It seems impossible today to write about anything other than the U.S. military operation against Venezuela and the impending/threatened U.S. military operations against Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, Colombia, Canada and whatever other countries may have been added to the Trump administration’s list between now and whenever I click “publish” on this post.
For now, let’s just focus on the most absurd of these: Greenland.
Donald Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland in the early months of 2025 seemed like an over-the-top joke. It doesn’t seem possible to open a world atlas and select a country that it would be more ridiculous for an American president to fantasize about purchasing or seizing by military invasion. It was such an astonishingly pointless, ugly, and indefensible proposition that reaction to Trump’s Greenland talk in early 2025 nervously assumed this absurdity must be intentional — that he was just trying to provoke a reaction to “own the libs” by talking up the most extremely nonsensical scheme imaginable.
So when this shiny object was replaced by a different one — tariffs! — and Trump stopped mentioning Greenland later last spring, we all breathed a sigh of relief, occasionally exchanging glances to express “Did that really just happen?” but reluctant to mention it ever again lest our doing so should revive the idea in the warped weave of his addled mind and bring it back to the center of his ever-shifting attention.
He never mentioned it again so we never mentioned it again. And that held true for most of 2025 until last month, when invading Greenland weaved its way back into “the weave” and Trump appointed the governor of Louisiana to serve as his special attache for the annexation of Greenland. (No, really.) And now in January of 2026, the president of the United States is once again very, very excited by the idea of annexing Greenland by military force.
Again, this is unreal and surreal, but it is also real. It’s not a Simpsons gag from the ’90s or a Hiassen novel or a bit of hyperbole from some sketch comedy team lampooning American imperialism. The Trump administration may be wholly lacking in serious people, but they are utterly serious about invading Greenland.
And thus Trump’s supporters now support this idea too.
After the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela this weekend, Michael Kagan grimly joked that “I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war.” The reference there was to the months-long persuasion/PR/propaganda campaign prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq at the start of that forever war. That campaign was, as Kagan notes, disgracefully dishonest, but at least they put in the effort instead of just abruptly changing course and having the whole country wake up to the news that we were now at war with Eastasia Venezuela.
We were not properly lied to about the purposes of this war because the current administration does not care about public support for its choices and actions. It does not care about those who oppose those choices and actions. And it does not need to care about its supporters because it knows they will quickly fall in line with any new policy or agenda — no matter how suddenly it is revealed nor how utterly it reverses the prior policies they had loyally supported just weeks before.
And so today we have the spectacle of vocal Trump supporters who just a short time ago were celebrating the president as a champion of Lindberg-style isolationism and non-intervention pulling a 180 and now celebrating him as a champion of McKinley-style imperialism and expansionism. They quickly and utterly reversed themselves without blinking, without hesitating or adjusting. Seemingly without even noticing that they were doing so.
For some examples of this, take a look at the one-topic special-edition “Evangelical Roundup” posted by John Fea on Saturday, “Evangelicals respond to the U.S. attack on Venezuela.” Fea always seeks some diversity in these roundup posts, so he includes David French’s never-Trumper response and that of the pacifist Shane Claibourne. But apart from French and Shane, the rest of the voices here are unanimously and gleefully supportive.
If we went back in time just two months, back in the old days when support for Trump’s “America First” agenda meant opposing interventionism, we could have polled all of these same people about a hypothetical military adventure in Venezuela. What would they have said? They would have said what they thought, back then, was the right answer — the loyal and obedient answer. Way back then, just before Thanksgiving, these MAGA evangelicals — Sean Feucht, Tom Buck, Andrew Walker, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, Greg Laurie, Gary Bauer (still alive!), Johnnie Moore, Eric Metaxas, Jenna Ellis, Todd Starnes, et. al. — would have told you that as loyal, obedient MAGA footsoldiers, they were opposed to interventionist adventurism because it violated the sacred principle of America First.
And yet they all quickly and loyally took to Twitter (“X”) to post their immediate, enthusiastic, unqualified support for the attack on Venezuela.
It wasn’t easy for them to do this because it’s no longer easy to post, as they all still do, on Twitter about anything other than what Grok and its algorithms send your way. And these days, that includes a lot of AI pornography and CSAM. “Elon Musk’s Grok AI floods X with sexualized photos of women and minors,” Reuters reports.
Again, if we could go back in time six months and poll all of those upstanding MAGA evangelicals to ask them if they would continue to use a social media platform flooded with “sexualized photos of women and minors” — a platform that responded to complaints about that with nothing more than a laugh/cry emoji — I’m pretty sure that all of them would have told you that no, of course not. Such an appalling thing would surely cause them all to delete their accounts in horror at such images — something they all have a long, long track record of consistently opposing.*
That’s what they would have said back when such a thing was purely hypothetical. But now that it is real, they’ve all come to accept it. Not because they’ve changed their minds about pornography, but because Musk and X and Grok are all right-coded and thus, for them, unquestioned and unchallenged.
Go back in time two years. That’s not that long ago, but it’s long enough ago that any mention of a U.S. invasion of Greenland — of Greenland! — would have been universally recognized as an implausible and nasty joke. Ask January 2024 Sean Feucht or Tom Buck or Andrew Walker or Franklin Graham or any of those others about the idea of the United States seizing Greenland by military force and they would have done what anyone would have done. They would have laughed in disbelief and then assured you that, no, of course they did not support such an absurd notion, and that they never would.
But two years later, they’re not laughing any more. Now they all support this idea enthusiastically. And they will eagerly condemn and castigate anyone who responds to it the way they themselves all did just two years ago.
And they will continue to fiercely support U.S. military action to conquer and seize Greenland for as long as they are told to do so — until it happens or until their leader is again distracted by some other shiny object, or until he misspeaks at some microphone and says “Iceland” by mistake, and then doubles down on the misstatement, abandoning his planned annexation of Greenland and advocating from that moment on for an invasion of its neighbor.
How does this happen? How does someone become so pliable and obedient as to reverse themselves on a dime to accept what they previously understood to be horrors and absurdities and atrocities?
I have theory about this — a theory that, as you can probably guess, involves Satanic baby-killers.
But that’s a longer discussion, one which we will have to save for a future post.
It’s also a discussion that involves a much longer project, one that we’re unlikely to be able to accomplish in time to be of any use to our neighbors in Canada and Mexico and, for the love of all that’s holy, Greenland.
* At least in public. Most of the evangelicals listed there are — or, at least, were — genuinely opposed to every form of pornography. But I’d bet there are at least one or two Col. Lockjaw types amongst those collected in John’s evangelical roundup and that those guys are secretly big fans of Grok’s new pornification feature.
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