An inside look at President Trump's campaign to acquire Greenland

about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.

Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know what I've never seen

this happen. This is true. Mysteries have every size each week, this American life, wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies. At a White House news conference in April, his president Donald Trump was discussing his displeasure at our European allies over the war in Iran. He said this about his problem with the NATO allies.

“You know, it all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland.”

They don't want to give it to us. And I said, bye-bye.

That's President Donald Trump in April. Trump's campaign to acquire the territory of Greenland

from Denmark, through purchase, threat, negotiation, or even military action is one of the stranger episodes of his presidency. And while Trump hasn't spoken publicly about the issue in a while, our guest, New Yorker staff writer Ben Talb says it hasn't gone away. In a new article, he writes that there are ongoing influence operation at Trump's direction to keep the possibility alive. Talb's reporting traces Trump's Greenland project from its inception in 2018

to the present day, a campaign that's yielded some comical moments as Americans sought to woo allies and wield influence in the territory with just 57,000 people. Talb also reveals some of the private actors who've helped to drive the process, players motivated by financial gain, notoriety, or ideology. Ben Talb has been contributing to the New Yorker since 2015. Among his many journalistic honors, he won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Future Writing,

for his work on the lasting effects on former detainees and guards of American abuses in Guantanamo Bay. His new article in the New Yorker is titled "Inside the Ludicrous Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland." Ben Talb, welcome back to fresh air. Thank you very much, Dave. I want to begin with a moment. Just before President Trump was inaugurated in 2025, when his son Donald Trump Jr. and the late Charlie Kirk took a trip to Greenland to try

and build some support among locals for this effort of the United States acquisition. I don't go for these guys. So, so, Charlie Kirk and Don Jr. arrived in New York Greenland. With very little warning, there was a sort of advanced team that had gone before them, carrying mega-caps to hand out to people, but the locals weren't really sure what was happening

until the Trump branded 757 landed in their airport. At first, people were very curious,

“very open to the idea of a high-profile visit, I think. But during the course of the day,”

President Trump himself mentioned the prospect of a military takeover, but the people at the time didn't know that this was happening. They were simply hanging out with Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk. So, they arrived in New York, the capital of Greenland, and were greeted by a solitary Trump supporter, a Greenlander named Jürgen Boassen, who led them down to the harbor and over to New York's most expensive hotel, where they hosted a number of locals for a very expensive lunch.

And it was only after they laughed that local journalists in New York working for the Greenlander publications found that, in fact, among those supporters, where a number of homeless people had been recruited with a promise of a free meal. And the portrayal in sort of both Charlie Kirk's words and those of Don Jr. was that actually this was evidence of a profound support building for an American takeover, effectively framed as these people would like to join the United States.

And in the aftermath of their trip, there was a huge surge in propaganda and influencers, pro-Trump influencers arriving in Greenland and trying to sort of get a piece of their own. And the strange thing about this propaganda is it wasn't actually directed at persuading Greenlanders that it would be good for them to join the United States. It was mostly aimed at convincing conservative Americans that this is something that Greenlanders wanted, rather than actually building

organic support. And one of the details that I love here is that you track down a high school student who had had an interaction here. You want to tell us about that? Was this guy easy to find for you? Actually, yes, so it nukees a small town. I mean, it is a capital of the country, but it is a capital with 20,000 people. And it's very easy to once you build some local contacts and local

“trust to get to know pretty much whoever you need to relatively quickly. So through the help”

of a local Greenlandic journalist named Nukaku Tobiason, I found a young high school and named

center of Nuk. It's a gathering space for a lot of people in town. It's very close to Greenlandic Parliament. And so it's colloquially known in town as the Danish embassy. So they were at Datties, holding court. And he was handed a maga hat and took a photograph with Don Jr Charlie Kirk in several other locals. And it was only later that he realized that he was being used. He said we were kind of manipulated. It was only when they posted the pictures that it looked like there was so many

people who liked him, but actually we were just friendly and people got free beer. But of course, when they went back to the US, Charlie Kirk went to his broadcast studio and gave a pretty, let's say dubious account of his few hours in Greenland claiming falsely that there are polar bears walking around in Nuk and that there are young Greenlanders coming up to him saying that they have rubies the size of baseballs which the Danes won't let them mind. And the Danes won't let

them mind their gold, their lithium, their gas, all this stuff which is completely untrue because Greenland has total autonomy and ownership over its natural resources. And he used this to sort of pivot into the he claimed locally the narrative that it's time for a rebellion against the Danes, which is not really what you hear in Nuk when you actually go talk to people. All right, let's go back to the beginning of this strange episode. The origins of this idea,

