Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from noted historian and Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson.
Hello. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
I want to talk today very briefly about the matter of Trump trolling. I’m kind of smiling, because a lot of people don’t know what to make of it.
It concerns four topics: Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America; assuming control of Greenland, or buying it, I should say; renegotiating the Panama Canal Treaty, with the idea that either they reform, the Panamanians, or we take acquisition of it; and then, of course, making Canada a particular state.
The traditional exegesis of all of these is that he’s trolling, and in reference to that, go back to “The Art of the Deal,” a ghostwritten book; “The Art of the Comeback,” etc. “The Art of the Deal 2”; and in that Trump exegesis, he says, when you go into a room to negotiate, you just seem wild and demand 100%, and then through the negotiation, the other party starts to make demands on you reciprocally.
And then, finally, you feel like you’ve been put upon, and you walk out of the room with a 55% or 60% advantage, and then you never make fun of the person. You praise them.
We’ve seen it with North Korea in the first Trump term. And under that logic, Donald Trump is telling Canada, well, you don’t spend any money to defend yourself, so to speak. You’re under the American nuclear umbrella, and the trade imbalance is not fair, because you have tariffs on our goods that we don’t have on yours.
And yet, you won’t patrol the border when you know the drugs and people are coming illegally into the United States. Blah, blah, blah. So, we are going to demand something from you—make you the next state. And there are—it’s very effective, because provinces like Ontario are very energy-rich and very conservative, and maybe some would like to join the United States.
So, it causes a lot of dissension. It may have led to [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau finally throwing in the towel. The next example is, of course, Greenland, this huge country, a semiautonomous province of Denmark, three or four times the size of Texas. Key to American security in World War II.
Trump says he wants to buy it. He said it before. They said, what are you doing? And in “Art of the Deal” fashion, of course, now Denmark is spending an extra billion-plus dollars of investment in this huge colony. And on their royal coat of arms are including Greenland imagery.
And so, according to this logic, they are now pushing back, and Trump is going to be better off than when he started, as in the case of Canada, when they started to patrol the border, and they clamped down on drugs, and they said they renegotiate any asymmetrical tariffs.
In the case of renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Mexican president showed a map recently of the southwest of the United States being part of Mexico. That was her counter.
That’s kind of a bad troll, because they rely on $63 billion of remittances. That’s their, remember, it’s their largest source of foreign exchange. So, I don’t think she should troll Trump. But the idea was that it was a message to Mexico that you have an imbalance. You’re sending people here illegally, 12 million in the last four years. You get remittances, $63 billion. 80,000 Americans have died per year, fentanyl. You won’t control it. So, we’re going to start to reexamine our entire message.
So, in the case of the Panama Canal: It’s similar to Greenland and Canada and the Gulf of Mexico controversies. The Chinese have intruded into an American domain. We built the canal. We operated it effectively for one century. And Panama is now flirting with Chinese capital in a way that hurts our national interest because China’s interest in the Panama Canal in times of crisis would be to shut it down and prevent our fleets from redeploying, either east or west. We, we all know that.
And so, under “Art of the Deal” with all of these controversies—Panama, Greenland, Canada, the Gulf of Mexico—you get boisterous, you get excessive, you seem unstable, and then the other party negotiates down in reasonable fashion, and you end up better [off.]
I’d just like to finish, though, there is one key element missing: Irony. Irony.
So, Donald Trump is saying to the Mexican government: If you look at the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, 1,700 miles are U. S. coastline; 1,700 miles are Mexican coastline. Why is it called the Gulf of Mexico? But here’s the key, and we are in an age of left-wing renaming things.
We topple statues. We rename iconic buildings. We take away Woodrow Wilson. We do everything. And according to your logic, it’s time that you had the Gulf of Mexico for centuries, but we have the exact amount of coastline that you do. And we now are a convert for your idea of renaming things. In the case of Greenland, you Europeans are anti-colonialists.
You’re always giving us lectures. This is a colony. New York City is closer to Greenland than is Copenhagen. And we defend it. And it’s a North American territory. So, do you still want to play the imperial colonialist because you only react to your colonial people when you’re pressured, and you’re endangering them.
He’s trying to tip the left-wing argument from Denmark: Oh, the United States is a bully, upside-down. That you’re the bully, you’re the colonialist. In the case of Canada, it’s the same thing. You don’t want us to intrude, but you want freebies. You want us to defend you while you pose as you’re an anti-militaristic, left-wing, pacifistic, utopian society.
But if you examine things, you would be scared to death about Chinese and Russian intrusion into your airspace or sea space, if it wasn’t for the United States. So, when you look at this, what Trump is saying is, I am using left-wing arguments—colonialism, changing names, imperialism, inviting in communist, autocratic governments that don’t reflect the will of people in the case of China, and I’m flipping them and putting them in your face.
And the whole point is to reexamine the status quo across the board. It’s kind of an anti-woke argument, isn’t it? Everything is up for grabs, and if the woke people think they can rewrite the history and traditions of the United States, maybe don’t. Trump can, too.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. Please subscribe to The Daily Signal for our next episode.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
