Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Gilda Radner jokes with a person in a King Kong costume at a party on the observatory floor of the Empire State Building in New York City on August 13, 1980. (AP)

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder in 1982 (Adam Scull / MediaPunch / AP)

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.

“That’s what’s great about being a writer,” Hanif Kureishi told an interviewer a decade ago. “Every 10 years you become somebody else.” He was 59 then, looking back on his younger days; in his 30s, he’d made his mark on a newly multicultural literary scene in London with the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, followed by the prizewinning debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The son of an English mother and a Pakistani father, he was a bad boy in the spotlight, intimate with working-class locals and worldly elites, unabashed about smoking weed and sleeping around, and funny. He invoked P. G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth, and struck a chord with upstart young readers and writers (among them Zadie Smith). His boldly nonconformist voice was his own.

Then, at the age of 68, in December 2022, he became somebody unimaginably different after he keeled over onto a hard floor in Rome and came to consciousness a paraplegic. Trapped in a paralyzed body in a hospital bed, he tweeted two weeks later, via his son: “An insect, a hero, a ghost or Frankenstein’s monster. Out of these mixings will come magnificent horrors and amazements. Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside.” And suddenly, Kureishi was back in the spotlight. People around the world were listening. He kept dictating.

When I went to visit him in London two years later, this past December, he was in his power chair, in the ground-floor living room of his colorful, cluttered house in Shepherd’s Bush. His hospital bed is in one corner, with stacks of books he cannot reach packing the shelves above it; his partner, Isabella d’Amico, and his 24-hour health aide, Kamila, sleep in bedrooms upstairs, next to his large, now-unused study. He had been sick with diverticulitis and had smoked half a joint and drunk half a beer, he told me, on the fateful day when he fainted and “fell literally flat on my face. Bang. Without putting my arms out or anything. I fell flat on my fucking face and broke my neck.” While we talked, his right hand, in splints to keep it from clawing up, fluttered in front of him, almost as if it were strumming a guitar—ironic, because Kureishi used to passably play the blues. His mobility is limited to controlling his chair, leaning forward, and wiggling his hips. Drugs, now a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, are very much back in his life: He’s taking 12 or so a day; he isn’t really sure. “It’s to make me shit. It’s to stop my bladder doing this. It’s for this, that, the other. God knows.”

He went cold turkey on virtually everything else, compelled by another need. Right away, he was “mad to fucking write,” he told me. “And I still am mad to write. It’s holding me together.” At first, the fragmented, dispatch-like nature of Twitter gave his individual utterances a suspenseful intensity: “Sitting here again in this dreary room for another week, like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen,” he tweeted a few days into his new life. And then, “I wouldn’t advice [sic] having an accident like mine, but I would say that lying completely inert and silent in a drab room, without much distraction, is certainly good for creativity.”

[Read: Hanif Kureishi is tweeting for his life]

Two weeks after the accident, Carlo, one of his three sons, revived the dormant Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles, that his father had once launched. The dictations began to coalesce into essays that combined tales of his former, able-bodied life with unvarnished assessments of his medical and mental conditions. “Experiencing the press coverage you might receive had you died,” in his words, spurred him on, and in July, just after he moved from an Italian rehab facility to London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, his agent agreed that the entries would work as a book. Shattered, a bare, tumultuous memoir of the first year of Kureishi’s new life, published in the United Kingdom in October 2024, is now out in the United States. It’s simultaneously the story of his mind’s entrapment in his body and his attempt to outrun that restriction with radical transparency.

Back in the 2014 interview, he’d spoken of forging “a new kind of English realism” as his career took off. After reading Shattered, I wondered if the multigenre experimenter had, quite literally, stumbled into a new kind of illness realism.

Nobody is equipped for the kind of calamity that struck Kureishi. But the body, with all its spewing, writhing, lusting, hunger, and degradation, had long been his obsession. His fiction had traced his own arc from young renegade to disgruntled middle-aged father to ailing older man. Pain and pleasure were his recurring catharsis points. He wanted to explore whether, and how, the body could really satisfy the curiosities of the mind.

