Donald Trump and the battle for Greenland

Last month we were watching  a Sky News Australia storey on Trump and Green land when a map similar to the one above appeared on the screen.  “Gosh, isn’t Greenland big !” exclaimed my wife.  I said no that was an optical illusion caused my the Mercator Projection.

(The Mercator projection is a 1569 cylindrical map projection by Gerardus Mercator, ideal for marine navigation because it represents compass bearings as straight lines. It is a conformal projection that preserves angles and local shapes but drastically distorts size near the poles, making Greenland appear larger than the Continental USA .  In reality the Continental USA (Lower 48): is approximately 7.66 million km² (land area) to 8.08 million km² (including water);  Greenland: Approximately 2.17 million km² (total area, including ice sheet) and Alaska: Approximately 1.72 million km².

Then I remembered there was a terrific article on this topic by Paul Wood in the 24 January 2026 edition of The Spectator:  Donald Trump and the battle for Greenland. 

This excerpt from the article has made me think that Trump does not understand the Mercator Projection.

…“This isn’t geopolitics – it’s ego politics. He wants to be the president who has expanded the United States’

But a takeover of Greenland isn’t a new idea for Trump. In his first term, he pointed at it on a map and said to his staff: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ As he told two US writers, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, this was his background in New York real estate. ‘I love maps. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, “I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building”… It [Greenland] is not that different.”

…Trump revealed the thinking that underpins this new age of American imperialism at his photo-op with the US Gold Medal ice hockey team: a foreign policy based on ‘STRENGTH’ – naked power shorn of hypocritical moralising. British readers might understand the current moment using a different sport, football. You could call it the Millwall approach to foreign policy: ‘Nobody likes us – we don’t care.

A city map of Manhattan is very different to a Mercator projection of the Arctic Circle.

I started thinking about Trump’s IQ and EQ.

With IQ  there are two good external clues.:

The Socratic ‘“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
The Dunning-Kruger effect:: This is a cognitive bias where individuals with limited  IQ  greatly overestimate their own  IQ’

I maintain Trump falls in the second camp.

With regard to EQ my 7MTF analysis is that Trump is a very high GoGetter and Politician and has low Regulator   He is Very greedy, very competitive.  He openly cheats at golf.

There is a famous Dostoevsky quotation “The smartest person is the one who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”

That is not Donald Trump.