Donald Trump’s call to annex Greenland has roiled markets and flabbergasted half the world. But Trump’s supporters in conservative communities – to the degree that this issue has their attention at all – are apt to accept his political argument as genuine.
The thing that is most irritating about this “Trump is play 8d chess while everyone else is playing checkers” argument (irritating specifically; there are more horrifying or awful things) is that because the argument is specifically that Trump is engaging in complex negotiation, any concession of any kind will be portrayed as a success. If the EU does anything — signs a trade deal, updates NATO governance, increases military budgets domestically — Trump will call it a deal and all these morons will say “see, look, I told you, he was just negotiating.” And there is no way to claim that the cost of the negotiation tactics is not worth the benefit of the so-called deal because they are explicitly isolationist and burning bridges with other countries is a feature, not a bug.