Why I warned about Greenland
Eight years ago, Trump told us in private he wanted to take over the European island — a move that could upend the Western world.
European leaders pushed back forcefully today against the idea of the United States taking over Greenland — a proposal the president has resuscitated in the wake of his invasion of Venezuela and which risks destroying the NATO alliance. The idea germinated in his mind more than eight years ago, when he shocked us in private by saying he was thinking about a takeover of the island.
More specifically, Donald Trump was focused on a “swap.”
It was 2017, and we were in the midst of internal debates about rebuilding the island of Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory had been ravaged by hurricanes the year prior, and the reconstruction was costing billions. The president was furious that the Department of Homeland Security was spending so much money on a place that was, in his words, “dirty” and “poor” and where the people didn’t support him politically. None of which were reasons we could cut them off from FEMA aid, argued then-acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke.
But Trump had an idea.
What if instead of continuing to pour money into helping the Puerto Rican people recover, we just “swapped” them for another island? Got rid of it? How about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland?
I remember Elaine Duke and I sitting in her office at DHS headquarters, baffled at the idea. We got off the phone with the White House and there was an awkward silence. Had the president just said what we thought he said? To her credit, Duke dropped it. This wasn’t an order. It was a dumb idea. And we needn’t look into it.
Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, effectively making it part of the NATO alliance. Trump was acting like we could just make a real estate deal to get rid of “our” island in exchange for “their” island (to say nothing of the abandonment of the three million American citizens in Puerto Rico). There’s no way he was serious.
I was wrong. The president brought it up again a few months later. In 2018, as DHS officials traveled to Puerto Rico to monitor the recovery, Trump upbraided us again for spending so much time and money on the place. In phone calls and meetings, he berated us. And he insisted we should look into “divesting” America of Puerto Rico, again proposing that we get rid of it and take over Greenland instead.
It wasn’t just an errant comment.
The following year I quit the Trump administration in protest, and I knew this was among the conversations I needed to publicly disclose. The ramifications of Trump’s designs on Greenland were serious, not only for the millions of Americans living in Puerto Rico but for our relationship with our closest allies. If this man won re-election, he would try to abandon our own citizens and take over the territory of our allies — with grave consequences.
So that’s what I did. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, I spoke out about those internal conversations. Here was one example:
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who was recently featured in a political ad from Republican Voters Against Trump, told MSNBC on Wednesday that President Donald Trump asked him and other officials whether the U.S. could swap Greenland for Puerto Rico because, in Trump’s words, “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.“…
“I did not take it as a joke,” Taylor said.
Trump himself dismissed my accounts as the rantings of a “DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE” making the rounds on the “FAKE NEWS circuit.” So reporters asked me the same questions over and over. Was I exaggerating? Wasn’t this in jest? I didn’t really think he wanted to get rid of Puerto Rico or take over Greenland, did I?
But the conversations with Trump happened. Multiple times. They were every bit as ludicrous as they sounded. And while foreign leaders nervously laughed them off as an “April Fools’ joke,” the world needed to know the truth: Donald Trump was not joking.
You see, this is always the red flag with Trump. The thing he calls a “joke” — or what aides describe as “half-serious” — is almost always the thing that deserves the most scrutiny. The “joking” phase with him isn’t harmless. It’s a trial balloon. Trump floats an idea publicly to see how much resistance he’ll face. Then if the backlash is muted, he advances. If not, he retreats temporarily and waits for a better moment.
We’ve seen this pattern before. He “joked” about locking up political opponents, about pressuring the FCC to punish comedians, about refusing to accept election results, about sending the military into U.S. cities, about staying in office beyond his term, and so on. None of those stayed “jokes” for long.
The Greenland takeover was yet another concept that people needed to understand was no farce. Unlike Trump’s many other absurd proposals (placing alligators in border moats, nuking hurricanes, or using firetruck ladders to help cows climb fences), this one had the power to detonate the world order. After he lost in 2020, I thought we had averted a crisis. I was wrong again.
Now we are watching that detonation sequence begin.
Like the invasion of Venezuela, Donald Trump has been quietly plotting the seizure of Greenland in some way, shape, or form for nearly eight years. We listened to his private rants about it in the first term, but we weren’t willing to carry out a takeover of an allied nation on his behalf. That’s not the case anymore. Trump is surrounded by people prepared to end the West as we know it, as long as it pleases the boss.
This week, Denmark’s prime minister warned that any U.S. aggression against the island would effectively bring an end to NATO itself. And the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom have come to her defense.
Yet Trump is unmoved. His dictatorial fantasies are hardening into real policy. Despite backlash, he mused about the Greenland takeover on Air Force One, his homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, went on CNN to assert America’s right to take Greenland, and Miller’s wife gleefully posted a picture of the island territory (above) superimposed with an American flag, an act that worsened the diplomatic spat.
To be clear, a U.S. hostile takeover of Greenland would do something unprecedented. It would trigger a direct confrontation between the United States and a fellow NATO member, Denmark. NATO is built on a simple, sacred principle: an attack on one is an attack on all. So if the United States were to coerce, threaten, or seize territory from Denmark — whether through force, economic pressure, or “negotiated” extortion — the alliance would face an impossible choice.
Either NATO defends Denmark against the United States, or it admits that Article 5 is meaningless. Either outcome is catastrophic.
If NATO fractures at the top, the dominoes will fall quickly. European allies will begin cutting bilateral security deals, no longer trusting Washington. Russia will exploit the vacuum in the Arctic, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic. China will surely accelerate its own territorial ambitions, citing U.S. precedent. Intelligence-sharing with our closest friends will dry up, while joint military planning collapses. And U.S. bases and outposts abroad will become politically radioactive overnight.
America doesn’t emerge stronger from this. It emerges alone.
If you need to be reminded, history tells us that isolation is exactly how great powers fall. What’s more, this year is the 25-year anniversary of one of NATO’s most significant moments, when the Western world rushed to America’s aid.
After September 11, 2001, NATO allies came to our defense. They invoked Article 5 after the 9/11 hijackers killed thousands of people on our soil. In the years that followed, European countries that had no obligation to spill blood for Americans did so anyway because they believed in the alliance, and in us.
Now those same countries are watching the United States flirt openly with territorial conquest and imperial entitlement. One by one, they are starting to turn away from the United States. This isn’t because they hate America; it’s because they no longer recognize it.
That’s why I warned the world about Greenland. With Donald Trump, the “joke” is always the tell. And if the American people and the Congress don’t push back hard, the joke is on us.
Your friend, in defiance,
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Trump's 'America First' is actually 'Americans Alone'
Truth
Floating ideas (or insults) as “ jokes” is a classic narscisst ploy. Believe me, I grew up w this. When people object, they save face by saying it’s just a joke and that the person who calls them out is “ too sensitive “ or “ can’t take a joke “ or “ is being “ hysterical “. That deflects the blame off them and puts onto the other person. Narscissists have no sense of humor tho. Every insult, accusation or criticism is a projection. Those w power to stop him must recognize this and take him seriously and use his own words against him. If not, we will be in WW3 before we know it.