Here’s Everything Trump Has Done So Far to Try to Take Over Greenland

The White House triggered international alarm when it ordered U.S. troops to storm Venezuela and capture the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Donald Trump’s blatant violation of international law and order transformed his rhetoric, which was until Saturday blithely dismissed as toothless threats and flat jokes about controlling the world, into a real, immediate danger.

Enter: Greenland. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s bombardment of Venezuela for oil, European allies weighed whether the U.S. president’s myriad jabs at annexing Greenland—another major international oil resource—had actually carried venom. They have since released public statements in defense of Greenland, potentially pitting the Danish territory against the world’s greatest military force.

To explain how the U.S. got to this point in its relationship with the Arctic island, this New Republic reporter has broken down the more critical details of Trump’s escalating feud with Greenland, its self-governing residents, and the U.S. ally that maintains it as part of its kingdom: Denmark.

August 18, 2019: Trump confirms rumors that he is interested in acquiring Greenland. He tells reporters at the time that the arrangement could be handled as a “large real estate deal.” His comments are little more than a laughless joke to most of the world—but not to those residing on the Arctic island, who receive news of Trump’s interest with searing indignation.

December 22, 2024: Trump’s interest in Greenland resurfaces before he enters office for his second term. He writes on Truth Social that “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.” Greenland’s leadership responds that the semiautonomous territory is “not for sale.”

December 24, 2024: The potential acquisition is lumped into a grander scheme to expand U.S. borders, in which Trump would aim to transform Canada and Greenland into American states.

January 7, 2025: Trump suggests that he would use military force to obtain Greenland, and economic force to squash Canada.

That same day, Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, and Trump staffer Sergio Gor pay a visit to Greenland as part of a not-so-subtle propaganda tour. The MAGA trio claim that Greenlanders are amenable to a potential takeover. Days later, it emerges that the American envoy had lied and staged Trump-friendly photographs, offering food to homeless people in exchange for pictures of them in MAGA merch.

Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, says that Greenlanders do not intend to be a “pawn in Trump’s hot dreams of expanding his empire to include our country.”

January 8, 2025: The House GOP writes that denying Trump’s “big dreams” of eastward expansion would be “un-American.”

February 11, 2025: In an apparent attempt to suck up to the president, Georgia Representative Buddy Carter files a bill pitching that “Greenland shall be known as ‘Red, White, and Blueland,’” authorizing the president to enter into negotiations with the government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland.

March 12, 2025: Greenland’s parliamentary elections result in a massive win for the pro-independence movement. The center-right Demokraatit Party, which supports a local business-driven approach to gaining independence, wins nearly 30 percent of the vote. The most aggressively pro-independence party, Naleraq, wins 25 percent.

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders. And we want our own independence in the future. And we want to build our own country by ourselves, not with his hope,” Demokraatit Party leader Jens-Friederik Nielsen tells SkyNews on the eve of the election.

March 27, 2025: Trump’s aggression inspires a massive reshuffling of Greenland’s Parliament, with the island’s four political parties forming a coalition government with the primary purpose of opposing American efforts to take control. The reorganization is fronted by Greenland’s center-right Demokraatit Party, making its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the country’s new prime minister.

That same day, second lady Usha Vance’s trip to much of the Danish territory is spontaneously canceled. The decision follows reports from local media that U.S. representatives were walking door-to-door in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, inquiring if residents would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife.

“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” said TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz.

The story bothered Usha Vance so much that a senior White House official reached out to this TNR reporter to insist that the details of her article were “categorically false,” though the official did not specify which part of the report Vance objected to.

Instead of touring the island as planned, Vance visits a U.S. space base on Greenland alongside her husband, Vice President JD Vance, then–national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

April 10, 2025: The New York Times reveals that the White House National Security Council has met “several times” to make Trump’s desires for the Arctic island a reality. One possible plan: a massive P.R. campaign consisting of spending federal dollars on advertising and social media with hopes of persuading Greenland’s 57,000 residents to annex themselves for America.

May 4, 2025: Trump refuses to “rule out” the possibility of using military force against Greenland.

