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Two seemingly disparate but very much related stories played out in politics this week. One, the whole world watched. The other happened quietly and mostly behind closed doors.
Nobody missed President Trump’s Greenlandic opera, which took us from the potential end of NATO to "Kumbaya" in the span of about 24 hours once credit and investment markets had their say about the president’s Arctic brinkmanship.
The narrative arc among Trump officials and core supporters was a familiar one: 1) He’s only trolling. 2) He’s actually raising valid points. 3) Actually, he’s deadly serious and very much correct. 4) Art of the Deal, suckers!
Step three is the essential pivot. For Trump to engage in his preferred brand of negotiations, his threat to do something genuinely awful and self-destructive has to be credible. But the more times he pulls these U-turns, the harder it is to convince people he really is so reckless. That’s particularly true of the people in his administration and his supporters, whose fear of an actual catastrophe is an essential ingredient.
Threatening to burn down your own house in order to get your neighbor to move a fence off the property line doesn’t work if your family tells everybody you’re just upset and would happily find a win-win solution. This is the TACO conundrum. In order to keep bluffing, a gambler needs to continually raise the stakes. For low-probability outcomes to provide motivation to opponents, the consequences must be high — maybe even existential.
As George Costanza put it: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” That’s true for Trump himself, whose capacity for the construction of alternate realities is profound, but also for his own people. And getting people who know him, like him and want him to succeed to believe he might be a monster requires Trump to absolutely commit to the bit. And that brings us back to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous line: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
All of this bluffing and bullying has consequences for Trump and for the people in his faction. Climbing down only gets harder. That means the tactics by his political allies and subordinates that often worked in constraining Trump before — “We can’t do X, but how about Y?” — are becoming less and less effective. Add in the purge (and self-deportation) of old-fashioned, rule-of-law conservatives from MAGA and you have a recipe for a very wild midterm election year.
Some Democrats say that the sudden, irrational fixation on Greenland was a ploy to distract from other, more damaging news stories, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics, the ongoing questions about the future of Venezuela as a U.S. client state and the failure to release the Epstein files as required by law. In this way, MAGA and anti-MAGA are alike: They see Trump playing four-dimensional chess when simpler solutions are available.
It’s easier to explain Greenland as the knock-on to all of the Venezuela flexing. The successful raid and subsequent vassalage of Nicolás Maduro’s successor had Trump feeling very bullish about his vision of a Western Hemispheric empire. When people, including many in his own party, told him he was not allowed to have Greenland, it threatened his claim on absolute authority. Trump responded by pushing back until people begged him not to act, which is in itself an acknowledgement of his power.
So what’s the next Greenland? Having to back down on this one will increase Trump’s need to show he remains a credible threat.
It could be American banks, which the president is starting to slap around pretty good. And the fact that it was financial markets that knocked the legs out from Trump’s Greenland move will no doubt heighten the president’s interest in showing the bankers who’s boss. There’s Trump’s effort to get the Federal Reserve under his thumb, then there was the demand that banks cap credit card interest rates at an impossible 10 percent, and now a $5 billion lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, for dumping Trump’s accounts after the then-president tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Banks have a lot more leverage than the media companies Trump squeezed at the start of last year, and the president’s demands are far more consequential than TV lineups. If the Supreme Court turns Trump away on the Fed as expected, the banks refuse to lose money on credit cards and Dimon tells Trump to go soak his head, do we get another round of brinkmanship and anxiety?
Certainly, we’re going to see some Greenlanding on the 2026 election itself. Jack Smith’s blistering House testimony may bring that one to the top of the list soon. The president is promising criminal prosecutions of the people he claims stole the 2020 election from him, so far to no avail. And what about the Republicans who have refused to comply with demands for gerrymandering or to abolish mail-in and early voting? The closer the president gets to what looks like a November repudiation, we would reasonably expect him to turn up the heat.
Or how about if the high court tells the president he lacks the power to set arbitrary tariffs? Or if the justices rule an eventual invocation of the Insurrection Act as out of bounds? Or if Bad Bunny trash talks Trump at the Super Bowl?
Who knows which provocations — or perceived provocations — could trigger the next cycle of escalation. Trump himself probably doesn’t know right now, but will go with his gut and take his party along for the ride. It will all depend on how good or bad he is feeling at any given moment and what his pride and showman’s intuition tell him.
While the world was watching Trump repel down the alpine heights of his Greenland claims in Davos, Switzerland, something quite unexpected was happening on Capitol Hill.
Nine Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted with their Republican counterparts to hold former President Bill Clinton in contempt for his refusal to comply with a subpoena to testify about his relationship with the infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton has no actual power, and whatever soft power he enjoyed in the party was mostly drained by his wife’s two failed presidential runs and the post-facto #MeToo view of the then-president’s assignations with a 21-year-old White House intern. But even so, contempt of Congress for a former president of one's own party in connection to a sex crimes investigation is really something.
The source of most power in Congress comes from party unity, so throwing the former president to the wolves like that tells us a lot about Democrats’ fervor to make Trump pay for his own efforts to hide his long relationship with Epstein. Being the tough-on-sex-trafficking party is just good politics, especially when the other guys keep stumbling on the issue.
Then note the declaration from 2028 Democratic presidential contender, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, that he wants to impose an age limit of 75 on the presidency, the executive branch, the federal courts and Congress. Emanuel is a long shot for his party’s nomination, but he’s definitely on to some ideas that will get into the Democrats’ discussion. The best part of Emanuel’s pitch: He said it would apply to him if he were to become president and would limit the 66-year-old to one term.
Or how about Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and the pitch for a constitutional amendment to end presidential pardon powers, an idea that gains increasing traction as the current president’s pardon spree of politically connected fraudsters marches on.
The theme here is a powerful one in American politics throughout the years: reform.
In and after the first Trump term, Democrats settled on a different one-word concept for their party: democracy, which is as vague as reform but not nearly as satisfying. The ill-conceived and poorly executed election overhaul Democrats offered at the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency was indicative of the larger problem. Getting people to care deeply about democracy in the abstract, especially on items seen as favorable to your own party’s chances, seems unlikely.
Getting people to care about corruption, ethics and the abuse of power, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. After electing the three oldest people to the presidency in a row and watching Congress remain unable to actually ban investment shenanigans by its members and those in the executive branch, there’s an appetite for reform. As Trump padded his net worth by some $1.5 billion in his first year in office while he gilts the White House and builds a ballroom, there’s probably even a demand.
The “democracy” vibe was appealing to Democrats for many reasons, particularly the strong public backlash against Trump’s efforts to swipe a second term. But it also hearkened to their 2016 claims about Russian interference being to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss. It was too much about them and their grievances. Cleaning house, especially when some of your own dust bunnies are getting swept up, is far more attractive to normal voters.
Given the wild swings ahead for Trump and the Republicans this year, reform is the kind of simple message that could carry Democrats to a midterm landslide.
[Programming alert: Watch "The Hill Sunday" with Chris Stirewalt — Who needs Greenland when you have this much winter weather headed your way? As much of the country hunkers down for a big snowstorm, Congress is following suit. We’ll talk to members on both sides of the aisle, including Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), on the economy, ICE protests, and what exactly is going on in the talks with Denmark. Plus, we’ll continue our march toward America’s 250th birthday with revered American historian Gordon Wood. And, as always, we’ll have expert analysis from our best-in-the-business panel of journalists. Be sure to catch us on NewsNation at 10 a.m. ET / 9 a.m. CT or your local CW station.]
