President-elect Donald Trump shared his renewed interest Sunday in the U.S. controlling the autonomous territory of Greenland, which is owned by Denmark.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in a statement announcing that he had chosen Ken Howery to serve as ambassador to Denmark.
Greenland’s prime minister, Mute Egede, has already rejected Trump’s remarks, saying in a statement: “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” according to Reuters.
Trump floated purchasing Greenland during his first term as president on multiple occasions.
He told reporters in 2019 about the island, “Strategically it’s interesting, and we’d be interested, but we’ll talk to them a little bit.”
“First we have to find out whether or not they have any interest,” he added. “They’re losing a tremendous amount of money, so we’ll see what happens.”
At that point, Denmark said that Greenland was not for sale, which caused Trump to cancel a trip he had scheduled to the country. He said in a tweet that Denmark is “a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time.”
Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, told MSNBC in 2020 that Trump had asked him and other officials in 2018 whether the U.S. could swap Greenland for Puerto Rico because, in Trump’s words, “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.” He said the conversation occurred before DHS officials traveled to Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, to help with the recovery from Hurricane Maria.
Greenland, between the North Atlantic Ocean and Arctic Ocean, is technically part of North America and is the largest island in the world. While a majority of Greenland is covered in ice, about 57,000 people live there.
The U.S. has considered purchasing Greenland at least twice, including in 1867 and then in 1946, when President Harry S. Truman proposed buying it for $100 million. Denmark rejected the offer.
Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner contributed.
