Ben Taub

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, cancelled the trip and then blamed it on Matt Fredrickson.

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 Danes and to the public in both the 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 former 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 Danz, who is sort of a part of the MAGA crowd, 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 and led a purge of career officials and replaced them with loyalists.

And so Tom Danz 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 to subvert the Kingdom of Denmark.

There's 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 Greenlandic government in, say, 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years still want to honor the agreements and the treaties that the United States has with Denmark, its former colonial master, as one of the senior national security officials put to me yesterday.

But the way that they went about addressing this question was not to coordinate, you know, this in open dialogue with the Greenlanders or the Danes and articulate their concerns, but rather to essentially work to try to accelerate Greenlandic independence in ways that would bring about a greater reliance on the US and essentially cut Denmark out of the picture.