Delusional Ramblings for Day One

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Jan. 4, 2025

There is always some mystery to what a newly elected president and Congress might do to or for us. With Donald Trump, we have someone who has made a series of promises regarding his very first day in office. We’ll soon discover there is a significant chasm between what a candidate promises to do in order to collect campaign contributions and votes and what he actually will or can do once in office.

Trump says he will end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on day one with a couple of phone calls. No he won’t. Neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Vladimir Putin take their marching orders from Trump, and neither are likely to stop what they’re doing just because he says so.

He also said he would close the border with Mexico, which will stop both commerce for many and education for some, and he’ll undo any number of Joe Biden’s Executive Orders. And there are all those promised day-one tariffs. It should be a very busy Jan. 20 afternoon as his various spokespeople explain why he didn’t keep any of his day-one promises.

More interesting are his latest flights of fancy regarding taking over the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, and absorbing Canada as the 51st state. These are the delusional ramblings of someone trying to manufacture a grand legacy that will instead be just another grand fantasy.

We didn’t even start the Panama Canal; that was the brainchild of the French. According to History.com, in 1881 they started grinding their way through the swamps and jungles of Colombia (Panama didn’t gain independence until 1903) only to finally surrender in 1889 after a stunning 22,000 worker deaths from malaria and yellow fever and a lack of investor funding.

The U.S. took over in 1904, gaining access through treaty to a 10-mile wide stretch bisecting then-independent Panama. It eliminated the need for shipping to risk the treacherous route around the Cape of Good Hope, reducing the trip between the Atlantic and the Pacific by 8,000 miles. We paid $10 million for the rights, another $250,000 annually, and guaranteed Panama's independence. Completed in 1914 with mostly West Indian workers suffering brutal conditions—another 5,855 workers died during U.S. construction—the Canal is 51 miles long with a dozen locks in six pairs.

Under U.S. control initially, we finally ceded complete possession and control to Panama in 1999. Panama’s control includes transit fees which can be significant given the number of ships wanting to use the shortcut. Trump says U.S. ships, or those heading here, are being treated unfairly and we should retake control of the Canal. Unfortunately, it is now part of another sovereign nation which we would have to attack or negotiate with to regain control. Additionally, Panama is not without national pride and could easily block the canal with a few sunken ships or broken lock gates.

(Unspoken here is that Trump is embroiled in a tax evasion case in Panama over a Trump-branded hotel project.)

Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark and not for sale. Trump says it is “critical” to our national defense, but we already have the U.S. Space Force Base Pituffik (formerly Thule Air Force Base) up and running there.

Greenland is an area larger than Alaska, about 81 percent of which is covered in ice. The total population is about 58,000, 88 percent of whom are native Inuit, and all of whom are Danish citizens. The real issue here are the large deposits of uranium and rare-earth minerals under that ice, plus huge oil and natural gas reserves offshore.

Not surprisingly, Denmark says we can’t buy, take, or steal Greenland.

Undeterred, Trump says “Many Canadians want to become the 51st state.” According to recent research done by the BBC and CTV News many, many more Canadians do not. The idea of Canadian statehood is most popular in the prairie provinces like Alberta, but even there it barely approaches 20 percent. Elsewhere, the idea is even less popular.

Canada has an area slightly larger than the U.S. and a population greater than California’s. It isn’t clear what advantage U.S. statehood would bring to a country already doing nicely as a neighbor. In fact, they are our largest and most productive trading partner.

Willingly becoming a member of our messy political family wouldn’t be considered a step up according to the recent polling. Canada will stay a neighbor and a partner but not a state.

We shouldn’t be shocked when Trump’s campaign pledges do not come to fruition; campaign promises rarely do. He won’t end wars with a phone call, won’t deport 11 million undocumented folks we can’t even find, and won’t buy Greenland, absorb Canada, or retake the Panama Canal. He’ll probably claim he’s done all of it, but that won’t make it true or any less delusional.