“you tell us in the story, goes back to Trump's first term in office, I think 2018. When”

he hears about this from a former business school classmate, is that right? Yes, it was from his longtime friend Ronald Lauder who had suggested that he buy the island.

And the first time he ever brought it up in any context which any of us are aware of is when he

summoned his National Security Advisor at the time John Bolton into the Oval Office and confided that Ron Lauder had suggested that he buy the island. He asked Bolton what he thought of it in Bolton was a little bit startled but said essentially well it is true that there are security issues of importance to the Arctic and it's the region that we've largely neglected in recent years and there's probably a lot of ways to sort of handle this. And so he told Trump that

he would do some research and get back to him with options. But actually what followed was the kind of as Fiona Hill who was serving as the Senior Director for Europe and on the National Security Council put it to me, it was all done in a slightly clandestine cloak and dagger way where Bolton summoned her into his office ashen faced and essentially said look Ron Lauder has told Trump that he used to buy green and we've got to head this off before he announces this to everybody.

People will remember Fiona Hill from the impeachment hearings in 2019, right? She was quite an

“impressive figure in the National Security Council. So she does some research what happens?”

So it is absolutely true and important that the Arctic is becoming a really serious site of National Security interests, not just for the United States but for Russia, for China, for Norway, for all of the Arctic nations or as China likes to call themselves somewhat questionably a near

Arctic nation. And you know basically this is a region that has not really been useful or

traversable for any military or commercial purpose except for Cold War era submarines going under the ice cap but as it melts, this opens up new waterways that are very strategically important to a lot of countries. And during the Cold War it was primarily viewed through the lens of the direct pathway for nuclear ballistic missiles to travel from Russia or from Soviet submarines in the far north. The United States does have this one base there. Under a treaty it has the

opportunity to establish military facilities in Greenland. Most of them have been abandoned except for this one base to track incoming missiles, right? Correct. So the US essentially took over Greenland militarily during the Second World War. It was at the request of the Danish consul in Washington, D.C. at the time, who was essentially acting alone in what he regarded with the interests of his country while the actual government in Copenhagen was under Nazi occupation. And so he encouraged

and essentially allowed the US to build military facilities in Greenland to defend those critical

waterways and the northwest sort of coastal areas from Nazi incursion. This was an incredibly

“important and valuable thing. And then during the Cold War the agreement between the United”

States and Denmark, which is in place since 1951, was that the US could stay, could continue to maintain its military in presence and could expand it pretty much however it's off fit. In coordination with the Danish and Greenland governments, that's been true since the 50s. It remains true today. If the US wanted to expand its military presence against legitimate security concerns from Russia or China or anyone else, it could do so in coordination with the Danes and up until about a year

and a half ago, I think that would have been most welcome. Right. You know, so eventually this does

Greenland, which gets a lot of attention. And John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, wonders where this came from because he's quite sure his staff were under strict orders not to

talk about it. Finally figures it out. Where did it come from? So yeah, both since said that he'd sort

of looked around to figure out what had happened. And what he found out was that at various occasions down at Marilago, Trump was sitting around at his dinner table and saying to the guests, what would you think if we bought Greenland? And the guests would say, oh well, that's a good idea.

