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Opinion|In Trump’s Mind, Greenland Is Just Real Estate
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/opinion/greenland-trump-real-estate.html
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Dec. 27, 2024
Did you hear the one about the real estate dealer who got elected president and started fantasizing about buying Greenland? Spoiler: If you elect him again, don’t be surprised when he actually goes for it.
In fact, President-elect Donald Trump did not wait to be sworn in before reviving his bid for Greenland, which he has upgraded to an “absolute necessity.” So it’s worth checking out what he finds so tempting in this big chunk of ice.
The idea was floated early in his first term by a good friend of his, the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, but Trump typically adopted it as his own and ordered his minions to get on it. “I’m a real estate developer,” he explained to reporters interviewing him for a book. “I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” Greenland, he conceded, was more than a corner store: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive.’ That should be part of the United States.”
Greenland, to be precise, is not a country. It’s a self-governing part of Denmark. But such technicalities are not a problem to a Manhattan real estate developer. Nor is the fact that the governments of Denmark and Greenland have reiterated that the island is not for sale. In Trump’s business, that’s an opening bid.
And Greenland, apart from looming bigly on a Mercator projection of the world, is a very desirable chunk of real estate, with huge potential for development. Trump is not the first American president to eye it; Andrew Johnson floated the idea in the 1860s, and Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million for it in 1946.
Greenland has abundant riches, including rare-earth elements, and lies strategically over the eastern gateway to the fast-melting Northwest Passage. The United States maintains the Pituffik Space Base there for missile defense and space surveillance. China has shown keen interest in putting its money into Greenland, though its efforts to build three airports there have been resisted by the United States.
