Danskcolin: Friday January 9th 2025 "Can an up-to-date Danish Lego set defeat Donald Trump? I wonder....!"

Yes, Friends, as you may have heard (!), Donald Trump has got his beady eye on the Danish province of Greenland at the moment. And the furore is causing a certain fluttering among a particular group of "old codgers" here in Liphook, in this quiet, semi-leafy corner of East Hampshire UK, to put it mildly !!!!

My wife Lois and I, "for our sins" (!), lead the local U3A online "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group, and Jeanette, one of our group members and the only member to be of genuine Danish extraction, has been sketching some ideas for countering Trump's designs on Greenland with help from Denmark's biggest exporter: step forward Lego toy building bricks, no less !!!!

me and my wife Lois, leading one of our online meetings of the

local U3A "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

"Denmark is ready!", says Jeanette defiantly, in this dramatic post to our group-members today!

(left) Danish-born "old codger" Jeanette and (right) her dramatic post today

to members of our local East Hampshire "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

Luckily, my wife Lois is a subscriber to the topical "The Week" magazine, which "plopped" through our letterbox today with its digest of news from home and abroad from the last week. And having skimmed the contents I'm exclusively able to send back this witty rejoinder to Jeanette, which is nice!

And certainly Donald Trump is all over the latest issue of "The Week" which fell into mine and Lois's hot little hands today - no doubt about that!

But how to explain the Trump phenomenon? The magazine is going with the "comedian model", I notice, following the analysis popularised by US journalist Michael Wolff, according to this editorial by "The Week"'s deputy editor, Theo Tait:

By contrast, Lois and I, although obviously no experts (to put it mildly!), tend to go with the "CEO" model for Trump. To us he acts like a CEO doing "deals" with foreign powers just like he might with a business rival, and brooking no dissent in his organisation. Perhaps "Dodgy CEO" model might be a better description, because Trump's past performance as a CEO has included plenty of financial losses and business failures etc, or so we've read.

Trump reminds Lois a lot of her experience working for Czech publishing billionaire Robert Maxwell, back in the late 1960's / early 1970's in Maxwell's "prestige" documentation department, at Headington Hall, Oxford.

Maxwell famously ruled his companies by terror, changing company policies and working practices on a whim, and, likely as not, reversing those policies the day after. What madness !!!! And we were reminded of the Maxwell era by a recent BBC documentary a few months ago.

(bottom left) Robert Maxwell with wife and family back in the day, and (bottom right) Lois

escaping Maxwell's clutches for 3 weeks in order to visit me during my study year in Japan

Later, I famously saved Lois from "a fate worse than death", by marrying her in August 1972, which, as a happy by-product, also got her out of a business trip with Maxwell to a book fair in Germany: the great man had invited Lois to accompany him as his "special assistant", and we all know what that would have meant!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Trump may be treating the US as a business, but how good are Trump's 'business' decisions? We listened yesterday to a fascinating BBC Radio 4 analysis of his take-over of Venezuela, designed (we think!) to open the country up to American oil companies and, at the same time, to halt, or hamper, the export of drugs to the US.

Lois and I didn't know that Venezuelan oil is apparently "tar-rich", considered "dirty" because it contains high concentrations of carbon. It's quite expensive to extract, needing specialised equipment to drill and process etc. Will America's oil companies be willing to spend out the necessary investment funds to modernise Venezuela's extraction methods?

Also we didn't know that, as far as drugs are concerned, Venezuela's world-wide drug exports are mostly of cocaine, and not the dreaded fentanyl, which is feared for its potency and extreme unpredictability - remind you of anybody haha!!!!

20:00 Trump is something of a right-wing populist, by all accounts, and later today, Lois and I watch a fascinating documentary on the PBS America channel about two countries in Europe where right-wing populists have swept into power: Hungary and Italy.

Hungary is a country that Lois and I visited several times in the 1990's and 2000's, so we're particularly interested in what goes on there. It's been governed for a number of years by Viktor Orban's populist Fidesz Party, and it's interesting tonight to see something of Viktor's methods.

flashback to 1994 and my first visit to Hungary, made as communism was dying on its feet.

The lively advert on the left was a cheeky poster promoting Orban's new Fidesz Party.

with the slogan "Ha unod a banánt, válaszd a narancsot" (if you're tired of bananas,

why not try an orange!): orange being, even today, the symbol of Fidesz,

and the joke being a typical example of Hungarian women's prison humour.

What madness !!!!!

Orban's policy has to be to keep democracy notionally in place, but to destroy the checks and balances in the country's constitution, in particular weakening the courts etc as much as he can, adding extra seats which he then packs with his own supporters.

Orban doesn't cancel elections, allowing them to go ahead, while changing the rules as much as possible to favour his own party.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

Nor does Orban gag the minority anti-government press, but he puts them under constant financial and psychological pressure, and in the case of index.hu, for example getting one of his billionaire friends to take it over. Fortunately the editor and the website's 80 journalists there all resigned en masse in protest at the sale, setting up a new website telex.hu, and continuing to challenge Orban's methods and policies. "Ne hallgassunk!" is the new website's slogan - "We will not keep silent!".

Here was the BBC's July 2020 report on the walk-out, dubbed by the journalists, interviewed in tonight's PBS programme, as "a sublime moment":