Don't Stop at Greenland and Panama, Sir!

Manifest destiny, sir! Trumpovia!

As recently as twenty-four hours ago, sir, I was, frankly, horrified by the thought of your regaining the presidency. But yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, you spoke of seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, and of renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and at that moment I recognized you at last, sir, as a man of incomparable vision and virility.

The Danes, with the 362nd lowest “defense” budget in the world, are going to keep us from seizing Greenland? Pull the other one, sir!

What have the Danes given the world? A style of furniture and a variant of puff pastry made of laminated yeast-leavened dough? Hamlet? LEGO? You’ll do what you’re told, Denmark, and the good people of Greenland, whom we’ve helped to shrug off the yoke of tyranny, will thank you for it in decades to come!

“Today Here, Tomorrow the World” from my 2024 album All We’re Saying Is Give Fascism a Chance. Listen free on Bandcamp.com.

And Panama, with their 182-person army! Do they not remember how effortlessly President Reagan liberated the oppressed people of Grenada in 1983? When he United Nations condemned that “flagrant violation of international law”, we were so chastized we could barely muster the strength to pop Madonna’s latest cassette into our Walkmans. Not!

But why, sir, should we stop with Greenland and Panama, when so many other countries are calling out for seizure by our mighty armies? Drill, baby, drill, indeed, sir (what a lot of commas!), but why bother with drilling when we can instead annex Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, and whose noble, if mostly dark-complected, people have suffered so grievously under the dictator Nicolas Maduro, whom you could undoubtedly beat at golf left-handed.

I’ve no doubt, sir, that a very simple solution to the whole H-1B visa brouhaha would be for the USA to annex India, from which hail most of the brilliant software engineers to whom Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, and your daughter Tiffany so stridently object. Given the country’s immensity, the prospect may seem daunting, sir, but let’s remember 2019’s unforgettable Howdy Modi extravaganza in Houston, where you were applauded by 50,000 Indian American software engineers, and 2020’s Namaste Trump in India’s Gujarat state, where your audience fairly creamed its jodhpurs when you Vowed to Solidify US-India Ties.

Only kidding about Tiffany, sir. Ain’t we got fun, you and I?

Do bear in mind, please, sir, that India is also one of the world’s richest sources of the rare earth elements neodymium, cerium, and praseodymium, central to the AI semiconductor supply chain. And colonization by an English-speaking superpower won’t be new to them, sir. As recently as the year before your glorious birth they were still a British colony!

While we’re speaking of semiconductors, sir, let’s note that the hilariously named Democratic Republic of Congo produces ten times more cobalt, used to insulate the microscopic copper wires that make microchips more reliable, than the second country on the list.

It isn’t like you to think small, sir, and I know that the idea of annexing the entire “sleeping giant” that is the continent of Africa has occurred to you. Go for it, sir — oh, do! (If they make a stink, sir, we can settle for just the subsaharan bits, and promise not to cut off anyone’s hands. We Americans are not stinking fat Belgian bastards (you of course remember the Monty Python sketch about national slurs). Nossir!)

It would be remiss of me to fail to mention New Zealand, where, according to no few of my billionaire friends, many Americans who have benefitted from your wonderful first-term tax cut are buying property in anticipation of a nuclear war or a pandemic much worse than the COVID-19 one you effortlessly brought to its knees. One of the remotest places on earth, sir, the land of the Kiwis has wonderful scenery, hot bitches, and a dark-skinned indigenous population for you to demonize should the urge ever strike. Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg is known to have bought a sizable hunk of the country, so you wouldn’t have to worry about your loafers being licked clean should you ever venture out for a hike.

I mustn’t neglect to mention, sir, that I love your idea of renaming the ocean basin and marginal sea presently known, very unfairly, as the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of America has a lovely ring to it, sir, but can we not just skip this step, given that some considerable expense is sure to be involved, and rechristen it the Gulf of Trumpovia?