One of the big massages of the Trump era is the Greenland effect.
I belong to a small group of people who think America should get Greenland in peace. It’s an old idea. The State Department bought the vast Arctic island in 1946, but Denmark didn’t want to sell the colony, unfortunately. But with its strategic and economic value, it should be reconsidered.
When it was reported in 2019 that President Trump was interested in the scheme, it immediately became a punchline.
Of course, buying Greenland will always be a political burden, but Trump’s embrace makes it even more burdensome.
The Greenland effect doesn’t just apply to obscure and weird good ideas, it also applies to good – or just popular – ideas. As president, when Trump implements policies, those policies become less popular. Despite anti-immigration rhetoric, support for increased immigration reached an all-time high. He made free trade more popular than ever, when he started a trade war with China.
Some of this is the result of the thermostatic dysfunction of American politics. When one is in power, many voters choose the other way.
But Trump poses a particular problem for conservatives because he and his supporters cannot count on him being unpopular. The stolen election is a symptom of this delusion: “Trump can’t lose; the election must be rigged.”
This makes the Greenland effect particularly insidious because conservative ideas, once associated with Trump, are often difficult to sell even for gifted politicians.
Which brings us to JD Vance (R-Ohio … or Greenland?).
The general consensus is that Vance is the “confidence pick”, the partner choice that “doubles” on the MAGA message. As Washington Post columnist Jim Geraghty wrote two weeks ago, “Picking Vance is as close as Trump can get to doubling down on himself.”
I generally agree with this analysis, but there is not one major difference between Trump and Vance. Trump is an entertainer-celebrity more than a conventional politician. As a result, he can get away with things that conventional politicians cannot. He may have invited fierce opposition from his opponents, but his fans simply sneered at his mistakes, malapropisms and mendacity. Those of us who predicted in 2016 that the “law of political gravity” would catch up with Trump have been proven wrong because Trump is subject to the law of celebrity gravity – a very different jurisdiction.
But Trump and his supporters are making the same mistake. He believes that unhinged Trumpism, as he defines it, is popular outside the bubble of Trump’s cult of personality.
This helps explain why most of Trump’s MAGA imitators — people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Herschel Walker — bombed in 2022. Even Vance, one of Trump’s few aggressive GOP Senate candidates to win this cycle, significantly lost to other Republicans in voting in red ohio.
Vance’s rollout has been rocky precisely because he is an unvarnished MAGA candidate, who thinks offending or scaring people is a sign of masculinity and strength. The unearthed comment about the misery of the “childless cat lady” comes in the context of greater support for the child tax credit, a very popular idea. It doesn’t take a good political mind to know that there are only two types of childless women: Women who want or want children that they haven’t been able to (or haven’t) had, and women who don’t have children. want a child (or not yet) and understandably object to mocking it. But in Trump World, ridicule is the point.
Vance and the left wing an insult they would have us believe that taxing the childless is a radical proposal from some MAGA edgelord. But as Dominic Pino of the National Review Institute noted, “The U.S. tax code, at present, penalizes the childless relative to those who do, all the same,” because of the child tax credit and other allowances for minor dependents.
The Trump campaign is trying to run away from Project 2025, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation and alumni of the Trump administration. Much of the panic about this is overblown. But the panic is predictable precisely because its supporters, including Vance, deliberately consider it a “second American Revolution,” which will be “bloodless” only if the left does not resist, in the words of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation (Vance wrote the introduction to the book Roberts to come).
There is a second problem with the Greenland effect. It’s not just about making conservative ideas unpopular. Its unpopularity has led Republicans to abandon conservative ideas in the name of political expediency. Trump has abandoned even the pretense of fixing entitlements or replacing Obamacare. He was effectively pro-choice on abortion, at least during the election. And, as Trump’s running mate, Vance has it too.
It’s really a double down ticket, twice the mockery for the price of one.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and host of The Remnant podcast. That’s Twitter @JonahDispatch.
