We’ve had a brutal week of weather. For me, it hit last Friday. My wife and kids made the annual trip to the March for Life in Washington by bus. The whole event has a penitential feel, especially with the weather, which this year was downright frightening. When they arrived home at nearly midnight, the wind chill was minus 15.
It’s a funny thing about surviving weather like that. You get conditioned — assuming you’ve learned the lesson of applying multiple layers of clothes. When “Snowmageddon” hit the next day, I felt surprisingly fine snowblowing multiple times. When I put the chickens to bed at 11 p.m. Saturday night, I can honestly say I marveled at the pleasant hush and serenity of the surroundings.
Switching gears to another cold place, I wish I had the same serenity about surviving the Donald Trump chaos in Greenland the last two weeks.
I vented about Trump’s saber-rattling in the Western Hemisphere in my last column. On talk shows, I raged at the insanity of Trump’s rhetoric toward Greenland. He had smoked off an unhinged dispatch to Norway’s leader that he cc’d to every U.S. embassy in Europe: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” For good measure, Trump threatened: “We’re gonna take Greenland, one way or the other.”
Whoa! What? Could you imagine having a son in the military who might be ordered to shoot our allies because of this president?
As I expressed my opinions on air and in print, blasting Trump as a bloviating madman, more than one Trump supporter urged me to calm down and remember that Trump explodes like this frequently, as I should know by now. It’s a tactic, often successful. As Scott McKay wrote at The American Spectator, “the Greenlandic diplomatic adventure (is) a classic example of the president’s dealmaking modus operandi at work: he asks for the moon when his aims are for far less, he rattles sabers and cages in order to get attention, he creates a crisis in order to force his counterparty to engage with him, when his secret terms are met he agrees to them, and then he proceeds to shower his counterparties with praise.”
Indeed, Trump long ago telegraphed this tactic. “I aim very high,” he wrote in “Art of the Deal,” “and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases, I still end up with what I want.” He advised: “think big,” “fight back very hard” and have “fun,” given that “the real excitement is playing the game.” The man enjoys the fight in the “art” of the deal, whether in New York with real estate or in the White House dealing with issues as diverse as tariffs and Greenland. Yes, it’s much scarier when he’s a president dealing with countries. Nonetheless, he does it all the time. The tactic often works.
Surviving the worst of Trump’s behavior — not unlike surviving brutal weather — requires proper conditioning. A lot of layers. But in the meantime, it isn’t pleasant. Sometimes, it can be downright frightening.