Ben Taub

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.

And 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 Nuuk.

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 Nuuk.

And the day after Landry left, they opened it as the official new U.S.

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.