“And that's how this sort of came out at the time. And you know, the truth is that just before”

the Wall Street Journal published this information and took the Danes by complete surprise. A couple of weeks prior to that, the US Embassy in Copenhagen had called the Danish Foreign Ministry and said that Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, would like to visit Denmark, and they would appreciate a formal invitation from the Queen. So the framing was going to be, you guys have to issue a formal invitation from the royal family to the United States, which we

will then accept. And the Danes, of course, proceeded to do so unaware that the reason for this was actually that White House staffers had heard that Melania wanted to see Copenhagen and thought that it was going to be a nice stop for her and Trump on the way home for best state visit elsewhere in Europe. So that was why that sort of all happened and the Danes kicked into gear to organize this state visit, very expensive, lots of security, lots of pump and circumstances involving the

“royal family. Then this leak takes place in the journal and throws it all into kind of a political”

scandal prior to the visit taking place. And at that moment, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Metaphritricson, when asked about Trump's aspirations to buy the island, you know, said this is absurd. Greenland has had a self-government since 2009. It's not really Denmark's to sell in

the first place. So even if it was the 19th century and countries were still buying and selling

territories, it wasn't really theirs legally to do so even if they wanted to, which they didn't. So Trump fixated on her comment that it was absurd and said that that was really nasty of her. And what actually sort of followed was as it was reported at the time, he then because she had said this was so offended he canceled the state visit to Denmark. But in reality, the reason that they canceled according to Bolton is that while he was in a private meeting with Trump, Melania

called and Trump answered the phone on speaker and Bolton overheard the exchange. And she said,

“"I don't know why people keep saying I want to go to Denmark. If you want to go, I'll go with you,”

but the idea had not come from her." And so Trump hung up the phone, canceled the trip and then blamed it on metaphysics. Wow. So give us an idea of who some of these characters were. You want to pick a couple and tell us about them? Yeah. So right after this sort of episode involving

the Wall Street Journal and the visit to Denmark that never took place, it seemed to the deans

and to the public in both United States and in Denmark that this entire idea had essentially evaporated. But what actually happened was the discussion just moved to secure rooms in the Eisenhower Executive Office building where the National Security Council meets. And there it took up a lot of energy among Trump's National Security staff. You had a new what they call policy coordination committee that was set up, which is in this case it was a secret National Security Council task

force that was focused on the acquisition of Greenland. And among the leaders of this effort were a formal special operations soldier named Drew Horn during Trump's first term he worked for both the Departments of Energy and Defense. He worked for the Office of the Vice President and he also worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and he was the co-leader of the Greenland PCC as they called it. And then you also had ideologues such as a man named Tom

Dan's who is sort of a part of the MAC account as he would describe himself who joined Trump's term after his brother who went on to become the Director of Project 2025. His brother was a lawyer in the White House who essentially participated in led a purge of career officials and replaced them with Loyalists. And so Tom Dan's joined the administration in early 2020 in the Treasury Department and soon thereafter was serving as the Treasury's representative on the Greenland PCC.

And the focus of the Greenland PCC was it was to separate the Kingdom of Denmark. There sort of no easier or clearer way of putting it. Their activities were centered on a real concern about potential pathways for Greenlandic independence and potential vulnerabilities of Greenlandic independence. There was a real legitimate national security issue to consider about if Greenland is on an inevitable path towards independence then would the Greenland government

in say 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years still want to honor the agreements and the treaties that the

officials put to me. But the way that they went about addressing this question was not to coordinate

“you know this in open dialogue with the Greenlanders of the Danes and articulate the concerns.”

But rather to essentially work to try to accelerate Greenlandic independence in ways that would bring about a greater reliance on the U.S. and essentially cut Denmark out of the picture. Right. We should just for context note that in 2009 Greenland had acquired self-rule. So even though it was a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it now elected its own parliament. Right. They're political parties. That's right. They have their own self-government which has

jurisdiction over most domestic matters. Denmark still maintains jurisdiction over matters that involve national security, defense, the constitutional law and certain things that sort of are integrated across the Kingdom. But Greenland has the right as part of the 2009 home-ruled agreement to essentially activate through referendum its own decision to move forward with full independence. And so they could do that whenever they choose to. Yeah. And I'm wondering from your sense of

reporting in Greenland, you took several reporting trips there. Do Greenlanders feel that Denmark is a colonial power that is exploiting the territory or do they feel some loyalty towards the Kingdom? It's a very difficult sort of domestic politics question for Greenland. I think there are obvious instances of historical injustice which are very fresh in Greenland and which affect people to this day which the Danes are doing, you know, deep reflection on and trying to pursue just pathways

