CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman said Tuesday on “Anderson Cooper 360” that President-elect Donald Trump is “clearly in an expansionist mindset” while discussing a desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark or seize the Panama Canal during his press conference.
Haberman said, “You know, especially on Greenland, these things are not all the same. Panama is a relatively new focus of his. As Kaitlin said, on Greenland, not only has he been talking about it for some time, but a lot of people have been talking about it for some time. This idea of acquiring Greenland for strategic purposes has happened, you know, for decades. A close friend of Trump’s suggested it to him in his first term, Ron Lauder. It’s never totally gone away, but Trump is clearly in an expansionist mindset.”
She added, “He also keeps talking about Canada as a 51st state that is clearly much more of a troll and sort of a dominance play. But in terms of Trump talking about military action, or at least not ruling it out, as Kaitlin said, that caught a lot of people by surprise. It’s not clear if that’s actually something he’s thinking about or something he said because he was quite visibly in a pretty bad mood during this press conference. I think primarily because of the legal challenges that he’s facing this week in the New York criminal case and with the possibility of the Jack Smith report and the documents of the federal case getting released. So what that looks like when he gets into office remains to be seen, but it’s not a surprise that Trump, at least in his language, has never been especially respectful of sovereign borders. We’ll see what that looks like in actual practice.”
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