The Week In Crazy

So much insanity has happened this week that I'm almost ready to give up blogging.

First, there was Trump's temper tantrum over trade with China, a legitimate issue, considering our trade deficit with the world's most populous country, that he has de-legitimatized with tariff threats and unilateral bullying of China's president. Trump said  he was "the chosen one" - at the same time that he also accused Jews of selfishness and disloyalty for voting Democratic and thus betraying Israel (therefore expressing solidarity with and making anti-Semitic tropes against Jews simultaneously).  Trump may have been chosen by 304 electors, but 54 percent of the American popular electorate chose someone else.

And then there's his sudden support for manifest destiny.  I don't know how this whole business started (to borrow an opening lyric from a late-seventies pop song), but someone suggested that Donald Trump might want to buy Greenland.  I used to joke, back in the late eighties when Trump was a real estate developer and climate change was called the greenhouse effect and not taken very seriously by anyone whose name wasn't Albert Gore, that if the planet warmed up, Trump would buy property up there to build condos.  Now he wants to buy the whole damn island!

Denmark, which owns Greenland, politely let Trump know that the island is not for sale, and Trump canceled a state visit to Copenhagen because Denmark's female prime minister was "nasty" to him.  There may be strategic reasons to own the world's largest island - Secretary of State William Seward tried to buy it when he bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and President Harry Truman considered the idea in 1946 - and there are also commercial reasons to but it, which I'll explain in the next paragraph. But Trump made a hissy fit when he was old that Greenland was not for sale, not unlike in the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," when Veruca Salt refused to take no for an answer when she wanted to buy one of Willy Wonka's trained nut-shelling squirrels.  ("I want the world . . .")

Despite being far up in the Arctic, Greenland is a viable island because of its vast mineral resources, which Americans are eager to get in on, and the Danes would be happy if we do, because they make money off mineral exploration, which is already being undertaken there by . . . China.  But then, mineral exploration in Greenland is only made possible by climate change, which is melting glaciers up north as well as exacerbating rain-forest fires in the Brazilian jungle, and rain forests there, which help blunt the effects climate change, have been cleared for farmland at an amazing clip already.  French President Emanuel Macron hopes to address the Brazilian wildfires at the Group of Seven economic summit in the French seaside resort town of Biarritz, except that Trump won't want to talk about it because he wants to keep Mr. Murray's coal trains running back home. 

At least one billionaire industrialist - not the coal magnate Bob Murray - won't live to see the worst effects of the climate change he's famous for denying.  It seems that David Koch died.

And on the day that Trump, whose protectionism the Kochs despised, made unflattering remarks about China and his own Federal Reserve director, sending the stock market down over six hundred points and threatening his own re-election hopes - so long as Marianne Williamson isn't the Democratic nominee.

Crazy.