In Greenland, a cold shoulder for Trump, but curiosity about U.S. ties

NUUK, Greenland - The people of Greenland, the Inuit, the people of the farthest north, are famously quiet. At church, you can barely hear them when they sing. In conversation, you have to lean in. This doesn’t mean they are passive. They eat polar bears.

Greenland is not for sale. That’s the dominant refrain from the people in the subzero capital of the world’s largest island.

But might Greenland be for rent? Or amenable to a Compact of Free Association? Just as the United States has in the Pacific with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau?

Based on interviews here, President-elect Donald Trump would have his work cut out for him convincing people of the merits of his desire to “make Greenland great again” by acquiring it, somehow.

“I don’t trust the guy,” said Bilo Chenmitz, who drives a snowmobile at the local ski slope in the half-light of winter. “I want Greenland to stay like it is.”

After Mass at the red-painted Nuuk Cathedral, Ida Abelsen pointed her finger toward her mouth, in the universal gesture of “gag me,” saying, “I don’t like the way he talks about Greenland.”

Yet there are also some here who are Trump curious - who want to hear more about how their lives might improve with closer ties to the United States.

Those lives today are not bad: free health care, free education for all, and for the needy, subsidized housing. As a self-governing territory of distant Denmark, Greenland has limited self-rule but is also a welfare state. A third of the gross domestic product and half the state budget are supplied by Denmark, about $500 million a year.

That’s about what the U.S. government announced in military financing for the Philippines last year. So it’s not hard to envision upping the bid for influence in Greenland.

For an outsider, Greenland has a faraway, otherworldly feeling, especially in winter. In Nuuk, the sun rises around 10 a.m. and sets at 4 p.m. People suddenly appear in your headlights. It’s got an Arctic Noir vibe. It’s also melting.

Greenland is like an extreme Alaska. Bigger, emptier and more remote. Its vast, ice-capped open space covers more than 836,000 square miles. The weather is gnarly.

And the population is minuscule. Greenland is home to 56,000 people, with 20,000 in the capital, the rest scattered in coastal hamlets. This is no hot-tubbing tourist hot spot, like Iceland. There are few roads. People travel by boat or plane or not at all.

We took a two-hour boat ride from Nuuk up the fjord and landed on the rocky shore of Qoornoq. It was once a fishing village of a few hundred people, said Capt. Georg Jonathansen, until it was emptied by the Danish government in the early 1970s. Today the village is not quite a ghost town, but all the homes have been converted to summer cabins. No one was there during our visit.

Some Trump backers in the United States imagine that acquiring Greenland could be one of the biggest real estate plays ever. Such as buying Alaska in 1867, when America snapped it up for a cool $7.2 million from Russia.

As the Arctic warms, faster than the rest of the planet, a new “Great Game” competition is afoot among the superpowers - China, Russia, the United States - seeking to exploit resources and new commercial shipping and military sea routes through the ice-free summer seas.

Already, Greenland is home to the northernmost installation of the U.S. armed forces. The sprawling Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base, is tasked with operating a global network of early-warning sensors to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Greenland also offers potential riches, according to geologists: untapped reserves of rare-earth minerals needed to make batteries for electric cars.

People in Trumpworld, eyeing this strategically situated landmass, see the incoming president’s desire to acquire, protect, control - whatever - Greenland as the kind of deal only Trump would float. His supporters describe Trump’s Arctic vision as audacious, a return to a muscular, acquisitive, expansive presence.

“It makes America dream again, that we’re not just this sad, low-testosterone, beta male slouching in our chair, allowing the world to run over us,” said conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who accompanied Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., on a visit to Greenland last week.

“It is the resurrection of masculine American energy,” Kirk said on his podcast. “It is the return of Manifest Destiny.”

Whatever else the president-elect has done for Greenland, he has certainly raised its profile. The place has been crawling with journos doing TV stand-ups against a frozen, pitiless backdrop.

“This is a great opportunity for Greenland,” said Kuno Fencker, a member of parliament and its foreign affairs committee, from the dominant Siumut Party. “We know Donald Trump. He’s a politician. He’s a businessman. You shouldn’t take him literally. But you should take him seriously.”

Danish officials have responded to Trump by emphasizing that Greenland will make its own decisions. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said.

Danish King Frederik X, who ascended the throne after his mother abdicated last year, recently increased the prominence of the Greenland polar bear and Faroe Islands ram in his design for the royal coat of arms.

As usual, Trump has raised anxieties as well as attention - especially after he declined to say at his last news conference whether he would rule out using military or economic force to take control of Greenland or the Panama Canal.

“My mom was asking me, seriously, if I thought Trump was going to declare war against Greenland,” said Poul Pedersen, a sociologist at Greenland University.

Fencker, the lawmaker, conceded that Trump’s “loose language” left some here confused whether the president-elect was wooing or threatening.

The U.S. military, he said, would never attack Greenland. Denmark is a NATO member.

“That we are even discussing this is distracting,” he said.

Would Trump apply economic and political pressure on Denmark to cede control? “Umm, I think he is already doing that,” Fencker said.

Pedersen, the university lecturer, said Trump’s interventions have tapped into simmering grievances over Denmark’s treatment of Greenland during its long colonial history. “He is already dividing people here,” he said.

The population of Greenland is almost 90 percent Indigenous Inuit, descendants of people who arrived in the 13th century. Most of the rest - about 7 percent - are Danes. There are also guest workers in the service industry from the Philippines and Thailand.

In the villages and towns, the grocery stores sell Danish imports, but people also eat polar bears, seals, whales, reindeer meat. They hunt and fish. Largest exports? Fish and shrimp. But it is all traded through Denmark, which serves as the seafood broker.

Daniel L. Johnsen, a local nature tour guide, followed Donald Trump Jr.’s entourage around last week. The president-elect’s son landed in Nuuk aboard his father’s campaign 757 airplane. He billed it as a private trip. He spent five hours in the country.

“It was the most bizarre day,” Johnsen said.

The younger Trump visited the National Museum and a statue of Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary who founded Nuuk.

“They gave hats to random people off the street, who agreed to wear the hats if they wanted some free food and free drinks. … It was all just for show,” said Johnsen, who sold video clips of Trump’s trip to the Danish news media.

The president-elect posted on his Truth Social platform: “Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen … MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

Jorgen Boassen is a prominent - and authentic - Trump supporter in Nuuk. He is a former boxer and a bricklayer. “The more the Danish media hated Trump” during his first term, “the more I liked him,” he said. “My friends were all laughing at me.”

Boassen was wearing a T-shirt that showed Trump with a raised fist, the gesture from after the shooting at his rally in Pennsylvania last summer, with the words “American badass.” As a prominent Trump supporter in Nuuk, with a prominent social media presence, Boassen’s phone has been ringing off the hook.

During the recent presidential campaign, he traveled to Pittsburgh to knock on doors for Trump, on a trip paid for by Trump donors.

What would a future relationship with the United States look like? “It depends how far Trump wants to take it,” Boassen said. He said he assumed that first Greenland might need to declare full independence from Denmark. “And then we can make our own deal,” he said.

As Trump turned his gaze toward the north, Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, said last week, “It is now time to take the next step for our country … to remove the obstacles to cooperation - which we can describe as the shackles of the colonial era - and move on,” suggesting he might push for an independence referendum in an upcoming parliamentary election.

The prime minister added in a news conference in Copenhagen on Monday that he wanted to work more closely with the United States on defense and mining exploration and was open to conversations with the Trump administration. He emphasized that “it is … Greenland that will decide what agreement we should come to.”

Boassen said he doubted Greenland would become a 51st state.

“But close partners? Maybe,” he said.