Somebody’s been talking about Greenland again, and we’re getting another flurry of articles about how Greenland’s apparent size on maps may be to blame for the obsession. Last year it was suggested that Trump wanted Greenland simply because it looked really big on the Mercator projection: Slate and Newsweek were a lot less circumspect about it than Foreign Policy was, but then they would be. The latest round of press appears to be equally circumspect. The Financial Times and Geographical magazine turn evidence of executive ignorance into some kind of teachable moment about map projections instead of saying outright: he thinks it’s bigger than it actually is, and that’s nuts. Providing some context is always good, but let’s try not to bury the lede.

Most people know the poles are exaggerated on the Mercator projection. They’ve seen other projections. In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier pushed back against the argument that map projections distort our understanding of geography: “Do they never look at a globe, or at other maps? Are map users complete idiots?”¹ It was a rhetorical question: of course they aren’t, he was saying. Apparently there’s an exception. But when the emperor has no clothes, you have to proceed as though most people run around naked.

Previously: Trump’s ‘Cartographic Compulsion’.

1. Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection (University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 175. See my review.