I’m a firm believer in befriending nutjobs, maniacs, lunatics, and whackaloons. At any given time, you need at least one of ‘em in your inner circle. (Weirdly, my friends say the EXACT same thing, but all their other buddies are normal. What gives?) Crazy people are the best people: The guy with an eyepatch muttering incoherently at closing time — the woman in a wedding dress weeping hysterically while doing 13 shots of Jäger — these are folks with GREAT stories to tell!
I guarantee you, if you go to a bar and sit next to a dude with three fingers, five teeth, and a Glasgow smile, you’re gonna be thoroughly entertained.
But the trouble with “fringe people” is longevity: They never stay too long in your orbit. Instead, they always burn themselves out.
Or just vanish.
That happens a lot, too: One day, the weird dude at the bar no-shows and you never see him again. (And then, several months later, you’ll be watching the evening news and go, “Hey, there’s Jim!”)
But while they’re still ensnared in your orbit, the primary benefit of befriending lunatics is that they push you out of your comfort zone. They force you to view the world differently, adopt bizarre vantage points, and reexamine your core beliefs.
And every now and then, you’ll come up with a really good idea.
Donald Trump isn’t a nutjob or a maniac, but he’s absolutely an outside-the-box thinker. In the world of politics, he’s about as “fringe” as an American president can be. The president-elect doesn’t receive nearly enough credit for being wildly imaginative or creative, but he’s always coming up with novel ideas — the kinds of concepts that other politicians wouldn’t even dare to consider.
Take, for instance, Greenland. I’ve been on planet Earth for many decades; I know lots of people. I can honestly tell you, I’ve never been around a campfire and heard someone exclaim, “When are we finally gonna do something about Greenland? Won’t someone do something?”
But once Trump declared that the United States “needed” Greenland for national security, everything changed. Suddenly, we began taking the idea seriously. Maybe we really could buy Greenland!
So let’s take this idea and roll with it: What else could we buy?
Well, there’s another island that’s not totally-exactly-really-officially an independent country either. The island of Taiwan.
We agreed to the “One China Policy” when Nixon opened China. But y’know, if Taiwan became part of America, there’d still only be “one” China.
Taiwan has a lot of people — over 20 million. About 80,000 Americans live there, too. It also produces 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. With artificial intelligence rapidly emerging into an international arms race, solidifying our relationship with Taiwan would give America a competitive edge — and would also freeze out the Chinese.
I know, I know: You’re worried about antagonizing China, right? After all, owning Taiwan would certainly have strategic benefits, but it’s not worth going to war over. Right? Why would we pay a bunch of money to “buy” Taiwan, just to fight an expensive war with a powerful adversary?
And that’s a valid point.
But what if we didn’t pay Taiwan? What if it paid us?
Trump is a dealmaker. Is there anything that Taiwan could offer us — money, technology, marketplace exclusivity, etc. — that would entice Trump to make a deal?
Theoretically, if Taiwan kept upping the ante, eventually there’d be a tipping point where the reward outweighs the risk. If life is a risk/reward proposition, then the tolerance for risk is directly tied to the size of the reward. If the jackpot keeps growing, so will Trump’s tolerance for risk-taking.
Taiwan’s GDP is roughly $755.67 billion annually. You could fund a LOT of government programs with that.
Money is a motivator. Money talks. Money makes deals.
And simply floating the idea would be enough to exert extra pressure on China. That could be very useful when negotiating tariffs and economic concessions. (Assuming, of course, we don’t inadvertently trigger World War III.)
The world has always been an unpredictable place, but even more so with Trump back in the White House. Unpredictability is the MAGA norm. From “needing” Greenland to annexing Canada to reclaiming the Panama Canal to renaming the "Gulf of America,” not too many political commentators had ANY of those agenda items on their Jan. 2025 bingo card. It caught everyone off guard — our allies as well as our enemies.
And that was always the point: With Trump, you’ve gotta expect the unexpected.
Which is why we can’t rule out Taiwan either.
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