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It’s remarkable how many times Donald Trump acts like Donald Trump, and people come away dazed and stupefied, as if they haven’t witnessed the spectacle over and over before.

It happened again this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In his speech on Wednesday, our president doubled down on his odd obsession over Greenland, demanding U.S. ownership of the icy island, insisting that he needs it for national security, and telling European leaders, in the pose of a Mafia don, “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.”

Trump had threatened, a few days earlier, to impose 100 percent tariffs on European nations that opposed his takeover plans. It seemed, this time, he wasn’t going to back down from his own ruinous demands.

And then he backed down. Just a few hours after his speech, which was unusually hostile by even his standards, he emerged from a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, announced that they’d worked out the “framework of a future deal” on Greenland, so there’d be no need for an invasion or for any punitive tariffs. Asked about the details of this framework, Trump said, “We’ll have something in two weeks”—his usual timetable for putting off important decisions, or sometimes evading them altogether.

In other words, Trump the Godfather had once again transformed into the TACO Man—the derisive acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” coined after the first couple of times he threatened tariffs, then backed off, early on in his second term as president.

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But this time, the syndrome played out differently. The targets of the threat, in this case the leaders of European........

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