Hacker News Reader

I am a Texan and no, I didn’t vote for who shall not be named.

> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?

I don’t think so. Americans are notoriously ignorant about geography; I doubt many can place Greenland on a map.

> To us in the Nordics, this is baffling.

As far as I am concerned, the same person threatened to execute US Senators for treason for telling US military they should refuse illegal orders. The US military swore an oath to defend the constitution; disobeying illegal orders is what is required in the US military code.

> Why is annexation suddenly considered 'vital' when the current alliance has worked for decades?

It is not vital. I personally believe he is trying to derail NATO and make our allies turn against us.

> Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?

Yes. Congress and the Supreme Court are acquiescing to his driving US foreign policy into the toilet.

Well, if how r/conservative is reacting is anything to go by, even the most hardcore MAGA and Russian bots do not seem to agree with this.

Give them time to figure out the mental gymnastics. They always do.

Iv seen few tweets by hardcores going from 'lol its obviously fake and stupid ragebait' to 'yes yes this is totally rational' after learning letter was real.

As of right now there is no mention of this on the Fox News web site, so a lot of Americans don't know about it.

That is really strange, in my opinion. Is that beacuse it's not looked at as important by Fox, or is there other reasons?

Fox News, among others, is a Republican mouthpiece. They rarely report anything that makes Trump look bad.

Had to type into their search box to find it -- published yesterday:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/why-trump-zeroed-greenland-...

Credulously echoes Trump's claims that rare earth deposits there are of strategic value.

And note it doesn't include trumps letter blaming Norway for not giving him a peace prize.

Looks like even fox has an article on their front page now.

Disclaimer: I didn’t vote for Trump but I will try to write objectively.

> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?

No, Trump’s campaign promise was to improve lives of average Americans. Instead, he’s escalating conflicts with countries on the other side of the world and funding state sponsored terrorism domestically. Americans are overwhelmingly against Imperialism.

Over several decades, Congress has given up nearly all their power to stop this to the executive branch. Even if they tried, Trump has proven that he’d do it anyway, overtly curtailing congress, courts and the law.

> Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?

As an American, my opinion is that I think we are.

> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?

As you said, this is executive branch overreach enabled by GOP control over all three branches of government. Republicans may call it 'absurd' and 'weapons-grade stupid', but they're actively enabling Trump's behavior.

> As a Norwegian, I am genuinely curious how US citizens are reacting to Trump’s letter To Norway and demands.

Almost all of the people around me are ashamed about this, and more than a little fearful. There is a huge opposition to the notion, not only because it's betraying our allies and weakening our place on the world stage, but also because it's an impossible-to-miss sign that our nation is in the process of collapse.

If there's anything that mutes the response to this, it's the fact that the feds are violently attacking our own citizenry and that's a more immediate problem.

It's time to seriously consider that Trump is Poetin's puppet and he's basically executing on Poetin's wish to destroy the west. Or Trump has just completely lost it.

> "To us in the Nordics, this is baffling."

Once you stop looking at trump as a president and start looking at him as a narcissist it becomes less baffling and more clinically insane.

do the people who voted for Trump actually back him on this specific issue?

Please excuse me if I am repeating something you've heard. Some fraction of the people who voted for Trump don't back him on this, or maybe any other issue. The US mass media is owned by oligarchs, and the oligarchs like Trump, so he has not been reported on completely or honestly since 2017, early in his first term. That fraction voted for someone who doesn't exist in reality.

A large fraction of Trump voter almost certainly do back him on this. There really is a cult of personality around Trump. I'm not sure Trump himself caused it, but he certainly took advantage of it when it started. The Qanon bullshit is a primary example of this. The US Republican party has made itself more and more rigid and lock-step over the years, Trump was able to take it over, to his advantage.

This part of Trump's voters would back anything he'd say or do, regardless of relation to reality. Luckily, the oligarch owned press is nearly omnipresent, and does not report honestly or completely on Trump, his behavior, so that fraction of voters can keep on believing in Trump as God King.

But the oligarchs would probably not be happy about a devastating trade war (I guess some are happy to buy up all assets and move to the _post-democratic age_ or whatever). So, why aren't they trying to stop the Greenland nonsense?

I think you mean "oligarchs" for they. I have no answer, I'm just a peasant in today's America. My economic interests absolutely do not align with oligachs'. I expect the oligarchs as a class don't think they'll personally be too handicapped by trade wars, and see some way to make more money out of it. Maybe Trump has promised them fiefdoms in a fragmented and demoralized US.

My specific knowledge does not allow me to say why they aren't (or are, behind the scenes) trying to stop the Greenland nonsense. It seems likely that Trump has promised them a slice of the extraction wealth, or that the oligarchs as a group don't see much trouble arising from a Trump takeover of Greenland, so they're just letting him do it rather than annoy him, or his easily angered base.

For what it's worth, I don't know a single person that thinks this is a good idea. However, I'm a software developer living in NYC, so the context of my socioeconomic/cultural bubble isn't representative of the average American's.

A few folks have already posted good points. This is a classic Trump/asshole negotiation tactic. This distracts from the clamor to release the Epstein files.

