It's always hard to interpret Donald Trump's more outrageous statements.
Is he joking?
Is he expressing wild ideas that he is playing with?
Is he emulating Richard Nixon's "rationality of irrationality"--- trying to intimidate foreign leaders by pretending to be crazy? Or is a statement really serious?
Trump's threats to take Greenland by military force are a case in point.
If he's genuinely serious about committing military aggression, then it may not be too soon to consider impeaching him again.
But it's important to note that this will not be a job for the Democrats in Congress.
Presidential impeachments can only work if initiated by members of his own party. Otherwise, they can be dismissed as a partisan attack, as we saw in Trump's two previous impeachments.
The recent impeachment of the South Korean president was supported by his own political party. Richard Nixon resigned after the top leaders of his Republican party came to the White House and said that they would support impeaching him if he did not quit.
U.S. House Republicans could well decide that Mr. Trump has to go before he can get the U.S. into a crazy war, to seize Greenland, which would alienate every single American ally and destroy NATO.
Helpfully, both of his possible successors would be fellow Republicans.
Whether his replacement would be Vice President JD Vance or House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., would depend on exactly who was impeached: just Donald Trump, or Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance as a package deal.
During George W. Bush's administration, still a lifelong Republican, I advocated impeaching both Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney.
The grounds?
They had started a totally unnecessary war in Iraq and were fighting it incompetently.
We all know how that war, which cost us about two trillion dollars and over 4,000 dead soldiers, turned out.
But Republicans were unlikely to remove both Bush and Cheney, since their successor would have been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.
As a registered Democrat now it's not for me to advocate impeaching a Republican president and/or vice president, but as a political analyst it's not improper to think about the possibility.
The idea of seizing Greenland is so far out that even joking about it could be considered an impeachable offense.
As a former Republican president, Calvin Coolidge, noted, "The words of the president have an enormous weight and ought not be used indiscriminately."
Greenland has never been part of the United States. We would not even have the feeble argument Vladimir Putin uses to justify attacking Ukraine: that it used to be part of the same political system that Russia was.
As a Russian commenter noted, "At least we grounded our Ukraine operation in both historical and existential justifications."
Seizing Greenland would also violate the international understanding, since the end of World War II, that aggressive wars were no longer tolerable.
Does the United States really want to totally finish off this understanding, already undermined by Russia's Ukrainian war?
As Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, noted, "If I'm Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, this is music to my ears."
Ukraine first, then Alaska?!
Do we really want to get into the aggression business? Why bother, when we already have a military base in Greenland by agreement with the Danish government?
Upwards of a million Russians have been killed or wounded during Putin's current war against Ukraine.
Do Americans want to pay a similar price?
For what?
Unlike Putin, Trump should concentrate on governing his existing country as well as possible rather than trying to add additional territory.
If Trump does not limit himself to governing wisely, congressional Republicans will have the ball in their court. Aggression is a serious matter. Just ask the German leaders who were hanged for war crimes after the Nurenburg trials.
Impeachment is a drastic measure, but it was put into the Constitution for a reason, and the third time could be the charm.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.
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