May 7, 2025: Reports emerge that several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard directed the U.S. intelligence community to spy on Greenland’s independence movement over the prior week. The officials also tasked agencies to identify individuals living in Greenland and Denmark who support the Trump administration’s goals for the island, and examine local attitudes regarding potential “American resource extraction.”

August 27, 2025: Denmark’s foreign minister summons a U.S. diplomat to discuss recent incursions in Greenland, including an influence campaign spearheaded by several people with ties to the White House.

One of the Americans reportedly compiled a list of denizens friendly to the U.S., collected the names of people who oppose Trump, and conducted reconnaissance on narratives that could potentially frame Denmark in a bad light for sympathetic American media. The other two Americans were caught cozying up to Greenland politicians, businesspeople, and locals.

December 21, 2025: Trump appoints Jeff Landry, the former Republican governor of Louisiana, as special envoy to Greenland. In an interview with the BBC, Trump affirms his commitment to obtaining the ice island. “We have to have it” for “national protection,” Trump said.

January 3, 2026: Trump’s sudden invasion of Venezuela—and the kidnapping of its leader, Nicolás Maduro—renews concerns regarding Trump’s rhetoric on Greenland. European leaders begin to take the threats seriously.

January 3, 2026: Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, posts a red, white, and blue image of Greenland, captioned: “SOON.”

January 4, 2026: Trump reaffirms his commitment to obtaining Greenland. In an interview with The Atlantic published Sunday, Trump says: “We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.”

That evening, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rebukes Trump’s rhetoric, saying in a statement that it makes “absolutely no sense to talk about the need for the United States to take over Greenland.

“The U.S. has no right to annex any of the three nations in the Danish kingdom,” Frederiksen says. “I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people, who have very clearly said that they are not for sale.”

January 6, 2026: Seven powerful NATO allies—including France, Germany, and the U.K.—publish a joint statement affirming their support for Greenland’s sovereignty. “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” they wrote.

The Department of Justice revealed Monday that it has only released less than 1 percent of the documents related to the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged child trafficking.

In a letter sent Monday to Manhattan-based District Judge Paul Engelmayer, Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche laid bare just how little had been done to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act since it was passed in November.

“To date, the Department has now posted to the DOJ Epstein Library webpage approximately 12,285 documents (comprising approximately 125,575 pages) in response to the Act, and there are more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review,” the letter stated.

That means that everything that has been released so far—including such tidbits as a government lawyer saying that Trump had traveled on Epstein’s plane “many more times than previously has been reported”—is just the tip of the iceberg.

The letter also stated that initial reviews of a recent batch of more than one million documents received by the DOJ in December revealed that a “meaningful portion” of those documents were “copies of (or largely duplicative of) documents that had already been collected” by the agency.

More than 400 lawyers, including 125 from the Southern District of New York, would continue to review the more than two million documents that remained, the letter stated, for the purpose of de-duplicating them and making efforts to protect victim privacy.

Multiple survivors have criticized the Trump administration’s most recent document dump for failing to redact “numerous victim identities” while also making “abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation.”

The letter included a lengthy list of ways that the DOJ intended to amend its process for ensuring victim privacy. It claimed that the department would modify the process for responding to survivor’s requests, improve the process of handling duplicative materials, run additional electronic quality control, and “refine” internal guidance for reviewers.

“First day, big problems here.”

That was anchor Tony Dokoupil during his difficult-to-watch debut as the fresh face of CBS Evening News.

During his first foray into evening news Monday, Dokoupil face-planted while transitioning out of a story on Venezuela while Bari Weiss, the right-wing shill tapped to become editor in chief of CBS News, reportedly looked on from the control room.

“To Governor Walz—no. We’re gonna do Mark Kelly,” Dokoupil joked, as graphics of the Arizona senator floated on the screen. “First day—first day, big problems here.”

“Are we going to Kelly here? Or are we gonna go to Jonah Kaplan?” Dokoupil asked producers. There was a long on-air silence, before he finally continued. “We’re doing Mark Kelly, possibly demoted from his retired rank of captain in the Navy.”

While transitioning out of Kelly, Dokoupil made yet another gaffe as he referred to Minnesota as the “Great Lake State,” which it is not. Minnesota is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” while the “Great Lakes State,” referring to multiple lakes, is Michigan.

