At the time, the notion was dismissed by the pointy-headed arbiters of right and wrong known as the mainstream media, who concluded that Trump must see his presidency as an extended season of “The Apprentice.” In this episode, the modern-day land baron outsmarts the Scandihoovian rubes who didn’t know the “green” in Greenland was cold hard cash.

Like almost every other preconception of Trump in his first term, that take was nonsensical. There was considerable historical and geo-political justification for Trump’s proposal to rescue Greenland from European colonialism, and perhaps if his enemies had not sprung the Ukraine phone call impeachment hoax shortly after the Greenland gambit was proposed, it might have become a major accomplishment of Trump’s first term.

I wrote about the original proposal on Aug. 26, 2019, for RealClearPolitics in an article that declared “Trump’s No Safe Bet; He’s a Leader.” The premise was that unlike the feckless, washed-out, safety-in-numbers politicians who lead by following polls, Trump used common sense and intuition to find solutions to problems no one else even liked to think about. Building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants might seem like an obvious idea now, but before Trump, no one would have dared to say it.

The same is true of his wish to reclaim Greenland as North American territory. Few if any of Trump’s contemporaries had considered the idea, but it was not without precedent. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward had sought to purchase Greenland for the United States in 1867, the same year he famously acquired Alaska from Russia.

These days, it may seem jarring to talk about buying large chunks of real estate for the purpose of national aggrandizement, but it wasn’t always so. In addition to Seward’s purchase of Alaska, the United States also can be grateful for Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which nearly doubled the size of the country, as well as for the largely free acquisition of Florida from Spain. Land deals are not just in Trump’s blood; they are part of our national heritage.

They can also be vital to national security. Certainly everyone can agree we were infinitely better off during the era of the Soviet Union because Alaska was no longer in the hands of the Russian oligarchs. And President-elect Trump alluded to a similar benefit on Truth Social when he appointed his ambassador to Denmark in December:

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

Trump elaborated on that sentiment last week during his impromptu press conference at Mar-a-Lago.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes. … People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That’s for the free world. I’m talking about protecting the free world. You don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen.”

So again, we have the Russian threat, but this time added on top of the perhaps even greater Chinese threat. As I pointed out five years ago, China has its own eyes on Greenland, not just for the strategic importance but because it is a repository of rare earth minerals and other resources:

“President Trump was well aware that the Chinese had already expressed their own interest in Greenland, offering to fund millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements on the island as part of the plan for global economic domination known as the ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’”

Fortunately, pressure on Denmark largely thwarted China’s Greenland ambitions, but meanwhile Trump’s appetite for American expansionism was whetted.

It is perhaps significant that the play for Greenland has been paired with Trump’s threat to take back the Panama Canal, which was turned over to the nation of Panama by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. The canal zone, after all, has proven to be a lucrative foothold for China in the New World, and provides a chilling warning of what might happen if someone of Trump’s stature did not step forward to hold the communist state out of Greenland.

And one thing is certain. No one is laughing at Trump this time around for his pitch to Denmark. Far-fetched? Maybe, but no one dares to underestimate Trump any longer. His willpower is a force of nature, and if he says he wants Greenland, don’t count him out.

Trump has already become the dominant force on the world stage weeks before he takes office. His attendance at the reopening of Notre Dame caused ripples throughout Europe. Mexico and Canada were put on notice that there was no more free ride once Trump took office, as he threatened them both with tariffs. Trump’s jest about making Canada the 51st state deserves a lot of the credit for (Governor?) Justin Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister. And that’s just the beginning.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Time magazine ran a little-heralded essay by Ray Dalio that examined “How a Second Trump Administration Will Change the Domestic and World Order.” Dalio, one of the world’s most powerful hedge-fund managers, is no friend of Trump. Before the election, he lamented that Trump led a “strong, unethical, almost fascist Republican Party.”

