Ben Taub

So Nuuk is 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 Nukaka Tobiasen, I found a young high schooler named Malik Dolarip Shaibal, who had run into Don Jr.

and Charlie Kirk at a pool bar called Daddy's in the center of Nuuk.

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 Daddy's holding court, and he was handed a MAGA hat and took a photograph with Don Jr., Charlie Kirk, and 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 were 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 were polar bears walking around in nuke,

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 mine, and the Danes won't let them mine 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 Nuuk when you actually go talk to people.

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.

And 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 a region that we've largely neglected in recent years.

And there's probably a lot of ways to sort of handle this.