Does President Trump have his eyes on Greenland again?
It’s always hard to bring clarity to Trump’s funhouse-mirror version of objective reality, but I think he tipped his hand over the Memorial Day weekend, when he posted a creepy, funny-not-funny AI-generated meme “Hello, Greenland!” to his social media account. Showing a scowling Trump leering over a Greenlandic landscape with a glint in his eye, it would have been provocative enough all by itself. But it’s only one of several hints Trump hasn’t quite given up his dreams of a new American empire. This in spite of repeated reminders “Greenland is not for sale.”
If the post was intended to set Greenlanders on edge, it succeeded.
“The meme is the latest beat in a standoff that produced the largest demonstrations in Greenland’s history in January and that remains unresolved as Washington presses for a deal Nuuk [the capital of Greenland] and Copenhagen have repeatedly rejected.” reported Arctic Today, a regional newsletter published in Anchorage. Not only was it visually provocative, added Elias Thorsson, it came at a time of renewed pressure for a “real estate” to give the USA control over the autonomous territory of Denmark. Thorsson explained:
The president and his allies routinely use social media memes both to troll political opponents and to push policy aims. Last January, Katie Miller, a former administration official and wife of top Trump aide Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland draped in the Stars and Stripes with the caption “SOON,” prompting Denmark’s ambassador in Washington to publicly demand “full respect for the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark.”
The latest post landed against a tense backdrop. On Thursday, the U.S. inaugurated a new downtown consulate, and hundreds of Greenlanders demonstrated outside, waving Greenlandic flags, chanting “go home” and carrying placards reading “Stop USA.” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and other ministers declined invitations to attend. [Links in the original.]
Nor, apparently, has his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, given up on his boss’ fever dreams of empire. Last week he even slipped a similarly jokey-not-jokey sidebar comment about the talks on Greenland’s future into congressional testimony.
Asked if he believes Greenland is part of Denmark, Rubio acknowledged it is — “for now.” Then, without drawing a breath, he went on to discuss ongoing talks between US, Greenlandic and Danish officials on collective security in the Arctic in the wake of Trump’s repeated demands that Denmark somehow sell Greenland to the US. Added Rubio:
The president’s view is that it’s a lot easier to defend it when you have control and complete control of it. We are obviously having conversations with both Denmark and Greenland. They are ongoing on a monthly basis now. I think we’ll have pretty good news.
At least this time Trump isn’t threatening to invade Greenland, as he did in a similar half-jokey, half-menacing just-kiddin’-no-I’m-not-kidding way back in January.
But Greenlanders are not amused. They weren’t amused in January, when Trump threatened military action, Denmark prepared to put up at least a token resistance and it looked like NATO was about to implode. Nor have they forgotten the brouhaha.
In America we have more-or-less forgotten about that crisis, but just about everyone in Greenland, and in Europe for that matter, still believes Trump’s neocolonial dreams of empire are limited only by his attention span. At least a few Greenlanders tell reporters they’re ready for anything — as soon as Trump’s birthday next week.
Lending credence to those fears is the round of negotiations Secretary Rubio referred to at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. In a deeply sourced article last month, the New York Times reported:
With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.
But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.
The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.
Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday. [Links in the original.]
Quite unexpectedly, I find myself looking sideways at the calendar, too. Would he? Could he? It seems impossibly far-fetched, but with a guy like Trump you never know.
Nor did I expect to find my reaction to Trump’s obsession is almost tribal. How dare he poach on my ancestors’ turf? I don’t pretend to be an expert on security issues in the High North, as the Arctic regions are known especially in Europe.1 But growing up with the Old Norse sagas of Erik the Red, Lief Eriksen and the Viking settlements in Greenland was as much a part of my Norwegian-American heritage as a taste for canned fish and brown goat’s milk cheese.
Years later, I taught a Native American cultural studies course that left me sympathetic to the indigenous peoples who have lived in Greenland for hundreds, even thousands of years before Erik the Red set sail from Norway. Turns out the indigenous Inuit people of Greenland belong to the same family of linguistically and culturally related peoples as the Iñupiat of Alaska. Who knew? Greenlanders, who are 80 percent Inuit, have their own complicated postcolonial memories of exploitation and forced assimilation by Danish colonizers, and they are well aware of the tragic history of cultural genocide on the North American mainland. Some are downright frightened at the prospect of US domination.
I doubt that Trump would know enough about Vikings to pick Erik the Red out of a police lineup, and he has already demonstrated he knows absolutely nothing about the history of Greenland. 2 So here’s a quick outline, courtesy of an Associated Press fact-check: Greenland was first settled, by distant ancestors of today’s indigenous people, some 2,500 years before the common era. It was colonized twice by Europeans, once a thousand years ago and then in the 18th century. It is now an autonomous territory of Denmark, with ultimate hopes of independence that have been thrown into confusion by Trump’s neocolonial fever dream.
