David Rennie

Not only did he not mention tariffs hours later, you know, when people came out of that speech saying, OK, optimistic view is he didn't mention tariffs, no use of force.

Pessimistic view where, you know, we're still potentially facing anything up to invasion.

And then he goes and meets the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutter, a man who has sacrificed his own reputation by kind of calling him daddy and constantly praising him.

But I think he, I think genuinely Mark Rutte, who's a very, very smart, experienced former Dutch prime minister, I think he thinks he's taking one for the team and he's doing his best to keep Donald Trump on side.

And they do this provisional deal that then Trump is calling a concept of a deal, whatever that means, that does appear to stop a long way short of owning Greenland.

And...

So if you are the Europeans and you are optimists, and that's not a lot of optimists in European capitals right now, you would say that, I don't know if people are saying this is a taco, you know, was Trump chickening out, but certainly it was not irrelevant.

People suspect that the markets fell sharply the day before.

That tends to get Trump's billionaire finance friends on the phone saying, you know, this is not great.

And the very first flickers of, I don't know if it's twitching of the corpse, I'm referring to the willingness of the U.S.

Congress to stand up to the president.

would be weapons-grade stupid.

So I guess for Europeans, the lesson is that provoking Donald Trump head-on seems to be a pretty bad idea, certainly very risky.

But raising the costs and making him realize that there is going to be resistance to his latest piece of bullying can sometimes work.

And so there is a certain degree of confidence that the worst has been avoided for now.

But the big...

big picture is that trust is being shredded and destroyed in ways that are not coming back as long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office.

There are leaks to various news organizations.

The Danish government, let alone the Greenlandic government, have not been involved in formal negotiations on this.

And so it's like a kind of game of telephone, right?