My Beautiful Laundrette is bookended by two beatings similar to ones inflicted on an adolescent Kureishi by punks who regularly chased him home from school. Pain conveys its bearer, whether it’s the Pakistani British Omar or his former skinhead lover, Johnny, to a new level of self-realization. The Buddha of Suburbia—with more plotlines pulled from Kureishi’s young life—follows teenage Karim on lust- and creativity-fueled escapades that end with the kind of sex that includes a leather hood, ropes, and a candle inside an orifice. “What do you do?” he asks the woman involved in this act. “Pain as play,” she responds. “A deep human love of pain. There is desire for pain, yes?” In the wincingly autobiographical novel Intimacy (1998), a married man who leaves his wife for another woman has aging very much on the brain.

But The Body (2002) most uncannily foreshadowed Kureishi’s current situation. The novel is narrated by a writer in his mid-60s whose medical ailments have left him broken—“I don’t go to parties,” he moans, “because I don’t like to stand up.” But a secretive new surgery transplants his brain into a young, fit body for six months, which he uses to screw women across Europe, take ecstasy, and contemplate how experiencing a body’s failure elevates your appreciation of just how good you can feel. “After the purifications and substitutions of culture,” he thinks, “I believed I was returning to something neglected: fundamental physical pleasure, the ecstasy of the body, of my skin, of movement, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the same state.”

Anointed with unexpected establishment credentials (Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2008), Kureishi was mellowing in the 2010s. As he put it to me, “I was bored with my own imagination and … I was happy having a good life. I was living part of the time in Italy, part of the time here; the kids were grown up. So I thought, Fuck it. Why should I spend all day working? So I was taking it easy and I had—I didn’t have much of a desire to write anymore. Not with the enthusiasm I had when I was younger. Then I had the accident.”

Writing fiction no longer merely strikes him as boring. To “make up shit” has become impossible. “It just seems frivolous to do that,” he told me. Some other writers, I pushed him, might retreat to the relief of fantasy in his situation. Not Kureishi. “I’m not writing fiction,” he said. “I’m not writing some stupid story, made-up story. I’m writing it directly about what happened to me.” Forget easing into his late phase as a writer. Kureishi has been ambushed by the physical infirmities of age in a rare way. He has always drawn on his own experience, but by choice. A vulnerable, relief-seeking self-exposure is now a necessity, a compulsion—a mode of connection, even as his world has shrunk. It has also offered a way to again rebel against the dominant modes of storytelling. He has one story, and it’s his own, and the only way he wants to tell it is to spit it out raw.

In 1926, after a bout with a devastating flu and a series of earlier nervous breakdowns, Virginia Woolf published an essay on why we don’t—but perhaps ought to—treat illness as a subject as valuable and enlightening as “love, battle, and jealousy.” “On Being Ill” considers illness as a foreign land, a place where “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.” Properly rendering the miasma of sickness and the “daily drama of the body,” argues Woolf—who endured her share of forced confinements in bed—is so difficult that the challenge is rarely undertaken. The ill usually write after they’ve recovered, when the palpable sensations of debilitation are gone, and “our intelligence domineers over our senses.”

Nearly a century later, fiction about illness is still relatively uncommon. Even the best of the genre, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room and Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, are told from a caretaker’s perspective or maintain a veil of silence over the specifics of the chemical and mechanical horrors that a body can endure. Excessive depictions of pain, as in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, can curdle understanding into a kind of grimy sympathy or, worse, distaste. The illness memoir, however, is a well-trodden contemporary genre. First-person tales about cancer, freak accidents, chronic disease, and mental breakdowns regularly make their way onto best-seller lists (or into remainder bins). They typically take one of two approaches: Either the writer finds redemptive lessons in the path toward death or disability, as Paul Kalanithi did in his posthumous megahit, When Breath Becomes Air, or, as in Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a previously unexamined world of disease is made manifest while the writer explores what we know, and don’t know, about its properties. The hope in both types of books is to impose sense—for the writer and the reader—on the mysterious.

