Trump transition
Trump Transition
Trump transition
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Donald Trump has long sought to make anything he controls bigger.
By Maggie Haberman and Jess Bidgood
President-elect Donald Trump is still a week away from taking office, but his musings about coercing Canada to join the United States while acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal — declining at one point to rule out the use of military force in those two particular cases — have made for a surreal prologue to his second administration. It’s a fixation that has set world leaders on edge and forced congressional Republicans into the odd position of insisting that the incoming president is not planning to storm the Arctic.
“The United States is not going to invade any other country,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. , said on “Meet the Press. “Trump, Lankford insisted, was simply making “bold” statements aimed at bringing “everyone to the table. “
Whether those words are a negotiating tactic or something more, the president-elect’s expressed preference for expanding the nation’s footprint reflects an impulse that has animated much of his career in the public eye: letting everything he controls be as wonderful as possible.
In this sense, Trump’s comments about taking Greenland and Canada through “economic force” can be seen less as the expression of a foreign policy objective than as the extension of a philosophy that dates back to his determined efforts to expand your power. corporations through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s.
In tonight’s newsletter we will see why.
The prime minister of Greenland says the territory wants to work more closely with the United States on certain issues, but Greenlanders, like Panamanians, have expressed little interest in actually handing their territory over to Americans.
As a businessman, however, Trump paid little attention to those who stood in the way of his desired expansions, even if they rarely figured out tactics to impede him.
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