Greenland has 57,000 residents, large reserves of gold, diamonds, uranium and rare earth minerals, and a president-elect in Washington who keeps saying he wants it. In January 2025, Donald Trump repeated that ambition, and the idea of buying the island moved back to the center of US-Denmark relations.
NBC News reported on January 9, 2025, that Greenland sat alongside the Panama Canal and Canada on Trump’s expansionist list. Some of those ideas are serious, sources told the network, and others amount to “trolling.” Greenland falls in the first group. Trump sees acquiring it as a national security matter tied to countering Chinese influence, and his son had visited the island. Carla Sands, a former US ambassador, argued that Denmark “can’t defend” the territory. John Bolton, a former Trump adviser, was dismissive, calling the whole agenda “this week’s series of neuron flashes.”
Legislation and a Greenlandic response
Congress moved quickly. House Republicans introduced a bill allowing Trump to negotiate with Denmark over acquiring the island, Fortune reported on January 14. Representative Andy Ogles sponsored the “Make Greenland Great Again Act.”
Greenland’s prime minister, Mute B. Egede, answered with an offer of talks rather than a flat refusal. “We have started a dialog and seek opportunities for cooperation with Trump,” he said, adding that the territory has “the doors open in relation to mining” and needs trade with the United States. His line on sovereignty did not change. Egede and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have both held that Greenland is not for sale and that Greenlanders should decide their own future. Egede has also talked up breaking from Denmark and pointed to a possible independence referendum around the next election, due no later than April.
The 2019 precedent
None of this started in 2025. In August 2019, during his first term, Trump floated buying the autonomous Danish territory. Frederiksen called the idea “absurd.” Trump then postponed a September 2-3 state visit to Denmark, Euronews reported.
Denmark’s political class was stunned. Former Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt tweeted: “So (Trump) has cancelled his visit to Denmark because there was no interest in discussing selling Greenland. Is this some sort of joke?” Another former premier, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, had first dismissed the proposal as “an April Fool’s Day joke.”
Frederiksen said at the time that the cancellation should not affect “commercial cooperation or foreign and security policies.”
Sources
- Why Trump wants to take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal (NBC News)
- Greenland is ready to cooperate with Trump, Premier says (Fortune)
- Shock in Denmark after Trump, spurned over Greenland, cancels visit (Euronews)
