So, America, how do you feel about Trump's presidency?
Mixed. I have mixed feelings.
Research using CEO turnovers and a trust proxy based on culturally inherited “generalized trust” finds that more trusting CEOs foster more exploratory R&D—showing up as ~6% more patents and higher patent quality—consistent with employees feeling safer taking risks.
Raising CEO trust by ~11 percentage points (for example: Greek-American → English-American average trust difference) corresponds to about a 6.3% increase in patents filed, roughly ~1 additional patent per year for the average firm, estimated at ~$3M in additional value. [ source: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/.../trust... ]
At a certain point in history, people begin to wear clothing not just for protection from the elements but as a cultural norm. At this point, culture begins to operate as a second skin. Clothing is both literal and symbolic. It is a technology, but it is also a signal—visible evidence that survival has moved beyond mere adaptation to nature and into adaptation to one another.
What clothing marks is the emergence of a new kind of life: not just survival in climate and landscape, but survival in relationship—in reputation, belonging, and shared meaning. Once clothing becomes normal, humans are no longer only animals navigating weather, hunger, and mating. They are social beings navigating expectations, norms, and interpretations.
Clothing, both practically and metaphorically, moves us one step further from a world defined primarily by nature and one step further into a world defined by culture. The body is no longer simply exposed; it is presented. Identity becomes legible. Membership becomes visible.
And the steps that follow extend this trajectory. Homes place a cultural layer between us and the elements. Settlements embed us in social structure. Climate control completes the arc, allowing humans to inhabit environments that would otherwise be unlivable—not by evolving new bodies, but by deepening shared systems of knowledge, cooperation, and design.
Seen this way, human history is not a story of escaping nature so much as interposing culture—adding layers between raw biology and lived experience. Clothing is among the earliest of those layers, a second skin that signals the moment when survival begins to depend less on genes alone and more on what we learn, share, and pass on together.
The fact that Trump is repeatedly threatening to invade and seize Greenland should alarm any serious person. Not because it is theatrical or provocative rhetoric—but because it crosses a line that Americans have not had to contemplate in generations.
Had anyone told me even a few years ago that a U.S. president would openly discuss invading and conquering territory belonging to a NATO ally, I would have dismissed it as absurd. Not “unlikely”—inconceivable. That idea simply did not belong in the realm of American politics as it had existed since World War II.
And yet here we are.
Trump has expressed this intention repeatedly, not as a joke, not as satire, but as an assertion of power. The repetition matters. This is no longer an offhand provocation; it is a declared posture. When a leader with control over the world’s most powerful military speaks this way, disbelief is not a strategy.
This would not represent a minor deviation in foreign policy. It would be a historic rupture—one that signals a shift from a rules-based international order to raw territorial ambition. From a nation that helped build NATO to one that treats alliances as obstacles. From a power that deterred invasions to one that contemplates launching them.
Trying to “tone down” that reality risks confusing sobriety with denial. There are moments—rare, but real—when calm language no longer clarifies the danger. Telling people not to worry because the idea sounds outrageous is like reassuring shoppers while someone is actively firing a weapon: the implausibility of the situation is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
The tragedy is that Americans are being asked to adjust, psychologically and morally, to something they were never meant to normalize. Threatening conquest is not part of our political tradition. It is the language of regimes we once defined ourselves against.
Disbelief was once the appropriate response. Now attention is.
"Having norms that increase cooperation can favor success in competition with other groups that lack these norms."
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 167). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Cooperation helps in competition. Hard to say whether that is wonderfully paradoxical or prosaically obvious. In any case, a truth worth repeating.
"Similarly, though the Supreme Court of Canada uses the same speaking protocol as the Great Sanhedrin, the U.S. Supreme Court goes the opposite way, beginning with the Chief Justice and proceeding down from there.
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success (p. 138). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.