[From the September 2019 issue: Meghan O’Rourke on life with Lyme disease]

The illness narrative usually benefits from months or years of deliberation: It’s a reckoning with how injury or sickness edges into a life and then cracks it wide open. As Kureishi tilted his chair forward and backward, he blithely told me that he hadn’t had a chance to read Woolf or any other books in the illness canon (he can’t hold a novel and doesn’t want to be read to), and that in Shattered, “there isn’t much reflection.” His writing method during the post-accident year he chronicles hardly changed, even when, halfway through, he knew that a book would emerge. Once he was home and stabilized, the suspense petered out, but his from-the-trenches method continued. For a few hours each day, he sat with his son, recording a routine newly cluttered by physiotherapy bills and National Health Service red tape. What winnowing they did was minimal. Shattered is akin to a war diary, prizing immediacy above all else.

Kureishi never planned to produce a stylized memoir. He simply documented the uncertainty and emotional convulsions of the moment. At night, when visitors left his hospital room, he was alone, awake, and imprisoned in his body. “I would write the whole scheme of the piece in my head,” he told me. “One sentence, one paragraph, one paragraph, one paragraph, and kind of hold it there. I could see it visually like a picture.” He’d keep it in his mind until morning, and then dictate in a rush. In an early entry, he notes that he hopes to one day “be able to go back to using my own precious and beloved instruments,” meaning pen and paper, then swerves. “Excuse me, I’m being injected in my belly with something called Heparina, a blood thinner,” he says, then gets right back to praising longhand.

The book’s tone leaps and crashes with Kureishi’s post-accident moods. A model of bountiful gratitude, he praises the Italian doctors and nurses who feed him and move him, who “wash your genitals and your arse, often while singing jolly Italian songs.” When someone comes to measure him for a wheelchair, he writes, “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He turns on himself frequently, worrying that he is “both a helpless baby and terrible tyrant.” Memoirs are designed for revelation, but Kureishi, a connoisseur of shock, invades his own privacy more than most. Nothing is off-limits, including the butt plug he wears in hydrotherapy: His rectum cannot be trusted to control itself. He can’t resist stories, such as one about a threesome he had years ago in Amsterdam, that remind him and us of his wild old days and magnify the contrast with his current straits. How many (sometimes tedious) details we might really want to hear doesn’t concern him. Shattered practices what Woolf calls “a childish outspokenness in illness”; she goes on to note how “things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Kureishi’s mode is impromptu exposé: He has no distance from himself or his condition, and refuses to add any.

For readers, this lack of filter makes Shattered bluntly intimate, demanding in its sharing. For Kureishi, it reflects the urgent purpose of his confessional writing, which is partly financial. “It costs me a thousand pounds a week just to have physio and to go swimming and all that shit,” he told me. Friends donate to a fund, but he’d like to contribute to it himself, with a book that really sells. The urgency is also partly—probably mostly—existential. If Kureishi can’t be out in the world, he needs his voice to be.

Kureishi’s emotions, as you’d expect, surface readily. He cried a few times while we talked, once when I asked him about the knife attack that maimed his friend Salman Rushdie. The two men suffered nearly fatal injuries within months of each other: Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a literary festival in August 2022 and has lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand. They emailed each other daily during Kureishi’s months in the hospital. Rushdie has written his own memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which he carefully and solemnly recounts the way the attack punctured and then reinflated his sense of self. Knife favors a narrative of growth; it aims for closure. Shattered rejects both, never leaving the insistent and unceremonious present tense.

[Read: Salman Rushdie strikes back]

Just as Kureishi hasn’t read the illness canon, he hasn’t read his own memoir. “People tell me it holds together,” he said. He doesn’t seem to need or want proof of that; he knows it’s fragmented. He’s interested in his daily creations as evidence of what feels like newly unfettered access to his mind—of his power to delve into its recesses and skim its surfaces, mobile as he can be nowhere else. That drive shows no signs of ebbing as he now works on a sequel and a movie, his son at his side. “I’ve never felt such a strong desire to be a writer,” he said. “It’s a relief that to be a writer for me is to be a human being, to be sentient.”

*Lead image sources: Stuart C. Wilson / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty;
Neville Elder / Corbis / Getty; Print Collector / Getty

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “‘I Am Still Mad to Write.’”

