Donald Trump’s Greenland Obsession Is Growing More Dangerous
When Donald Trump first started talking about turning Greenland into US property, he pretended to care about what its people would like to see happen. Trump and his associates are now dropping the pretense and threatening to use brute force.
A poll last January showed 85 percent of Greenlanders are against becoming part of the US. Efforts to influence the Greenlandic people since then haven’t shifted the dial enough for Donald Trump’s liking, so he’s ramping up the coercive pressure. (Nicole Combeau / Bloomberg via Getty Images
It’s that time of year again. On December 22, 2025, exactly twelve months after appointing venture capitalist Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark with the message that US “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Donald Trump named Jeff Landry as his special envoy to Greenland and brought the Arctic island back to the front pages.
Since then, in a repeat of last January’s pattern, a one-sided war of words has escalated, with various figures close to Trump attempting to present a takeover of Greenland as an inevitability, and the Kingdom of Denmark, of which Greenland is one part, as a liability.
Landry, the governor of Louisiana, is a stalwart of the current Republican Party. As his state’s attorney general, he fought against efforts to limit air pollution in “Cancer Alley,” an eighty-five-mile stretch of chemical industry in a majority Black area of southeast Louisiana.
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