We begin, though, with something that you don't usuall think you'd be hearing about in this country or saying on the news. The president of the United UNITED STATES IS THREATENING WAR OR WAR ACTIONS AGAINST EUROPE SPECIFICALLY TRUMP WANTS TO TAKE GREENLAND, SOMETHING HE'S MUSED ABOUT BEFORE. NOW HE'S DIALING UP THE PRESSURE, HE SAYS THIS IS NATIONAL SECURITY, BUT THERE'S NEW TEXT MESSAGES WHERE TRUMP CITES GETTING SNUBBED, LOSING THE NOBEL PRIESPIE, SOMETHING THAT HE THOUGHT HE WAS IN CONTENTION FOR.
HIS ANGER OVER THAT LOSS LEADS HIM TO WRITE TO NORWAY'S PRIME MINISTER, CONSIDERING YOUR COUNTRY DECIDED NOT TO GIVE ME THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE FOR HAVING STOPPED EIGHT WARS PLUS I NO LONGER FEEL AN OBLIGATION TO THINK PURELY OF AN INTERACTION OF PEACE. THIS MAY BE THE FIRST TIME IN WORLD HISTORY ANY LEADER HAS ADMITTED THAT BECAUSE THEY THEY DIDN'T GET A PEACE PRIZE, THEY'RE NOW THREATENING WAR. HE'S BASICALLY ADMITTING A KIND OF PERSONAL INVECTIVE FOR AN INTERNATIONAL CRISIS.
ALTHOUGH EVEN IF TRUMP'S CRITICS WOULD LOOK AT THIS AS A CHANCE TO BEAT UP ON HIM OR SAY THAT WE HAVE TO BALANCE OUT THE FACT THAT IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE, DONALD TRUMP IS OFTEN SAYING THINGS THAT ARE UNTRUE, SOMETIMES KNOWINGLY FALSE, LIES, OTHER TIMES JUST THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE FOR a variety of reasons. So whether this is a kind of a taunt or a troll or something he threw out there is up for diplomatic interpretation, but Trump is as a factual matter threatening Europe. He wants to potentially, he doesn't actually use war powers.
He's already using tariffs. Lawmakers are pushing back. There certainly is no authority that, you know, that the president has to use military force to seize territory from a NATO country.
America still is for democracy. America still is for self-determination of people, for sovereignty of other nations. The only security threat to Greenland right now is the United States.
The Danish people, frankly, are flipping out that their longest ally, America, is now threatening to invade part of their PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TAKE THEIR TERRITORY. THIS IS A REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT. AND WHILE THERE ARE PEOPLE who sometimes say that to understand Trump or to dismiss him and his antics, if you're a political ally, you have to allow a certain amount of chatter.
We are well past the tweet and chatter zone. Trump says it's a national emergency. He recently invaded a sovereign country and extracted their president, not with any great foundation, public support, authorization from Congress or even a plan of what we were going to do down in Venezuela, but just because he chose to.
And, of course, any president of a major power, especially the United States, the number one power in the world, a nuclear power, could at any time do things like that against smaller countries. The fact that most presidents in both parties rarely or never do it in the modern era is telling. I say rarely, because you can point to examples under Obama or Bush where they went in and did national security operations in sovereign territory.
But very few people who have studied the history of diplomacy see what Trump is doing in Greenland as having any precedent whatsoever. His own treasury secretary struggling to explain the tariffs. The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency that it it is a strategic decision by the president.
This is a geopolitical decision, and he's able to use the economic might of the U . S. to avoid a hot war.
So why wouldn't we do that? DISCUSSION, RIGHT? THAT'S ONE VERSION OF DEFENDING TRUMP, SORT OF.
THE IDEA THAT AFTER VENEZUELA WE NEED TO GO INTO GREENLAND IS I THINK IT IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT IS SORT OF BEYOND POLLING OR DISCUSSION BECAUSE IT WASN'T EVEN ON THE TABLE. AMERICANS WHO, OF COURSE, WERE PROMISED THE END TO NEW WARS AND FOREVER WARS BY DONALD Trump have not been thinking about starting any war with Europe, even if we start with a smaller country like Denmark or Greenland that we think we can easily take. It's just not on the table.
An NBA game that was played in IN LONDON, HERE'S SOME REACTION. THAT THE PLAN WAS STILL I THINK THIS HAS SOME SUPPORT. AND BECAUSE THINGS ARE UNFORTUNATELY SO POLITICIZED, WHICH WE'VE TALKED ABOUT AND ADDRESSED ON THIS PROGRAM, WE We've had people on from all sides of the debate.
We try to go at the facts and the evidence, but listen to everyone. This is one where if you go and check what other independent conservative sources are saying, take Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, The Sister Journal of the Fox News, you will find a similar bafflement. There's just a question of how tough people sound with the sitting president or what they think might alienate him.
But the bottom line idea of going into Greenland is nonsensical, would be IT WOULD BE LAUGHABLE IF IT WEREN'T NOW PART OF U . S. POLICY.
