Greenland as a Stress Test for MAGA Loyalty

Pollsters have long understood that the act of casting a ballot creates a bond. Once we have voted for a candidate, we feel invested in him. We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we might have made a mistake.

Psychologists have lots of terms for the cognitive glitches that make us think this way: post-decision rationalization, dissonance reduction, commitment escalation, choice-supportive bias. But these phrases don’t do justice to the sheer intensity of what happened in red states in November 2016. Voters who detested Hillary Clinton were emotionally fused to the man who defeated her. Something similar happened eight years later with Kamala Harris, soldering the attachment more firmly.

I understand it. On three successive occasions, the Democrats put up terrible candidates—a curiously self-indulgent thing to do, given how high the stakes were, but that’s another story.

I don’t get a vote, obviously—that was settled at Yorktown—but if I had had one, my candidate in 2016 would have been Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Still, let’s be honest: Reason is perhaps the only serious publication where I can mention a Libertarian Party candidate and expect more than the tiniest flicker of recognition. For most Americans in most states, there were only two plausible candidates, and, having chosen one on faute-de-mieux grounds, they began unconsciously to build him up in their minds.

After all, Donald Trump was delivering on a fair chunk of what he promised. He deported illegal immigrants, stopped appointing left-wing activist judges, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, cut federal regulations, and said what his voters wanted to hear about trans people. True, his tariffs raised prices and made America less competitive. But in the country with the largest gross domestic product in the world, trade is a small proportion of the economy; a spectacularly dumb tariff policy can be offset by moderately sensible policies on taxation, regulation, and energy abundance.

At the same time, Trump was being attacked, often stupidly and dishonestly, by people whom his voters cordially loathed. We are a tribal species, and each such attack pushed them closer to him.

As time passed, the nose pegs came off. Trump was their guy. Sure, he could be brash, bombastic, boorish. But he was more or less delivering on what he had been elected to do. Who cared about his character failings? When you hire a plumber, do you ask whether he is faithful to his wife, or do you just want to get your boiler fixed?

Trump’s character flaws, with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, led to the breakdown of January 6, 2021. Everyone knew, his supporters especially, that Trump cannot admit defeat. Whenever something goes against him—a business deal, an awards ceremony, a round of golf—he calls foul and claims victory. Because no one dared check this behavior in him as president, it became more extreme and more destructive.

Will anything turn MAGA against him? I wondered whether, by threatening to annex Greenland, he had found the one issue where his base would not follow him. He was elected as the candidate who would put an end to foreign adventurism, and voters opposed taking Greenland by 71 percent to 4 percent—4 percent being, coincidentally, the “lizardman’s constant,” the estimated proportion of people in any poll who will give insincere or demented replies. Perhaps that is why, as I write, he seems to be backing down from the demand.

The drama, the neediness, the insistence that owning Greenland was “psychologically important for me,” the demented letter to the Norwegian prime minister saying that, because he had not won the Nobel Prize, he might just seize someone else’s territory—will his people continue to back him through all that?

Trump’s refusal to understand that the Norwegian government does not control the Nobel committee is telling. During my time in politics, I came across this tendency again and again when dealing with representatives of tinpot dictatorships. “Why will you not let British Airways fly to our glorious capital?” Well, they’re an independent airline and, if they think the route is profitable, I’m sure they’ll put on a flight. “Lies! Why does your government not act?”

The only two examples I can think of where officials blamed the Norwegian government for the prizes were in 1935, when Hitler went ballistic over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist, and in 2010, when China froze relations with Oslo over its award to the dissident Liu Xiaobo. The idea of attacking a country—let alone a different country—over not getting the prize is without precedent.

There is no point in sugarcoating this. The chief executive is unfit for office. His erratic behavior, his inability to distinguish between his public role and his private interests, his determination to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to his personal wants: These things should bar him.

Congress could put a stop to all this nonsense tomorrow. It could reassert its prerogatives over trade policy and cancel the tariffs. It could begin impeachment proceedings on the grounds that the president is no longer compos mentis. But, filled with cowards and flatterers, it hangs back. And so the checks and balances that the founders put in precisely to contain two-bit Caesarists fail for lack of will.

“A republic—if you can keep it.” Can you, cousins?