Recently, while reading Noah Feldman's lucid study, The Three Lives of James Madison, I happened to be going through the long section regarding how Madison, as Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State, was involved in swindling Napoleon out of the Louisiana Territory. (Fact I Did Not Know: vital to Napoleon's decision to sell us half-a-continent was the fact that he lost most of an army in Haiti to yellow fever, which also kept Haiti free. Yay, mosquitoes!) They were just trying to buy what was then called Florida, the entire strip of land including the coasts of what are now Alabama and Mississippi as well as the Florida panhandle (West Florida), as well as the peninsula (East Florida.)
On April 11, 1803, however, Talleyrand, Napoleon's crafty minister, having convinced the emperor that his plans for an empire across the sea was folly, asked the American envoys whether they might like to buy the whole of Louisiana. He asked them to make him an offer. Robert Livingston, the lead negotiator, was so gobsmacked that he told Talleyrand that, no, all he really wanted was New Orleans and the Floridas.
This was a good backing story to have running through my brain when, on Tuesday night, just when I thought the news day had ended at last, this popped on the electric Twitter machine:
I spent a half-hour making sure that this wasn't some sort of parody account. Surely, the President* of the United States wouldn't be so balls-out petulantly crazy as to cancel a state visit because a foreign government refused to sell him a portion of its own country. I didn't fully believe it until the BBC reported on it, too.
The president was scheduled to visit on 2 September, at the invitation of Denmark's Queen Margrethe II. Then last week Mr Trump suggested the US was interested in buying Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen described the suggestion as "absurd" and said she hoped Mr Trump was not being serious...
The suggestion was dismissed by Greenlandic and Danish officials. "Greenland is not for sale, but Greenland is open for trade and co-operation with other countries, including the USA," said the territory's premier, Kim Kielsen. Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister, tweeted: "It must be an April Fool's Day joke." Soren Espersen, foreign affairs spokesman for the populist Danish People's Party, told national broadcaster DR: "If he is truly contemplating this, then this is final proof that he has gone mad."
Looks like El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's real beef may be with brother Espersen there, not that the Danish gent is wrong or anything.
This is Mad King stuff. He says he wants to buy something—and some people—who are not for sale, and he demands that Denmark take this bubbling insanity seriously, and when they don't, he insults them by cancelling a state visit. For a while on Tuesday night, I thought it was funny. Then, I looked it up and realized that Denmark has been one hellaciously good ally. It lost 43 soldiers in Afghanistan before withdrawing its troops in 2013. Those 43 deaths represent the highest per capita death rate of any member of the coalition, including the United States. And now it declines to participate in the grandiose fantasy of an increasingly unmoored president*, and it gets rewarded with the worst kind of diplomatic insult.
Then, this wasn't funny any more.
There is no bottom. None at all.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