Dokoupil, who previously co-hosted CBS’s morning news show, was tapped by Weiss last month to refresh the network’s evening news program previously helmed by news giants such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

Dokoupil actually promised to be “more accountable” than Cronkite, whatever the hell that means. And yet, his awkward flubs were removed from subsequent streaming and the show’s West Coast broadcast, according to Entertainment Weekly.

The 44-year-old journalist reportedly caught Weiss’s eye after his wildly unprofessional attempt to interview author Ta-Nehisi Coates last year, which Dokoupil turned into a diatribe defending Israel and accusing the author of antisemitism. CBS staffers were reportedly not impressed by Weiss’s uninspired pick of a “mediocre white man.”

Ahead of his debut, Dokoupil previewed his show with a MAGA-coded video posted to social media railing against the “elites” and “legacy media,” complaining about coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the president’s fitness for office (not naming names) as examples of journalistic missteps—that were all copy-pasted right-wing talking points.

Dokoupil’s appointment seemingly aligns with Weiss’s journalistic North Star: staying on the Trump administration’s good side, and pulling the national discourse to an invented center that is both unrigorous and uninteresting.

Forget a conservative majority—Donald Trump personally needs Republicans to win big in the coming midterms.

The president tossed aside the significance of his allies’ local elections while speaking at the GOP retreat Tuesday, telling lawmakers that he needs the party to maintain control of the federal government in order to avoid a Democrat-led impeachment effort.

“You gotta win the midterms,” Trump said. “Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since Trump returned to office, white-knuckling every branch of the federal government. If history is any indicator, that won’t bode well for the party come this fall: In a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party loses grounds via midterms, a phenomenon known as the “presidential penalty.” Those are the basic odds, even before Trump’s devastating tariffs and wildly controversial immigration agenda are taken into account.

But early indicators—such as a healthy dose of special elections in the last year—suggest that the national backlash to Trump’s second-term agenda could be worse for the party than usual. Democrats have already seen surprising gains in unexpected areas of the country, including in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be on the verge of panic. Anxious about midterms, the White House has spent months trying to influence red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn more seats in Congress. So far, that pressure campaign has had mixed results.

The MAGA leader then went on to suggest that Republicans are too nice to impeach Democrats in turn, claiming that they could have impeached “Joe Biden for a hundred different things.” Fact check: Conservative lawmakers tried to impeach Biden several times, though each effort crashed and burned as claims of mounting evidence turned out to be bunk. In one instance, the caucus’s star witness in the Biden-Burisma bribery scandal fessed up to fabricating the story with the Russians.

Trump, meanwhile, has plenty to worry about should he lose sway over the American legislature. Over the last several months, Trump has committed acts of war against Venezuela without congressional approval, forced the National Guard into cities around the country without forward consent of local governors and mayors, signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship, was revealed to be a close confidant and longtime friend of child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and routinely attacked the foundational pillars of American democracy by challenging the bounds of the Constitution (to name a small handful of indiscretions).

That should give Democrats plenty of fodder to push Trump out of power—if they can muster the votes.

If they do, plenty of pending charges await the convicted felon—including the dormant consequences of ex–special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.

New Year, same Stephen Miller.

The often-belligerent White House deputy chief of staff delivered a screaming tirade Monday night about “tin-pot dictators” in response to a simple question about the future of Venezuela’s government, following the Trump administration’s capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

For context, Miller has been on a generational run of appearing completely unhinged while giving screaming interviews on television.

CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Miller on President Donald Trump’s sudden dismissal of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as a viable candidate to lead the country. Following Trump’s evaluation that Machado didn’t have the “respect” of her countrymen, there was some concern that he was simply acting out of pettiness because she won the Nobel Peace Prize over him.

“Why does the president think that Machado should not be the next leader; why does he think she’s weak?” Tapper asked.

Miller sputtered out a meaningless answer referencing “all Venezuela experts” who thought that installing Machado would be “absurd and preposterous.”

“So, should there be an election?” Tapper pressed.

It was a simple enough question, but growing gradually louder, Miller ranted about how the “superpower” United States could not allow Venezuela to operate drug trafficking in its own backyard.

