Greenland Prime Minister Expertly Shuts Down Trump's Wild Threat
In his address to Congress Tuesday night, Trump gave conflicting messages to the citizens of Greenland. While he claimed to 'strongly support' Greenlanders' 'right to determine [their] own future,' and promised to keep them safe and make them rich, the president also restated that the United States would succeed in acquiring the territory.
'We need it really for international world security. And I think we're going to get it. One way or the other, we're going to get it,' Trump said.
The president said that his administration was 'working with everybody involved to try to get it.'
Despite what Trump claimed Tuesday, it seems that neither the leaders of Greenland nor Denmark are actually playing ball with his wild imperialist threat. Egede shut down Trump's comments in a post on Facebook Wednesday, written in Greenlandic and Danish.
'Kalaallit Nunaat is ours,' Egede wrote, using the Greenlandic term meaning 'Land of the People,' or the 'Land of the Greenlanders.'
'We don't want to be Americans, nor Danes; we are Kalaallit. The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland,' Egede wrote in the post.
Meanwhile, Denmark's Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that Trump's reference to Greenlanders' right to self determination was the most important part of the speech—especially with the parliamentary elections approaching next week. He stressed that it was important for the election to proceed 'without any kind of international intervention.'
But Trump's outrageous threats to acquire Greenland have become a hot-button issue on the island, and while his attempts at outreach have ranged from frivolous to ineffectual, his rhetoric about making the territory the 'fifty-second state' has already electrified the independence movement there.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted that Greenland was not for sale in a television interview after Trump's address. Last month, Trump made a startling phone call to Frederiksen and was reportedly 'aggressive and confrontational,' threatening tariffs against the country unless it does exactly what he wants—flying in the face of his false promises about self-determination.
Despite the fact that leadership hardly seems interested in handing over control of the mineral-rich territory to the U.S, that hasn't stopped Republicans from letting their imaginations run away with them. Last month, Republican Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia filed a bill to rename Greenland 'Red, White, and Blueland.'
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