America, this is your insane president

Also, very disrespectful to the Prime Minister to address the letter "Dear Jonas".  

Trump has no leverage over the Committee, though.  And I do hope the Prime Minister responded to "Donald".

 

Thousands of demonstrators gathered across Denmark and Greenland Saturday to protest President Donald Trump’s controversial demand to seize the Arctic island.

[...]

An estimated 10,000 Danes gathered at Copenhagen’s City Hall Square to push back against Trump’s threats, with many people in the crowd donning parody hats mimicking Trump’s signature, bright-red MAGA cap that instead reads “Make America Go Away.”

The caps also read “Nu det NUUK,” a play on Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and means “Now it’s enough.” On the side of the cap is the Greenland flag and the country’s own spin on the MAGA slogan.

The caps have become so popular they’re reportedly sold out in Denmark.

[...]

Rallies were also held across the Danish realm, as well as in the capital of the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut in Canada’s far north.

  Independent UK

"We're respected again." -- DJ Trump

UPDATE 01/20/2026:

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

  The Atlantic

And perhaps the foresight to realize a possible - perhaps probable - U.S. defection.

Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. [...] Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

[...]

The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him.

I'm afraid we cannot pin our hopes on Republicans in Congress. Nor, actually, even Democrats.

 UPDATE 01/20/2026:

Divisive narcissism

Don't encourage him

That woman just about gagged me when she said he has a great smile.  WTF?  And then I learned she's voting for Joe Biden, which makes me wonder if that, "You're so handsome when you smile," was actually a dig for all the women men complain about being too harsh and saying they should smile more?  I'll try to believe that's what she was doing.

Narcisissist conversation with concerned governor

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Projecting lies

Watching Fox News ahead of Wednesday’s impeachment vote, President Trump gave a Twitter call out to one of his most combative allies in the House.

In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on “Fox & Friends” about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who “couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.”

But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress” were common practices of past administrations.

“They simply wanted to get at the president,” Mr. Collins had actually said. “So they said at the end of the day, we can’t form any crimes. We’re going to have a vague abuse of power. And while we’re at it, let’s just throw in abuse of — obstruction of Congress because we didn’t get our way.”

[...]

Mr. Trump has made a habit of injecting his own words into the comments of people he sees on television and then publishing them as direct quotes on Twitter, where he has more than 67 million followers.

[...]

When Ken Starr, the former independent counsel, appeared on Fox News last month, he noted that Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, had testified that efforts to pressure the Ukrainians to conduct investigations into Mr. Trump’s rivals did amount to a quid pro quo.

But when Mr. Trump quoted Mr. Starr on his Twitter feed, he replaced that part with a phrase suggesting just the opposite.

“Ambassador Sondland’s testimony stated that President Trump said the Ukraine President should just do the right thing (No Quid Pro Quo),” Mr. Trump wrote.

[...]

Another time in November, Mr. Trump heard Jason D. Meister, an adviser to his campaign, tick off a list of his accomplishments on Fox News. “He’s done so many great things,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, purporting to quote Mr. Meister. “He’s devastated ISIS & killed AlBaghdadi, building Wall.’”

While Mr. Meister did talk about the Islamic State and the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its leader, he never mentioned the president’s efforts to build a wall across the southwestern border.

More often than not, the allies who Mr. Trump misquotes do little to publicly contradict him.

[...]

“I have regularly tried to reach out to Fox News guests that he has misquoted,” said Daniel Dale, a fact checker for CNN who, along with his colleague Tara Subramaniam, has compared all of Mr. Trump’s tweets against video clips of the people he quotes. “I can’t recall someone ever responding. In general, Trump allies just let the creative additions stand.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who studies authoritarianism and propaganda, called the tactic a “power play.”

“He’s challenging them to correct him,” she said. “This is how a cult of personality works. The leader will say something that everyone knows is wrong, and no one will correct him.”

[...]

Mr. Trump told reporters that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, had told him after he read the transcript [of Trump's call to Zelensky] that it “was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.”

Mr. McConnell later denied making the comment, saying at a news conference that he had “not had any conversations on that subject” with Mr. Trump.

But other Republicans have said nothing when Mr. Trump appeared to have wrongly quoted them. The president said, for example, that Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, had described the call as “perfect” — a word the president uses repeatedly to describe his own conduct.

If Mr. Scott also used that word, it wasn’t in public.

“We’ve all seen it. We saw the transcript, we saw what the whistle-blower put out. I don’t see what they’re talking about,” Mr. Scott had said on Fox News, defending the president but not using his chosen word, “perfect.”

[...]

“It represents his will to market, to frame reality, to make the world appear as he wishes, despite reality,” [Jennifer R. Mercieca, a historian at Texas A&M University who specializes in American political rhetoric,] said. “He counts on his followers being so gullible and so cynical that they won’t doubt the reality that he has constructed for them.”

