Simply everyone should have an ice breaker!

Of course I have had a bad attitude about Donald J. Trump since he first blathered his way on to the scene way back when.

I can’t believe he wants to spend more billions of dollars on ice breakers the U.S. COAST GUARD will have very little use for.

Is there ice in the USA? (The frozen water, not the law enforcement types).

Why yes there is.

Happens every winter in all our cold places. Sometimes thick and impossible to get through. Unless you have an ice breaker. We currently have three big polar level icebreakers and and unknown number of smaller regional ice breakers.

But do we need a fleet of giant Finnish ice breakers to bust through whatever local ice forms on U.S. waters?

Demonstrably not because a. It’s only here for a while, and b. It always melts.

So we probably have enough ice breakers, thank you very much. This does not matter to our child-man president. He played golf with the president of Finland some time ago and walked away convinced we need lots more ice breakers.

Just like we need a new ballroom, another refurbished reflecting pool, a big Trumpian arch sticking in the middle of everything in historic Washington and a lot of faux gold plating and shiny vases in the Oval Office.

One thing i need to point out here is I am biased, heavily biased, toward Finland. My second child was born in Helsinki and let me tell you, Finnish midwives know all about having babies. And their nurses love to talk to people who speak English, so they can work on their English.

Finland itself is fantastic.

They have reindeer there and they aren’t shy about eating them.

Nothing more wonderful than sautéed reindeer meat spread around the base of a little mound of mashed potatoes with a pat of butter and some lingonberries on top.

I ate as much of that as I could afford.

“Oooo…how could you? Those darling little reindeer! What about Santa?”

Screw that.

He’s a marketing myth in the first place. A reindeer in my book is just a deer with a better reputation, a steer that can sprint, an antelope that goes very well with the right condiments. Jaysus…I would go back to Finland for that, alone. Give me a blank check and a couple of days in any department store that has survived. Stockmann, the greatest, was so valuable to my family we have paintings of it hanging in the living room.

But I digress!

I say we should outsource all our warship building to Finland! It’s gritty work and we don’t do much of that here anymore.

Are they a cheery people?

Probably enough for folks who spend a lot of the year in frigid darkness. I had a friend who had some dates with a stunning Lapland woman. She was a vision of beauty who had very little to say. Kind of drawn to long, pensive silences. It was not good for my friend, an engaging, intelligent Texan.

Anyhow, welding together our warships would give the Finns something to brag about even as it drives the Russians nuts. And what could be better than driving the Russians nuts?

But back to the issue.

Our flabbergasted president wants these these ships because Russia has lots of them, and they are huge. Of course, Russia is mostly ice much of the year, so it needs them to keep the harbors opened so it can move its most valuable exports, young men headed into the meat grinder that is the Ukrainian war.

But we don’t have ice like that.

The suggestion is we will use these Finn ice busters to work on frozen hegemony at the poles.

Note. The Coast Guard will of course accept anything that hints at largess, but it really doesn’t need them and probably doesn’t want them. No one knows how to sail them. No one knows how to use them to bust up ice.

The U.S. Navy will go batshit about it and won’t want those big things rusting anywhere near its own collection of floating rusting big things.

So parking will be a problem, too.

Charlie Madigan was a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for 40 years. He worked for United Press International and The Chicago Tribune. He lives in Evanston, Ill.