President-elect Donald Trump has once again stirred controversy by reviving his ambition to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a proposal that has long puzzled political observers. MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown took a deep dive into Trump’s fixation with the ice-covered territory, tracing its origins to his first term in office.
According to past reports by journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, Trump’s interest in Greenland appears to stem from his fascination with its size. Trump reportedly told officials, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
Brown finds Trump’s reasoning characteristic to be underwhelming. “As tends to be the case with Trump, the real answer is both entirely on-brand and deeply weird,” he writes. “Even if Trump really did come up with the idea of buying Greenland himself as he claimed, the motivation of ‘it’s massive’ doesn’t speak highly of his strategic vision for the United States — or his own business sense as a developer.”
Brown notes that Trump’s obsession with acquiring Greenland is unlikely to end in success, pointing to the territory’s unique challenges and the historical context of its name. “It’s especially fitting that a real estate developer whose properties have declared bankruptcy multiple times is besotted with this particular landmass,” Brown quips.
“Greenland is one of the oldest bait-and-switch real estate cons in the book, named to encourage settlement on what is a mostly barren expanse of ice.” Adding to the skepticism, Brown highlights how common map projections distort Greenland’s true size, making it appear larger than it is.
“As any cartography fan would tell you, the way Greenland looks on most common maps is extremely misleading thanks to the distortion needed to make a globe flat. Instead, the island — while still huge — isn’t quite as massive as Trump seems to think,” he explains.
While Trump’s latest remarks have reignited debates about the feasibility and logic of such a proposal, critics like Brown argue that the idea reflects a superficial understanding of geopolitics. For now, Greenland remains firmly under Danish sovereignty, despite Trump’s enduring fascination with the “massive” island.