Ben Taub

If the U.S.

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.

So yeah, Bolton 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 Mar-a-Lago, 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 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 from a 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 pomp 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, Mette Fredriksson, 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 cancelled the state visit to Denmark.

But in reality, the reason that they cancelled, 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.