Trump's Outrageous Threats Get Practical Results

Michael Barone
Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:02:45 -0800
Opinion

Think about it. Heads of government do not normally reveal the texts of private communications from other heads of state. Yet that is what Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway did Sunday, on the first weekend of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the international press would have no difficulty finding appalled foreign leaders to comment.

You could think of this as a hostile act of a statesman appalled that the American head of government does not know that the government of Norway does not decide who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. It is probably better to think of it as an intervention, by a sympathetic observer who has noticed that Donald Trump backs down from untenable positions in response to ructions in political and financial markets.

Which is what Trump has done between the publication of his letter on Sunday and his speech at Davos on Wednesday. On Sunday, he seemed to be threatening war with Denmark, and European commentators, not without reason, lamented that he was risking breaking up the NATO alliance out of pique of not being awarded a prize by a committee that was never going to honor a non-leftist American president.
Updated: Fri Jan 23, 2026

Think about it. Heads of government do not normally reveal the texts of private communications from other heads of state. Yet that is what Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway did Sunday, on the first weekend of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the international press would have no difficulty finding appalled foreign leaders to comment.

You could think of this as a hostile act of a statesman appalled that the American head of government does not know that the government of Norway does not decide who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. It is probably better to think of it as an intervention, by a sympathetic observer who has noticed that Donald Trump backs down from untenable positions in response to ructions in political and financial markets.

Which is what Trump has done between the publication of his letter on Sunday and his speech at Davos on Wednesday. On Sunday, he seemed to be threatening war with Denmark, and European commentators, not without reason, lamented that he was risking breaking up the NATO alliance out of pique of not being awarded a prize by a committee that was never going to honor a non-leftist American president.

Proof of which was the granting of that prize to Barack Obama in 2009 for what even Obama himself admitted was for no tangible accomplishment. And Trump has never forgotten the ridicule heaped on him by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, ridicule that led directly to that ride down the Trump Tower escalator four years later.

Actually, Trump has some valid points on Greenland. It sits astride missile, drone and air transport routes between North America and western Russia and eastern Europe. The United States would have even more flexibility than it does under current agreements with Denmark if it were to become U.S. territory. That's one reason the U.S. holds on to Guam in the west Pacific and has spent billions upgrading military facilities there.

All that said, Trump's usual negotiating technique of starting off with extravagant demands was, in the careful words of social scientist Charles Murray, "next-level crazy." Denmark has been an active ally of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, has increased its rate of defense spending above levels Trump demanded, and has adopted immigration policies in line with Trump's advocacy.

With Denmark as with Canada, as with fellow Republicans in Georgia and other states, Trump's obnoxious maximalist demands have alienated him from sympathy and empowered the forces against him. Other leaders have figured out that he requires gushers of praise to permeate every dialogue, and they're probably ready with encomiums for his avowals in his Davos speech that he won't use violence to obtain Greenland.

Some surely consider this a humiliating process. But national leaders dealing with American presidents at least since the time of Franklin Roosevelt have felt themselves duty-bound to cater to their personal styles (Roosevelt's was condescension, Lyndon Johnson's domineering) despite personal distaste. Only a leader as disciplined and aloof as Charles de Gaulle dared do otherwise.

And it has to be said that Trump's bluntness and braggadocio have had some of its intended effect. The American Enterprise Institution's Yuval Levin in an interview with The New York Times' Ezra Klein, makes the point that many of Trump's lurching policy changes, not codified into law, can easily be wiped away by the next Democratic administration, perhaps even by a Democratic House of Representatives next year.

But despite his own preference for procedural regularity in making institutional change, Levin admits that "they've driven a lot of change that will be durable." Initial polling reaction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, has been negative. But there's no doubt that Trump has proved that the border can be controlled under current legislation — which would increase the political cost of any subsequent administration adopting the open border policy of Joe Biden's.

It is also telling that the best estimates of both pro- and anti-immigration analysts are that the substantial numbers of ICE deportations from within the United States, far above those of other recent administrations, are orders of magnitude lower than the numbers of self-deportations. As on other issues (like military recruitment), Trump is uninterested in institutional change but interested in sharply changing the behavior of the larger public.

The effect of Trump policies, and the possibility that they may be put back in place at some later date, will likely discourage many illegal aliens from living in this country more or less permanently, as some 10 million have been up through January 2025. As I wrote last fall, "Who will want to make long-term plans that can be ruined by sudden deportation or hurried self-deportation?"

We learn from experience, and just as the former real estate developer sometimes seems to accept discipline from financial markets, so the former reality TV show host sometimes seems to accept discipline from the ratings. On Greenland, he has responded to the cues of the markets and the ratings and backed off from threats of force, while retaining the possibility of increasing the already significant U.S. presence there.

Meanwhile, the NATO alliance remains in place, with its increased number of European members spending increasing percentages of their economies on defense. Three more years of this Trump administration will strain and irritate foreign leaders and American politicians, with wild threats and childish petulance driving one crisis after another. But it may continue to get them, often grudgingly, doing things Trump's way.