But after the fact he was forced to acknowledge that Trump’s election would lead to “a giant renovation of government and the domestic order aimed at making it run more efficiently” and that China would be “widely considered the United States’ single greatest threat.”

Although Dalio is nostalgic for the post-war international order, he recognizes that under the new rules, “The U.S. and China will be competing for allies, with China generally believed to be in a much better position to win over nonaligned countries because China is more important economically and does a better job exerting its soft power.”

Unless you are a secret admirer of Xi Jinping, that assessment makes the best case for why Donald Trump is the right person for the job of restoring American dominance. No one does a better job of exerting “soft power” than the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president. He has already changed the conversation just with a social media post and a press conference. So what happens when he gets in office?

I’m not the only one taking Trump seriously. So are both Republicans and Democrats.

Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat, for instance, said, “I do think it’s a responsible conversation if they [Denmark] were open to [the United States] acquiring it, you know, whether just buying it outright. If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase.”

And MAGA superstar Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, accompanied Donald Trump Jr. to Nuuk, Greenland, last week to test the waters for Making Greenland America Again.

“What we learned is a couple of things,” he told his huge YouTube audience. “Number one, the people of Greenland are awesome. They’re tough people, they have tough winters. They’ve been through a lot and they feel forgotten, but they are the most lovely people. Number two, they feel as if they’re mistreated right now by the Danish government, that the Danish government is not treating them the way they’d like to be treated, and they want to be wealthy again.”

In just one week, the real work begins after Trump is sworn in. There’s no guarantee that he will accomplish his goal of buying Greenland, but with his salesmanship, one thing is certain – it’s more likely that Greenland will become the 51st state than that Canada will.

The name is best known as the title of Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1969 western featuring a colorful cast of aging outlaws – William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson – who give it their all as they battle bounty hunters, the Mexican Federal Army, and the passage of time in order to make their mark while they still have a chance.

Substitute the legacy media and special interests for the bounty hunters and Mexican army, and that about sums up the desperate last-chance mission of the ragtag band Trump has put together to carry out his mandate of meaningful change in a government grown fat and corrupt for the past half-century.

We don’t need to belabor the point. Trump’s appointees aren’t outlaws, but they certainly have the federales worried – the so-called administrative state, the people who have been wearing badges and making the rules. Because this Wild Bunch looks like they mean business. If they get approved, they will be kicking ass and taking names.

It’s a far cry from Trump’s first Cabinet, which he appointed with the permission of the administrative state. The outsider president didn’t know enough yet – or have enough power – to buck the system. He went with consensus choices who, at best, might talk about change but would be hesitant to effect it. Half of them shot Trump in the back; most of the rest were disloyal to his face, along with the congressional power brokers who put up roadblocks to every meaningful reform.

It’s not hard to think of Trump as Pike Bishop, the William Holden character in “The Wild Bunch” who leads what’s left of his gang out of a disastrous gunfight at the beginning of the movie and then plans his next move. At one point, Pike tells his trusted lieutenant, “This is our last go-around, Dutch. This time, we do it right.”

That’s where Trump is now, at age 78, sensing the insufficiency of his first term and wanting to make a real difference the second time around. This time, we do it right.

The  president-elect has wasted no time in assembling his team of rabble-rousers. You can break the mayhem down into four discrete buckets – justice, health, national security, and economic overhaul – and it looks like, if he gets his way, Trump’s second term could be historic. Throw in the government reinvention project spearheaded by rogue entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and you are well on your way to the second American revolution. No wonder the political establishment will stop at nothing to crush Trump and his appointees before they can begin the reforms they promised.

The old guard may have celebrated when they took down the proposed appointment of Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, but they won nothing. Trump’s replacement nominee, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, will work just as hard as Gaetz to shake up the Department of Justice. As one of Trump’s attorneys in his first impeachment trial, she has intimate knowledge of how the Deep State can aim the full force of the federal bureaucracy on an individual to destroy him or her.

