With President-elect Donald Trump once again making noise about seizing Greenland from Denmark, MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown decided to examine the origins of Trump's years-long fixation on buying the large ice-covered territory.
After reviewing past reports on Trump national security officials' interactions with him during his first term about Greenland, Hayes finds that Trump seems to simply covet Greenland because it's a large piece of land.
In fact, Trump is directly quoted by reporters Susan Glasser and Peter Baker as saying of Greenland, "I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
Taking stock of this, Hayes comes away unimpressed with Trump's geopolitical acumen.
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"As tends to be the case with Trump, the real answer is both entirely on-brand and deeply weird," writes Brown. "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."
Hayes then adds that, were Trump to get serious about taking Greenland for the United States, it would likely not end well for him.
"It’s especially fitting that a real estate developer whose properties have declared bankruptcy multiple times is besotted with this particular landmass," he writes. "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. And, 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."