“forward with the Greenlanders to rectify these past injustices. And the truth is that, you know,”

prior to Trump's second term, most Greenlanded political parties were in some form or another

pro-independence. What sort of pathway or timeline were among the chief variations between the parties themselves? But really Trump's aggression towards Greenland and efforts to overtly break it apart have been essentially the greatest thing that's ever happened to Danish Greenlanded relations in the past 100 years. I think Trump's subversive activities and over to aggression towards the incredibly small and vulnerable population of Greenland has driven them to seek protection and

unity with Denmark, with the European Union and with the rest of the NATO alliance as their greatest chance of defending themselves against the United States? One of the interesting things

about this to me is, you know, when we think about Trump coming back in for a second presidential term,

I mean, there are a lot of issues he's dealing with. I mean, the economy and tariffs and all this. But somehow, this guy Tom Danes, who's fascinated with the Greenland thing, managed to have a real effect on the transition process and elevate this idea in the Trump agenda? Yes, that's absolutely true. And essentially, he put it to me, he spent the weeks following the election pushing his Greenland agenda in conversations with people who were on the transition team until it eventually became one of

Trump's central fixations. And he said, essentially, if you coach an idea and you work it and sell it and help people understand why it makes sense and ultimately it becomes their idea not yours, then there's no end to what you can accomplish in DC if you're willing to give other people the credit. So that's sort of how this seems to have taken off. Danes, for his part, has a family connection to Greenland in that his grandfather served in as an merchant mariner in the Second World War

for the United States and was deployed to Greenland and helped build the Petrufix base base there,

which is the only remaining military base for the United States open still. So he had never been

to Greenland himself until I believe last year, but it was something that he thought about a lot

“and he had a connection to and that's why he was sort of obsessed with it during the first term”

and wanted to be the representative for the Treasury on the Greenland PCC. That's a Greenland policy coordinating committee that kind of operates within the national security council, right? Correct. Which the government of Denmark did not learn about for a long time? Yeah, in fact, I went to Copenhagen in the course of my reporting to one side learned details from the Greenland policy coordination committee because their work was retroactively classified.

And so once I sort of knew how it worked and who was on it and what it was aiming to do, I went to Copenhagen to essentially ask the Danes how they navigated that entire period, while, you know, overtly dealing with a diplomatic situation with the United States and everyone's in ally and everything's good, but knowing that Americans were covertly running operations against them and to my surprise, the Danish government was unaware of this and was learning it for me

because the United States had taken such measures to essentially, I mean, it's really sad and

like that is what was happening. They were working to subvert the kingdom of Denmark while pretending to be a strong ally. We need to take another break here, let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub, he is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside the Lutacrisse Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland." He'll be back to talk more after this short break.

I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.

You know, every day on up first NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast,

“we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story, our questions. What really happened?”

What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow our first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. So, early in the second Trump term, all these conservative influencers get into the act of trying to convince Greenland that it is in their interest to welcome the embrace of the United

States, you know, that they're being mistreated by Denmark. What does this feel like? I mean, what is Trump saying about all of this? In terms of what they promised to Greenlanders, it's pretty much uniformly one thing, and it's just money. There's not really any other case that they're making that sticks, you know, when Charlie Kirk was making the case himself after Greenland elections last year, he was saying that joining the United

“States would be nothing but upside for the great people of Greenland. He said, but like Trump,”

he just focused on money. And these four lines are just verbatim what the case was and it's saying the same thing over and over again. He said, you will be wealthier. You will be richer. You will have the US dollar. You will have more purchasing power. And it's framed as if, you know, these are four different things because he's coming up with four different reasons, but it's all the same thing. It's that the US has more money and we're going to give it to you. That's the pitch. There's

nothing about dignity or self-determination that really holds or healthcare that makes any more sense.

