Joe Biden may still be in the White House, but even before he takes office Donald Trump is setting the global agenda with his boasts, bombast and bullying.
So we see billionaire technology bosses who once posed as brave liberals suddenly acting as pathetic quislings, pouring cash into the coffers for his inauguration while ripping away controls on online hate and misinformation. One of them, given a government role, openly seeks to subvert British politics.
And the president-elect of the planet’s most important democracy is threatening other close allies of the United States with talk about taking over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Brace yourself for the second coming of Trump. We have four years of this tumult to endure.
The property tycoon is famously unpredictable, yet few people would have thought his first diplomatic spat upon restoration would have been with Denmark, a long-standing ally of Washington that has spilled the blood of soldiers assisting US operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Iraq.
Nor with Canada, a placid country with whom the US shares the world’s longest border and is so deeply entwined culturally and economically.
But that rambling press event in Florida last week underlined Trump’s utter contempt for democratic or diplomatic norms, along with his determination to leave an indelible mark on the world after the confusion and failures of his first term.
As so often with Trump, he spoke nonsense at times: China does not control the Panama Canal, as he suggested, and there is no evidence Hezbollah was involved in the 6 January insurgency in Washington.
Yet a twisted logic lay beneath the malice, mangled facts and mischief in that meandering discussion at Mar-a-Lago, which veered in typically bizarre style from discussion on the strength of showers to suggestions that Nato members drive up defence spending to five per cent of GDP (a target no member hits at present, and which would mean Britain doubling sums spent on the armed forces.)
This was most apparent with his headline-grabbing demand to buy Greenland. As I discovered while reporting there 15 months ago, there is deep unease over Danish rule and their enforced development that bubbles beneath the surface of this massive, resource-rich Arctic nation.
Details of a horrific campaign of clandestine mass contraception in the 60s and 70s recently emerged, which was imposed on girls as young as 12 and left some infertile. One of the island’s two MPs termed it a “genocide” inflicted on indigenous Inuit people, designed to cut costs of modernisation and a generous Nordic welfare system, while the island’s chief doctor told me the scheme was so extensive it halved their population.
Naja Lyberth, a trauma therapist who exposed this disturbing campaign, one which rode roughshod over medical ethics and human rights, told me it was only after she helped break down walls of silence that they could understand why so many of their women were unable to have children. She went on to explain how traditional communities that lived off hunting felt looked down upon by Danes.
“They judged us – the way we lived, because we were not modern, but we had our own communities with our own values. We had to follow their family system, their culture. They wanted to turn us into different people. It was horrible,” she said. “We were supposed to be equal citizens but we did not feel equal.”
It was clear many Greenlandic people resent Danish control. They won home rule in 2009 from their former colonial masters but despite having their own flag, they do not have control over their currency, courts or security. Polls indicate a majority of the 56,000 citizens living there back independence.
So Trump’s explosive demand for Copenhagen to sell the world’s largest island to the US – which occupied it in the Second World War, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis – or face punitive tariffs touches on genuine dissatisfaction felt among people living in a place of growing strategic significance, as global warming opens up the ice across the North Pole.
There are no signs the people of Greenland want to trade one colonial master for another, however – especially one so intent on pillaging their mineral wealth. Still, this idea is more likely than the concept of Canada becoming the 51st US state (a move that might ensure a Democratic electoral majority, given Canadians’ liberalism).
Yet, even these bizarre Trump outbursts have dangerous consequences since they can corrode US credibility, distract from issues of importance, undermine key alliances and play straight into the hands of bloodstained dictatorships actively engaged in a worldwide war against democracy.
It is bad enough that we must witness the return of this selfish man who deliberately undermined a key tenet of democracy – that a leader must relinquish power after electoral defeat.
But now Trump 2.0 is voicing a destructive message: that might is right, that imperial expansion is acceptable, that international law is irrelevant, that smaller or weak nations are pawns to be pushed around by stronger powers.
This shatters attempts to cling to any pretence of rules-based international order, while sending a destructive signal to dictators such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin that they do not need to respect the rights or sovereignty of nations such as Taiwan and Ukraine.
There are frightening similarities between events unfolding in the US and Putin’s spraying around of disinformation, enslavement of obedient oligarchs and muscular revival of imperialism.
One thing is certain: Trump is already handing a propaganda coup to the enemies of democracy with his land-grabbing bluster. This becomes all the more toxic as he echoes Kremlin arguments by saying he can “understand” why Russia feels threatened by Ukraine’s potential Nato membership – especially ahead of his efforts to force a peace deal on Kyiv that threatens to play straight into Putin’s hands.
True democrats can only look on in horror, fearful at the return of this self-serving president launching an assault on our system’s most fundamental values, while the planet’s dictators watch on with unfettered delight.
