Forget Greenland… how will the rest of us survive a second Trump presidency?

After a crazed press conference in which the president-elect hinted at economic war with Canada, strong-arming Denmark into handing over Greenland, and taking back control of the US-built Panama Canal, Sean O’Grady says it’s too easy to laugh off Trump’s excesses – by the sound of things, this time he’s deadly serious

January 20th, 2029… that’s 1,473 days away. A little over four years more, then, of the kind of childish, braggardly, nonsensical, dangerous, incoherent, sneery, confused and just plain bonkers stuff we saw flowing out of the glowering, tangerine figure of Donald J Trump in his warm-up presidential press conference.

One minute, he’s on about showers with no water coming out of them, the next he’s concerned about the role Hezbollah (?!) played in the January 6th riots.

And, just when the assembled journalists think they can’t cope with any more cobblers, he solemnly puts the United States on the road to war with Panama and Denmark, plus a crippling economic war with Canada – unless it agrees to become the 51st state of the Union.

What to say? How are we going to cope with the second Trump presidency?

Remember, if you will, that in his first chaotic term, Trump had guard rails and responsible public servants to steer him away from his more crazed ideas. This time, it’s different – hundreds of personally loyal Maga-ites appointed to the key jobs, often spectacularly unqualified, whose fealty is to Trump, not the US constitution, and who believe that the election result last November gives him a mandate to do whatever he likes.

Plus, this time, the almost equally juvenile Elon Musk will be riding shotgun. America will soon evolve into an elective dictatorship, with a more or less compliant Congress and a Supreme Court that’s already granted the Orange Monster executive immunity, placing him above the law.

If I were an American, I’d be concerned. If I were Greenlandic, I’d be terrified that he’s about to send in the Marines.

He’s serious, by the sound of things, and we should believe him when he says, as he does, that: “For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

Trump refuses to rule out the use of military force, and is preparing the ground by suggesting that Denmark’s formal sovereignty over self-governing Greenland is illegitimate, even though the Danes have been around for longer than the United States has existed (and a few vikings may well have set foot in America before the pilgrim fathers showed up).

Rather slyly – Trump is not without guile – he threw this into his verbal chop suey: “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security.” Well, however true that is, Greenland sure as hell isn’t American, and never has been. That won’t stop Trump trying to strangle the Danish economy, and conduct a mutually ruinous trade war with the European Union.

The Panama Canal Zone certainly was once American territory but was transferred legally and peacefully to Panama by international treaty, freely entered into by the US, in 1977.

As if all that weren’t enough, the man-child went on to delegitimise Canada and its border with the United States, fixed in the 19th century. To Trump, Canada is already a mere state of the Union, its premier a “governor”. It is not a proper country, and the border is only an “artificially drawn line”. He suggested the country would be better off if it simply surrendered its sovereignty, ditched King Charles, and became part of the US. Canadians, whatever they may think about outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau, might beg to differ.

We’d all love to laugh all this Trumpery off, and we’re inured to his excesses. Yet there’s nothing amusing about the casual way he advocates force as a way to resolve international disputes through military and economic coercion. If he’s got a problem with other countries, he can take it to the United Nations, and use peaceful means to deal with allies.

It’s a mystery as to why he tends to bully America’s friends, sell out potentially strong allies such as Ukraine, yet appease her enemies, such as Russia and North Korea – but there is plainly something Putinesque about his regard for the independence of his neighbours. To him, Canada seems to attract the same contempt as Putin shows towards Ukraine. Trump is indeed absurd, and fully deserving of the scorn and ridicule he attracts. But he’s a fearful, treacherous sort of clown.

The bad news is that the world is going to have to live with his blunders for the next four years – and his toxic legacy much longer.