The Trump Purchase: Greenland!

He'll probably want to change the name. 

Many of us like to complain about Trump, and we sometimes lose sight of his inherent power to amuse us. El Presidente can be a funny dude. Usually this is unintentional, but the comedic effect is just as real. Take a movie like “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” for instance. No one set out to make that movie funny, but it is nevertheless pure comedy gold.

Similarly, there is zero possibility that Trump is trying to make us laugh by wearing that silly thing on his head every day, and yet, every day, it gets a chuckle out of me. (No, I do not mean the MAGA hats.) When Trump opens his mouth, there is no telling what will come out. His utterances range from jaw-droppingly ignorant to totally ridiculous. No kidding, that's about the range of it. Funny stuff, though, either way.

Trump went full boffo this morning with a proposal that the United States enter into negotiations with Denmark about them selling us Greenland. It reminds me of that old Margaret Cho joke, “does anyone in the audience want a vagina? I've got one I'm not using.” It also reminds me of a joke that many of us had a chance to tell back in the old days. “I just flew back from Europe, and the weather was clear enough to give us a good look at Iceland and Greenland. It's some kind of joke: Iceland is mostly green and Greenland is covered in snow.” The joke is now on us, of course, because the ice and snow that once covered Greenland is disappearing faster than rats escaping from a sinking ship. This has suddenly gotten Trump's nose open. He's a very bold businessman, after all, especially with other people's money. Ordinary people will look on with mild bemusement at Greenland losing its sense of irony, but the great billionaire sees a wonderful opportunity. It's the last such undeveloped lot in the world! Greenland becoming green creates an awful lot of prime real estate! Really, an awful lot. 835,000 square miles of it.

That comes to 535,000,000 acres! Trump obviously expects the Danes to sell cheap. His whole team believes the Danes to be a bunch of stupid hippies who go through life making one socialist mistake after another. Let's make 'em an offer! Throw it on the wall and see if it sticks!

Trump claims to be a tough negotiator, and I'm sure that he is. “Let's see,” as he makes that ridiculous tough-guy face, “we bought Alaska for seven point two million, and that was almost 600,000 square miles, figure some inflation, how about $50,000,000?” The Danes do not appear to be as desperate as the Tsar was back in 1867, so they'll probably hold out for a lot longer than he did. How much is Greenland worth, anyway?

Let's consider Iowa, that's a nice flat place with a lot of good farmland. Thirty-seven million acres total, and twenty-eight million of them are devoted to agriculture. The low-end estimate for Iowa farmland is $4,000 per acre . . . that comes to $112,000,000,000 (one hundred and twelve billion dollars). You can have the rest of the state free. There are fifteen times the number of acres in Greenland when compared to Iowa, 535,000,000 compared to 37,000,000. So you can scale up the estimate.

Nobody is expecting Greenland to be as fertile as Iowa, although it might be. The Vikings seemed to like it when they were there. The growing season will be shorter, even without the ice and snow all the time. So there are negatives. There are also enhancements, as you might expect. Look at that extensive coastline! New opportunities for tourism and trade. With glaciers that thick, I doubt if there has been a comprehensive survey of the natural resources, but I think that it is safe to say that Greenland offers much more in the way of valuable resources than Iowa. This thing is not going to be cheap.

Assuming that only twenty percent of Greenland turns into decent farmland, that comes to 107,000,000 acres. At a value of 75% of the low-end price for farmland in Iowa ($3,000 per acre), that comes to $321,000,000,000 (Three hundred and twenty-one billion dollars). Another portion of the land will no doubt be good for grazing sheep or something, so tack on another $50,000,000,000 (fifty billion dollars). Then you've still got eighty percent of the land to fool around with, and a lot of that is coastline. The resource profile will probably be similar to the rest of the northern edge of the world, which is resource-rich. That would be Alaska, Canada, and Russia. (And I guess little bits of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.) So if I'm the Danes, I'm looking for two trillion dollars in cold, hard cash. ($2,000,000,000,000.) It would probably be higher if I did some more research. That's a bargain, too. That's less than we spent on useless Middle Eastern wars that only made us look bad with nothing to show for our blood and treasure. It's a lot less than we spent to dig our way out of that George W. Bush economic collapse thing. Two trillion, that's my take-it-or-leave-it price. You snooze, you lose. I'm smiling for six or seven minutes and then I'm looking at my watch, putting some phone numbers on the table, and walking out the door. You know where to reach me.

No exclusive rights for any particular purchaser, either. Maybe the Russians or the Chinese are interested. They might want to start a bidding war. Who else could afford it? Cash on the barrel head; serious buyers only. Let's not make a list of the untrustworthy ones, although we know who they are.

Yeah, that El Presidente Trumpo, he's a hoot. Make 'em an offer! Let's make a deal! He's a regular laugh a minute. How much do you think the Mexicans will take for Baja California? We could always use more of California.