As his second term looms, Trump has gone full-blown imperial

In the hunt for geopolitical advantage, Denmark’s garden looks greener

It’s getting to the point where it’s easy to imagine Trump arriving for inauguration astride an elephant decked in MAGA red, accompanied by a retinue of tech titans and dispensing largesse to the adoring crowd.

When Donald Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, evangelicals cheered him as a modern-day Cyrus and liberals sneered at the monarchical pretensions.

They’re not laughing any more. As his second term looms, Trump has gone full-blown imperial. With the aplomb of a Habsburg negotiating the absorption of a minor principality, he spent last week floating various proposals to enlarge the United States.

First it was the turn of Canada to become a satrapy. Then Panama heard rumblings about re-Americanizing its Canal. Then came the patriotic — and unilateral — renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Even the language of Trump’s social media posts struck just the right regal notes. Dispatching his son Don Jr. to the frozen Arctic wastes, he tweeted with royal munificence: “I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA.’ ”