  NYT

Mores simply, this is what a narcissist does all the time. They rephrase what they've heard into what they want to have heard when they retell it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Do all narcissists do this?

I now know three who do.

[In Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi, he discusses] his “perfect” call with the president of Ukraine. Here’s the kicker: “I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America’s interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.”

You see, when you underline things it makes them true. People might lie when they’re typing in normal text, but if you underline it, or ALL CAP it, or UNDERLINE ALL CAP with an exclamation point, it pretty much has to be true. Watch:

TRUMP IS A STABLE GENIUS!

See?

  The Bulwark

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tim Apple: Daniel Dale has the list

U.S. President Donald Trump called Apple chief executive Tim Cook “Tim Apple” at a White House event last Wednesday.

  Daniel Dale @ Toronto Star

And then he gave two different explanations: first, he said he'd said "Tim Cook Apple", but said Cook so softly people missed it. When the audio clip proved that to be an obvious lie, he claimed he said Tim Apple to save time and words.

Gwenda Blair, author of a biography on Trump, said the president is a disciple of the “school of Roy.” One of Trump’s key mentors, the late ethics-challenged lawyer Roy Cohn, advocated endless brawling over any admission of fault.

“Never back down, never say you’re sorry, never acknowledge any mistakes, if something goes wrong it’s somebody else’s fault, double down, triple down, throw anything back in the opposition’s face,”

[...]

For Trump, Blair said, “saying you’re wrong for something small is as bad saying you’re wrong for something large. It’s admitting some kind of fallibility.”

[...]

This was in keeping with Trump’s long-standing approach to minor verbal missteps. At least 20 times in office, the president has responded to a trivial error by amending the erroneous word in a way that does not acknowledge any error at all.

The prepared text of his State of the Union address in 2018, emailed to reporters by the White House in advance, had Trump lauding a Homeland Security agent named Celestino Martinez, who “goes by C.J.” Instead, Trump said, “He goes by D.J.”

Then he added: “And C.J. He said, ‘Call me either one.’ So we’ll call you C.J.”

[...]

He has spoken of a Border Patrol agent “on the Clintons’, and Chiltons’, ranch,” mocked a country that opposed the presence of U.S. “mishes, and missiles,” urged skeptics of his Israel policy to “open our hearts and minds to possible, and possibilities,” and boasted of beating election expectations “for the midtown, and midturn, year,” not quite getting to “midterm” on the second try.

[...]

At an Illinois rally in October, Trump said a large percentage of American steel jobs were “vanquished” before he took office, an inadvertent departure from his usual line about how they had “vanished.”

“You could say ‘vanquished’ and ‘vanished.’ It’s a combination of both,” he said.

Appearing in June on the Fox News show Fox and Friends, Trump was attempting to complain about the diversity visa lottery program when he mixed up his words.

“We have the lottery program. It’s called lotta visary,” he said.

“Diversity lottery program,” host Steve Doocy interjected.

Trump’s dismissive response: “Yeah, or lottery visa. OK? Whatever. They have 50 names. Every one of them has ‘lottery.’”

Every one except lotta visary. Lotta visary???

There was at least one time Trump confessed to a word error. Or, perhaps, a supposed word error.

Do you remember it? I didn't until Dale reminded us.

Trump received furious criticism in July for saying, while appearing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin, that “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.

His implausible explanation more than 24 hours later: “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t — or why it wouldn’t — be Russia.’”

It's surprising he tried to back out of that, actually.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders said the next day that Trump’s willingness to admit such errors demonstrates his “credibility.”

“When he sees that he has misspoken,” she said, “he comes out and he says that.”

Yes, we noticed. But thanks for pointing out it's about credibility, Sarah. What do you bet he told her to say that?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sadly, this may be the most accurate assessment of the Trump situation

Because no one with power or authority seems to understand how to deal with Trump’s unique brand of asshole behavior, it’s not likely he’ll ever be checked until the next election—if then.

Why am I so sure? I’m the child of two narcissists.

When you’re a child of narcissists, you get very good at noticing patterns in behavior. You learn to recognize the signs leading up to “meltdowns” (public tantrums over the tiniest of slights that are held up as great injustices), “dressings down” (forcing someone to listen to a complete accounting of all the ways they’re terrible), and “wagon fixing” (teaching someone a lesson for imagined slights by doling out an outsized punishment). You learn this because it is necessary for your survival, to keep out of the line of fire, or at least out of the shrapnel zone. Narcissists as parents are all about wielding control over people, and they don’t care what kind of asshole they have to be to do it.

[...]

Assholes can be and do get defeated, but expecting a true Watergate moment—where the president steps down to prevent the country from falling further into chaos—is not based in reality. Media outlets and Twitter personas do a disservice to everyone when they hype up the cinematic ending that’s never ever going to arrive. Understanding what others know about aberrant behavior and how to navigate it might be the only way to hold the president even minimally to account.

  Vice

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