The Window Seat: Venezuela and Greenland Indicate an Rhetoric Overload

Throughout Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, ceaseless scandals reverberated through news cycles, their urgency colliding with a citizenry long accustomed to political controversy.

A staggering number of court cases resulting in a felony conviction, which was nothing more  than background static at that point, underscored  the  decline  of public attention to politics. It was just too tiresome to keep track of what to care about.

If Americans are already numb to scandal at home, it’s worth asking whether we can register the significance of Trump’s escalating foreign interventions.

Since Trump has taken office, he has authorized an expanded series of U.S. military operations and strikes across several countries and regions including Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela. In mid-2025, tensions with Iran briefly captivated public attention, particularly after U.S. airstrikes on their nuclear facilities.

But while Venezuela’s intervention soon drew more sustained attention, it has been somewhat eclipsed by Trump’s renewed focus on Greenland, including tariff threats and strategic rhetoric. When Trump says, for example, that we must “own” the semiautonomous country of Greenland, does that rhetoric still carry enough weight for people from the U.S. to notice and assess?

The answers are not so clear. A study by Pew Research Center revealed that the number of U.S. adults who follow news about foreign international affairs “very closely” make up a small number.

Even when coverage is more frequent, the central audience that pays serious attention remains small, is often older, and highly educated. While interest spikes when the U.S. intervenes, the sheer volume of such rhetoric may prevent us from processing their significance.

President Trump calls to “own Greenland,” because it is, “strategically located and mineral rich,” justifying doing “something to Greenland whether they like it or not,” and that the the people of Denmark would be “better off as Americans.”

He also claimed early after the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife that the United States would “run” Venezuela, with the rhetoric now largely shifting from the prevention of drug trafficking toward obtaining control and resources.

The rhetoric has a blaring commonality in that it underscores democracy and autonomous or semi-autonomous peoples right to self-determination. While his speeches and statements typically begin discussing strategy and security, they tend to finish focusing on minerals and profit.

As I was writing this piece, new remarks about Greenland surface daily from Washington and Europe. Coverage of international relations is indispensable, but I can’t help but wonder if the sheer volume of comments only works to normalize and trivialize them.

U.S citizens, fairly, have grown hesitant of U.S. military conflicts, and decades of political rhetoric about democracy and freedom so much so that may have left us feeling numb. Even now, when the rhetoric shifts to national security and strategic gain from minerals.

I remember, in my sixth grade history class, learning about the hazards of communism. Now, through the internet and democratization,  I see even that notion, of democracy being good and communism being bad, fervently debated, and with it the exhaustion of people no longer knowing what to believe. Just as it was difficult to track the endless court cases, constant considerations of raiding a NATO country may no longer carry the significance it should.

With the ease of political burnout and an overload of shocking statements from Washington, it’s worth wondering if the supposed significance of Trump’s rhetoric about Greenland or Venezuela will also inevitably mean very little to us.