Donald Trump’s call to annex Greenland has roiled markets and flabbergasted half the world. But Trump’s supporters in conservative communities – to the degree that this issue has their attention at all – are apt to accept his political argument as genuine.
The thing that is most irritating about this “Trump is play 8d chess while everyone else is playing checkers” argument (irritating specifically; there are more horrifying or awful things) is that because the argument is specifically that Trump is engaging in complex negotiation, any concession of any kind will be portrayed as a success. If the EU does anything — signs a trade deal, updates NATO governance, increases military budgets domestically — Trump will call it a deal and all these morons will say “see, look, I told you, he was just negotiating.” And there is no way to claim that the cost of the negotiation tactics is not worth the benefit of the so-called deal because they are explicitly isolationist and burning bridges with other countries is a feature, not a bug.
While entirely true, it doesn’t mean that the whole thing is a win for Trump.
While his supporters might be inclined to see the best possible version of his Greenland idiocy, it still comes back to “How does this lower my grocery bill?”
Even if Trump can pretend that he’s successfully wasting his time on geopolitical strategic posturing instead of addressing critical domestic concerns, well… Yeah. None of that looks good for him.
People voted for him because they’re struggling. They’re still struggling.
An adage I come back to time and time again with MAGA is that they may be the stupidest people in the world, but they still know how much money is in their bank account.
Sure, they’ll loudly talk about all of Trump’s “accomplishments” but it’s not because those things actually matter to them. It’s because they’re trying to convince everyone, including and especially themselves, that they’re not complete suckers