Donald Trump held a press conference this week in which he once again threatened to invade and take over Greenland and Panama, and that Canada should be annexed as our 51st state. Trudeau replied to that by saying “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” while the French foreign minister said “Non,” the EU wasn’t going to sit back and let their borders be violated.
All of this is utterly bonkers — the delusional aspirations of a very stupid narcissist. That he’s the president is not sufficient grounds to justify this program of expansionist imperialism, and I hope that reality is going to crush his dreams in short order. Hope. That’s a threadbare belief at this point.
But I am most worried about the weird, pathetic obsessions of this rambling old man — the frozen strawberries of his career. He wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America…what? I know he doesn’t believe in history, but now he wants to reshape geography to fit his nationalistic ignorance? And then there are the Big Issues of the Trump campaign.
Perhaps Trump’s most consistent political position, since his first run for office, is his vehement opposition to windmills.
His latest comments came as part of extended criticism of environmental and energy efficiency — complaining about dripping showers, low-water dishwashers and electric heaters. (He railed against the water in toilets during his first term, saying in 2019, “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”)
On Tuesday, he blamed windmills for a sharp increase in whale fatalities across southern New England’s coastlines in recent weeks. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” Trump said.
He said windmills “litter our country” and compared them to “dropping garbage in a field.” He said they are “the most expensive energy ever,” and that only those who build them with subsidies want them.
“We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said.
I can sort of understand the opposition to wind turbines — he’s in the pocket of the oil industry, and wants to increase our reliance on fossil fuels — but showers, dishwashers, electric heaters, and toilets? WTF?
When you buy a house that no water comes out because they want to preserve even in areas that have so much water, you don’t know what to do. It’s called rain. It comes down from heaven.
No water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens? You’re in the shower 10 times as long.
This is an imaginary problem. Trump doesn’t have to deal with trivial details like plumbing, so this is his idea of the problems the little people have. There aren’t any water restrictions in places that have lots of water, and in places with serious droughts, the first thing they’ll shut down is watering lawns and golf courses. No one takes a “drip, drip, drip” shower.
Likewise, washing machines, they want in your washing machine to have very little water coming out of the washing machine. So when you wash your clothing, you have to wash it four times instead of once you end up using more water.”
We’re a party of common sense. And things that I’m telling you now is really all about common sense.
Trump has never in his life operated a washing machine. That’s not how they work.
The Republicans are not a party of common sense. Nothing their president says makes any sense.
You know, the US Constitution has this 25th Amendment that allows congress to dismiss a president for inability or incapacity to perform the duties of his office. There is a clear case that Trump is not fit to be president — he’s demented, with delusions of grandeur, and an unrealistic grasp of the state of the world. Unfortunately, congress and the Supreme Court will never question the god-king, and even if they did, they’d put JD Vance in his place. We are so screwed.
Not as screwed as Canada, Greenland, Panama, the EU, and Ukraine if he gets his way, but still pretty goddamned wrecked.
Look behind the curtain. Greenland, Panama, the Gulf – these were not even mentioned during the campaign. When Trump says bizarre stuff like this, ask yourself, what is it he would rather you not be talking about? And this time, it is his sentencing coming up on Friday.
Or not.
This week’s unholy mix of drought, wind, and fire in Southern California
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The MAGA enablers will do tremendous harm during the coming four years, just as BoJo and the tories did extreme harm to Britain.
But look…BoJo and the tories are gone from power and in full disarray today. Power exposed them for what they are. They purged themselves of the competent people that might help them bounce back.
Now it is up to the Useless Party (D) to prepare to completely remove GOP from federal power in USA just as it has been in California. No more fucking status quo like Obama or Biden. A new deal.
I keep remembering the British comedian who, on Test Match Special, said that Trump was a made up character from Sacha Baron Cohen like Borat and Ali G. He’s going far beyond that.
So now it appears that one reason Trump wants Canada and Greenland is because of their super-immense size. And he thinks they are that extra large because he does not understand the Mercator projection. (Just like he did not understand that the people who ask for political asylum have not recently emerged from insane asylums.)
