UFOs, Greenland and Donald Trump
At Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Trump, speaking of the Democratic lawmakers in the House chamber, proclaimed, “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”
Not so fast, Mr. President. Here are two examples of real crazy. Both originate with the president himself.
Example number one starts with some clumsy asides by former president Barack Obama. On a recent podcast, a friendly host asked the ex-chief executive a “lightning round” series of questions including one having to do with alien visits to earth.
“They’re real,” Obama answered, “but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept secret in Area 51, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president.”
Okay, that’s inartful, but Obama’s answer must be placed in context. The podcast host, Brian Taylor Cohen, also asked Obama if slain rapper Tupac, declared dead in 1996, was still alive, as some wild rumors have it.
Obama answered with a flip, “He’s on my playlist.”
When President Trump was asked about Obama’s extraterrestrial comment, he charged that the former president “gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.”
Trump was either being willfully misleading, or crazy himself to believe what Obama had said was a deep, dark secret of the American government. It’s no blemish on you if you choose the latter option. Crazy is as crazy does.
(A day or so after the Cohen podcast, Obama offered a more thoughtful assessment of the aliens on earth question, noting, as many have, that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that life exists in other solar systems millions and billions of light years away from our own. But no, he continued, there have been no alien visitations to earth, as far as he knows. “Really!”)
An even more blatant example of presidential goofiness occurred in regard to Greenland. On Truth Social, President Trump announced he was sending a U.S. hospital “boat” to care for “the neglected sick” on the large semi-autonomous island owned by Denmark in the North Atlantic
Along with the text message, Trump posted a photograph of the U.S.S. Mercy steaming out of port.
There are several things wrong here. First, Mercy and her sister ship, the U.S.S. Comfort, are both in dry dock in Mobile, Ala., for repairs. It will take weeks if not months to return them to sea duty.
The photo of the U.S.S. Mercy posted by Trump was apparently AI generated. What loose nut was rolling around inside the president’s head for him to do that?
Second, as Greenland and Danish authorities made clear, there are no “neglected sick” on the island, which has been long coveted by Trump for goodness knows what reason. Its minerals? Our national security? His ocean-size ego?
The only emergency, if it was that, involved a U.S. sailor flown by a Danish Defense Seahawk helicopter to a hospital in Nuuk. The sailor was on an American submarine patrolling seven nautical miles off the coast from the Greenland capitol. The flight was requested by U.S. naval officials, probably the sub’s captain.
In response to Trump’s social media posting, Greenland prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen replied, “It’s a no thank you from here…. Please talk to us before making more or less random statements….”
As for the aforementioned State of the Union, Trump’s 2026 address made clear why the annual speech should be mothballed: no longer serious occasions of state, they have become partisan brawls that cleave Congress into warring factions which, in turn, further stagger attempts at legislative deal-making.
Trump’s performance Tuesday night was maybe the worst example yet of our descent into governmental mindlessness. The president is always the lead character at State of the Union addresses. On Tuesday, Trump again showed up as the great political divider in chief, or, if you will, with apologies to the late great Monty Hall, as the star of “Let’s Not Make A Deal.”
President Jefferson set aside in-person State of the Union speeches in 1801. The practice was reversed by President Wilson in 1913. Another 112-year interlude would do just fine. It may take that long to recover from this modern adaptation of the occasion solemnly used by FDR in the long ago to pronounce the world-shaping Four Freedoms.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. The author of “JFK Rising” and “Troubled Times,” he can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.