Trump and Greenland: How MAGA went Arctic

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1:00Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. I'm Lucy Proctor and you're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. This is Trump and Greenland, how MAGA went Arctic.

1:18Every year, packs of purebred Greenland sled dogs gather on the ice in a frenzy of pre-race excitement. It's all beautifully low-tech. The dogs are tied together with coloured twine to wooden sleds, the lone racers riding low to the ground as they tear off into the surrounding whiteness. There's around 56 ,000 people on Greenland, mostly of mixed Inuit and European descent, and a fair number come out to watch the annual championship. But recently, the race has been troubled by interlopers. In March 2025, America's second lady, Usha Vance, posted a video on her Instagram. I'll be visiting Kalalutnuna, Greenland, next weekend.

2:05I'm particularly thrilled to visit during our national dog sled race, which our country is proud to support. This was news to the race organisers, and for that matter, to the Greenlandic government, which hadn't invited her. That might have been OK in different times, but the backdrop to the visit was a series of increasingly aggressive statements. made by President Donald Trump about his desire for the United States to acquire the semi-autonomous North Atlantic island from its current owners, Denmark. This desire has only really hit the news over the past year, but it's an ambition Trump has harbored for some time.

2:42Essentially, it's a large real estate deal. Here he is speaking during his first term in office back in 2019. It's not number one on the burner, I can tell you that. But by 2025... And I think we're going to get it. One way or the other, we're going to get it. I look forward to meeting many of you soon. The second lady, Usha Vance. See you soon. She didn't get to see the dog race after all. Instead, in an effort to exert American authority, or save face perhaps, Vice President J.D. Vance decided last minute to join his wife on the trip. And together, they went where there wasn't a need for an invite.

3:20the US military base on Greenland's north coast. We need Greenland from a national security situation. President Trump's insistence Greenland should belong to America reached a crescendo in recent weeks. World leaders are still reeling, experts scrambling to understand the reasoning. But drill down beneath the Trump rhetoric. Look more closely at who's behind those invites to the dog race And who exactly is doing Trump's bidding in the region? And you find powerful people who together have had Greenland in their sights for years. I'm Lucy Proctor, and for the BBC World Service, this is the story of how MAGA went Arctic.

4:09After Donald Trump very unwillingly left office in 2021, my husband Peter Baker of the New York Times and I were working on a book about his first term in office and debriefing as many people as we could as they left the administration. Susan Glasser writes for the New Yorker magazine. In 2021, Donald Trump was in forced retirement in Florida, spending his days posting memes linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, hoping to unseat the democratically elected president, Joe Biden. At that time, his early 2019 musings on Greenland had been filed by most people under Unserious Things Donald Trump Says.

4:50But it turned out when we were talking to many of his former White House officials, they said, no, actually Donald Trump had been really obsessed by this. So we flew down to Mar-a-Lago to see Donald Trump and about an hour and a half into that interview, his aide said, no, time's up, last question. And just sort of on a flyer with said, hey, what about Greenland? Tell us about Greenland. And Donald Trump sort of lit up and he said, oh, yes, it was my idea. It was totally my idea. I love maps. I looked at a map. I saw this. It's massive. And I said, we have to have it. It's just like when I'm building a building in New York City and I see there's one building that I don't have there and I want to have it.

5:38Well, this is just like a real estate deal, except to put it mildly, it's a lot bigger. Susan Glasser knows a political scoop when she sees one. She and her husband went about working their contact books. Did the idea really originate with the president? The trail led to Ambassador John Bolton, long-time Republican hawk, who served as Mr Trump's national security chief between 2018 and 2019. Well, sometime toward the end of 2018, he called me down to the Oval Office one day and said that a prominent New York businessman has suggested that the United States buy Greenland from Denmark and asked what I thought of it.

6:17I learned later that Ronald Lauder was the prominent New York businessman. And I'd known Ronald Lauder for many years, mostly through Middle East matters. Ronald Lauder is president of the World Jewish Congress. He's also the billionaire heir of the Estee Lauder beauty empire and old friends with Donald Trump. I'm not aware that really anybody else in Trump's circle of friends or anything else knew anything about it. But John Bolton thought Ronald Lauder was onto something. He says there'd been intel that Russia and China had been stepping up activity in the wider Arctic, scoping out new sea routes amid the melting ice caps.

