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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes 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, I've never seen this happen.
Wait, this is true?
This is true. Mysteries of 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, as 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 Taub 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. Taub'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.
Taub also reveals some of the private actors who've helped to drive the process, players motivated by financial gain, notoriety, or ideology. Ben Taub has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2015. Among his many journalistic honors, he won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his work on the lasting effects on former detainees and guards of American abuses in Guantanamo Bay.
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Chapter 2: What prompted President Trump's interest in acquiring Greenland?
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, how did it go for these guys?
Well, so Charlie Kirk and Don Jr. arrived in Nuuk, Greenland, with very little warning. There was a sort of advanced team that had gone before them carrying MAGA 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. And 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 friends. Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk.
So they arrived in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and were greeted by a solitary Trump supporter, a Greenlander named Jorgen Boasen, who led them down to the harbor and over to Nuuk's most expensive hotel, where they hosted a number of locals for a very expensive lunch.
And it was only after they left that local journalists in Nuuk, working for the Greenlandic publications, found that in fact, among those supporters were a number of homeless people who had been recruited with the 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 community. 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.
Right. And one of the details that I love here is that you tracked down a high school student who had had an interaction here. You want to tell us about that?
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Chapter 3: How did Trump's Greenland acquisition idea evolve over time?
Was this guy easy to find for you?
Actually, yes. 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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What were the reactions of Greenlanders to Trump's visit?
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.
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? There are 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 Rule 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.
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Chapter 5: What influence operations are ongoing regarding Greenland?
This week on Up First from NPR News, President Trump is at the G7 in France and is supposed to sign a peace deal with Iran. That deal, if it happens as planned, will have big effects on the global economy and more. And we will track the changes as they unfold. On a week of major geopolitical news, listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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. 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 Greenlandic 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Trump. 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, while 96% of the Greenlandic population lives on the west coast. Because the way that the currents flow, you have on the west coast of Greenland, facing Canada and the United States, you have ports that have open water even in the winter.
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Chapter 6: How did Trump's actions affect U.S.-Greenland relations?
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 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 the 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, you know, essentially with respect to limits to his global powers, the only thing is his own morality. He said, my own mind, it's the only thing that can stop me.
As part of the United States effort to woo support in Greenland, there was a plan to have Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President Vance, visit Nook, 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 Usha Vance, the vice president's wife, would attend the dog sled race with one of her sons and visit Nuke as a tourist. And Trump's phrasing of this was, she's a very nice woman and loves the concept of green and so she is going there.
So then a couple of military transport planes from the United States delivered an advanced security team because, you know, this is the second family of the United States. And the Danes, 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 nuke.
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 Usha's touristic visits completely and instead reframed 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.
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