Greenland obsession

What's really behind Trump's Greenland obsession

The president-elect's desire to acquire the Danish territory reportedly came from the most predictable, and ridiculous, of sources.

By Hayes Brown

President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday shared the name of his chosen ambassador to Denmark. Compared with other high-profile appointments, Ken Howery’s naming won’t raise many eyebrows. What did elevate those eyebrows was Trump’s statement announcing Howery, in which Trump resurrected his past interest in taking Greenland off the Danes’ proverbial hands.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in his statement. It was an unwelcome throwback to his first term when the policymaking came down to the president’s whims and a recognition that this time around there’s going to be even fewer people able to dissuade him from his most quixotic of ventures.

We probably should have seen this week’s resurgence coming given how long he’d pressed for American ownership of Greenland before that news became public. The Wall Street Journal first reported in 2019 that Trump harbored an interest in buying the immense ice-covered island. As the diplomatic spat between the U.S. and Denmark grew, The New York Times reported that “while Mr. Trump has long derided nation-building, his flirtation with nation-buying turned out to be more serious than many originally thought. He has been talking privately about buying Greenland for more than a year and even detailed the National Security Council staff to study the idea.”

But what to make of Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland in the first place? There’s been a concerted effort to make the energy poured into his half-baked fantasy make sense. Maybe it’s about controlling the rare earth minerals that Greenland possesses and are crucial to high-tech manufacturing? Perhaps it’s about ensuring continued American access to Pituffik Space Base, the Pentagon’s northernmost military outpost? Or is Trump interested in countering Chinese influence in the Arctic as more waterways open because of climate change?

As tends to be the case with Trump, the real answer is both entirely on-brand and deeply weird. In their book “The Divider,” The New York Times’ Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser reported that the proposal originally came from his longtime friend Ronald Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune. As Baker wrote for The New York Times in 2022:

Mr. Trump later claimed the idea was his personal inspiration. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’” he recalled in an interview last year for the book. “You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.”

He added: “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”

But in fact, Mr. Lauder discussed it with him from the early days of the presidency and offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate. John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, assigned his aide Fiona Hill to assemble a small team to brainstorm ideas. They engaged in secret talks with Denmark’s ambassador and produced an options memo.

We can discern three things from Baker and Glasser’s reporting. First, even if Trump really did come up with the idea of buying Greenland himself as he claimed, the motivation of “it’s massive” doesn’t speak highly of his strategic vision for the United States — or his own business sense as a developer. Trump would eventually discard the options presented to him in favor of insisting that Denmark put Greenland up for sale. When the Danes insisted that was off the table, he lashed out at Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, calling her refusal “nasty,” and canceled an official trip.

It’s especially fitting that a real estate developer whose properties have declared bankruptcy multiple times is besotted with this particular landmass. Greenland is one of the oldest bait-and-switch real estate cons in the book, named to encourage settlement on what is a mostly barren expanse of ice. And, as any cartography fan would tell you, the way Greenland looks on most common maps is extremely misleading thanks to the distortion needed to make a globe flat. Instead, the island — while still huge — isn’t quite as massive as Trump seems to think.

Second, Lauder’s suggestion becoming an obsession for Trump highlights a habit that the president-elect has only leaned into further lately. More than ever, it appears that Trump is more easily influenced by his fellow billionaires than people with actual expertise. In his first term, he turned to the now-former head of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac Perlmutter, to act as a shadow secretary of veterans affairs. This time, he’s tapped Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to co-lead a glorified cost-cutting commission. According to The Wall Street Journal, the idea came out of a breakfast between Musk and Trump at the house of another billionaire, investor Nelson Peltz.  

Finally, the whole affair speaks to Trump’s inability to take no for an answer. The Danish government was exceedingly firm in 2019 that Greenland is not for sale. His own national security staff was frustrated by the petulance on display that scuttled any chance of a deeper Danish-American security arrangement regarding Greenlandic territory. Greenland itself is pushing for total independence from Denmark, not for trading one overlord for another. And yet here we are, five years later, seeing Trump making the same demands all over again much to Greenland’s dismay.

One mystery remains: Why bring back the whole Greenland boondoggle now? While it’s not apparent where Lauder first got the idea or why he was interested, he likely isn’t the one who replanted the seed in Trump’s head. Lauder said in 2022 that despite his long relationship with Trump, he wouldn’t donate to the former president’s election campaign. Federal Election Commission filings from this year seem to indicate that he kept his word, focusing instead on getting Republicans elected to Congress.

Much like Trump’s threat to reclaim the Panama Canal, there may be something darker at work with his Greenland obsession — a desire to see American territory expanded under his watch, a neo-colonial bent that would fit all to uncomfortably well with his mercantilist worldview. But it’s also entirely possible that, having latched onto an idea previously, Trump is simply now unwilling to let it go, no matter how much people around him try to correct him. It’s a stubbornness that would be unbecoming in most children, let alone in the Oval Office. Now it has the potential to wreak havoc once returned to a seat of power on the world stage.