6:54And in the ambassador's eyes, the idea of acquiring Greenland wasn't so far-fetched. The first U.S. effort to buy Greenland was by William Seward, fresh off his success in buying Alaska from Russia in 1867. In 1914, to protect the Atlantic passages to the Panama Canal, the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands from Denmark and tried again to buy Greenland, which they refused. In fact, as the Cold War was developing, Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland from Denmark for$100 million in 1947. Perhaps Denmark and Greenland could finally be persuaded on the matter. Maybe hold a referendum. So I said, let me take a look at it.

7:39I went back and over the course of the first half of 2019, the staff of the National Security Council did research on the subject. We actually had a meeting planned in Denmark between the prime minister and me on a very quiet basis to talk about Greenland. But before that could happen, John Bolton had an epic falling out with Donald Trump. And in September 2019, the president took to social media to announce he was sacking Bolton. He's now just one of many names on Trump's list of sworn enemies and is facing federal charges for alleged mishandling of classified information. The meeting with the Danes was cancelled.

8:19Somehow, news of the talks reached the Wall Street Journal. The next day, I think media in Denmark asked the prime minister, who's still prime minister today, what she thought of that. And she said the idea was absurd. So, of course, the next day in Washington, the press asked Trump what he thought of her comment. And Trump said she's a nasty woman. And that was the end of the negotiations. Fast forward to January 2026 and Greenland is at the centre of a major diplomatic crisis, undermining NATO's credibility as a unified force. He's shredded decades of American effort to build up good faith and trust and reliance on American leadership of the alliance.

9:02And he has done so in ways that the people who experienced it are not going to forget anytime soon. So how exactly did this happen? If you've been following the saga at all, you'll have heard two repeated reasons from the White House as to why Greenland is so important. security and critical minerals. So let's stay in the realm of global security strategy and ordinary geopolitical reasoning for now to see if Donald Trump might have good reason to threaten a NATO ally. Greenland's been a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark since the 18th century, becoming semi-autonomous in 2009. Lots of Danes live and work there.

9:45Jepa Stransberg is one of them. His work as an Arctic analyst straddles the University of Greenland and the Royal Danish Defence College. Like President Trump, he's very keen on maps. I think that they visualise a particular vision of reality. I mean, if you look at a normal map, it doesn't really explain much about the Arctic. You really have to look at a map that's kind of looking down onto the North Pole from above, don't you? Yeah, on a traditional map, Greenland and the Arctic is a peripheral space. That military base the Vansers ended up visiting last year is called the Pacific Space Base.

10:23But it used to be called the Tula Space Base, the base at the end of the world. But if you look at the world from above on a polar projection, you have the Arctic in the centre and you have Russia on one side and you have the US on the other side. Instruments at the base monitor near space and the potential trajectory of Russian ballistic missiles if they were ever to be fired towards North America. During the Second World War, Greenland was important. War's dramatic action reaches the far north. For mining cryolite to make aluminium, for monitoring weather and as a stop-off for planes flying to Europe.

11:00That's why the Americans occupied Greenland while Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany. And they've been there ever since, scaling back from 17 bases to just one, they're always with the option to build more. What would Trump acquiring Greenland or America taking ownership of Greenland add to that capability? Silence. I don't know. With the agreement during the Second World War and the subsequent defence agreement of 1951 allows the US to have a military presence as it sees fit in Greenland. in order to protect North America. And this defence agreement is without a deadline. It's not running out.

11:45Trump has repeatedly said over the last few weeks that there are Russian destroyers and Chinese destroyers. There are Russian destroyers, there are Chinese destroyers. And Russian submarines, to be fair, we don't know what Russian submarines are doing. But in terms of Chinese and Russian destroyers circling Greenland, is that true? I don't think so. I don't believe so. I haven't heard of any or seen any. I've heard of anybody who's seen any or seen any intelligence report. No, it's not true. Though it is true Chinese and Russian naval ships have been spotted off the coast of Alaska, thousands of miles away, the Arctic is a big place.

12:23This notion of the Arctic as being one thing is misleading because there's a very big difference in terms of strategic thinking whether you are in northern Scandinavia, whether you're around Greenland, whether you're in the Bering Strait. And I think, in a sense, one should be careful not to get into, discuss these details too much because it doesn't really matter, not the way that he's using it to achieve a particular goal. Jepa Strandsberg is not the only person who's told me not to look for answers in President Trump's claims about Greenland's strategic importance. Writer Susan Glasser said the same.

12:58While the Danes and New Yorker journalists are not Trump's biggest fans right now, they have a point. The details don't quite stack up. It's the same story with Greenland's natural resources. I must say when I was a young fieldologist, I had one of the best jobs in the world. Here's another Danish expert, this time Fleming Gertrur Christensen, the former head of the Geological Survey of Greenland, the body in charge of mapping Greenland's oil and critical minerals. And I've spent probably a couple of years, if you count all the field days, stay in a tent and then you walk around day long looking at the rocks.

