Let's get Trump a big, beautiful globe!
The Oval Office ought to once again feature a great globe.
On Christmas Day 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received a 50 inch in diameter, 750 pound globe, which he mounted behind his desk in the Oval Office and referred to frequently during WWII. Globes are particularly valuable for tracking wars fought at high latitudes because Mercator projection maps exaggerate the scale of the far north and south.
Identical globes were also delivered to Winston Churchill and chief of staff George C. Marshall so they would be looking at the exact same globes when discussing strategy and tactics on the phone.
In contrast, this is the only photo I’ve been able to find of President Trump with what’s even kind of a globe:
He seems to be a more of a map guy than a globe guy.
The Mercator projection might help explain his not unreasonable interest over the last 8 years in buying Greenland and his new, out-of-the-blue obsession with grabbing territory from Canada.
Canada and Greenland are big, but they aren’t that big. And Russia is huge, but it’s not that huge.
Africa. That’s a big place, Africa.
The globe really shows how tiny Europe is, and how big Africa is. It's almost a revelation. The contrast is bigger compared to a map. (You can actually see it partially in that FDR photo.)