Trump still wants Canada and Greenland

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I feel that something very bad will happen to us, and the rest of the world will turn its collective back on us.

A satirical counter offer to President Donald Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland has popped in the form of a petition which suggests that Denmark should buy California.

More than 200,000 people have signed up for the plan which says that the Scandinavian country needs “more sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.”

“Måke Califørnia Great Ægain,” reads the top of the petition website, replacing some English letters with Danish ones.

Among the listed so-called “supporters” of the petition are the ancient Scandinavian king, Sven the Viking, Karen from accounting and Laris Ulrich, the Danish drummer and founding member of the band Metallica.

“Imagine swapping your rain boots for flip-flops,” the petition says, perhaps cogniscant of the fact that during the dark winter months Denmark gets just an hour of sunlight a day. By contrast, California gets 300 days of sunshine a year.

As part of the buyout plan, the petition — launched on the website denmarkification.com — has set a crowdfunding goal of $1 trillion, “give or take a few billion,” and the target of 500,000 signatures.

And at the bottom of the the petition’s website, which does not mention Greenland, is a message reading, “Disclaimer: This campaign is 100% real… in our dreams.”

Xåvier Dutoit, “chief pastry officer” of the campaign, said the idea for the petition came to him one night in the Philippines, where he was having a beer with some friends.

“While on vacation, I was at a bar with some friends, and overheard a rather loud American tourist discussing Donald Trump’s bid to buy Greenland from Denmark,” he wrote in an email to NBC News. “That American didn’t seem to grasp how unhinged and absurd it was for any country’s President — especially in a stable democracy that the USA claims to be — to offer or threaten to take over another sovereign country’s territory.”

The following morning, he wrote, he pulled together a “funny campaign website” that “was fully intended to entertain my friends for a few days.” Instead, it went viral.

The campaign began to see explosive growth on Tuesday, Dutoit said, and it’s now getting up to 1,000 new signatures an hour.

"We’ve been especially touched by lots of warm and enthusiastic support from Californians — and laughed when folks from other parts of the US raised their hand asking to have their state purchased by Denmark!" he wrote. "It seems that a lot of people needed this little bit of fun and levity, at a time when much of the public discourse is increasingly tense and worrying."

Whether Californians will be open to the petition’s proposition that Denmark should own it remains to be seen, although it does promise to send executives from the Danish toymaker Lego to secure the U.S. state, calling them the country’s “bestest negotiatiors.”

“Rule of law, universal health care and fact based politics might apply,” the petition says. “We’ll bring hygge to Hollywood, bike lanes to Beverly Hills, and organic smørrebrød to every street corner.”

The damage Trump's second presidency inflicts on the US standing in the world may quite possible be permanent.