13:41For years he's watched as American companies have tried to extract the riches buried beneath Greenland, starting back in the 70s. Alaska and the North Sea turned out to be better, cheaper prospects. Then America's own shale oil and gas boom drove prices down further, and coupled with quite stringent environmental rules set by the Greenlandic government, the big American oil companies left Greenland over the last decade. A UK-based company, currently going by the name of 80 Mile PLC, now holds the licences. They've been looking for finance to explore the most promising untapped hydrocarbon reserve in Greenland, in the Jameson Basin.

14:22But you don't know before you drill. Greenland also has two big deposits of metals, key to the production of the magnets that make our electronic world go round. Donald Trump's been giving mixed messages on whether mining for these critical minerals is the reason behind his demands about Greenland. But journalists have snooped around nonetheless and found American billionaires invested in the region. The Beauty Empire heir Ronald Lauder, the one who first planted the seed in the president's mind way back in 2018, is reportedly invested in a water company in Greenland. Hydropower would be key to mining.

15:02And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and AI mastermind Sam Altman invested in an outfit called Cobalt Metals in recent years. And they have especially been looking for nickel, copper and cobalt. And they have found some interesting rock types. Kobold partnered with that British firm, 80 Mile. But in order to develop the project, they have to drill, and they have to drill deep. And that takes a lot of money. Even with the bottomless pockets of the world's richest men, the sums just didn't add up. And Kobold left Greenland last year. I see their name from time to time. During his visit to Greenland, Vice President J.D.

15:47Vance said the US had to beat China and Russia to the punch when it came to mining for minerals in the Arctic. But pressure from the US and Denmark has so far managed to keep Chinese investors out of the race without the need for an invasion. For now, it seems the only people who might be making any real money from mining in Greenland are the market speculators cashing in on the chatter about who's taking over what. Yeah, I think that's the case because both of the companies down in South Greenland, their share price has doubled within the last two or three weeks. This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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17:26You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Proctor, and this is Trump and Greenland, how MAGA went Arctic. So then, if security concerns don't explain the recent crisis, because America already has a presence, and it's not really about the minerals, because it's just too costly, what then is this really all about? To understand what's been fuelling the Greenland obsession, we need to understand MAGA. The Make America Great Again project is several things. It's the blue-collar voters with the red caps, hoping for a revival of the American dream. Thank you very much.

18:06Wow. And then there's the MAGA power base, a clique of Trump loyalists made up of think tankers, unelected lieutenants and Republican Party manoeuvres who have the president's ear. And in that world, Greenland took on a life of its own. I've been reporting on Donald Trump and the MAGA movement for years, making podcasts like The Coming Storm. In that time, I've come to understand how it is that things that seem quite niche or insignificant or just plain weird can become world-changing. The way I've come to see it is if Donald Trump voices an interest in something, however slight, people understand it's a way to get his attention and maybe make it into his orbit.

18:53It's a sort of feedback loop. People talk about something because Trump talked about it. And Trump continues to talk about it because his people talk about it. Susan Glasser. I'm mindful of the words of Chris Christie, Donald Trump's former friend, the former governor of New Jersey, who is, I think, quite an astute Trump watcher. And he once said to me, listen, you know, you've got to make sure people stop it with this idea that, You know, Donald Trump is playing 3D chess or 4D chess or, you know, frankly, even checkers. You know, he's a guy who, you know, talks about something because he talks about something.

19:32The key to understanding the last few weeks is, in fact, those dog races in the snow. Back in Covid times, during Donald Trump's first term, he brought a venture capitalist from Texas called Tom Dams into the Treasury. Hey, Tom Dams. Tom Dans is big brain MAGA. Ivy League educated, he went to Brown and Harvard. He speaks multiple languages. Before politics, he was a Wall Street guy, travelling across Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, making deals. He's self-made, the first in his family to have hot running water, the kind of guy who makes things happen. And he posts a lot of videos on his ex-account from snowy places in the high north.

20:16Yeah, tough day on the bike, but a great day for a dog sled. So once he got into government, knowing Greenland was already a talking point, albeit one on the back burner, Tom Danz took on the task of making that happen. Pretty soon, he was given a job as a commissioner at the United States Arctic Research Commission, the federal agency that advises the President and Congress on Arctic policy. Last year, he was put in charge of it. So if you're in Anchorage, come on by. And here's an interesting sidebar. Tom Dans has a twin brother, Paul, who was director of the controversial Project 2025, the right-wing wish list for Trump's second term.