As for Trump's case to the United States, it's, you know, first of all, he's always saying

that we need to defend it against all the Russian and Chinese ships that are circling Greenland, trying to take it militarily. That's completely fiction. It is absolutely the case that throughout the entire Cold War and to this day, Russian ballistic nuclear submarines go between Greenland and Iceland and the United Kingdom to get into the North Atlantic. That is an extremely well defended focus of NATO. Has been for 80 years. There's all kinds of multi-domain military

operations focused on tracking Russian submarines as they go past the East Coast of Greenland to get into the North Atlantic. But the Chinese ships are in the Russian part of the Arctic. They're nowhere near Greenland and the Russian ships are focused on getting into the Atlantic Ocean, not in taking Greenland. The East Coast of Greenland by which they pass anyway is basically depopulated. There's only 2,300 people on the East Coast of Greenland. Well, 96% of the Greenland

ic population lives on the West Coast because the way that the currents flow, you have on the West Coast of Greenland facing Canada in the United States. You have ports that have open water even in the winter. And on the East Coast of Greenland, you have water and wind blowing down from the Arctic and that for the 100 kilometers out from the coastline, it's just solid ice. So you can't even approach the Greenlandic mainland. Let alone land on it or let alone have any military utility

and sort of taking the Eastern Greenland because there's no one there. One of the other things that Trump and others have said is that there are rare earth minerals in Greenland that could be mined and would be a strategic advantage to the United States and a financial advantage for Greenland. Yes. And in some sense that is true in that there are very likely rare earth deposits in Greenland that have valuable minerals in them. But the challenge economically is that it's not profitable

to mine them. The problem is in the cost of logistics and infrastructure, poor weather and bureaucracy,

it's an incredibly remote Arctic environment and the costs exceed the value of whatever can be

“pulled from the ground. And the truth is that you don't need to annex the island to do business with them.”

The Greenlanders have been saying since 2019 when Trump's ambitions first leaked in the journal, you know, we are not open for annexation but we are open for business and they've been open for investment for a very long time and no one wants to invest in it frankly. It's just not a profitable investment. That's the challenge. So the mining thing doesn't really add up. The only explanation that has ever come out of Trump's mouth that actually makes sense for his ambitions

was when about six months ago he told that New York Times that he considers it psychologically important to own the territory rather than to merely have military access to it. And he added that,

morality. He said, "My own mind, it's the only thing that can stop me." As part of the United States effort to support in Greenland, there was a plan to have Ushia Vance, the wife of Vice President

“Vance. Visit. Look, the capital of Greenland. But that didn't happen. Why not? What happened?”

Yeah, so this was one of those amazing moments. The White House announced that Ushia Vance,

the Vice President's wife would attend the dog's lead race with one of her sons and visit New Kaisatorist. And a Trump's phrasing of this was, she's a very nice woman and loves the concept of Greenland, so she is going there. So then a couple of military transports planes from the United States delivered in the Vance Security team, because, you know, this is the second family of the United States. And the deans, too, treated this as an important VIP visit that needed security, so they deployed

police to maintain public order and make sure that they would be safe in New York. And for the next several days, American representatives were as a Danish TV correspondent, put it, they were seen walking around practically knocking on one door after another and asking people if they'd be interested

“in a visit from the Vice President's wife. And everywhere the response was, no thanks. So at that”

point, the White House canceled Ushia's touristic visits completely. And instead reframe this

as the Vice President is going to make sure that we've got a good check on the security situation in Greenland giving all the essentially fictional Russian and Chinese threats happening up there. And so he traveled up to Petufex base base on an official visit where he then berated Denmark, lied about Russian, China attempting a lot of very aggressive incursions in Greenland. And essentially blurred it out the truth at one point. He said, the President said we have to

have Greenland and that we can't just ignore the President's desires. So that was sort of the end of that for a while. And from that point forward, it seems like things were quieting down in terms of influence operations for a while. But it soon became clear in Denmark and Greenland that was

“actually happening was it was just kind of a strategic pause while they regrouped and figured out”

what to do instead. We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside the Ludicrous Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland". We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is fresh air. On Consider This, NPR's afternoon news podcast, we cover everything from politics to the economy to the world, but every story starts with a question.

