SAM MAGAZINE 1/25 | 21 and frightening, and that it is unsafe to have them live among us. Or to take a foreign policy example, when the President says that the Panama Canal is now controlled by the Chinese, we do not need to believe that even he thinks the Chinese are actually controlling or running the canal -- but we do need to understand that he disapproves of how the canal is being run and that, for security or purely commercial reasons, he wants to see greater direct U.S. control over it. The stories may not be true, but he has serious policy goals and a serious strategy for achieving these policy goals when he tells them. Similarly, this “not-literally-but seriously” school of presidential interpretation argues that we should not take President Trump’s threats as literally true indicators of his conditional intentions, but interpret them as bluster – purely performative speech – to make his larger, deeper objectives clear and to convey the seriousness of his commitment.to accomplishing them. In this view, we can dismiss the President’s utterly and patently preposterous suggestion that the United States might seek to annex Canada as the ridiculousness that it is, but nonetheless recognize it as a being a signal of how seriously he views the goal of making Canada “harmonize” its immigration, legal, and economic policies with those of the United States. This “seriously, but not literally” school of interpretation has been the dominant view of how to make sense of the President’s statements. The first weeks of the new administration suggest, however, an alternative view, one that is the direct opposite of this traditional wisdom. To make sense of what is happening, we need to take President Trump’s statements literally, but not seriously. In this view, for example, when President Trump suggests that the United States should acquire Greenland, we should understand that the President does in fact desire to acquire Greenland. He means exactly what he says. This view argues that we need to interpret his words in a very, very literal sense. But this approach to reading President Trump goes on to suggest that we should not expect to find a serious, underlying logic, or a serious strategy or strategic vision, that explains his desire to acquire Greenland. There is no larger plan or underlying goal here. Acquiring Greenland does not serve some rational, instrumental purpose. Acquiring Greenland is not an objective justified in terms of achieving some deeper American interest or protecting some fundamental American value. Acquiring Greenland is the totality of the idea. It is the alpha and omega of the policy. It as far as the mental thread goes. We should not waste our time trying to figure out how replacing Danish sovereignty with U.S. sovereignty would enhance the West’s ability to maintain freedom of access to the Northwest Passage or how it would speed exploitation of whatever strategic minerals might be found under Greenland’s shrinking ice cap. We should understand that whatever strategic or economic justifications might be offered, these are in fact afterthoughts, not evidence of a serious analysis or larger goal or plan. Similarly, when President Trump suggests annexing Canada – or, for that matter, depopulating Gaza so that this prime Mediterranean waterfront location could be better developed – we need to understand that, at least momentarily while he is making these statements, this is exactly what he would like to do. But in this “literally-but-not-seriously” view, there is no reason for us to assume that he has given any serious thought to how annexing Canada would affect the United States (or, for that matter, affect Canada and the Canadians), nor that he has given serious thought to what an effort to “cleanse” Gaza of its inhabitants There are, in general, two views of how to interpret President Trump’s orders, tweets, speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks.
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