21:00Greenland gets a mention in there too. I've been in touch with Tom Dans in recent weeks to talk about Greenland. He's open and friendly, said he'd be happy to chat, until, that is, the White House closed down all comms. But what comes across is this is a man who feels really quite strongly about Greenland. This is him on MAGA Commander Steve Bannon's War Room podcast last February. We're here in the south of Greenland and you can see the American flag here flying at half-staff behind us. We're at the site of the former main base in US base during World War II. Dan says his grandpa served in World War II as a merchant seaman, running supplies to U.S.

21:46bases in Greenland, and afterwards stayed on to help build the space base at the end of the air. My grandfather, this was a U.S. merchant marine, and actually made this run. In 2024, Tom Dan set up an organisation called American Daybreak. Its sole aim is to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Greenland. Greenland is part of North America. It's the front door on our U.S. east coast. A big part of American Daybreak's strategy has been to bring key conservative figures to see the promised land for themselves. It was American Daybreak who orchestrated Usher Vance's ill-fated trip to watch the dog sled race last year.

22:24It was also behind another trip in January 2025 for Donald Trump's son, Don Jr. Also along for the ride was... I'm here in Greenland. This kid's got a MAGA hat on. What's your message to Donald Trump? MAGA YouTube maverick Nick Shirley. now more infamous for his videos claiming to expose fake Somali daycare centres in Minneapolis. Buy Greenland. Buy Greenland. Buy Greenland. Buy Greenland. No more damage. No more damage. Images of Greenlandic teenagers in MAGA hats amplifying that Greenland feedback loop, that idea that Greenland was destined to become a part of the United States. And as you remember, I visited Nook back in January with Donald Trump Jr.

23:06They're great people. Which only grew louder with the arrival of MAGA superstar, the late Charlie Kirk, also on the American daybreak trip. The MAGA doctrine, as we've articulated a couple of times on this program, is hemispheric dominance. This is Kirk talking on his podcast. But the vibe is this. The move needs to be allow the people of Greenland to first use personal autonomy and agency to disconnect from their Danish masters. and then allow Greenland the opportunity to be part of the United States of America. It does not have to be a state. Two months later, American Daybreak's PR efforts to impose Usher Vance on the dog sled race is swiftly rejected.

23:49And Vice President J.D. Vance steps in to make an offer Greenlanders can't refuse, in his eyes at least. And if the people of Greenland were willing to partner with the United States, and I think that they ultimately will partner with the United States, We could make them much more secure. We could do a lot more protection. And I think they'd fare a lot better economically as well. This has to happen. If this all feels uncomfortably imperialistic, the fact is there are Greenlanders on board with the idea. Greenlanders who love Donald Trump in an online kind of way, but also elected politicians in Greenland looking towards the United States and feeling the pull of those most American ideals, liberty and freedom.

24:33I'm born in Idulisset. It's on the north-west coast of Greenland. From his house near a fjord, Kuno Fenka can see 100-metre-high icebergs floating out to sea. In his 30s, Kuno got a job with an oil company and travelled up and down the north coast. He was shocked at the poverty in the settlements away from the cities. No ordinary toilets, places where you don't have running water. You don't have infrastructure for roads. You don't have harbour pier infrastructure for the fisheries. What Kuno witnessed politicised him. He lost his job, he says, because of his pro-Inuit views, and stood for election for the first time.

25:16He's been hopping around political parties since, and today he's an MP for the centrist populist Nalarak party. Kuno had a friend at American Daybreak who was going to President Trump's inauguration. So in January 2025, Kuno bought a ticket to Washington, D.C. To look around and see what's going on within the new political sphere that is being built up in the U.S. He spent his time attending meetings and appearing on podcasts. My name is Kuno Fenger. We've been working on Greenland. I should say, Kuno is not pro-MAGA. In fact, he hates the idea of an American takeover of Greenland. But not as much as he hates Danish control of the territory.

26:02And he's not alone. A majority of people in Greenland want independence, and a sizable sum think America could provide the pathway to that goal. I think that the American mindset is that the most valuable thing an American can say to another country is that you can become a part of the United States. But that's not the view that we have in the rest of the world, I think. But I tell them that it's not the political organisation that we aspire to. We've been colonised long enough and we want to get out of colonisation and annexation. We want to be part of the international community without being directly a part of the United States.