Donald Trump, for reasons no one fully apprehends, is preparing for his looming second term by talking like a 19th-century imperialist. At a press conference this week, he pointedly declined to rule out the use of military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, while insisting on renaming the Gulf of Mexico. He also has repeatedly alluded to a takeover of Canada, including using his social-media platform to share an imagined map of the United States consuming its neighbor to the north.

Rationalizing these statements in either moral or strategic terms is challenging. But the conservative columnist Dan McLaughlin is up to the task. “In fact, Trump is sending a message to the world and America’s enemies: We’re serious about protecting the Western Hemisphere—again,” he writes. Trump, he explains, is shrewdly analyzing the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and Greenland and seeking to ward off Chinese influence, and is belittling the sovereign rights of American neighbors in order to scare them into cooperation. It’s all quite strategic. If Metternich had had a social-media account, he probably would have been binge-posting fake images of a European map with a gigantic Austrian empire.

This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.

Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.

Trump “starts a negotiation on his terms, starting with the most outlandish demands but with designs on a deal,” McLaughlin writes admiringly. During the first Trump term, some conservatives likewise insisted that his threats to obliterate North Korea were the prelude to some tough dealmaking. The deal turned out to be that North Korea was permitted to continue developing its missile program, but Trump got a prized collection of flattering personalized letters from Kim Jong Un.

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

McLaughlin is a longtime hawk, so his current stance is unsurprising. More remarkable is the support that Trump’s bout of unprovoked threats has gained from conservative thinkers who otherwise cast themselves as anti-interventionist. Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has written extensively about the failures of the Republican Party’s hawkish faction, notes that the case for invading Greenland is not “sufficient” to outweigh its moral and diplomatic costs. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to reject the notion. “I’m not a war-hawk expansionist,” he said recently on a National Review podcast. “But I don’t think it’s a totally insane idea.” Yes, he granted, “it would be an unjust, aggressive war.” However, “it would be far less costly or dangerous than regime-changing Iran.”

This is an interesting method for evaluating policy ideas: think of a much worse policy idea that is not an alternative, and ask whether it would be worse than that. Repealing the First Amendment might sound risky, but in comparison with, say, blowing up the moon, it seems downright prudent. (You may also recognize this form of reasoning from the periodic conservative argument that “Trump is less dangerous than Hitler.”)

The journal Compact is one of those magazines that have popped up during the Trump era with an apparent, if unstated, mission of reverse-engineering an intellectual superstructure for his populist impulses. Compact’s proprietary formula combines statist left-wing economic policy with social conservatism. And, although its authors don’t agree on everything, it has been fairly insistent about noninterventionism as a foundational principle. The bread and butter of Compact’s foreign-policy line is articles with headlines such as “No to Neoconservatism” and lamenting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave new life to American foreign-policy hawks. (You knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, has called for social conservatives to “cast off the ideology” of interventionism.

And yet, yesterday Compact published an essay celebrating Trump’s imperialist ideology. (Headline: “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.”) “Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Chris Cutrone writes. “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative.” Greenland, he explains, is strategically valuable, so we should take it. Canada is “the most European part of the Western Hemisphere,” and therefore deserving of geopolitical annihilation. The essay ends on this rousing note: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

It seems paradoxical that anti-interventionist conservatives (and horseshoe-theory Marxists, in Cutrone’s case) would be enthusiastic about naked imperialism, while even ultra-hawks such as John Bolton consider it bellicose and irresponsible. (“It shows Trump, again, not understanding the broader context that his remarks are made in, and the harmful consequences that this is having all across NATO right now,” he told CNN.) The ideological through line appears to be that intervention is wrong when it’s done to spread democracy (Iraq) or protect a democracy (Ukraine), but launching a war against a peaceful democratic ally is somehow reasonable.

The more likely explanation for this paradox is simply that the neoconservatives are the least loyal to Trump of all the conservative factions, and the anti-interventionists the most. And so if loyalty to Trump means developing reasons to favor threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland—none of which poses the slightest danger or was considered even vaguely hostile by Trump’s allies until Trump thought to target them—then, by jingo, reasons will be found.