And NPR, we stand for your right to be curious to make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider This, wherever you get your podcasts. So there were these efforts to get people in Greenland to welcome acquisition by the United States to build support for that. Didn't seem to go very well. And then in January of this year, after the US military action to take out Bena Swailand President Nicholas Maduro, Trump's

rhetoric about taking over Greenland really kind of wrapped up, didn't it? Yes, in the aftermath of the Venezuela raid, it really seemed to the deans and the Greenlanders that sort of piggybacking off of the success of that raid, he might do something else. And there were a number of indications that Greenland would be the next target. Among them was that a former White House official Katie Miller, who's also married to Stephen Miller, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor,

posted online a map of Greenland overlaid with the American flag with a one-word caption. It just said, soon. And then Trump said, we do need Greenland, absolutely. And his

accolades were basically making clear that this was a priority. Stephen Miller himself went

on CNN and said, nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland. So at that point, the deans were really spooked and they and seven other European nations deployed troops to Greenland. They actually carried live ammunition and explosives and they prepared to blow up Greenland's runways to slow any possible invasion. The deans also carried fresh blood packs in case of casualties and were

operating under standing orders that were reiterated to them that they should shoot at any invading forces. One thing to be really clear of though is that they don't have any concrete evidence of a planned U.S. attack. There was no direct intelligence that this was likely to happen. It was more contextual and in the aftermath of Venezuela it seemed like this as Trump's folks frame it this extension of the monro doctrine which was really now looking at

as a kind of like conquering strategy all over the western hemisphere or something that would put them in the in the target sites. And so as far as the Europeans were concerned and this is

to raise the cost as in explicitly if the United States is going to invade Greenland they're

“going to have to kill European troops to do so and probably the Americans would succeed.”

At taking over Greenland they have the military capacity to do so the Europeans didn't doubt that but they would actually fight and they would force them to shoot them and they would force them to kill them and this was the gamble that doing so would sort of raise the cost politically as well for Trump and the White House in terms of planning for something like this it would make it difficult to do the quick and dirty annexation as a Danish military intelligence officer

put it to me it would make it something that would be potentially very very complicated and unpalatable in terms of domestic politics where obviously going to war with Europe is the kind of thing that could escalate to impeachment very quickly in a way that going to war with Iran did not and so that was the message they intended to send. I mean this is a remarkable moment I mean a NATO ally army to defend itself from the United States because Trump had refused to rule out military action

to acquire Greenland. How did Trump respond to these military steps by all of these allied European countries? He absolutely understood the message of force and his response was to announce that

every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new tariffs at first 10 percent

and then he added that if by June 1st the United States did not reach a deal for what he called the complete and total purchase of Greenland by that date he said then they would rise to 25 percent later Mark Ruta the Secretary General of NATO spoke to Trump a few days later at Davos and he defuse the situation and Trump rolled back these tariff threats and said that for now military options were

“off the table and things have kind of quieted down since then but the truth is that the Greenlanders”

and the Danes I think are essentially lucky as they see it that the U.S. got tied up in Iran and are fearing that if things wind down with Iran and this new deal sort of sticks that he might refocus his attention to Greenland soon enough but since January there have been no military threats and things appear to have been quieted down. Now you do right that even though this isn't being talked about actively now there are ongoing influencing operations at the direction of Trump what exactly

are they? Yeah so in December of last year Trump announced on truth social that he had a new so-called special envoy to Greenland and that's Jeff Landry the governor of Louisiana this a appointment came as a surprise to Denmark Greenland and the State Department and the State Department what?

