Speaking, or rather ranting, at Davos, Trump actually said this to the European leaders: “If it wasn’t for us you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese.”
I heard this phrase many times in American bars, usually in disreputable parts of town and close to chucking out time. This cliché favoured by drunken yobs has been satirised by many American comedians and film makers. For example, in A Fish Called Wanda, it was uttered by a character portrayed as a walking caricature of a moron.
Trump follows interesting role models, in other words. But he was still only warming up. America, or rather he personally, could “financially destroy” Switzerland, said Trump, showing exactly how guests in a foreign country should behave.
Denmark is ungrateful to America for having saved its bacon in the big war, was the way Trump put on his historian’s cap. “Europe has been screwing us for 30 years,” he continued, and NATO “gave us nothing”. Actually, European, including Danish, soldiers died side by side with Americans in Afghanistan, which is the only time Article 5 of the NATO charter has been invoked.
NATO’s Secretary General Rutte later spoke to the man he had once deferentially called ‘Daddy’ and enlightened him on that subject. That was like trying to convince a lunatic that he isn’t really Jesus Christ.
Actually, Europeans could say with equal justification that the US has been screwing them. Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, US bonds have acted as default purchases in the financial markets for decades. This has allowed the US to run up her staggering sovereign debt of $36 trillion, which has largely enabled Americans to enjoy unprecedented prosperity.
During his campaign for a second term, Trump bemoaned the national debt and promised to do something about it. He kept that promise by adding another £2.25 trillion to the debt. Apparently, the markets are uneasy about this, which means the US cost of borrowing is going up. This means, inter alia, that Americans will pay a higher interest for all their loans, cars, mortgages, holidays, whatever they borrow for.
Yet the question of who exactly has been screwing whom never came up as a possible retort. That allowed Trump to ratchet up the level of insults.
Europeans are “stupid people” for buying Chinese-made windmills. The Chinese, on the other hand, are savvy for selling those abominations but never using them themselves. Actually, China produces 44 per cent of the world’s wind power, but what are facts among friends.
The subject of Russia never came up, but when it had in the past Trump often repeated the lie that the US provided $350 billion’s worth of aid to the Ukraine. Once again, what’s an order of magnitude among friends. In fact, the numeral he cites refers to the amount appropriated by Congress. The actual aid delivered was under $40 billion, but no one can pull the bit out of Trump’s clenched teeth.
His mode of delivery makes one want to disagree with Trump even when he is right. Such as, for example, when he ranted about Europe’s spending too much in general and too little on defence, uncontrolled immigration and commitment to the “green new scam”. Actually, a native speaker who has been to school would have said “new green scam”, but Trump isn’t into mellifluous elocution.
If someone – anyone – spoke to me in that hectoring, insulting tone, I’d tell him to perform a ballistically unlikely act on himself and walk out. This regardless of what he was saying, true or false. Yet leaders of great – fine, formerly great – countries sat there like naughty schoolchildren reprimanded by a stern headmaster.
No one even responded with the phrase in the title above, which would have sucked some electricity out of the air. Perhaps the Europeans sensed that Trump was blowing off some steam before performing one of his usual about-faces.
Sure enough, he did allow that he wasn’t after all going to send the 82nd Airborne into Greenland, or rather Iceland, as he kept calling it. A Freudian slip perhaps? Is Iceland going to be declared another essential link in America’s defence chain, making her ripe for occupation? If I were a member of Iceland’s government, I’d give serious consideration to beefing up the coastal defences. Just in case.
For the time being, Trump has come up with a solution for Greenland/Iceland that every sensible commentator, including this immodest one, has been offering for yonks. The US doesn’t need to occupy Greenland to use it for Arctic defences. The Danish government, and NATO in general, would be happy to let Americans build as many bases on the island as they desire.
Trump’s insistence that the land under the bases should be sovereign US territory is a moot point. This is the self-evident case with all US bases anywhere in the world, and no special dispensation is required.
Of course sovereignty over the area of US bases doesn’t imply one over the rare earth minerals that are as plentiful in Greenland as they are hard to mine. This may still prove to be the sticking point for Trump, who never forgets to look after number one, which doesn’t always mean his country.
And oh yes, Trump has withdrawn his threat to slap additional tariffs on those European countries that oppose a US occupation of Greenland. I’m not surprised: it has been two days since he first issued that threat, plenty of time not just for a 180 but even for a 540.
In general, the whole atmosphere of Davos evoked conferences of the past where implacable enemies tried to find some accommodation making a military clash unnecessary. If Trump continues in this vein, it won’t be long before Europeans chalk the US up in the rubric of foe rather than friend.
I’d take that as a personal tragedy and, more important, a catastrophic development for the West at large. As for inviting Putin to join the Gaza ‘peace board’, I’ve already commented on that surreal outrage, so I shan’t repeat myself.
Actually, since that sham board is Trump’s personal project, no European country can block Putin’s appointment. Checks and balances are disappearing from Western politics, and the US isn’t doing brilliantly in that respect either.
