The Lebon Prize

The Lebon Prize has been awarded to  Donald J.Trump for moving the murder of Renee Good by one of his ICEmen -- and the Jeffrey Epstein saga -- off the front pages. DJT has long coveted the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Committee is unlikely to cave into his churlish, deranged, playground behavior and his insistent demand to fork it over. Venezuela's opposition leader in exile, Maria Corina Machado, gifted her medal to him but that does not count! The Lebon is the appropriate award for thinking backward, for being on the wrong side of history and for being straight-out wacko.

Secondarily the Lebon reminds Americans that with 1,093 days left in his term as of January 22nd, Trump will do even more enormous damage to the world and this nation than he and his lickspittles already have, which is bad enough; some wreckage, especially to the environment and especially climate change, could take one or even two generations to recover.

DJT believes that our country w/could be enriched by the acquisition of Greenland as well as Canada and Mexico. The threat to Greenland is, at the moment, the most dire because it is tied up with Trump being pissed at the failure of Norway go come through with the Nobel which has what-to-to with neighbor Denmark, to which Greenland has been related for some 300 years. If you are confused you should be. The plot is operatic in its density and it's bye-bye NATO, which he has long hated. His "Board of Peace" is intended to wound NATO.

Trump is a certifiable, deranged psychopath according to a shrink friend; thus, ordinary behavior should not be expected. Greenland is the largest, and arguably coldest, island in the world, north of 14th Street. It is replete with undeveloped rare elements and lots of other natural resources. Therefore, we should  expect that Trump and his kin will find a way to continue skimming off the top, now estimated at $1.4 billion -- in one year -- as reported by the NY Times; JD Vance and wife visited there for about three hours last March to reinforce US hegemony. The ice continued to melt.

Stephen Miller, the Trump attack hound, may be correct in asserting that nobody is going to mount much of a military defense if Trump decides to put cold weather boots on the ground whether (no pun) or not Greenlanders want them there. Most of them have no desire to be ruled by the US, nor to give up their land, nor their socialized medical benefits which are a lot better than down here. The US has long had a critical defense presence there by agreement; it needs no other arrangement.

Other US presidents — going back to Truman (offered: $100 million)— have considered acquiring Greenland by purchase, much as Seward bought Alaska in 1867 for $6 an acre. Or in 1803, we purchased what is now Louisiana from France for $16 an acre (sums not adjusted to 2025 values.) For DJT that may count as permission or at least precedent.

Trump asserts that the security of the US depends on him (metaphorically) trudging through the ice and snow. The hypothesis rests on the notion that China is our ultimate enemy. China gains nothing by going to war with the US and losing the US and other nations’ markets. Putin, on the other hand, is in a war of attrition in Ukraine. To be fair, he has a point. Inside his cold stare, dominating Ukraine protects Russia from NATO; the US and Russia are already in a proxy war: Ukraine is the hapless battlefield. A safe bet is Russia takes all the territory in the east that it has already; US support continues at low scale. Russia and the US are in a low-level, long-running conflict with no end in sight but an unpleasant, yet tolerable, stasis.   

Claude, the albino alligator native to a San Francisco zoo has died. Trump, tyrannosaurus rex, the Tyrant King, lives on.