The fact is, wind power has been cheaper to build, and operate than traditional power sources. And that is why wind turbines have been built in large numbers over the last decade. That fact guarantees more wind turbines will be built, Trumps opposition won’t matter. Industry will go where the money is. The energy industry makes good income from wind turbines, where as Trump has gone bankrupt many times and has left behind him a trail of numerous failed businesses. Trump is not a model of competence in business, the energy industry is. Trump’s hysterical lies about wind turbines killing whales won’t stop wind turbines from being built.
The toilet thing is simply an aversion to any environmentally friendly improvement, similar to the whole thing about still wanting tungsten based light bulbs instead of modern LEDs that last for years and can render the same yellow-ish “soft white” light tint. Pick an appliance and there’s somebody out there who wants to keep their old one that was “perfectly fine my entire life” and Trump will say anything to get their vote by validating their feelings.
Yeah, my new toilets use about 1/2 to 2/3rds of the water of those they replaced and I’ve almost never had to flush a second time.
So my take is if it takes you 10 flushes to get the thing to finish, you’re just completely full of shit.
@7 LEDs last for years “in theory”. On average they don’t though. Why? For the same reason that PCs from the mid to late 80s where all crap – a combination of cheap capacitors in the design, and the fact that they used like a 6v capacitor on a 5v rail, instead of something like the 10v, which means that they literally had almost zero margin of error between the voltage they needed to supply and what they where rated at. LED bulbs, to “keep people buying them”, have done the same thing, and you can find video, after video, after video, of people dissecting the things, after failure, and going, “Yep, the LEDs all still work, and all the basic AC to DC power circuitry is still good, we just have this fried capacitor here, and if I replace it…. Wow! Its working again. Isn’t that amazing?!” People notice this, and don’t give a crap why they are failing in two to three years, when they should be lasting decades.
As for the toilets.. Yeah, unless you have a situation where you need to use a fair bit of paper, they all work… OK. I have seen some freaking terrible ones though, and some of those terrible ones are among the expensive brands. So, maybe Trump’s complaint is because he uses stupid amounts of toilet paper (got to clean up them diapers), and then bought either stupid expensive, but badly designed, or alternatively really cheap, and badly designed, models…
Both complaints would be “valid”, for someone who has no f-ing clue what they are talking about, and don’t care to figure it out. To sort of thread hop, this is similar to the “new computer” experience. Yeah, you get all that crap if you are stupid enough to use Fakebook, dumb enough to buy a computer from a random retail store, instead of custom built (or from a company that is at least marginally more interested in a functional machine than one branded to their company, and subsidized to a lower price by stuffing it full of crap from ten other companies), etc. I.e., if you know what you are doing, know something that knows, or actually give a damn about knowing, you can avoid most of it. If you are dumb enough to buy something from Walmart, use Meta, trust Google, when a lot of people don’t any more, and actually think that “traditional news” sites are still useful sources, and not dying breeds who are desperate for ad revenue, then yep, you will have a horrible experience. Just like every other technology, when you have no idea how/why it works like it does, and just trust the first con artist that comes along and tells you, “I have these new high tech magic beans I can sell you!” That this is a majority of the public is a serious problem.
The almost majority of the voters wanted this.
Trump didn’t make much sense his first term and he hasn’t gotten any better with age.
What you see is what you get.
And no.
I don’t yet have any explanation for why 49% of the American voters elected this guy.
He’s just stoking his base.
Reality does not matter, it is completely irrelevant to his people, they just care about their ego, their self image, the feeling of having power over their opponents, real or imagined.
Trump didn’t learn the first lesson of kindergarten.
Be nice to your friends or you won’t have any.
So far he has insulted all our neighbors. He called Trudeau the governor of Canada several times, implying that Canada is or will be our 51st state. Mexico continually, and now again with his Gulf of Mexico changing to Gulf of America.
He hasn’t insulted Panama and Greenland, just threatened to invade them, conquer them, and annex them.
Greenland is part of the European Union via its government by Denmark. The EU is already appalled by this.
