Only ski jumpers and their penises can save Greenland from Donald Trump

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column, back after a refreshing two-center winter break in Venezuela and Greenland.

The question on everyone’s lips this week has surely been: “Has Gerardus Mercator fooled Donald Trump?”

Mercator was a 16th century Flemish geographer and cartographer whose legacy is the Mercator Projection (alas not a 1970s progressive rock band but a way of drawing maps). It shouldn’t be confused with Mercosur, the EU’s planned trade pact with four South American countries, which they also started negotiating in the 16th century.

Anyway, the Mercator Projection is great when it comes to navigation but it does distort world maps by making certain parts of the globe appear larger than they are, including Greenland.

Which begs the question, does Trump really want Greenland for its untapped oil and gas reserves and its rare earth minerals (which aren’t really rare, so why don’t we call them ‘earths’?) or does he just fancy taking over an island that’s large but not quite as large as he thinks it is? Answers on a postcard to the White House.

The reality is that Trump tends to get what he wants and Greenland could well end up in U.S. hands (to get ahead of the curve, I’ve already secured the naming rights for the island’s prospective Major League Baseball team, the Nuuk Nukes).

Europe’s only option to stop Trump appears to be to force him to eat the national dish, suaasat, which is a soup made of seal, whale, reindeer, or seabirds, or to offer him something else European instead.

Is there an EU country that he could be offered instead of Greenland (besides Hungary, which he already has shares in)? Luxembourg’s got money? Malta’s got sunshine? Ireland’s got one of Trump’s golf courses?

Perhaps he’ll accept a prize. Can the EU strongarm the Norwegians into giving Trump the Nobel Peace Prize (or even the “Noble Peace Prize” as he wrote on Truth Social this week)?

None of this seems likely to work but help may be at hand courtesy of an unusual source, the world of ski jumping.

Greenlanders need to be able to ski (at least in part because they don’t have roads connecting towns), but the world of winter sports has been rocked by a scandal involving ski jumpers. Turns out that, in order to gain that all-important competitive advantage, some male ski jumpers have been injecting their genitals with acid.

Turns out that injecting the penis with hyaluronic acid (which is normally found in anti-aging creams) not only makes it, er, younger but also larger (don’t, whatever you do, inject it with hydrochloric acid). That could mean you get to wear a slightly larger ski suit, and that larger surface area means there’s more fabric to catch the wind and therefore potentially further jumps.

Surely this kind of behavior would put Trump off owning the island. Mind you, it involves cheating (and there have long been claims that while Trump plays a lot of golf, he doesn’t always stick to the letter of the law) and a dubious medical procedure (Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, did once claim to have had a brainworm), so maybe injecting your penis with acid will become official U.S. health policy.

CAPTION COMPETITION

” Emmanuel, that pretend gun is the closest you’ve come to sending me weapons.”

Can you do better? Email us at pdallison@politico.eu or get in touch on X @POLITICOEurope.

Last time, we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best one from our mailbag — there’s no prize except the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far preferable to cash or booze.

“Trump’s coming to get you.”

by Anita Evans