DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
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.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 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.
DAVIES: 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 operations 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 have 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. His new article in The New Yorker is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." Ben Taub, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
BEN TAUB: Thank you very much, Dave.
DAVIES: 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?
TAUB: 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 who - at the time didn't know that this was happening. They were simply hanging out with 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 Boassen, 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 America 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.
DAVIES: 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? Was this guy...
TAUB: Sure.
DAVIES: ...Easy to find for you (laughter)?
TAUB: Actually, yes. So Nuuk is a small town. I mean, it is the capital of the country, but it is a capital with 20,000 people. And it's very easy to - once you build some local context 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 Nukaaka Tobiassen, I found a young high schooler named Malik Dollerup-Scheibel, 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 the 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 U.S., Charlie Kirk went to his broadcast studio and gave a pretty, let's say, dubious account of the - his few hours in Greenland, claiming falsely that there were polar bears walking around in Nuuk and that there were 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 of 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.
DAVIES: All right. Let's go back to the beginning of this strange episode. You know, 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?
TAUB: 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 adviser 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. And so he told Trump that he would do some research and get back to him with options.
But actually, what followed was a kind of - as Fiona Hill, who was serving as the senior director for Europe on the National Security Council, put it to me, it was all done in a slightly clandestine cloak-and-dagger way, where Bolton summoned her into his office, ashen-faced, and essentially said, look, Ron Lauder has told Trump that he needs to buy Greenland, and we've got to head this off before he announces this to everybody.
DAVIES: People will remember Fiona Hill from the impeachment hearings in 2019, right? She was quite an impressive figure on the National Security Council. So she does some research. What happens?
TAUB: So it is absolutely true and important that the Arctic is becoming a really serious site of national security interests, not just for the United States but for Russia, for China, for Norway, for all of the Arctic nations or, as China likes to call themselves somewhat questionably, a near-Arctic nation. And, you know, basically, this is a region that has not really been useful or traversable for any military or commercial purpose, except for Cold War-era submarines going under the ice cap. But as it melts, this opens up new waterways that are very strategically important to a lot of countries. And during the Cold War, it was primarily viewed through the lens of the direct pathway for nuclear ballistic missiles to travel from Russia or from Soviet submarines in the far North.
DAVIES: The United States does have this one base there. Under a treaty, it has the opportunity to establish military facilities in Greenland. Most of them have been abandoned, except for this one base to track incoming missiles, right?
TAUB: Correct. So the U.S. essentially took over Greenland militarily during the second world war. It was at the request of the Danish consul in Washington, D.C., at the time, who was essentially acting alone in what he regarded were the interests of his country while the actual government in Copenhagen was under Nazi occupation. And so he encouraged and essentially allowed the U.S. to build military facilities in Greenland to defend those critical waterways and the northwest sort of coastal areas from Nazi incursion. This was an incredibly important and valuable thing.
And then during the Cold War, the agreement between the United States and Denmark that - which is in place since 1951, was that the U.S. could stay, could continue to maintain its military and presence and could expand it pretty much however it saw fit in coordination with the Danish and Greenlandic governments. That's been true since the '50s. It remains true today. 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.
DAVIES: Right. You know, so eventually, this does become public because The Wall Street Journal does a story that says Trump is talking about buying Greenland, which gets a lot of attention. And John Bolton, the national security adviser, wonders where this came from 'cause he's quite sure his staff were under strict orders not to talk about it. Finally figures it out. Where did it come from?
TAUB: 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, you know, the truth is that just before The Wall Street Journal published this information and took the Danes by complete surprise, a couple of weeks prior to that, the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen had called the Danish Foreign Ministry and said that Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, would like to visit Denmark. 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 Frederiksen, 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 canceled the state visit to Denmark. But in reality, the reason that they canceled, 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. 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, canceled the trip and then blamed it on Mette Frederiksen.
DAVIES: Wow. We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we are speaking with Ben Taub. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he has a new article that takes an inside look at Donald Trump's efforts to acquire Greenland. It's called "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." Taub's reporting reveals some of the private actors who sought to advance the acquisition effort with motives of their own.
So give us an idea of who some of these characters were. You want to pick a couple and tell us about them?
TAUB: 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 a 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 Dans, 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 Dans joined the administration in early 2020 in the Treasury Departmentì and, soon thereafter, was serving as the Treasury's representative on the Greenland PCC.
