The madness of King Trump threatens U.S. and global security

Donald Trump now believes he is the master of the universe, not just of the United States and the Americas. This is not hyperbole.

The president’s determination to seize Greenland from Denmark by bullying or force, his threats to NATO allies, his obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, the ego-driven list goes on. His speeches and posts reveal a man convinced he is the world’s most brilliant leader, who can split control of the world with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and best both.

The madness of King Donald has metastasized to the point where it threatens U.S. and global security — unless GOP members of Congress, sane business leaders, and five sober Supremes move to curb him.

Don’t take my word for how dangerous Trump has become. Take Trump’s.

“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” he told the press this month. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.” Never mind that taking Greenland would put the U.S. at war with its NATO allies, including the island’s owner, Denmark.

Trump has already pledged to slap new tariffs on Copenhagen and seven European allies who support the Danes.

This is nuts. A 1951 treaty basically lets the U.S. put as many troops and bases in Greenland as it wishes. The island’s government is eager for U.S. investment to mine rare minerals. Yet, the president is ready to destroy NATO, and possibly fight with our closest allies, whose help and Arctic experience are essential to protecting Greenland from Russia and China.

The only ones to benefit from Trump’s Greenland obsession are Putin and Xi, as they sit back and watch him destroy the NATO alliance they have been eager to shred for decades.

Indeed, Russian officials and talking heads are exulting over America’s self-destruction, which shifts attention away from Moscow’s ongoing, massive attacks on Ukraine’s urban centers, trying to destroy all electricity and heating during a brutal winter.

“It would have been difficult to imagine something like this happening before,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists this week, gloating that Trump’s actions diminished the “prospects of preserving NATO as a unified Western military-political bloc.”

In other words, Trump’s Greenland mania is undermining U.S. security at a rapid clip. His foolishness raises the possibility of NATO allies shooting at each other, rather than working together to block Russia’s desire for territorial expansion. The White House is putting America in league with Moscow as an aggressor willing to invade or coerce a neighbor into handing over territory.

And for what reason? So that Trump can boast he has made the best land grab since the Louisiana Purchase?

The president hints at this with a doctored photo on Truth Social, which shows European leaders in his office looking raptly at a map of Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela covered with American flags.

Buoyed by the U.S. military’s kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro (a one-off extraction bearing no resemblance to seizing a NATO ally’s territory), Trump acts as if he believes he can grab anything he wants.

For the 79-year-old president, the signs of dementia — or an ego gone wild — are expanding.

Boiling with for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump wrote the Norwegian foreign minister that Oslo’s decision “not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS” was to blame for his aggression toward Denmark. Due to this insult, the president claimed, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace … but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

When the Norwegian leader replied that the Nobel was awarded by an independent committee, not the government, Trump insisted this was false. He appeared oblivious to how this churlish behavior makes him and our country look idiotic. All the more so because Trump’s repeated claim about stopping eight wars is a complete falsehood.

Trump achieved several temporary ceasefires in outbreaks of border violence in Africa, the Caucasus, and Asia, but ended no wars. And the best-known of those ceasefires, in Gaza, is already falling apart.

Yet, this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president will unveil his putative “Board of Peace,” a proposed group of top global leaders who would preside over an unwieldy, as yet nonexistent series of subordinate structures tasked with rebuilding and setting up a government for Gaza.

This concept was endorsed by the U.N. Security Council specifically to deal with Gaza. But in a bait-and-switch, the White House has crafted a charter that ignores Gaza; instead, this aspirational board appears aimed at replacing the United Nations in dealing with global hot spots. At every turn, according to the charter, its players and committees would be subject to Trump’s final control.

The president has already invited Putin, that great Russian peacemaker, to join the board.

The top level of the group is supposed to consist “exclusively of heads of state and government” under Trump’s leadership. It’s unclear how many will join. Consider that the entrance fee for full membership is $1 billion, apparently creating a slush fund with no visible rules on whether it will be spent at Trump’s sole discretion.

What is clear is that Trump’s war on NATO allies and his embrace of Putin — along with his embrace of the dog-eat-dog system that led to two world wars — are the work of a president who has lost all moorings. Add to that the economic blindness of a man who, when warned of the grave cost of subordinating the independent Federal Reserve Bank to his political will, responded, “I don’t care.”

Trump’s behavior is that of a self-appointed Sun King, who is not only convinced that “L’État, c’est moi” but “Le monde, c’est moi.” Unless this madness is checked soon by the other government branches, America may be reverting to the kind of world most of us never imagined we’d face.