Trump Appears to Change His Mind on Greenland After EU Threat

Donald Trump is now claiming that the “framework of a future deal” has been reached on Greenland and “the entire Arctic region.”

The president posted on Truth Social Wednesday afternoon that he had a very productive meeting with the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As a result, he wrote, a possible “solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st.”

Last week, Trump had threatened to impose tariffs against European countries that opposed his plan to annex Greenland. He may have been persuaded otherwise after European pension funds began divesting from U.S. Treasuries and the European Parliament suspended a possible trade deal with the U.S. Wednesday over his threats.

Despite Trump’s post Wednesday, his dream of annexing Greenland still seems unlikely, given that Rutte and NATO do not control the territory, Denmark does. Both the elected leadership of Denmark and Greenland have said any discussions about Greenland’s future is up to them, not the United States, and that the island is not for sale.

Trump also wrote that “Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and various others, as needed, will be responsible for the negotiations—They will report directly to me.” It’s a rather large question mark as to what will actually be the subject of the negotiations.

Vance is not well thought of by European leaders, and has insulted them on several occasions. A meeting between Vance, Rubio, and the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark in the White House last week was over very quickly, giving the impression that it didn’t go well, especially considering NATO countries deployed troops to Greenland the next day. That does not bode well for these new negotiations.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wants to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t mix up Greenland and Iceland—but he did. Multiple times.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday, Trump repeatedly and erroneously mixed up Greenland with Iceland, a completely separate landmass and independent nation. The gaffe sparked concern that Trump, who has been showing increasing signs of cognitive decline, had no idea what country he was even demanding to own.

Once again demonstrating her fierce commitment to truth-telling, Leavitt tried to defend the president by lying about something that everyone heard.

“President Trump appeared to mix up Greenland and Iceland around three times,” NewsNation’s Libbey Dean wrote on X after the speech.

“No he didn’t, Libby,” Leavitt responded. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is. You’re the only one mixing anything up here.”

She included an image of Greenland, which appeared to be a large mass of ice. Regardless of what was written in Trump’s prepared remarks, the president claimed the territory was “Iceland” multiple times—another place entirely.

Watch what Trump said for yourself:

Senator Ted Cruz appears to be leaving Texas yet again ahead of another major winter storm.

The third-term lawmaker was photographed boarding a flight to Laguna Beach, California, Tuesday, sparking concerns online that the lawmaker’s controversial history of ditching his constituents (and dog) amid bad weather was morphing into an inevitable bad habit.

Cruz’s office told Houston Public Media Wednesday, when the photo took off on social media, that he left on a work trip planned several weeks ago, and that he would be back in Texas before the storm arrived.

“Senator Cruz is currently on pre-planned work travel that was scheduled weeks in advance,” a spokesperson for Cruz said. “He will be back in Texas before the storm is projected to hit.”

Texas is gearing up for another potentially disastrous ice storm this week that is expected to batter the north and central regions of the state. Governor Greg Abbott preemptively declared a state of emergency to handle the imminent freeze, prompting state agencies to actively monitor Texas’s electrical grid and oil supplies.

When asked to confirm if Cruz had left for Laguna Beach, his spokesperson said: “You have the tweet with the pic.”

The scene is remarkably reminiscent of one of Cruz’s worst moments in 2021, when he bailed on his community—and his dog—to fly to Cancun during a historic winter storm that crashed Texas’s power grid, leaving millions without heat or electricity for several days.

But that wasn’t the only time Cruz was missing in action during a Lone Star State emergency. Last July, when floods killed at least 135 people in central Texas, Cruz was busy vacationing in Greece. He caught a flight back two days later, in what his office said was the “first flight home.”

The Trump administration is ordering active-duty military police soldiers to be ready to deploy to Minneapolis.

MS NOW, citing three unnamed sources, reports that an Army military police brigade unit stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was issued “prepare to deploy” orders Tuesday. At least a few hundred soldiers are now getting ready to potentially go to the city, which has been rocked by violence from federal agents following the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer.

“We have nothing to announce at this time, and any tip about this is pre-decisional,” a Department of Defense official told MS NOW.

This latest order comes after news of another deployment from Friday. Two battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, stationed in Alaska and specially trained to operate in winter weather, were also issued orders to be ready to deploy. There are at least 500 soldiers in a battalion.

Last summer, the Trump administration deployed 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, where they mostly guarded federal buildings, including an immigration detention center. That deployment was found to be illegal in federal court. If soldiers are deployed to Minneapolis, they would have to refrain from enforcing the law against civilians, otherwise they would be violating the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, as Trump was found to have done in Los Angeles.

President Trump has been simultaneously threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and claiming that he doesn’t need to do so in order to use federal troops to put down what he sees as a “rebellion.” Either way, not only is he threatening the Constitution and the stability of the U.S., but he would also be following the example of a dictator, which, oddly enough, he just said he wants to be.

President Trump, who has a lengthy résumé of authoritarian tendencies, thinks that sometimes “you need a dictator.”

“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said on Wednesday, speaking of the long-winded, indignant, and incredibly boring address he gave earlier that day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case.… It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”

This kind of talk—which Trump has all but normalized—sheds further light on his aggressive, antagonistic approach to diplomacy, especially after he spent the morning threatening Europe, Canada, Greenland, and, bizarrely, Iceland.

“As I [have] always said, he is at his most honest when he is at his most malevolent and depraved,” George Conway commented on X.