And the focus of the Greenland PCC was - it 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 it to me? 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 U.S. and essentially cut Denmark out of the picture.
DAVIES: Right. We should, just for context, note that in 2009...
TAUB: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...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.
TAUB: 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.
DAVIES: Yeah. And I'm wondering, from your sense reporting in Greenland - you took several reporting trips there - do Greenlanders feel that Denmark is a colonial power that is exploiting the territory, or do they feel some loyalty towards the kingdom?
TAUB: It's a very difficult sort of domestic politics question for Greenland. I think there are obvious instances of historical injustice, which are very fresh in Greenland and which affect people to this day, which the Danes are doing, you know, deep reflection on and trying to pursue just pathways forward with the Greenlanders to rectify these past injustices. And the truth is that, you know, prior to Trump's second term, most Greenlandic political parties were, in some form or another, pro-independence. What sort of pathway or timeline were among the chief variations between the parties themselves.
But really, Trump's aggression towards Greenland and efforts to overtly break it apart have been essentially the greatest thing that's ever happened to Danish-Greenlandic relations in the past hundred years. I think Trump's subversive activities and overt aggression towards the incredibly small and vulnerable population of Greenland has driven them to seek protection and unity with Denmark, with the European Union and with the rest of the NATO Alliance as their greatest chance of defending themselves against the United States.
DAVIES: One of the interesting things about this to me is, you know, when we think about Trump coming back in for a second presidential term, I mean, there are a lot of issues he's dealing with - I mean, the economy and tariffs and all this. But somehow, this guy, Tom Dans, who's fascinated with the Greenland thing, managed to have a real effect on the transition process and elevate this idea in the Trump agenda.
TAUB: Yes, that's absolutely true. And essentially, as he put it to me, he spent the weeks following the election pushing his Greenland agenda in conversations with people who were on the transition team until it eventually became one of Trump's central fixations. He said, essentially, you - if you coach an idea and you work it and sell it and help people understand why it makes sense, and ultimately it becomes their idea, not yours, then there's no end to what you can accomplish in D.C. if you're willing to give other people the credit. So that's sort of how this seems to have taken off.
Dans, for his part, has a family connection to Greenland in that his grandfather served in - as a merchant mariner in the second world war for the United States and was deployed to Greenland and helped build the Pituffik Space Base there, which is the only remaining military base for the United States open still. So he had never been to Greenland himself until, I believe, last year. But it was something that he thought about a lot and he had a connection to, and that's why he was sort of obsessed with it during the first term and wanted to be the representative for the Treasury on the Greenland PCC.
DAVIES: That's the Greenland Policy Coordinating Committee that's kind of - operates within the National Security Council, right?
TAUB: Correct, yeah.
DAVIES: Which the government of Denmark did not learn about for a long time.
TAUB: Yeah. In fact, I went to Copenhagen in the course of my reporting to - once I'd learned details from the Greenland Policy Coordination Committee because their work was retroactively classified. And so once I sort of knew how it worked and who was on it and what it was aiming to do, I went to Copenhagen to essentially ask the Danes how they navigated that entire period while, you know, overtly dealing with the diplomatic situation with the United States and everyone's an ally and everything's good, but knowing that Americans were covertly running operations against them. And to my surprise, the Danish government was unaware of this and was learning it from me because the United States had taken such measures to essentially - I mean, it's really sad and difficult for me to be using these words, but because they were being duplicitous towards an ally. Like, that is what was happening. They were working to subvert the Kingdom of Denmark while pretending to be a strong ally.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Ben Taub. He has a new article which takes an inside look at President Donald Trump's campaign to acquire Greenland from Denmark. It began during Trump's first term as a proposal to buy the territory, which went nowhere. That effort would blossom in his second term into threats of military action and high tariffs. Taub's reporting reveals some of the private actors who sought to advance the acquisition effort with motives of their own. Taub's article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland."
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, you know, that they're being mistreated by Denmark. What does this feel like? I mean, what is Trump saying about all of this?
TAUB: 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 - 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 multidomain 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. And on the east coast of Greenland, you have water and wind blowing down from the Arctic. And for the 100 kilometers out from the coastline, it's just solid ice. So you can't even approach the Greenlandic mainland, let alone land on it or let alone have any military utility in sort of taking eastern Greenland, because there's no one there.
