately they all fit Trump’s actions, at least in this case. But they also have very different implications. A world in which Trump is carefully plotting to humiliate others is very different than one where he’s actually mad; a presidency based on seeking attention is very different than one where the president just doesn’t know what he’s doing. Of course, more than one could be correct, in which case the question is why particular situations evoke particular responses.

I guess the main point I’d make is that even with Trump I’d be very careful about attributing presidential actions to personal factors. And while I do think that the last one on the list above is the one I return to, I’d generally be skeptical of anyone who is confident that there’s one clear explanation for whatever any president does.

1. Yes, Tulsi Gabbard would have made very different choices as president than Joe Biden — but that’s (among other reasons) why Gabbard came nowhere close to the Democratic nomination. Similarly, the Joe Biden of the 1970s couldn’t have been nominated in 2020; he was nominated only because he successfully convinced party actors that he would seek to enact the party’s agenda.