“For years, we sent our soldiers to die in deserts in the Middle East to try to build them parliaments, to try to build them democracies, to try to give them more oil, to try to give them more resources. The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” Miller raved, now fully shouting. “This whole period that happened after World War II where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging in these vast reparation schemes—”

Miller’s framing ignores the plain fact that American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere was done entirely in the U.S. interest for oil, power, and security, not for charity.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about now,” Tapper said.

Miller recoiled, accusing Tapper of “doing that smarmy thing,” claiming that his interviewer knew exactly what he was talking about.

“I asked you about if there should be an election!” Tapper pressed again.

Miller continued to rant about ensuring “security and stability” in Venezuela, even though he had just made clear that Venezuelan interests were the furthest thing from his priorities.

“But the woman running Venezuela right now is part of the Maduro regime,” Tapper pushed back. Rather than back Machado, Trump had signaled that he would recognize Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as the face of the country.

“The reason why I was giving you that speech, which I know you didn’t want to hear, is because you’re approaching this from the wrong frame,” Miller raved. “This neoliberal frame that the United States’ job is to go around the world and demanding immediate election be held everywhere, all the time, right away—”

“No, that’s not what I think. But you invaded the country—went into the country and we seized the leader of Venezuela—” Tapper interjected.

“Damn straight we did!” Miller cried. “Because we’re not gonna let—and the point Jake, is we’re not gonna let tin-pot Communist dictators send rapists into our country, send drugs into our country, send weapons into our country, and we’re not going to let a country fall into the hands of our adversaries!”

As a feral Miller continued to rant about Venezuela’s “bright” and “incredible” future, and “one of the greatest foreign policy and military victories” in American history, Tapper gently cut him off and segued into the next segment.

America’s defense industry is about to take a shot of adrenaline straight to the veins, if the president has his way.

Speaking at the GOP retreat at the Kennedy Center Tuesday morning, Donald Trump announced that America “is going to start producing [weapons] much faster” than it has been in recent years.

The declaration followed Trump’s complaints that the U.S. and its allies have to wait “too long” to receive their weapons orders, such as “four years for a plane or five years for a helicopter,” according to the president.

“The problem is we don’t produce them fast enough,” Trump said. “We’re not letting that happen anymore.”

“We’re telling our defense contractors, ‘You’re going to start building faster,’ you know a guy makes—I have a big problem with it,” he said.

Trump then went on to claim that he was the “king” of Boeing, recalling a story in which he claimed that the country’s largest aircraft manufacturer and exporter had named him “salesman of the year.”

“I said, what about salesman of the—in the history of Boeing? I’ve sold more Boeing planes than any man in history, probably over 1,000 planes. I said, that’s the good news, but why should they wait three to four years to get a plane? They should get them immediately,” Trump said.

But Trump’s colorful and bombastic threats about war have not had the same toothless intonation since he ordered U.S. troops to invade Venezuela and kidnap its leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Saturday.

Instead, countries around the world have become alert to America’s newfound hostility with a second-term Trump as its leader. Earlier Tuesday, a coalition of seven NATO allies issued a joint statement, vocalizing their support for Denmark and Greenland against potential U.S. aggression after Trump told reporters the U.S. “needs” the Arctic island for “national defense.”

Donald Trump might get his Nobel Peace Prize after all.

In a seemingly desperate bid to regain favor with the U.S. president, the 2025 recipient of the prestigious honor—Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—offered to give her medal to Trump after he announced he would not back her to run the country she’s fought to reclaim.

“Did you at any point offer to give him the Nobel Peace Prize? Did that actually happen? I read that somewhere, I wasn’t sure if it was true,” asked Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a one-on-one interview with Machado late Monday.

“It hasn’t happened yet, but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we—the Venezuelan people … we want to give it to him, share it with him,” Machado said.

She was named the 2025 recipient for her staunch opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, becoming one of the most outspoken opponents to the authoritarian leader. She spent 11 months in hiding for daring to speak out against him, reportedly fearing for her life.

Machado dedicated her prize to Trump in September after the U.S. president unsuccessfully pined and schemed all year to win the award.

