When Trump has veered from the way diplomacy is typically conducted, Cheevers saw him as doing “the most American thing a president can do.”
As for taking over Greenland, “the idea that we shouldn’t expand our borders is kind of ridiculous,” he said. “That’s how we made the country.”
Trump’s foreign policy whirlwind of recent months has bewildered many, including Republicans who wish he were spending more time fixing problems closer to home. His grab for Greenland and his attacks on Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran and beyond have confounded those who thought “America First” would mean fewer foreign interventions.
But for now, Trump’s supporters appear largely to be giving him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to foreign policy. Where critics see bluster, they see the “art of the deal.” Where even some Republicans see an abandonment of the postwar rules and alliances that made America prosperous, Trump’s fans laud a president reviving the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt. And while Trump may appear to be contradicting his campaign rhetoric opposing military adventures, the president’s mantra of “peace through strength” still resonates.
Overall, Trump’s foreign policy may yet prove a political liability, and polls show that independent voters are deeply skeptical of it. For now, Trump’s military moves have been quick and have not cost American lives, meaning that public opinion could sour further if a future intervention is more painful. And Trump’s latest foreign policy decisions are being made against the background of growing anger over his administration’s actions in Minnesota, a furor that could drown out any successes he tries to point to abroad.
Still, the blowback from his base about his overseas interventions has been limited. Trump appeared to back down from his demand for taking over Greenland last week, but the framework of a deal he says he reached with NATO over the Danish-owned island remained unclear.”Trump’s base has a phobia or a distaste or an objection to endless wars,” said Douglas Wilson, an evangelical pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who has emerged as one of the president’s most prominent defenders on the ultraconservative Christian right. “But they don’t have an objection to flexing militarily.”
Polls show concern about the economy and a widespread view that Trump is not focusing on the right priorities. But they also show Republicans to be largely on board with his aggressive foreign policy.
A Marist poll conducted Jan. 12 and 13 found that most Republicans favored the United States’ taking military action in Venezuela, Iran, Mexico, Cuba and even, at 57%, Greenland. A Quinnipiac poll conducted Jan. 8 to 12 showed only 23% of Republicans supporting the use of force to take Greenland, but 67% supporting attempts to buy it.
In Washington, even conservatives who favor restraint in foreign policy have found things to like in Trump’s global hyperactivity of the last few weeks.
Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, a magazine founded by the 1990s right-wing presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, called Trump’s attack on Venezuela “foolhardy.” Attacking Iran to support protesters, he said in an interview, would seem jarring when the administration is “currently trying to suppress protest in Minnesota.”
But finding a peaceful way to annex Greenland, he said, “is the most sympathetic thing the government has proposed doing on foreign policy in nearly a century.”
“The European argument that this could unravel NATO — what a bonus,” Mills said.
Interviews in Moscow, Idaho, last week showed that Trump’s supporters were inclined to trust the president’s foreign policy, even if they sometimes struggled to explain it. Brandon Mitchell, the area’s representative in the Idaho House of Representatives, endorsed Trump’s interest in Greenland, even though “I kind of don’t know where he’s at on that and why.”
“There’s a lot of things that he does that I kind of questioned and then I’m like, ‘But that worked,'” said Mitchell, a Republican who operates Jiffy Lube shops.
In downtown Moscow — the second syllable is “coe,” not “cow” — America’s divisions are palpable on every corner. Gay pride flags are displayed at businesses aligned with the liberal community revolving around the main campus of the University of Idaho in town. And then there are the buildings associated with Wilson, one of America’s best-known Christian nationalists; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is part of his denomination.
Watched closely by security guards, Nick Solheim, a rising political operative who had flown in from Washington, gave a speech at Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College urging the students to join him in the fight against their “enemies.” He highlighted Trump’s campaign message about “an end to endless wars,” and attacked “Republican elites” such as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for teaming up with “establishment hawks.”
Solheim, 28, said nothing about Trump’s own military interventions, instead praising his trade deals and mass deportations. In addition to cofounding a group, American Moment, that aims to train the next generation of Republican aides, Solheim has mused about buying Greenland since at least 2021.
In an interview, he described Trump’s pursuit of Greenland as having “spiritual” significance, because “our nation has stagnated in a certain sense.”
“We haven’t been to the moon since, what, the ’70s or ’80s,” he said. “We haven’t explored new territory. We haven’t conquered anything.”
One of the young men in Solheim’s audience was Jacob Gartrell, 19, president of the University of Idaho chapter of Turning Point USA, the right-wing group founded by Charlie Kirk. Gartrell said he appreciated Trump’s attacks on “drug boats” near Venezuela because each bombing was saving hundreds of lives, echoing the president’s contention about the strikes. (He said he was speaking only for himself, not his group.) But he had issues with other aspects of Trump’s foreign policy, because he believed that the United States already had too many foreigners.
“If we were to take over both Venezuela and Greenland,” he said, their residents could “just hop on a plane and come to America.”
Trump has not talked about annexing Venezuela, but has promised to “run” the country indefinitely. Still, Gartrell’s concern highlighted the contradictory impulses of Trump supporters who want their leaders to turn inward but also to project strength.
Florian Justwan, a political science professor at the University of Idaho, said there were early indications in his own, unpublished survey research of the seeming foreign-policy contradictions in Trump’s base: core supporters of Trump appear both more likely than other Republicans to say that the United States should concentrate more on its own problems, and more likely to favor military action in places like Greenland and Latin America.
Justwan said that Trump’s populist approach to foreign policy — including sharing private texts from world leaders — still appeared to resonate with his base.
“It’s about anti-elitism,” he said. “It’s about doing what’s right for the in-group.”
Indeed, after the campus Turning Point USA meeting on Friday night, Ben Coons, 22, said it was “really cool” that Trump was making “people respect us when we feed them and take care of them.” He said that last summer he’d visited Denmark, where they “pooh-pooh America all day long.”
But there was also some unease. Wilson, the far-right Christian leader, said that acquiring Greenland was a “good, noble goal,” as long as it was done “peaceably.” Striking Venezuela was “defensible” because “what you had was a drug cartel that had seized control of a government.” But airstrikes for changing the government in Iran would not be, because “what’s the American foreign policy interest in doing this with naked military power?”
The success of the Venezuela mission, he warned, “invites a spirit of hubris.”
“Thus far, Trump is living a charmed life in foreign policy,” Wilson said. “So take risks when you need to, but don’t resort to it first thing.”
Wilson has said that his flock makes up some 10% percent of Moscow’s increasingly polarized population of around 25,000 people. At the town’s Unitarian Universalist church, the Rev. Elizabeth Stevens said she believed there was no longer a single Trump supporter in her congregation.
Stevens said parents of adolescents had told her they worried “that we are going to slide into World War III and their kids are going to get called up and put at risk.” She pointed to Trump’s renaming the Defense Department the Department of War and the administration’s turn against U.S. allies, international law and the United Nations.
“A lot of people are making comparisons to heading into World War II, and this time we’re on the wrong side,” Stevens said. “There’s a lot of fear.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
