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Fresh Air: An inside look at President Trump's campaign to acquire Greenland
June 17, 202612:50 PM ET
Fresh Air
Dave Davies
New Yorker writer Ben Taub says while the idea of acquiring Greenland is out of the headlines, it hasn't been dropped. Taub describes how Trump's ongoing efforts have broken the trust of our allies.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
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...
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/17/nx-s1-5860861/an-inside-look-at-president-trumps-campaign-to-acquire-greenland
Fresh Air
Dave Davies
New Yorker writer Ben Taub says while the idea of acquiring Greenland is out of the headlines, it hasn't been dropped. Taub describes how Trump's ongoing efforts have broken the trust of our allies.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
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...
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/17/nx-s1-5860861/an-inside-look-at-president-trumps-campaign-to-acquire-greenland