THE JOURNAL WRITES, FOR MORE THAN 75 YEARS, THE FONDEST DREAM OF RUSSIAN STRATEGY HAS BEEN TO DIVIDE WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE U . S. AND BREAK THE NATO alliance.
That's now a possibility as Trump presses his campaign to capture Greenland, no matter what the locals or its Denmark owner thinks. The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board landing with much of the rest of the country saying this doesn't make sense. I am joined by Jason Johnson tonight, Morgan State University politics professor and MSNOW analyst and Ruth Ben-Ghiat NYU history professor and the author of strongman Mussolini to the present.
Ruth, what do you see as the validity of this move on a scale of zero to 10, we're seeing a lot of folks say zero. It has it's not a risk reward. It has no particular validity.
What do you rate it? And then what do you think is really going on with Trump and this plan? Well, it has zero validity from a point of view of anybody other than an autocrat, a megalomaniac autocrat.
But what's going on is, you know, Trump talked about trying to buy Greenland in 2019. And the then secretary of state Pompeo went along with it saying that, you know, global warming will liberate all these precious, you know, minerals and oil undiscovered oil. So there's that.
The other thing is that I believe that Trump is in office in part to solve Vladimir Putin's problems and creating a CRISIS FOR NATO AND DIVIDING NATO AND HAVING THE U . S. GO ROGUE IN WAYS THAT ARE QUITE AUTHORITARIAN, WHO DOES IT BENEFIT?
IT BENEFITS PUTIN. AND THE OTHER THING is that, unfortunately, autocrats can get into a state. I call this autocratic backfire when they believe their own hype and they become convinced THEY ARE IN THE SENSE THAT NOTHING CAN RESTRAIN THEM AND DONALD TRUMP RECENTLY GAVE AN INTERVIEW TO THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYING HE WAS RESTRAINED ONLY BY HIS OWN MIND WHICH IS NOT HE IS NOT REASSURING AND HIS OWN MORALITY.
AND SO, YEAH, HE FEELS THAT HE HAS A RIGHT TO THIS. BELIEVING THE HYPE, AS YOU KNOW, ALSO VIOLATES ONE IT'S ONE OF BIGGIE'S TEN CRACK COMMANDMENTS FROM SCARFACE, NEVER GET HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY. WHEN YOU CUT OFF ALL FACTS and you live off propaganda that, as you say, is at risk.
Tell us a little bit more about the NATO or European vendetta. And then I want to bring Jason in, especially on the domestic politics of this, because you're reminding everyone that if Trump is doing something that makes no sense and also benefits Putin, maybe that's the only sense it needs to make. And for anyone who would rather believe that their president is only looking out for the U .
S. , low bar, but hoping for that, it almost can offend your sense of patriotism. If you forget who's president, you just said to the average American, well, this only makes sense if you understand they're doing it for a foreign powers benefit, not yours.
That would be pretty upsetting, right? You take out the red and the blue, and you say, well, so walk us more through the details of that Russian part. And then Jason, tell us what you're thinking tonight.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST DETERRENTS TO PUTIN AND ALL BAD ACTORS HAS BEEN NATO, AND THE VERY POWERFUL U . S. MILITARY, WHICH HAS BEEN STATIONED ALL OVER EUROPE, INCLUDING IN GREENLAND, and represents a huge power, a huge deterrent.
And so you have to get rid of that. But really, psychologically, it can sound absurd, but Trump is very-he had almost a narcissistic ego injury when he did not get the peace prize. And he talked about it in many, many posts.
And Machado of Venezuela gave him hers, but that didn't satisfy him. And so he actually wrote to the Norwegian prime minister, saying that because he didn't get-as you said in the introduction-because he didn't get the Peace Prize, he feels no obligation to care about peace. And so when autocrats are denied something, they go into a kind of rage and they take it out both on their own people and in this case, on the continent of Europe by threatening economic warfare with the tariffs.
Jason? Yeah, this is the thing, Ari, it only makes sense if you look at this internationally, but also it doesn't really make sense long term for the United States. I have spent a tremendous amount of today answering text messages and phone calls from friends and colleagues abroad.
And I feel like I literally have to explain basic American policies. And I had a friend from England text me and say, don't you all still have checks and balances? How was he able to do this?
And I had to say the checks and balances on this kind of presidential communication and behavior have disappeared, right? In any sort of functional administration, even a previous Trump administration, someone would have said, hey, you can't send that message to the prime minister of Denmark. Somebody would have said, hey, you can't just buy another country.
Russia actually has a greater claim on Ukraine than the United States has on Greenland. At least Russia can say, hey, there are some Russians there in Ukraine, and they want to join us. Nobody in Denmark wants this.
Nobody in Greenland wants this. It doesn't help us economically. And if these tariffs come through, the damaging impact on the United States heading into a midterm year, heading into the summer will be absolutely catastrophic.
There is no logic to this other than Donald Trump making Putin happy or everybody else just trying to appease him.
