One of my big pet peeves about the Trump era is the Greenland effect.
I belong to a small group of people who think that the United States should acquire Greenland peacefully. It is an old idea. The State Department inclined In 1946, the Danes bought the huge Arctic island, but unfortunately they did not want to sell their colony. But given its strategic importance and economic Value, worth a revisit.
When it was reported In 2019, when then-President Trump took an interest in the plan, he immediately… become to end line.
Of course, buying Greenland was always going to be a difficult task politically, but Trump's acceptance made it infinitely more difficult.
The Greenland effect applies not only to good, obscure, and outlandish ideas, but also to good, or simply popular, ones. As president, when Trump adopted a policy, that policy became less popular. Despite his anti-immigration rhetoric, support for increased immigration reached A time for all times stop. he did Free trade is more popular than ever before, while starting a trade war with China.
Part of this was the result of the thermostatic Dysfunction of American politics. When one side is in power, a significant number of voters lean toward the other side.
But Trump poses a specific problem for conservatives precisely because he and his enablers cannot accept the idea that he is unpopular. The stolen election lie is a symptom of this delusion: “Trump couldn’t have lost; the election must have been rigged.”
This makes the Greenland effect particularly insidious because conservative ideas, once associated with Trump, often become a hard sell even for the most talented politicians.
Which brings us to JD Vance (R-Ohio…or was it Greenland?).
The general consensus is that Vance was a “trust choose”, a choice of running mate that “duplicate below” about the MAGA message. As Washington Post columnist Jim Geraghty put it wrote Two weeks ago, “Electing Vance is the closest Trump can come to doubling down.”
I generally agree with this analysis, but it fails to take into account a key difference between Trump and Vance. Trump is more of a celebrity entertainer than a conventional politician. As a result, he gets away with things that no conventional politician could. He may provoke passionate opposition from his enemies, but his supporters simply shrug off his misstatements, gaffes, and mendacity. Those of us who predicted in 2016 that the “laws of political gravity” would catch up with Trump were wrong because Trump is subject to the laws of celebrity gravity, a very different jurisdiction.
But Trump and his supporters made a similar miscalculation: They believed that pure Trumpism, as they define it, is popular outside the bubble of the Trump personality cult.
This helps explain why most of the MAGA Trump impersonators (people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Herschel Walker) failed in 2022. Even Vance, one of the few The aggressively pro-Trump GOP Senate candidates who managed to win that cycle significantly underperformed other Republicans in Republican Ohio elections.
Vance's launch has been like this rocky Precisely because he is a no-frills MAGA candidate, who thinks offending or scaring people is a sign of masculinity and strength. His outed comment about miserable “childless cat ladies” came in the context of his broader support for child tax credits, a very controversial issue. popular You don't have to be a brilliant politician to know that there are basically only two types of childless women: women who want or wanted to have children but it didn't work out (or it hasn't worked out yet) and women who didn't want children (or haven't had them yet) and understandably object to being ridiculed for it. But in Trump's world, ridicule is what matters.
Both Vance and his left wing detractors It would make us believe that taxing those without children is some radical MAGA proposal. Lord of the EdgeBut as Dominic Pino of the National Review Institute says grades“The U.S. tax code, right now, penalizes people who don’t have children compared to those who do, all things being equal,” because of the child tax credit and other allowances for minor dependents.
The Trump campaign is trying to circumvent Project 2025, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation and alumni of the Trump administration. Much of the panic over it stems from witheredBut the panic was entirely predictable precisely because its defenders, including Vance, have deliberately presented it as a radical “second American revolution,” which will be “bloodless“Only if the left does not resist,” in the words of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation (Vance writes (the prologue to Roberts' upcoming book).
The Greenland effect poses a second problem. Not only does it make conservative ideas unnecessarily unpopular, it also leads Republicans to abandon them altogether in the name of political expediency. Trump has abandoned even the pretense of fixing entitlements or replacing Obamacare. He has become an effective advocate for abortion, at least during elections. And, as Trump’s running mate, Vance has done so as well.
It's really a double bill, twice the insults for the price of one.