But what I think is pretty depressing to me is that, as someone else posted, lots of people (even the ones I personally know who don't like Trump) are just so sick of politics and inured against all this madness that they prefer to think about other things. There's also a feeling of helplessness, as it's true that there's not much that an individual can do to affect immediate, meaningful change. My best friend and I went door knocking in PA in 2024 to try to turn out votes for Kamala Harris. He was super passionate about politics. Since then he's shrugged and has literally said to me, "Well, we tried. Let's just focus on our own individual lives." When I try to bring this topic up with other folks, including my best friend, I often get a - "Well they voted for this. Our live are still good. Let them suffer." And when tariffs and other international relations, such as Greenland come up, most people I know tend to just shrug and don't have much to say.

It's a really strange and interesting phenomenon I've observed. Since I strongly believe that smart phone and social media addiction have deranged most individuals, I of course have a bias to think that most people are a mixture of easily distracted by this very distressful situation and psychologically uncomfortable with the aforementioned feeling of not being able to do anything with an immediate result, i.e. no instant gratification that we've been conditioned to expect. But then I read books about history, and it seems like this behavioral pattern isn't unique to this smart phone era, so maybe it's just human nature. Most people probably don't believe in an abstract principle strongly enough to really sacrifice or even be that uncomfortable about it. I'd like to think this isn't the case, so I've tried to modulate my conversations to pleading with people I know (again, most of whom are against Trump and all this), to at least have a conversation where we can agree this sucks. But then, it's another maddening thing, where a lot of folks have told me - That's obvious, why do we need to talk about it.

Regardless - I can only speak for myself when I say that I am wholly, 100%, and passionately against this. I'm just guessing, but I suspect that your confusion on why there's no strong movement against this stems from a large-scale prisoner's dilemma (most individuals here are optimizing for their own local maxima, which leads to our collective minima), and the distressing phenomenon that most humans probably don't like to just be assholes, they try to follow the rules and norms of society, but we have here an asshole who doesn't, so it's difficult to combat him and this administration.

Sigh. Sorry for the long post. Maybe it helps. I don't know, it's a strange time. Even taking the time to at least explain what I've personally witnessed is only my attempt to try to put out the right karma in the universe against this anti-intellectual, indecent behavior.

Thank you for taking the time to write this. I feel for you and understand (though disagree with) the nihilism of your friends. As an outsider, it saddens me to bear witness to the beginning of the sunset of the American epoch. What a bold, noble experiment the USA was!

And to think that we did this to ourselves for a reality TV con man who bankrupts casinos.

I think the feeling of helplessness is reasonable.. Maybe they see how much more they have to sacrifice a lot more to fight this tyranny of stupidity. Only when the population has lost a lot more will they get mad enough to say "well we've lost too much" (if you see how protests go big in other oppressive regimes - the famous quote is "civilization is 3 missed meals away from riots").

Maybe it's all the Nazi thuggery of ICE scaring them, that keeping quiet feels much more safer.

Disclaimer: I don't live under the Trump tyranny.

No need to apologize, quite the opposite. This is exactly the kind of insight I was hoping for. I read the NYT and other U.S. papers and get the editorial perspective, but I still feel, and many here in Scandinavia feel the same, that we can’t fully understand what’s going on at the level of everyday experience in the U.S. That’s why your ‘street‑level analysis’ is valuable and much appreciated.

Have been following Trump since the 1970's. This is a negotiating tactic of his and actually it's a somewhat common negotiating tactic that many people follow when in a negotiation for something they want. Behaviorally anything less than the original demand seems more acceptable. Think of if you were diagnosed with a dreaded disease and then found out you had a lesser disease. The lesser disease by contrast seems less threatening.

I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it) but there is an angle he is pursuing with this. Trump is a master of FUD and also you can't typically tell what things he says he'll do that he does vs. those that he decides not to pursue further (and tha tis part of the magic of how he gets what he wants the unpredictability).

To answer your question of course it's an over reach happening in plain site but people tend to be numb to it at this point since it doesn't directly impact them day to day.

I fear that there is no other angle to this. He just wants the 'added land to the US' and 'won a Nobel peace prize'-accolades next to his name as one of the few presidents.

It's going to be difficult to explain to anyone looking back on this time how they managed to keep up the pretense that this was a functional adult with his faculties intact.

Here you are imbuing a "master of FUD" angle to a letter that might as well be written with crayons.

Oh yeah it's so common to threaten allied counties to get what you want. What the hell are you even saying. Stop trying to normalize this insanity.

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths some people will go to in order to sane wash the batshit crazy things that the President says and does. And just like all the other rationalizations before this, this one is no different: "negotiating tactic" (aka 4D Chess)

> I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it)

You don't? It seems pretty clear to me. He states it in the first sentence of his letter:

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace..."

That's it. That's the reason. It's not very complicated and it doesn't require any thought. Childish? Sure. Unbecoming of an elected official in any capacity? Absolutely. But this is who he is and this is how he operates. I can't think of any President before Trump that required special whisperers to translate everything he says and tell us what he really means.