DAVIES: One of the other things that Trump and others have said is that there are rare earth minerals in Greenland that could be mined and would be a strategic advantage to the United States and a financial advantage for Greenland.
TAUB: Yes. And in some sense, that is true in that there are very likely rare-earth deposits in Greenland that have valuable minerals in them. 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 Journal, 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.
DAVIES: 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 Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, but that didn't happen. Why not? What happened?
TAUB: 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 Nuuk as a tourist. And Trump's phrasing of this was, she's a very nice woman and loves the concept of Greenland, 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 Nuuk. 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, given all the essentially fictional Russian and Chinese threats happening up there. And so he traveled up to Pituffik Space Base on an official visit, where he then berated Denmark, lied about Russia and China attempting a lot of very aggressive incursions into Greenland and essentially blurted out the truth at one point. He said, the president said we have to have Greenland, and added, we can't just ignore the president's desires. So that was sort of the end of that for a while. And from that point forward, it seemed like things were quieting down in terms of influence operations for a while. But it soon became clear in Denmark and Greenland that what was actually happening, was it was just kind of a strategic pause while they regrouped and figured out what to do instead.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has a new article titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland."
So there were these efforts to get people in Greenland to welcome acquisition by the United States, to build support for that. Didn't seem to go very well. And then in January of this year, after the U.S. military action to take out Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump's rhetoric about taking over Greenland really kind of ramped up, didn't it?
TAUB: Yes. In the aftermath of the Venezuela raid, it really seemed to the Danes and the Greenlanders that, sort of piggybacking off of the success of that raid, he might do something else. And there were a number of indications that Greenland would be the next target. Among them was that a former White House official, Katie Miller, who's also married to Stephen Miller, Trump's Homeland Security adviser, posted online a map of Greenland overlaid with the American flag with a one-word caption. It just said, soon.
And then Trump said, we do need Greenland. Absolutely. And his acolytes were basically making clear that this was a priority. Stephen Miller himself went on CNN and said, nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?
So at that point, the Danes were really spooked, and they and seven other European nations deployed troops to Greenland. They actually carried live ammunition and explosives, and they prepared to blow up Greenland's runways to slow any possible invasion. The Danes also carried fresh blood packs in case of casualties and were operating under standing orders that were reiterated to them that they should shoot at any invading forces.
One thing to be really clear of, though, is that they don't have any concrete evidence of a planned U.S. attack. There was no direct intelligence that this was likely to happen. It was more contextual. And in the aftermath of Venezuela, it seemed like this - as Trump's folks frame it, this extension of the Monroe Doctrine, which was really now looking at - as a kind of, like, conquering strategy all over the Western Hemisphere - that was something that would put them in the target sights.
And so as far as the Europeans were concerned - and this is as one senior European source who was involved with the planning put it to me - the idea was to raise the cost. As in explicitly, if the United States is going to invade Greenland, they're going to have to kill European troops to do so. And probably the Americans would succeed at taking over Greenland. They have the military capacity to do so. The Europeans didn't doubt that. But they would actually fight. And they would force them to shoot them, and they would force them to kill them.
And this was the gamble - that doing so would sort of raise the cost politically as well for Trump and the White House in terms of planning for something like this. It would make it difficult to do the quick-and-dirty annexation, as a Danish military intelligence officer put it to me. It would make it something that would be potentially very, very complicated and unpalatable in terms of domestic politics, where obviously going to war with Europe is the kind of thing that could escalate to impeachment very quickly in a way that going to war with Iran did not. And so that was the message they intended to send.
DAVIES: I mean, this is a remarkable moment - I mean, a NATO ally arming to defend itself from the United States because Trump had refused to rule out military action to acquire Greenland. How did Trump respond to these military steps by all of these allied European countries?
TAUB: He absolutely understood the message of force, and his response was to announce that every European nation that had deployed troops to Greenland would face new tariffs - at first 10%. And then he added that if by June 1 the United States did not reach a deal for what he called the complete and total purchase of Greenland by that date, he said then they would rise to 25%.
Later, Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, spoke to Trump a few days later at Davos. And he diffused the situation, and Trump rolled back these tariff threats and said that for now, military options were off the table. And things have kind of quieted down since then. But the truth is that the Greenlanders and the Danes, I think, are essentially lucky, as they see it, that the U.S. got tied up in Iran and are fearing that if things wind down with Iran and this new deal sort of sticks, that he might refocus his attention to Greenland soon enough. But since January, there have been no military threats and things appear to have been quieted down.
