Over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a press conference in Atlanta, where he confronted a good question about his boss.

Donald Trump, the reporter noted, has been “very active on the campaign trail” in recent weeks, telling voters how glad he is that Denmark “gave Greenland” to the United States.

“Has the president misunderstood the agreement that was made?” the reporter asked.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what comments you’re referring to,” Rubio replied, adding that the president is “fully apprised of” the latest details.

It’s curious that Rubio, who recently became the first and only secretary of state ever to hit the campaign trail in support of a political party, claimed to have no idea what his boss has repeatedly said about the U.S. taking control of an arctic island. But making matters worse is the idea that Trump is “fully apprised of” the details surrounding U.S. policy toward Greenland — because if that’s true, it suggests his relationship with reality is irretrievably broken.

In fact, as Election Day got underway for American voters, the Republican president appeared via phone on Fox News, where he falsely declared that Europe “just gave” Greenland to the U.S., which most certainly did not happen. (Lawmakers in Greenland did vote on Tuesday to approve a recent trilateral security agreement with the U.S. and Denmark, but quite obviously that didn’t hand over the island to the U.S.)

Nevertheless, Trump said the same thing a day earlier. And the day before that. And the day before that. And a few days before that. And several times in the days before that.

Somehow, all of this apparently escaped the attention of the official responsible for implementing the administration’s foreign policy.

I’m not in a position to say with certainty whether Trump is deliberately trying to mislead the public or is genuinely confused about a subject even he ought to be able to understand. But to the extent that people might be tempted to believe the president, it’s probably worth re-emphasizing that the U.S. didn’t “get” Greenland, no matter how many times he pretends otherwise. As The New York Times reported in September:

On Tuesday, he signed a document that paves the way to expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, opening new bases. But it explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one — especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space — wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as “tremendous for Europe and for the United States.”

For Mr. Trump, it was a major retreat.

I can appreciate why the president might find this embarrassing (assuming he’s actually aware of the political reality). He did, after all, make a “100%” guarantee to Americans that he would acquire the island — nine months before he settled for a deal that gave him what he already had.

But the more the president peddles nonsense about his imaginary acquisition of Greenland, the more obvious it becomes that he’s brazenly attempting to rewrite recent history about one of the more notable foreign policy fiascos of his second term.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post While Rubio pleads ignorance, Trump pretends his Greenland policy wasn’t an embarrassment appeared first on MS NOW.

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