Yeah the State Department didn't know either and so Landry who of course had never been to Greenland

“until last month took it upon himself to sort of refocus on professionalised the influence”

operations that had gone so spectacularly poorly last year when they were done privately and so he invited Yogan Bosn, the solitary Greenlander who supports Trump to the governor's mansion in Louisiana and he asked Bosn what really mattered to Greenlanders that they could help with and Bosn said that the healthcare system in Greenland is a disaster and as he put it it's a death sentence to get sick in Greenland. Now Greenland has universal healthcare and for serious operations or health

problems Greenlanders are often flown to Denmark for treatment for free treatment but it is also the case of course that in very very remote parts of Greenland there are towns that have no doctors there are towns where access to care is very difficult and in order to get proper care they do have to travel to nook so it is true that there is a very vulnerable situation for people living in remote parts of the country but Bosn gave Landry the impression that it was a death sentence to

get sick in Greenland so at that point Landry talks to Trump and they decide to deploy and US naval hospital ship to Greenland to pick up the slack and Trump takes to truth social to announce that it's on its way and he posts an illustration of the US naval ship the mercy. Of course it wasn't on the way the mercy was in dry dock in Alabama so too was the other a US navy hospital ship both were undergoing repairs no ship was on the way and we should know that Danish officials

responded strongly to the notion that you know getting sick in Greenland was a death sentence right I mean there is a health care system. The Prime Minister of Greenland himself said look we have a public health care system where treatment is free for citizens and he added please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media so again we're talking about the governor of Louisiana sitting governor of Louisiana is Trump's special

uninvited to attend a business conference with the instruction of just trying to what makes

“him friends yeah he was upon landing he said that his instructions from Trump were to go over”

there and make a bunch of friends as many friends as he can so he also brought with him a doctor who claimed to have come to assess the medical needs of the Greenlanders but the Greenland a health ministry had no idea that he was coming and there had been no coordination so they were obviously very upset about that and the health ministry even put out a statement to the effect of essentially you know this isn't a population for you to come experiment on and view as subjects

for your research of course you know the business conference was a real opportunity for the Americans if they wanted to to show real investment interest in greenlanded businesses but instead Landry's visit essentially took all the oxygen out of the event a lot of journalists flew in

just to basically try to figure out what on earth Landry was doing there since he was not officially

“part of the conference he had merely sort of bought a ticket to show up in the audience he then”

sat in for about 30 minutes before walking out and then going around trying to talk to young Greenlandic children offering them chocolate chip cookies he said if you come to Louisiana and you come to the governor's mansion all the chocolate chip cookies you could eat so then in another sort of bizarre encounter that was captured on film a Greenlandic boy apparently asked if Landry was famous in Landry's wife said I don't know if he's famous but he's the governor of Louisiana

at which point Landry said to him would you want to take a picture and the boy just shook his head and said no so that's pretty much how the visit went this was against the backdrop of a very important event though whose significance can't be understated the day after Landry left Greenland the United States opened a very very large consulate in Nuke it's 30,000 square feet and up until recently you know the US had no diplomatic presence in Greenland since 1953

when they shut down their last consulate but they reopened it during the pandemic in 2020 and at the time it was operating up until very recently out of a small red cabin that had

“I think two or three employees total now they were renting this 30,000 square foot office space in”

the center of Nuke and the day after Landry left they opened it as the official new US consulate this is a huge facility in one of the biggest buildings in the capital of Greenland and therefore the entire country it's about 150 meters from the parliament and it's now regarded as something that people fear as a kind of annexation headquarters because the facility does not make sense except in the context of something that looks like a takeover we need to take another

break here let me reintroduce you we are speaking with Ben Taub he is a staff writer for the New Yorker his new article is titled inside the ludicrous deadly serious plan to take over Greenland we'll continue our conversation after this short break this is fresh air every story from shortwave and pair science podcasts starts with a question like why do we have nightmares how does they affect my energy bill at NPR we are here for

your right to be curious about the world around you follow shortwave wherever you get your podcast because the more you ask the more interesting the world gets you know you've made several reporting trips to Greenland you spend a lot of time there doing reporting the things other than this acquisition effort but what's your sense of from looking at the media there the public debate the online discourse of how the threat of an American invasion translates into what they might experience