DAVIES: Now, you do write that even though, you know, this isn't being talked about actively now, there are ongoing influencing operations at the direction of Trump. What exactly are they?
TAUB: Yeah. So in December of last year, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had a new so-called special envoy to Greenland, and that's Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana. This appointment came as a surprise to Denmark, Greenland and the State Department.
DAVIES: And the State Department?
TAUB: Yeah. The State Department didn't know either. And so Landry, who, of course, had never been to Greenland until last month, took it upon himself to sort of refocus and professionalize the influence operations that had gone so spectacularly poorly last year when they were done privately. And so he invited Jorgen Boassen, this solitary Greenlander who supports Trump, to the governor's mansion in Louisiana. And he asked Boassen what really mattered to Greenlanders that they could help with. And Boassen said that the healthcare system in Greenland is a disaster and, as he put it, it's a death sentence to get sick in Greenland.
Now, Greenland has universal healthcare. And for serious operations or health problems, Greenlanders are often flown to Denmark for treatment - for free treatment. But it is also the case, of course, that in very, very remote parts of Greenland there are towns that have no doctors. There are towns where access to care is very difficult. And in order to get proper care, they do have to travel to Nuuk. So it is true that there is a very vulnerable situation for people living in remote parts of the country, but Boassen gave Landry the impression that it was a death sentence to get sick in Greenland.
So at that point, Landry talks to Trump, and they decide to deploy a U.S. naval hospital ship to Greenland to pick up the slack. And Trump takes to Truth Social to announce that it's on its way, and he posts an illustration of the U.S. naval ship the Mercy. Of course, it wasn't on the way. The Mercy was in dry dock in Alabama. So, too, was the other U.S. Navy hospital ship. Both were undergoing repairs. No ship was on the way.
DAVIES: And we should note that Danish officials responded strongly to the notion that, you know, getting sick in Greenland was a death sentence, right? I mean, they said there is a healthcare system.
TAUB: Yeah. In fact, the prime minister of Greenland himself said, look, we have a public healthcare system where treatment is free for citizens. And he added, please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media.
DAVIES: So again, we're talking about the governor of Louisiana. The sitting governor of Louisiana is Trump's special envoy to Greenland - Jeff Landry. One of the other things you write about is that he traveled to Greenland uninvited to attend a business conference with the instruction of just trying to - what? - make some friends.
TAUB: Yeah. He - so upon landing, he said that his instructions from Trump were to go over there and make a bunch of friends, as many friends as he can. So he also brought with him a doctor who claimed to have come to assess the medical needs of the Greenlanders. But the Greenlandic health ministry had no idea that he was coming, and there had been no coordination. So they were obviously very upset about that. And the health minister even put out a statement to the effect of, essentially, you know, this isn't a population for you to come experiment on and view as subjects for your research.
Of course, you know, the business conference was a real opportunity for the Americans, if they wanted to, to show real investment interest in Greenlandic businesses. But instead, Landry's visit essentially took all the oxygen out of the event. 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, do 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 U.S. 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.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Ben Taub. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has a new article titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland."
You know, you've made several reporting trips to Greenland. You spent a lot of time there doing reporting on things other than this acquisition effort. But what's your sense of - from looking at the media there, the public debate, the online discourse - of how the threat of an American invasion translates into what they might experience, what their own perceptions of this are?
TAUB: Yeah. It has taken a tremendous toll in Greenland. You know, there's sort of shocking figures of the mental health toll that it's taken just in the past year. A recent health survey by the Center for Public Health in Greenland noted a more than fourfold increase in the past year alone in the percentage of Greenlanders who show symptoms of psychological distress. Eighty-two percent of respondents said that Trump's annexation rhetoric negatively affects their everyday lives, and 1 in 4 said that they have difficulty sleeping. There's also Greenlanders who have left the country out of fear of an invasion and moved to Denmark for safety reasons.
I mean, it just is the case that as Americans, we are represented by a government that has a very, very powerful military and is a superpower. It's - as Stephen Walt put it in an essay for Foreign Affairs earlier this year, we have become a predatory hegemon. And the people on the receiving end of this are a small, indigenous population in a country that has received very little attention in recent decades and, in fact, throughout all of history. And now, suddenly, they're thrust into the spotlight in the most unpleasant, most hostile possible way. And at the end of the day, it's the people who are representing us who are doing this to them.