Erik the Red and the Vikings settled there around 985 CE, but his colony died out during the 15th century. The last Norse ship for which we have documentation sailed to Iceland in 1410. The Danes arrived on the scene in 1721, when a Dano-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede as business opportunities galore. (Nordic dynastic history is pretty convoluted, and the idea of national self-determination came late to the region, but Wikipedia’s history of Greenland manages to be brief, detailed and reliable.) Greenland officially became a Danish colony in 1814, when Norway was transferred to the Swedish crown after the Napoleonic Wars.
I’ll leave it to others to assess how well regarded the Danes rank as colonial overlords. Greenland is not a settler colonial society like the US and Canada (an estimated 89 percent of Greenlanders are Inuit); and nothing like the American Indian Wars took place there. Even so, a combination of economic exploitation, cultural insensitivity, racial stereotyping and forced assimilation common to colonial regimes led to a strong independence movement. In 1953, Greenland’s colonial status ended and it was incorporated into the kingdom of Denmark. In 1979 it was granted home rule; now it has its own autonomous parliamentary governmen, and a procedure exists for the Greenlandic and Danish governments to negotiate its eventual independence.
Ironically, Trump’s repeated demands that the US acquire Greenland in some kind of “real estate deal” appear to have knocked all that into a cocked hat. (Wikipedia has an objective detailed account, with 338 footnotes to date, of the ins and outs of “Proposed United States acquisition of Greenland” from the 1800s to the present.) In January, when Trump’s bluster and threats hit a fever pitch, Danish newspaper editor Rune Lykkeberg warned:
This is the tragedy of the people of Greenland: when they finally get the leverage to assert their dignity and demand recognition from their old master, they are confronted with a new, much stronger and more ruthless colonial master. And all of this is happening in a new geopolitical era, where an old phrase from Thucydides seems to describe the worldview of today’s rulers: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
More recently poet and activist Aqqaluk Lynge, a founder of the pro-independence political party Inuit Ataqatigiit (community of the people) told a Reuters correspondent he now believes Greenland’s future lies with Denmark. The British news agency’s Catherine Tai said his change of mind reflects a broader trend:
“We feel betrayed by the United States,” the 78-year-old said in an interview at his home outside the capital Nuuk, where from his window you can spy chunks of ice floating in a nearby fjord. “We are in a very difficult situation, where the only ones that can save us today are Denmark and Europe.”
Lynge is not alone. The U.S. president’s comments have triggered a mighty backlash that has helped alter Greenland’s political trajectory – much like in Canada, where patriotic anger at Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the “51st state” of America swept Mark Carney’s Liberals back to power last year, after they looked destined for defeat.
For decades, vocally pro-independence parties dominated politics in Greenland, a self-governing Danish territory of about 56,000 people. Now, following an election held in March 2025 in the shadow of Trump’s threats, the government is led by a party that has ruled out any discussion of independence in the foreseeable future, while supporting a gradual approach to eventual secession. Even members of the government who previously advocated independence have swung against it in recent months.
At least for the moment, Trump is preoccupied with his war with Iran and the weekend’s upcoming gladiatorial combat at the White House, another gaudy imitation of empires past. I’d put the odds of a US invasion of Greenland on Trump’s birthday on a par with the likelihood of Julius Caesar coming back to life and winning the New York primary. But with Trump, you never know. He may at least get off another glowering, jokey-not-jokey mean tweet 3 on the subject.
After all, Trump has been hankering after Greenland ever since his first term in office. And such luminaries as the New York Post, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Trump himself have long dubbed Trump’s imperialist or quasi-imperialist ambitions, albeit in that half-jokey way of his, the “Donroe Doctrine,” according to Wikipedia, which reproduces a 2025 Post cover that shows the Stars and Stripes superimposed on a map of the Western Hemisphere, from the “MAGA Canal” north to the “51st state” and “Green Our Land.”
When it came to a head in January, of Trump’s neo-imperialism was greeted with almost universal condemnation in cultural, religious and indigenous spaces. His fever dream of Trumpifying the Western Hemisphere from the Panama Canal (sometimes as far south as Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn) ignores the complicated colonial and postcolonial history of the entire hemisphere. Even the World Council of Churches warned “the US government’s stated determination to own and control Greenland is in diametric opposition to the wishes of the people of Greenland and to their political trajectory towards independence.”
In January, when the joke was turning ominous, a semiprofessional singing group called the Marsh family in England did two songs poking fun at Trump’s grandiloquent quest for a new MAGA empire.
