Damian Paletta

This is something Trump wants to buy, Greenland.

But then when President Trump speaks, it's a much more, you know, maybe we'll use the military.

I'm not going to take anything off the table approach.

And so it's hard for the Europeans to know exactly who to negotiate with.

And that's why President Trump going to Davos here is such a key moment for the whole conversation, because they'll see how serious he is and what his ultimate objectives are.

Excellent question.

We're less than 10 months away from the midterm elections.

And these are really consequential elections that will determine who controls Congress in the final two years of Trump's presidency.

Now, President Trump is a lame duck president.

He's not going to run for reelection.

So his ambitions and goals might not completely overlap with the goals of the Republican Party or even the goals of voters.

For voters, affordability and the economy, those are huge issues, and those are always big issues.

Those are the sorts of things that can decide elections, potentially much more so than whether the United States controls Greenland.

But President Trump is in legacy mode.

He's trying to think of the sorts of things that'll outlive him, the sorts of things that'll define him and his legacy going into the future.

Now, ironically, this midterm election idea is kind of forcing Trump to move faster because he knows he only has 10 or 11 more months of Republican control of Congress.

If Democrats take control of the House, it makes it much harder for him to operate unilaterally like this.

So that might make him even more adversarial, even more aggressive with the European allies.

And that could, ironically, pull him even further away from voters.

And that's exactly what we're going to be watching for today and in the days to come.