Shouting orders to non-existent troops and moving little army men around on a big map....

[Ol Janx Spirit]

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, referring to his special envoy for Greenland.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/denmark-us-submariner-evacuated-donald-trump-hospital-ship-greenland/3851919/

But it isn’t.

THE FACTS: The USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, according to social media posts from the shipyard showing the pair of white hospital ships alongside each other in late January. Publicly available ship tracking data show both ships are still in the shipyard.

The Comfort arrived at the shipyard in the southern state on Jan. 23 and is expected to remain there through April, according to the government contract for the work.

Repairs to the Mercy, which arrived there in August, have run past their expected completion date. Government contract records show the ship is slated for more repairs in March in a shipyard in the northwest state of Oregon.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-focus-greenland-us-trump-hospital-ship-5db7f911c79d1320c6c6e29d895e1403

And there is great confusion about why the proclamation was ever made in the first place.

It could be due to an American sailor being airlifted off of a submarine and evacuated to a hospital; or maybe it stems from the challenging nature of caring for people in rural environments—but neither makes any sense. We can only speculate that it is a misinterpretation of the two facts combined into some kind of fever dream mixed with a god-complex.

But it should be profoundly disturbing to everyone, because it feels too much like we are at the point where he is shouting orders to non-existent troops and moving little army men around on a big map to soothe his desire to be something he can never achieve.....

And there are no indications that the military itself are even taking the directive seriously:

The Pentagon has not received any orders to send a U.S. hospital ship to Greenland, despite Donald Trump bizarrely claiming one is “on its way.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-disputes-donald-trumps-bizarre-greenland-flex/

In a way it is laughable; in a way it is sad; but in so many other ways it is alarming.

“Throughout his life, Adolf Hitler had never been able to admit a single mistake or accept responsibility for any failure. And as the thousand-year Reich he founded teetered on the brink of collapse in early 1945, he blamed it on the weakness of the German people and a military organization riddled with timid, disloyal and incompetent officers. If only they had really listened to him and let themselves be inspired. If only they had possessed the same will and determination as him – certainly everything would have turned out differently.”

https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/defeat/enter-bunker.htm

Sure, this seems like an inconsequential little story about falsely proclaiming something that is silly on its face, but you really don’t need to squint too hard to see how this story represents the beginning of something larger.

It is what happens when pure imagination and power meet.