🥇“Trophy Envy” Edition

Donald Trump has apparently discovered the one thing more dangerous than nuclear war: not getting a trophy.

According to a text message he sent Norway’s prime minister, Trump is now linking his renewed obsession with taking Greenland to the fact that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize. In Trump’s telling, Norway’s failure to hand him the award for “having stopped 8 Wars PLUS” has freed him from the burden of “thinking purely of Peace.”

In other words: Give me the Nobel or I’m taking the Arctic.

Trump’s message, first reported publicly through copies shared by Norway’s government, reads like a drunk text from a jilted admirer: he complains Norway “decided” not to give him the prize (it didn’t), declares the world isn’t safe unless America has “Complete and Total Control of Greenland,” and tosses in a “Thank you!” at the end—because manners still matter when you’re threatening to annex an island the size of Western Europe.

Norway’s prime minister had to respond with the diplomatic equivalent of explaining gravity to a toddler: the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by an independent committee, not the Norwegian government. Which is the kind of basic civic fact most people learn in school, but Trump seems to encounter only when his feelings are hurt.

Meanwhile, Greenland is not a vacant Costco parking lot awaiting development. It’s been part of the Danish Kingdom for centuries, it’s self-governing, and its 57,000 residents have been extremely clear they do not want to join the United States. Protesters in Nuuk even marched through the snow chanting “No means no” and “Yankee, go home”—helpful phrases to remember when your foreign policy starts sounding like a bar fight.

Denmark and European allies have begun reinforcing the island, because Trump’s version of “de-escalation” appears to be tariffs, threats, and group texts demanding full territorial control. And after a recent meeting involving the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland, officials walked out thinking they’d formed a “working group”—only for the Trump administration to announce they’d begun “technical talks” on acquiring Greenland, as if everyone had just agreed to list it on Zillow and international law can be disregarded like a negative Yelp review.

The moral universe may bend toward justice—but in Trump’s hands, it mostly bends toward petty revenge, real estate fantasies, and a desperate need to be handed a medal.

Rob Rogers - Substack and Andrews McMeel

Clay Jones - Substack and Claytoonz

Nick Anderson - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Paul Lander and Dan McConnell

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Dave Whamond - cagle.com/whamond

Andy Marlette - Tribune Content Agency

Graeme MacKay - cagle.com/mackay

A Danish lawmaker is begging the world to stop treating Donald Trump like a volatile uncle at Thanksgiving—someone you “manage” with compliments and careful seating arrangements—because this time he’s not just ranting, he’s openly threatening to take Greenland.

In a blunt warning, Trine Pertou Mach argues that Trump’s yearlong threats to seize the world’s largest island aren’t a misunderstanding, a bargaining tactic, or a “joke that didn’t land.” They’re imperial bullying, and the longer allies respond with nervous laughter and polite phone calls, the more Trump learns the same lesson every playground tyrant learns: appeasement works.

Mach makes clear Denmark’s main concern isn’t clinging to Greenland as a colonial possession. Greenlanders—57,000 people with an obvious right to self-determination—should decide their own future. But that right is exactly what Trump is undermining with his “I’m taking it” routine, backed by economic threats, military pressure, and the increasingly familiar claim that America needs everything “for global security.” Because apparently global security is impossible unless the U.S. owns everything.

Trump isn’t liberating anyone, certainly not Venezuelans, Palestinians, or Greenlanders. He’s pursuing domination and control, the kind of “rules don’t apply to me” foreign policy the world just watched in Venezuela. Letting that slide, she warns, doesn’t end the problem. It invites the sequel. Today it’s Caracas, tomorrow it’s Nuuk, and after that it’s any country unlucky enough to exist near a superpower with resource envy and a fragile ego.

Mach’s central point is simple: the rules-based order only exists if countries defend it. If Trump can threaten annexation in plain language, and the world responds with diplomacy-as-therapy—soothing statements, de-escalation meetings, careful wording—then international law becomes just another optional guideline, like “do not microwave foil.”

So what should Europe do? Mach says stop walking on eggshells and start building real independence from Washington: reduce reliance on U.S. weapons, rethink intelligence ties, stop letting American tech giants function as the infrastructure of democracy, and unite internationally against imperial coercion, whether it comes from Trump or any other strongman with a map and a tantrum.

The world can’t keep appeasing Trump and acting shocked when he escalates. The bully isn’t confused. He’s testing the fence. And every time the world flinches, he hears the same answer: go ahead.