China is high on the list for economic and political warfare. (To be fair, they might deserve this. They are doing what we are planning, being imperialistic and threatening their neighbors i.e Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, etc..)
Canada, Greenland, and Panama have zero to do with all the many problems the USA faces.
Trump isn’t solving any problems here, he is creating new ones.
I needed to fly to the west coast a couple months ago. While passing over the Great Basin and other areas completely devoid of human occupation, I couldn’t help wondering why we didn’t pack this otherwise useless land with solar panels and wind turbines. We could probably power the entirety of North America with the unused energy just raining down on our desserts. And wind turbines in that area would also have the benefit of being completely unable to kill whales.
Ironically, we already all but own Greenland and Panama.
Greenland is part of NATO since it is part of Denmark.
We even have US military bases already on Greenland.
Greenland/Denmark are allies and up until a month ago our friends.
They are also aware that the USA is the unpredictable 800 lb gorilla in
the room and aren’t going to do anything to provoke us.
Invading Greenland doesn’t actually gain much for us.
Same thing with Panama.
We already got mildly annoyed once with them and invaded them and
arrested their president Manual Noriega.
Panama is well aware that it is a good idea to stay on friendly terms with the USA.
Will somebody point out to Trump that the Governor (General) of Canada is Mary Simon
The left says save the whales, the right says everything the left does to save the whales is actually killing them. I would bet my house more whales are killed by propeller strikes from oil tankers than windmills.
PZ says: Hope. That’s a threadbare belief at this point.
I’m not certain I even have that threadbare belief at this point. The crazier Trumps gets, the more excited his followers become. This has me believing the is no hope.
As Pacific Palisades burns, firefighters report hydrants coming up dry: ‘Water supply just dropped’
This is what our neighbors chose, twice. I blame them far more than the politicians they elect. I don’t think it is any more complicated than they couldn’t possibly vote for a Democrat, much less a woman. I think people who point out bad campaigning and lukewarm policies of Democrats conveniently overlook the infinitely worse nonsense that spouts from this man on a daily basis. His party and the media exert immense effort to sane wash him and explain the unintelligible nonsense he spreads.
I don’t think Republicans are going to turn on him until some undeniably awful shit happens. What that is, I don’t want to find out, since they seemed to be able to ignore his bungling of COVID that costs hundreds of thousands of lies, as well as his attempt to overthrow the government.
There is a method to the madness. The Bannon Strategy. Steve Bannon said (paraphrasing), “Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way we deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Just look at the useless Manu Raju and Andrea Mitchell and Kirsten Welker clones clamoring for a sound bite that they can repeat ad nauseam. “Trump says he wants to buy Greenland. What’s your response to that?” That’s the total extent of our media’s capability. No analysis. No mockery. No sarcasm. No pushback. Yet, they will chase every piece of BS that comes out of the pipe.
Fortunately, for now, our guardians are late night comedians like Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert. For now. Until their media masters get the Word and yank them off the air.
I plan on scanning our atlas to an image so I can rename the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ the ‘Gulf of Mofo’ and ‘Greenland’ to ‘tRUMP’s Greedland’ and ‘Panama’ to ‘tRUMPS Enema’
We are formulating our statement for 2025. It will be something like ‘Reject and Defy the Criminal, Destructive, Narcissitic MUMP* CULT’
*Timothy Snyder coined the term. MUsk+trUMP. A terrible disease that is growing.
I hope we are too small to be a target of the MUMP CULT’s retribution.
I do: they are either evil or stupid. Every single fucking one of them.
Trump is a bubble stock.
They all know he’s long been utterly barmy, and they all hate him, but they all value his ability to rile the base with the next great outrage while they get on with their systematic destruction of democracy. That’s valuable, up until the point that a powerful one of them breaks ranks.
Not a single one of them wants to pull the 25th Amendment on him — until someone else does it first, whose career they can’t kill (metaphorically or literally, they don’t mind either way).
My genuine fear is that they are all hoping he can avoid 25A or death for about eight or ten years.
