Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland because of course he does. He has been mentioning it to staff for weeks. If only they had tittered, the world might have been spared this.

Instead they said, “We could use the Puerto Rico reconstruction money,” or “Right as usual, Mr. President” or “Do you know that Nuuk doesn’t have a single decent hotel?”

Greenland is part of Denmark, however autonomous it thinks it is, and the Danes took a dim view. For one thing, Greenland’s population of 56,000 is mostly Inuit, which would make Trump a colonial power. Remember what he said about previous colonies, the s--thole ones?

If he can’t cope with Scots angry at his golf course in Aberdeenshire, imagine how he’ll incense the locals with his gigantic Leif Erikson Golf and Country Club. It will offer the Wellness Spa at Glacier I and the Trump Thule Restaurant Bar’s Fish and Chips with a Trump Twist (the waiter calls you fat).

They won’t like him building casinos. The world’s largest island is not even a bit green. That was just the real estate agent. “Sure it needs a little paint, a little love, but look at that green patch!” The Onion World Atlas says Greenland is 81 per cent ice, 12 per cent rock, 5 per cent rocky ice and 2 per cent icy rock. When Greenland plays Rock-Paper-Scissors, it wins with Rock and Ice crush Scissors, Paper and the Boat You Sailed In On.

And that’s why politicians are wrong to assume that Trump’s motive is fending off Russian and Chinese ambitions in the Arctic. Trump would never annoy his confidant Putin and he can’t imagine Chinese people being anywhere but China. “They don’t fit in,” he says.

As people age, they often regress to the year they liked most and stop there. Born in 1946, Trump planted his flag in 1971 when he started in his dad’s real estate business at age 25. All Greenland means to him is ice and snow. He keeps hearing about this climate thing so he thinks “cold, the customer wants cold.” Greenland = cold. It has ice and snow. Problem solved.

Trump does deals. He wants to do a Louisiana Purchase with Danish real estate and he assumes it’s for sale. Trump’s lifetime shtick is that everything is for sale and everything, however implausible, can be bought: politicians, loyalty, wives, mistresses, Mar a Lago members, endangered species, hair, the colour orange, and a frozen land mass to shove in the face of those enraging Green people.

To him Greenland is an abstraction. He does not grasp that its main export is rising sea levels. It’s only after he changes Greenland’s name to Mar a Björkland that he realizes he has been confusing it with Iceland all along.

Here comes the awkward bit. The next decades’ weather forecasts for vast areas of the U.S. are hot and flooded with a chance of drought, including New York and Los Angeles, cities he likes.

So what does Trump think of Canada? Not at all. White people. Polite. Ice and snow. Fresh water. What will the U.S. soon need in large quantities? Water for irrigation. A decade from now, fresh water will be Canada’s most valuable commodity.

He will buy Canada. I was the first to call Sarah Palin a hillbilly catastrophe™ for the Republican Party and say she would open the door to bad things, which turned out to be Trump. That was my best Idea IPO. I bought low because no one believed me, and sold high.

I long ago trademarked the prediction that the U.S. will one day invade™ Canada because it wants what we have. Maybe Trump will say, “Give us all your water and we won’t invade.” Or he will invade.

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But first he will try to buy us. His first offer will be a few billion, less than he plans to spend on his Mexican wall. As with Greenland, he will not be happy to discover that Canadians are not all white and not a bit polite, their ice and snow is melting, and their rivers are already drying up.

Not everything is for sale. In 1971, it was, and Trump lives in that year still.

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