Eric Schmitt’s Greenland playacting ignores Missouri — and GOP voters | Opinion
Thursday afternoon, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt made his case for the United States “acquiring Greenland,” insisting it “isn’t a silly idea. It makes all the sense in the world.”
“This isn’t to ‘get attention’” he wrote in one of 10 posts on X. “This should happen.”
Maybe it should happen to please an audience of one: Donald Trump, who has been bleating again about how he wants the U.S. to take over the island, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and is most certainly not on the real estate market.
But the rest of us? That’s a hard no. The push to seize another nation’s territory “might be the least popular idea in American political history,” in the words of sometimes-Trump-apologist Reason, a far-right libertarian magazine. It cited a Reuters/Ipsos poll from Wednesday that showed only 4% of Americans think Greenland should be taken with military force. Among Republicans, only 8% think it’s a “good idea.”
One of Trump’s primary campaign pitches was that he would be the “peace president.” He’s apparently so obsessed with the moniker that he had the State Department rename the U.S. Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. He’s been embarrassing himself for years by complaining loudly that he hasn’t received a Nobel Peace Prize. But maybe that itch is scratched now that he’s gotten his hands on the Nobel medal originally given to Maria Corina Machado, opposition political leader in Venezuela — you know, that country where Trump directed military forces to bomb Caracas and abduct President Nicolas Maduro in a pre-dawn raid earlier this month? Remember — where Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have bragged about blowing boats of alleged drug smugglers out of the water, then circling back to kill off survivors? Some peacemaking, there.
Tough talk is a key feature of Trumpism — and Schmitt is fluent. Once known as a kind and compassionate Republican back in Missouri, the senator fills his prolific social media feeds and cable news appearances today with the threatening, violent language of MAGA: “Overwhelming force” will stop “third-world regimes flooding our country with drugs and crime.” A “rogue” judge who ruled against Trump “in a fit of rage” must be impeached. “We’re about to supercharge mass deportations. And there’s nothing the Left can do to stop it.”
Sovereign nations’ might?
Schmitt is a smart man. So I have to wonder why he’s choosing to storm the Greenland hill. Chief among his arguments are the tactical advantages of the island’s geography and location — which we have been taking advantage of for decades from Pituffik Space Base on the northwest coast.
The senator is big on reminding us that the U.S. is a sovereign nation. That’s why he so fervently backs Trump’s push to oust immigrants, as he claimed on FOX News’ Laura Ingraham show just this week. Well, you know what else is a sovereign nation? China. And it has nearly twice the number of active military personnel we do. India’s troops outnumber ours, too. Is Schmitt arguing that might makes right? China could convincingly say Alaska would give it strategic advantage in the Pacific. Why shouldn’t it mount its own invasion?
And of course, Schmitt has to realize an American incursion into Greenland would immediately result in a counterstrike by the other NATO countries — and it wouldn’t be military. They could — and, I’m convinced, would — instead destroy the U.S. economy overnight by a variety of retaliatory measures, including especially a “black swan event” sell-off of U.S. Treasury bonds, which would instantly send interest rates soaring.
Trump is historically unpopular. He has never won a majority of the popular vote, and I’m convinced that Joe Biden’s fecklessness and Elon Musk pouring millions into battleground states are the only reasons he’s back in the White House. Schmitt himself won election to the Senate in 2022 with only 55% of the vote in deep-red Missouri, against an especially weak Democratic opponent. He’ll never be on a ballot again with Trump, whose management of the economy and desperate distractions from the Epstein files aren’t winning him any new fans.
So why back this horse, now, on something that’s never going to happen?
I think the answer is the false, closed online feedback loop. There’s a lesson for all of us: Nobody likes a bully in the parking lot or the bowling alley, but the social media algorithms are purposely designed to amplify and reward bad behavior. “Rage bait” keeps people clicking (where they’re served advertisements) better than rational discussion. Schmitt and his staff, I assume, seem to spend too much time with their noses in their smartphones.
But X isn’t real life. Americans don’t want to annex Greenland. They have no desire for military expansionism, the “Trump-corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” Schmitt praises. As he said in his Senate victory speech: “Missourians have always been suspicious of a federal government 1,000 miles away telling us how to run our lives.”
And Missouri needs a senator who will help his Republican Party figure out a way to fix the costs of health care and groceries that its president keeps breaking.
This story was originally published January 17, 2026 at 5:01 AM.