But Trump’s sudden capture of Maduro early Saturday has completely unrooted Venezuelan politics. The U.S. invasion—involving hundreds of American troops who stormed Caracas overnight—was apparently all about oil, according to Trump. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.

The attack followed months of escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, in which the Trump administration repeatedly pinned U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels, despite a resounding lack of evidence.

Later Saturday, Trump said he would not support Machado in her own bid to lead the country, telling reporters at Mar-a-Lago that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader” as she lacked sufficient “respect” in Venezuela.

He instead signaled that he would recognize Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as the face of the country. Rodríguez had also been recognized by Venezuela’s armed forces as its interim leader. She was sworn in on Monday.

In the same Saturday press conference, Trump warned that Rodríguez would pay “a very high price” if she did not “do what’s right” with regard to helping American companies access Venezuela’s oil reserves.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice quietly removed references to a fictional drug cartel led by Nicolás Maduro from its newest indictment of the kidnapped Venezuelan president.

The New York Times reported Monday that the new indictment of Maduro and others on charges related to drug trafficking omitted a crucial element of the original charges: the criminal organization that Maduro supposedly ran, Cartel de los Soles.

The original indictment filed against Maduro in March 2020 in the Southern District of New York described the Cartel de los Soles as a “drug trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking officials” that operated between 1999 and 2020.

“Under the leadership of Maduro Moros and others, the Cartel de Los Soles sought not only to enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine,” the indictment said.

But apparently, Cartel de los Soles isn’t a real organization at all. It’s a slang term invented by the Venezuelan media to describe corruption, according to the Times. The supposed cartel’s inclusion in the original indictment would be as if someone tried Trump for leading “Trumpworld” as a criminal organization.

The original indictment mentions the cartel 32 times, while the new one only mentions it twice, this time describing Cartel de los Soles as a “patronage system run by those at the top.”

The fabrication of Cartel de los Soles must be a relatively new revelation for the Trump administration. In November, the U.S. State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization led by Maduro.

The new indictment adds to the original by including additional charges of “narco-terrorism,” conspiracy to import cocaine, and gun charges, as well as charges against Maduro’s wife for allegedly accepting bribes to broker trafficking meetings.

A woman was arrested live on camera in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while talking to a local newscast about protesting the U.S. government’s sudden takeover of Venezuela.

Jessica Plichta helped Grand Rapids Opponents of War organize the turnout Saturday, which inspired dozens of locals to march through snowy city streets. But in a bizarre turn of events, Plichta’s decision to exercise her First Amendment rights ended when local authorities handcuffed her on the sidewalk while she was live on air.

“We have to apply pressure at all points that we can, this is not just a foreign issue,” Plichta said before she was arrested. “It’s our tax dollars that are also being used to commit these war crimes.”

She was reportedly arrested for obstructing a roadway and failure to obey a lawful command from an officer, according to 13 ON YOUR SIDE.

Plichta had visited Venezuela just three weeks before the Trump administration kidnapped the Latin American nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. While there, she attended an international summit, the People’s Assembly for Peace and Sovereignty of Our America, during which she said she saw Maduro “in person.”

“People loved him,” Plichta told the ABC News affiliate before her arrest. “Maduro was elected by the people. He is for the people, and the people want to see his return. Free Maduro.”

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital Caracas as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture Maduro. Trump failed to notify Congress before the invasion but didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from the America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

The invasion followed months of escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, which saw the Trump administration repeatedly pin U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels despite a resounding lack of evidence.

The Trump administration is cutting off $10 billion in funding for social services like childcare and aid for poor families in five deep blue states. 

The New York Post reported Monday that the Department of Health and Human Services will freeze funding for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The freeze will affect $7.35 billion from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program, which gives cash assistance to very poor people. The administration is also blocking $2.4 billion in Child Care Development Funding and  another $869 million from the Social Services Block Grant for all five states, citing benefits going to immigrants. 

An official from the Office of Management and Budget later confirmed the news to Axios, though all states don’t appear to have yet been notified.

The move appears to be a reaction to Minnesota’s Somali day-care scandal, which the right has latched onto.  

Regardless of the justification, this is likely just another instance of Trump going out of his way to spite American citizens, many of whom voted for him, living in states that didn’t.