It’s no accident that the Trump transition team has declined FBI background checks on his nominees and appointees. Remember, this is the same FBI that entrapped Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn in the early days of his first administration. Not to mention the FBI that let President Trump be impeached for questioning Joe Biden’s role in Ukrainian corruption, even though the agency was in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop that would have vindicated Trump if it had been released.

You can bet that Bondi, assisted by Trump’s criminal lawyer Todd Blanche in the role of deputy attorney general, will remove any Justice Department employees who pursue charges against anyone for political purposes. Those days are over.

But that’s just the beginning, and although the Justice Department overhaul may bring the most significant changes immediately, the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services could result in long-term changes of even greater impact.

Anyone who has noticed the prevalence of advertising for wonder drugs on cable news probably can understand the concern that Big Pharma has an outsized impact on the health narrative being told in mainstream media. Multiply that concern by a dozen when you measure the influence that drug companies have not just on Congress and health regulatory agencies but on the medical industry itself.

Bobby Kennedy has no fear of Big Pharma or the scientific establishment and he is willing to demand accountability for the kinds of policy decisions that led to our disastrous COVID policies four years ago. Is he right about everything? No, but he asks the right questions – questions that until now no one in power has dared to raise.

What about national security? There are problems everywhere, none bigger than China, which has been the missing link in U.S. foreign policy for the past four years. Does President Biden even have a China policy? You would be hard-pressed to find it, unless it is appeasement. No response to the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. No response to the cold war with the Philippines or the creation of Chinese naval bases in the South China Sea. No response to the increasing pressure tactics employed against our crucial trading partner, Taiwan. No response to China cracking down on human rights and free speech in Hong Kong. No response to China’s creation of a spy base in Cuba in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. No response to China’s predatory trade practices using slave labor.

You can expect the silence from the State Department to end when Sen. Marco Rubio is approved by the Senate as the new secretary of state. China is on notice, but other hot spots around the globe will also be addressed by Trump’s national security team, which includes former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Rep. Michael Waltz as national security adviser. Trump promised to negotiate a settlement to the frightful war in Ukraine, and by appointing Gen. Keith Kellogg as special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Trump is signaling that the killing has to end.

National security and the economy overlap in at least two crucial areas – illegal immigration and Trump’s plan to use tariffs as a tool to tame our allies and confound our adversaries. Treasury Secretary-designate Scott Bessent has made it clear that he will work with Trump to use tariffs to reshape the global economy and lessen the national debt.

That will be a key ingredient as Trump’s national security team works to deport the millions of illegals who have developed a dangerous symbiosis with the labor economy. Trump knows we can’t merely overlook the lawbreakers without surrendering our moral superiority, but the trick will be to find economic resources to make whole the industries like agriculture that will need to reinvent themselves with a legal work force.

In the first Trump administration, the response to Trump’s plans for massive change was “Why?” But now the response is “Why not?” As Trump asked black voters in 2016, “What do you have to lose?” Now that question is being posed to the entire nation, which has been sleepwalking toward the abyss for too long. If we don’t solve illegal immigration, the national debt, and the corporate stranglehold on our regulatory agencies and Defense Department, then there won’t be anything left to lose. That’s why nearly 60% of Americans support Trump’s transition, despite the fear-mongering of Rachel Maddow, the New York Times, and Biden’s White House.

In one last parallel between the cinematic “Wild Bunch” and Trump’s political variation, it is worth noting that Trump and his team know exactly what they are getting into. The Deep State isn’t going to take kindly to the president turning off the spigot of easy money for lobbyists, Big Pharma, and the military-industrial complex. But don’t expect Trump to back down.

In a crucial scene in the film, as the outlaws plot their revenge, Ernest Borgnine warns William Holden that “They’ll be waitin’ for us.”

Holden responds: “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Neither would Trump or any of the 77 million deplorables who joined his gang on Nov. 5.