Trump: Impeach is the new Orange

[Animalmother]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07xkeee2k3o
Interesting to see an actual response from European members. I think there's an inkling that Canada will tell the US to get fucked as well.

[Wrathbone]

I still don’t understand why Denmark aren’t treating this as an opportunity to give Trump what he claims he wants whilst rinsing him of cash. He needs it for national security? Fine, give him unlimited basing rights with hefty rent costs, so long as he respects Danish sovereignty and flies the Danish flag at each base. He wants mining rights (which he says he doesn’t, but let’s be honest, of course he does)? Sell him mining rights, along with a tariff on everything mined. We know he loves tariffs. He wants taxation rights on future shipping routes past Greenland? Great, negotiate an equitable deal.

This really shouldn’t be difficult for either side and I’m not sure why it’s escalated to the point where NATO is under threat. I fail to see what it is that Trump could plausibly want that requires annexation of Greenland.

[Raid]

This may be nonsense, but aren't resource extraction efforts heavily controlled inside the arctic circle? I wouldn't be surprised if Denmark can't, or won't do it for ecological reasons.

And yes, Trump can rabbit on about defence all he wants, the only thing he gives a shit about are the minerals he can plunder. It's been astonishing watching his responses to reporters about the Venezuela situation - when the US invaded Iraq for Gulf War II: Return of the Tyrant, the public messaging was obviously focussed entirely on WMDs, and not that sweet, sweet crude oil that everyone else suspected. Trump however has been going out of his way to say how much the Maduro abduction was to do with the oil trade, even going to the point of correcting his closest government supporters in front of cameras who are clearly trying to shift the aim onto more noble purposes. Just watch this segment from The Daily Show which puts together a handful of clips of it.

Trump is obviously a tyrannical bully, but he's particularly honest when he's talking about his aims because he knows it doesn't matter, nobody can stop him, and his supporters will do all of the damage control. He's happy to let everyone else deal with this cognitive dissonance that still somehow surrounds the things he says, whereby people still don't actually believe him when he says he wants to strip-mine Greenland, because that's just not how we collectively react to politicians. He's already told us what he wants, he's just trying to work out the best way to do it. He's already threatened several other Central / South American countries, and I honestly don't think he'll be that concerned about removing their leaders too because the evidence is there to show that America is extremely good at it here in the year 2026. He's already publicly pressuring Venezuela to place an American puppet in power, and he doesn't care about the optics of that.

Would he do that to a European nation? I don't know - Venezuela has a tiny, comparatively antiquated military, but that's not the case with the EU as a whole. Part of me wonders whether part of his aim is to pit Europe against Russia first, and then steal Greenland while EU forces are too busy securing their western borders.

[Wrathbone]

This may be nonsense, but aren't resource extraction efforts heavily controlled inside the arctic circle? I wouldn't be surprised if Denmark can't, or won't do it for ecological reasons.

That's the most plausible explanation I've seen. I guess if they leased some form of mining to the US, Trump would rapidly expand the operation well past agreed limits and then shrug at the condemnation.

I'm struggling to find the exact quote and who said it, but yesterday I saw that someone in Trump's posse of moustache-twirling villains had essentially said they can invade whoever they want because the 'right of might' has been true since the dawn of mankind and nobody will dare stand against them. Like you say, the false veneer of doing terrible things for noble purposes has dropped entirely. They're a bandit nation now, plain and simple, and it's chilling.

[eny]

That'll be the ghoul Miller, absolute psychopath.

[eny]

The twunt cabal want what China has, and only taking full control of the Western Hemisphere can facilitate that.

[Wrathbone]

That'll be the ghoul Miller, absolute psychopath.

That's him.

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/06/stephe ... urope-nato

Earlier, when discussing Venezuela in the same interview, Miller said, "we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world."

He added, "Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland."

[Raid]

I don't think ghoul properly describes Miller. He has all the charm of one, but he's far more belligerent and aggressive, particularly over this issue. I think the US administration is being told to project aggression and force in their communication on this, which matches their foreign policy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwynjdqgellt

This is going to be interesting to watch. The US is apparently moving to seize a Russian-flagged tanker. Russia has said that they have moved naval assets to escort it, though it wasn't clear whether they were in place yet - apparently it's a submarine, which could be basically anywhere (though I suspect the US knows). The BBC have published an image of what looks to be a US Coast Guard ship shadowing the tanker taken from RT, and while it hasn't been properly verified yet (It's kinda difficult to believe anything that comes out of Russian state media), there's evidence that it's genuine.

Edit: And it's happened already. The US is claiming they've seized that tanker, as well as another one in the Caribbean. I wonder if they asked the captain "Your oil or your life!", because they certainly come across like bloody global highwaymen now.

[Animalmother]

Imagine if Russia tried to pull any of this shit.

[Raid]

Imagine if Russia tried to pull any of this shit.

Slightly more condemnation and exactly the same amount of action taken, presumably. Same with China.

[Animalmother]

So what happens when these ships start to (rightly) defend themselves against being boarded? If they are Russian owned, they might start sticking people with anti aircraft launchers on them.

[Raid]

That's the question, isn't it.

That said, whether the ship was actually owned by Russia is questionable. There's some really shady-sounding stuff that happens in maritime shipping; the tanker that was seized today was only apparently sailing under a Russian flag temporarily (this is something Russia itself has said), and this is something that changed while the ship was at sea - doesn't exactly sound legitimate, does it. I guess maybe they thought sticking a Russian flag on it was a way of trying to avoid being approached by the US.

I have no idea what international maritime law says about the seizure of a vessel due to one country's sanctioning of any countries its travelling between, nor do I have any idea whether the US can just declare sanctions and then take action without any agreement from other parties. If they can, what's to stop them just declaring sanctions on a ship they want, and then they just take it?

[Mantis]

The one we aided in the seizing of isn't likely to have any oil in as for as I have read. It came from Iran and never actually made it to dock at Venezuela before being forced to flee is what I believe happened.

Considering the effort the US went to capture it there seems to be a prevailing thought that there may have been something else on that tanker that they wanted to get their hands on. Possibly their intelligence suggested that Russia had agreed to ship missiles or drones from Iran over to Venezuela or something. It looks like the Russian navy was trying to position itself to escort the vessel before the US got to it.

Russia has been operating with absolute impunity with their shadow tankers since the war broke out. If it turns out to be true that this ship had some Russian assets onboard then maybe it isn't such a bad thing that it's been seized. As much as I don't support anything the US is doing right now, anything that disrupts the Russian regime is a small win at least.