what their own perceptions of this are yeah it has taken a tremendous toll in Greenland you know there's sort of shocking figures of the mental health toll that it's taken just in the past year a recent health survey by the Center for Public Health in Greenland noted a more than four fold increase in the past year alone in the percentage of Greenlanders who show symptoms of psychological distress 82% of respondents said that Trump's annexation rhetoric negatively affects

their everyday lives and one in four said that they have difficulty sleeping there's also Greenlanders who have left the country out of fear of an invasion and moved to Denmark for safety reasons I mean it just is the case that as Americans we are represented by a government that has a very

very powerful military and is a super power it's as Stephen Wald put it in an essay for foreign affairs

earlier this year we have become a predatory hegemon and the people on the receiving end of this are a small indigenous population in a country that has received very little attention

the spotlight in the most unpleasant most hostile possible way and at the end of the day it's the people who are representing us who are doing this to them in some ways it sort of seems like such an abstract and in kind of an idea I mean yeah abstract and as the title of your story says ludicrous idea I mean you might think that people might laugh it off but it sounds like people are

“not no they talk about yeah a lot of Greenlanders are just completely exhausted I mean I think that”

Trump's initial sort of interest in Greenland was in some ways regarded at first as a kind of

opportunity this was a way of potentially learning greater investment from the outside world not just America but from Europe frankly from Denmark by you know some greenlandic politicians saw the US interest as a kind of cuddle a piece of leverage to use against Denmark in their own domestic negotiations for greater control over their destiny and now it's kind of morphed into something where people are just completely exhausted and worn down they don't trust the United

States that trust cannot be rebuilt it's something you can only break once and it is broken at the same time there is this kind of resilience in the society to influence operations

partly because they have such a unique language and such a small population so everyone really does

know everyone else and so there is a kind of domestic resilience in that everyone can instantly identify what's going on around them but it's sad because there's also a great suspicion now and a great deal of alertness that you know they can't just regard American businessman coming to invest in their businesses as pure interest in their future or in a joint venture they have to be on their guard and be suspicious in ways that are actually unhealthy, unhelpful and might

might actually divert legitimate business interest in their country for mining or minerals or other activities altogether and I wonder if the United States willingness to engage in military

action like you know deposing Maduro in Venezuela and you know attacking these ships that are

regarded as drug runners but which are you know subject to attack without any warning if that kind of sends a message that there may be a reckless use of this enormous power. Yeah if there's one consolation that people can take from that it was articulated to me quite well I think by a man named Jacob Cosbow who was a Danish former senior military intelligence officer who worked alongside the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years and he was saying

the absurdity of that scenario a full scale invasion of Greenland is in some ways kind of reassuring because he thinks that the rank and file of the US military the generals the intelligence officials are still very closely integrated with European allies there's daily operations and work together and they are close allies even as the politics are what they are and his sort of solace that he takes in this scenario is that it's so absurd that it would definitely get leaked if there was a

“sort of plan for an amphibious assault and amphibious assault would take time you have to get ships”

in the vicinity of Nuke to pull that off and so by that point you know this is the kind of thing that would be all over the New York Times and the press in the United States and forcing congressional hearings if this was really something that was on the table and so what he's more concerned about is this kind of quick and dirty takeover the 2am version as he put it where a couple of planes with the flight plan that says "patific space space" suddenly just veered towards Nuke and then you

have a couple hundred special forces officers who just land and take over the capital the airport the parliament and so on but that's the kind of scenario that really can be deterred with the small European force that they deployed in January you blow up the runways you have troops who will fight back and suddenly it's a politically unviable thing and it's the kind of thing where you can be deterred and so as long as the Europeans essentially continue to show that they will

“fight for Greenland as they showed in January I think that you know there might be a lot of”

continued interest rhetoric aggression influence operations and every manner of sort of denigrating remarks towards Greenland and Denmark and Europe for the remainder of the term impossibly beyond but I think that the message was sent that Europe will fight for this and there will be casualties on both sides and the question is is that something that can trump or any president for that matter could survive domestically well Ben Taub thank you so much for

speaking with us thank you so much for having me on Dave Ben Taub is a staff writer for the New Yorker his new article is titled inside the ludicrous deadly serious plan to take over Greenland

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