One was a rather nice arrangement and rewrite of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” spoofing Trump’s imperial ambitions: “How he longs to have an empire, / How he hankers for an empire,” and “He is drumming out the glory of a land once free and brave.” Another song, dropped a few days later when Trump’s hankering after Greenland became more explicit, contained the refrain, “It’s a mother-f*cking piece of Denmark, he’s crazy.” But I feel the last word should go to their YouTube blurb on the Battle Hymn, where they wrote, with what seems a hint of sadness:
During the American Civil War it became a signature marching song for the Union Army, linked to patriotism and faith, and has since become part of the canon of American national music. We do not attempt or treat it lightly, but our version reflects on how the first week of 2026 has already seen Trump’s troops advancing his domestic and foreign policy agendas. Every marching step is another step away from the principles and traditions embedded in the song: we have seen the transgression of international law in Venezuela, the murder of unarmed Americans in Minneapolis (and its defence by the administration), the US’s withdrawal from multiple international organisations, and explicit threats issued to other sovereign powers and polities, including Greenland.
It looks like Aqqaluk Lynge, co-founder of the Greenlandic political party Inuit Ataqatigiit (community of the people) isn’t the only one who feels betrayed by Trump’s America.
Notes
1 The term “was introduced as the English synonym for the Norwegian term nordområdene (i.e. the northern areas) in the mid 1980s, but not adopted as the official language of Norwegian authorities until the beginning of the 21st century,” according to Odd Gunnar Skagestad, “The ‘High North’: An Elastic Concept in Norwegian Arctic Policy,” FNI Report, Oct. 2010, Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Oslo https://www.fni.no/publications/the-high-north-an-elastic-concept-in-norwegian-arctic-policy.
2 Trump’s arithmetic was a little off, too. In January he dismissed Denmark’s colonial claim to Greenland by saying: “The fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn’t mean that they own the land. I’m sure we had lots of boats go there also.” That would be in 1526, some 500-plus years after Erik the Red established his colony, a century after it died out and 200 years before Denmark reclaimed the area in 1721. “It’s the same logic about the U.S. and sovereignty, right? You have a couple of boats arriving from Europe and now you own the United States of America,” Andreas Østhagen of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute told an AP reporter. “The Indigenous population was there before you guys.”
3 I’m not what to call a post on Trump’s “Truth Social.” (I’m not about to call it a “truth,” for obvious reasons.) So I’ll just fall back on Urban Dictionary, which defines a mean tweet as follows: “Best USA President ever was removed because of mean tweets”; or, in the alternative, as A humorous phrase used by conservatives to expound their belief that a president who is a massive dickhead is better than a president whose head doesn’t even function.” The references to Trump are obvious.
Links and Citations
Stefanie Dazio, River Zhang and Emma Burrows, “FACT FOCUS: Trump repeats false claims when discussing Greenland’s security in the Arctic,” Associated Press, Jan. 13, 2026 https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-greenland-denmark-trump-arctic-security-russia-china-6346aa8e86be594e467e8cc18f98357b.
Rune Lykkeberg, “Greenland’s tragedy: the dream of independence now looks like a trap laid by Donald Trump,” Guardian, Jan. 20, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/20/tragedy-greenland-independence-denmark-trump-us.
Jeffrey Gettleman, Maya Tekeli, Anton Troianovski and Eric Schmitt, “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland,” New York Times, May 18, 2026 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/world/europe/us-greenland-talks-trump.html.
Marsh Family, “‘Battle Hymn of the Empire” – Marsh Family adaptation of ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ about Trump,” YouTube, Jan. 10, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8saU0WeocP0.
__________, “‘Piece of Denmark’ – Marsh Family parody of ‘Piece of My Heart’ by Erma Franklin on Greenland/Trump,” YouTube, Jan. 19, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSDIkpwlqsA.
Catherine Tai, “Greenland’s independence champion despised Denmark. Trump changed his mind,” Reuters, May 29, 2026 https://www.reuters.com/investigations/greenlands-independence-champion-despised-denmark-trump-changed-his-mind-2026-05-29/.
Elias Thorsson, “‘Hello, Greenland!’: Trump posts looming meme as protests greet new US consulate,” Arctic Today, May 23, 2026 https://www.arctictoday.com/hello-greenland-trump-posts-looming-meme-as-protests-greet-new-us-consulate/.
“US secretary of state Marco Rubio says Greenland is part of Denmark ‘for now’,” Sky News, June 4, 2026 https://news.sky.com/story/us-secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-says-greenland-is-part-of-denmark-for-now-13550610.
“WCC: ‘people of Greenland have an inalienable right to self-determination’,” news release, World Council of Churches, Jan 15, 2026 https://www.oikoumene.org/news/wcc-people-of-greenland-have-an-inalienable-right-to-self-determination.
I have relied heavily on Wikipedia, which has several detailed, objective articles on Greenland, Danish colonization and Trump’s noeocolonial ambitions.
[Uploaded June 11, 2016]
Ordinary Time 