DAVIES: In some ways, it sort of seems like such an abstract and - kind of idea, I mean...
TAUB: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...An abstract and, as the title of your story says, ludicrous idea.
TAUB: Yeah.
DAVIES: I mean, you might think that people might laugh it off, but it sounds like people are not.
TAUB: No.
DAVIES: How do they talk about this?
TAUB: Yeah. A lot of Greenlanders are just completely exhausted. I mean, I think that Trump's initial sort of interest in Greenland was, in some ways, regarded at first as a kind of opportunity. This was a way of potentially luring greater investment from the outside world, not just America, but from Europe, frankly, from Denmark by - you know, some Greenlandic politicians saw the U.S. interest as a kind of cudgel, a piece of leverage to use against Denmark in their own domestic negotiations for greater control over their destiny. And now it's kind of morphed into something where people are just completely exhausted and worn down. They don't trust the United States. That trust cannot be rebuilt. It's something you can only break once, and it is broken.
At the same time, there is this kind of resilience in the society to influence operations, partly because they have such a unique language and such a small population. So everyone really does know everyone else. And so there is a kind of domestic resilience in that everyone can instantly identify what's going on around them. But it's sad because there's also a great suspicion now and a great deal of alertness that, you know, they can't just regard American businessmen coming to invest in their businesses as pure interest in their future or in a joint venture. They have to be on their guard and be suspicious in ways that are actually unhealthy, unhelpful and might actually divert legitimate business interest in their country for mining or minerals or other activities altogether.
DAVIES: And I wonder if the United States' willingness to engage in military action, like, you know, deposing Maduro in Venezuela and, you know, attacking these ships that are regarded as drug runners but which are, you know, subject to attack without any warning - if that kind of sends a message that there may be a reckless use of this enormous power.
TAUB: Yeah. If there's one consolation that people can take from that, it was articulated to me quite well, I think, by a man named Jacob Kaarsbo, who was a Danish former senior military intelligence officer who worked alongside the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years. And he was saying the absurdity of that scenario - a full-scale invasion of Greenland - is in some ways kind of reassuring because he thinks that the rank-and-file of the U.S. military, the generals, the intelligence officials, are still very closely integrated with European allies. There's daily operations and work together, and they are close allies, even as the politics are what they are.
And his sort of solace that he takes in this scenario is that it's so absurd that it would definitely get leaked if there was a sort of plan for an amphibious assault. An amphibious assault would take time. You have to get ships in the vicinity of Nuuk to pull that off. And so, by that point, you know, this is the kind of thing that would be all over The New York Times and the press in the United States and forcing congressional hearings if this was really something that was on the table.
And so what he's more concerned about is this kind of quick-and-dirty takeover - the 2 a.m. version, as he put it - where a couple of planes with a flight plan that says Pituffik Space Base suddenly just veer towards Nuuk. And then you have a couple hundred Special Forces officers who just land and take over the capital, the airport, the Parliament and so on. But that's the kind of scenario that really can be deterred with the small European force that they deployed in January. You blow up the runways, you have troops who will fight back. And suddenly, it's a politically unviable thing, and it's the kind of thing where you can be deterred.
And so as long as the Europeans essentially continue to show that they will fight for Greenland, as they showed in January, I think that, you know, there might be a lot of continued interest, rhetoric, aggression, influence operations and every manner of sort of denigrating remarks towards Greenland and Denmark and Europe for the remainder of the term and possibly beyond. But I think that the message was sent that Europe will fight for this, and there will be casualties on both sides. And the question is, is that something that Trump - or any president, for that matter - could survive domestically?
DAVIES: Well, Ben Taub, thank you so much for speaking with us.
TAUB: Thank you so much for having me on, Dave.
DAVIES: Ben Taub is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is titled "Inside The Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan To Take Over Greenland."
On tomorrow's show, we hear from comedian Ali Siddiq. He served six years in a Texas prison and turned his life into some of the most-watched storytelling in comedy. He has a new special out in time for Father's Day called "My Father" about a man who wasn't always there but who Siddiq wanted to be like anyway. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
TAUB: (SOUNDBITE OF PAT MARTINO'S "EL HOMBRE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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