P.S. While we are on the subject of English usages, I continue to absorb the intricacies of my learned language.
Thus a football commentator the other day described a tackle as ‘vociferous’, even though neither party had uttered a sound. Did he mean full-blooded? Crunching? Bone-crushing? My pet idea of fining the misuse of big words has been vindicated yet again.
Football commentators don’t know better, but Will Self, the writer who grew up in a professor’s family should. Yet here’s a passage from a Times review of the new Dictionary of Biography, specifically Self’s entry on JG Ballard’s novel Crush:
Self talks about Ballard’s fascination with the fact that the “dysfunctional relationship between humans and technology reached a sort of orgasmic crescendo in a paean to the delirious psychosexuality of celebrity car crashes” – “a sentence,” comments the reviewer, “that could only exist in a dictionary confident of its readers”.
Yes, confident that his readers are as ignorant as he is. A crescendo, Will, isn’t to be confused with a climax, orgasmic or otherwise. It’s a way of getting to the climax by gradually increasing tempo and volume. It’s a staircase one climbs to get to an Islington flat, not the flat itself. Glad to be of help.
The solecism apart, that whole sentence is a pseud straining every tendon to show he’s posher than thou. This is a pseud version of the ditty: “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.”
Another day, another embarrassing tirade from our president. However, I feel I can offer a defense of the “green new scam”. I have not been following the proceedings at Davos, so I cannot be sure of context, but the lunatics in our government who propose to bankrupt the country in the name of climate change have named their plan the “Green New Deal”. It is supposed to remind us of Roosevelt’s plan to save the country from financial ruin via profligate spending. As if that were something worth repeating. I would expect we will be able to paraphrase Morgenthau: “We have just as much carbon dioxide as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!” Anyway, I think Trump was mocking the Green New Deal and all “net zero” plans by referring to it as the Green New Scam.
Thank you for this — I didn’t know it. The phrase sounded awkward to me, but of course it doesn’t with Green New Deal. This is one part of Trump’s diatribe, by the way, where I share his sentiments. There are other parts as well, as I think I mentioned. But I would have still walked out of the room had I been there — I don’t let people talk to me that way, especially if they are powerful.
The other day, Daniel McCarthy, the pundit who edits The American Conservative (and reads me, occasionally taking issue, not always coherently, with what I say about Trump), wrote a piece on the subject. He is pro-MAGA, and his argument is that Trump’s job as he sees it is to undo the New Deal.
Now I feel about the New Deal the way he and you do (I actually used the Morgenthau quote in one of my books.) But part of it was FDR’s commitment to free trade and what during the days of the British Empire was called liberal interventionism. I like the former, not the latter. But this is what made the US a dominant global power during after the war (McCarthy didn’t mention that little interlude during FDR’s tenure).
Trump, who understand greatness as power and wealth, ought to be careful what he wishes for. The way the global economy is configured, largely due to the US, makes autarkies well-nigh impossible. If, for example, the financial markets dump US bonds, and this is already beginning to happen, the dollar would be in jeopardy, as the world’s reserve currency at any rate. Considering the size of the US national debt, this would be a catastrophe compared to which the Great Depression would look like a walk in the park. And the shock waves of that explosion would hit the whole world, not just the US.
Trump also thinks his waging trade war on the whole world, especially America’s allies, will weaken China. In fact, it’s strengthening it, and Putin’s Russia as well. If the world is a china shop, Trump is the bull in it. And we all know what happens with that combo. I’m making some assumptions here that aren’t exactly safe: that he is acting in good faith, not because he is in cahoots with foreign tyrants, and that he is compos mentis. Let’s just sit back and watch: just about all we can do (other than bitch about it).
I could not agree more – Trump was terribly wrong about “speaking German.” Nicholas De Santo explains why – Brits, for one, simply would not be able to learn to speak German, he says. I will add: we, Americans, would not be able to speak German (let alone Japanese) for the same reason. Most of us speak American alright, but even Mexican is too much for an average Joe. Just wanted to add my 2 cents to a learned conversation.
I think your Soccer commentator has heard the clichés “ferocious opposition” and “vociferous opposition” and thought that the latter was an elegant variant of the former.
Mr Self not only doesn’t know the meaning of crescendo (a gradual increase in volume that may or may not be accompanied by an increase or decrease in speed), he also doesn’t know the difference between a paean and a dithyramb. But mere ignorance of the meanings of precisely defined words is less odious than the use of hermaphroditic barbarisms like “dysfunctional” and “psychosexuality”. A sentence that contains such jargon of the sociological sewer is beyond all possibility of correction.
Mr Trump doesn’t use long words much. Why should he, when there are so many short ones to mangle?
Is there a single word for “corruption of language”? If not, may I suggest “glossophthoria”? And people like us, who feel that we have a duty to study such nasty phenomena, could be “glossophthoriologists”.