What? You think he’ll leave in four years? Face it: They’ve only just got him started and they already know how to fix everything from the practice run. They plan for him to leave office feet-first, and preferably not before they’re ready.
His attempts to prevent it happening keep it in the news. We’ll see if he shuts up about Panama, Greenland and Canada after Friday. My prediction: he won’t.
JD Vance seems to lack whatever weird charisma Trump has, to the weird people who find him charismatic. So President Vance wouldn’t have that support. Also, AFAICT, he’s not completely insane. Although I guess that could cut both ways, since he might be competent enough to get terrible things enacted where Trump would just play golf and tweet.
True, but I think you’re missing the more important point. It’s one thing that he never does a load of laundry – presumably he has people for that – but if he’s equally unaware of how showers work… Does Trump shower? Does he wash at all?
@17 – donfelipe who said; “I don’t think Republicans are going to turn on him until some undeniably awful shit happens. What that is, I don’t want to find out”
My thinking is Trump has already crossed the Rubicon with that. He has done so much bad shit and none of the Republicans or his followers seem to care even when his actions hurt and kill. See shoot someone on 5th Ave as the prelude.
So Trump will go down in history for conquering Greenland, Panama, and even fucking Canada. Oh yeah, his dumbshits will honor him for that. But he’s not Hitler. No…don’t ever say that. He’s just a true American.
Trump is standing in front of a paper shredder holding some paper. An intern walk in and Trump asks “How do you operate this thing?”. The intern takes the papers and runs them through the shredder. Trump then says “Thank you. I need three copies of that.”
A recent poll found that less than 15% of Canadians would even consider the idea of joining the US, but if Canada did join: it would skew the electoral college so much that there would probably never be Republican president again, nor a Republican majority in Congress, and considering Canada would likely come in as several states instead of a single one they would lose the Senate as well. Instead, Trump should consider Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s counter offer for Canada to take Alaska and Minnesota.
So Trump is—almost literally—tilting at windmills?
Good point, Trickster. They might suddenly discover a reason to do away with the electoral college of which they have always had the greatest respect… but why take the chance when they could just make Canadians worth three fifths, or perhaps some say as much as two fifths could be too much, but at least if they come up to him with tears in their eyes and say “Sir, please make us come concept of fifths” then that could be something for the greatest minds to think about.
It is even easier than that.
After the US-Canadian Anschluss, aided by our enormous armed forces, all the former Canadians would now be…illegal, undocumented immigrants to Greater USA. Since they weren’t born in the USA they would have to apply for citizenship.
That Federal bureaucracy was downsized by Elon Musk’s DOGE, so the three voter registrars left would take a few centuries to consider 40 million citizenship applications.
The two million Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico still can’t vote in US elections unless they move to the USA and establish residency somewhere.
He’s not serious, it’s just bait to distract and stop people thinking about the consequences of anything he actually does. He just talks shit so the media will eat it and not chew on anything meaty.
He is serous because he wants to be “one of the greatest presidents” but since he is a dumb child, the only way he imagines it happening is by territorial expansion. @willj nailed it.
warriorpoet @ 12 Useless land? I hope you’re joking. Far too many people see land that humans haven’t occupied yet as useless, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Thanks asclepias @ 34. I was thinking the same thing. That land is far from useless and to couch it as such is — well — sounds like Trumpthink.
@34 — thank you. Deserts may not be well suited to agriculture, but they are still precious ecosystems.
Using a portion of arid land for wind, solar, and geothermal energy would be a lot better than continuing to burn carbon, but any renewable energy construction should incorporate environmental planning from the outset to make sure habitats and endangered species aren’t stressed or lost.
34&35, You are, obviously, correct. Unused and useless are two very different things, and any use we may potentially put the land to would require large amounts of precautions to ensure we don’t cause ecological problems. I apologize for my careless use of language there.
The point I was trying to make still stands I think. Switching to a system of using a majority of renewable energy is far more possible than most people think. We have the resources, and we have the space.
ProPublica – The Six Stages of Trump’s Resistance (2018)