The Europeans are all in a tizzy over Trump’s desire to take over Greenland, distracting themselves from what should be job one for them: figuring out how to avoid getting nuked by Russia for being such pains in the ass. England is at the top of the target list for being positively vile toward Russia and a convenient nuclear target because it is compact and isolated from the mainland. A single Sarmat missile would render it bereft of life for a geological period of time. Trump wouldn’t lift a finger in retaliation: he doesn’t want that island, especially if it’s been nuked.

Speaking of islands, Greenland is the largest island on Earth and one of the most useless because most of it is covered by a gigantic glacier. Nevertheless, adding it as an asset to the national balance sheet of the US, along with Venezuelan oil, should make it possible to prolong the agony of runaway US federal debt just a little longer — past the end of Trump’s term as president.

What happens after that doesn’t matter to him. “Après moi, le deluge!” (That’s French for “After me, the flood.”) King Louis XV of France is thought to have said that and Trump probably thinks the same. “L’État, c’est moi.” (“I am the state.”) That’s another pithy French phrase attributed to an earlier Louie, Louie XIV, and Trump also seems to be thinking along the same lines. He is doing his best to ignore the US Congress, the courts and international agreements, opting out of a hundred or so international agencies and attempting to rule by decree (a.k.a. a “presidential order”).

Trump is intellectually a very limited man who is said to have never read a single book (but claims to have written one). Trump knows about just two things: real estate, finance, and… three things: real estate, finance and having sex with underage women. To my knowledge, he has never publicly declared to not know anything about having sex with underage women; if he has, I stand corrected. In any case, underage women don’t make good collateral for trillions of dollars of federal loans. Venezuela’s oil reserves, thought to be the world’s largest, do make good collateral. They are not oil (they are underground tar sands) and not reserves (they are resources that may be technically impossible or economically impractical to extract), but these are technical details Trump doesn’t want to know about. Back to real estate, then: the largest island on Earth (that’s Greenland, in case you haven’t been paying attention) also makes a good piece of collateral, especially if Trump makes some spurious but enticing claims about a virtual Eldorado of riches hiding under 1.6km of of ice. But ice is easy to drill, is it not? “Perceuse, bébé, perceuse !” quoth King Donald the Zeroth.

But what’s an island (even the Earth’s biggest) when there is an entire continent up for grabs? That would be Antarctica, governed by The Antarctic Treaty which was signed in Washington on 1 December 1959. But Trump doesn’t believe in any silly international agreements and would actually be technically correct in thinking that Antarctica doesn’t belong to any one country, so why not claim it for himself? All he would have to do is declare that Antarctica is his and his alone and then graciously grant presidential charters to all 10 permanent research stations located on that inhospitable continent. And then the entire continent, penguins and all, can be listed as collateral for more federal loans. What a bonanza!

Why must Trump generate so much debt in such a hurry? The petrodollar is dead and countries are unloading US debt as fast as they can short of causing a panic and steadily shifting their reserves to gold (and now silver). Without new collateral new debt issuance would be problematic. And without new debt the US Treasury would run dry in a great hurry because huge payments are coming due. There is the $1 trillion due in interest payments on the US federal debt that has already been accumulated. Then there is the $1.7 trillion budget deficit. Round that up a bit and that’s $3 trillion — a princely sum indeed! Half a trillion will be used to pad out the defense budget to $1.5 trillion and immediately go to Trump’s friends at various high-tech companies to keep the AI bubble inflated. Trump doesn’t want it to pop while he is president because it would take the entire US stock market with it and that would make him look bad.

But Trump wants to look good, and “Antarctic America” would certainly be helpful to that end. Imagine that! The US would add not just an island, but the fifth-largest continent with an area of 14,200,000km2. What a glorious achievement that would be! Resting on his laurels, Trump would surf safely toward his retirement. He is no doubt very much looking forward to the twin blowouts of this summer. There is his 80th birthday, to be celebrated on June 14 in the new White House ballroom currently being guilt (not a typo!). It will be followed by the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. It is worth noting that most empires, dynasties and republics don’t tend to survive past the 250-year mark, making it an auspicious occasion for the Old Republic to go “Poof!”. It may be Trump’s predestined purpose in life to make the end of the USA memorable by sending it off with a bang, not a whimper.

Some time after the twin blowouts, Trump might suffer a slight aneurism and permanently relocate to his palatial compound in Florida, letting JD Vance take the reigns at the White House. Following tradition, as a result of the midterm elections in November his party is likely to lose majorities in both houses of Congress, making him largely irrelevant for the rest of his term. Why not let his vice president JD Vance play the Lame Duck in Chief? Trump would probably prefer to play golf to his heart’s content rather than impotently watch his vetos get overridden.

As his final project, I would suggest that Trump commission a very large guilted statue of himself to be installed atop a gigantic Babylonian-style ziggurat erected at the South Pole: behold, ye penguins, the Emperor of Antarctica!