The United States has been trying to annex Greenland for centuries.
The massive island in the Artic—which is home to 56,000 people and holds vast oil and mineral reserves—is currently an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward planned to purchase Greenland, but it fell apart; in 1946, President Harry S. Truman tried to buy it for $100 million. He failed, too.
The most recent attempt at grabbing Greenland came in President Donald Trump’s first term in office. As the New York Times journalist Peter Baker and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser reported in their book The Divider, an unexpected friend of Trump’s planted the idea: cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder (of Estée Lauder, the $29 billion makeup brand).
The billionaire reportedly pitched Trump on buying Greenland—though by 2019, Trump was claiming it as his own brainchild. According to the Times, Lauder “offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate.”
The two men have a long relationship. Lauder and Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business together. Since 2016, Lauder has donated well over a million dollars to pro-Trump organizations. In 2022, he reportedly backed away from supporting Trump. Lauder’s donations on OpenSecrets show over $8000 sent to Nikki Haley’s campaign in October 2023. It seems things have been patched up since then. The billionaire, according to reporting from CBS News, attended Trump’s inauguration.
Lauder’s motives for introducing the idea of buying Greeland are unclear. As Trump told Baker and Glasser in 2021, the idea was “not so different” from his own approach to real estate development in New York City. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,” Trump explained.
“I love maps,” the president continued. “And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ”
Lauder has not publicly commented on Trump taking credit for thinking of buying Greenalnd himself. (Lauder, who recently retired from Estée Lauder’s board, did not respond to a request for comment.) According to Baker and Glasser, the billionaire reportedly offered to go to Greenland and help facilitate the purchase himself. “A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Trump told an adviser at the time.
Still, the cosmetics mogul—whose net worth is estimated at $4.7 billion—has a history of throwing himself and his money into various right-wing causes and campaigns in New York State. (He was, in this way, an early adopter of the au-courant embrace of the right-wing among American luxury fashion brands.)
Lauder has been one of the largest donors in New York politics for at least 20 years, a legacy which includes a failed self-funded bid for New York City mayor in 1989, in which he ran to the right of Rudy Giuliani. And this isn’t his first time involving himself in international affairs, either. A staunch supporter of the state of Israel, Lauder has aligned himself with the right-wing Israeli Likud party traditionally (stepping away to criticize the right in a rare move in 2018). When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was running for Prime Minister in the mid-1990s, Lauder allegedly helped bankroll that campaign, though he denied those reports at the time. Lauder is currently the head of the World Jewish Congress. In response to the University of Pennsylvania’s choice to hold a Palestinian literary festival in fall 2023, Lauder and other billionaires loudly withdrew donations from the university
Though Lauder’s exact reasoning on Greenland is not clear, current explanations for grabbing the island are varied and becoming talking points beyond backrooms in the State Department.
Both Democratic and Republican leaders have cast Greenland as potentially critical to national security in a warming world. The island hosted American nuclear weapons storage during the Cold War and is located on the shortest air route between the United States and Russia. And while its rare-earth mineral deposits are notoriously difficult and expensive to access, that hasn’t stopped American leaders from eyeing them.
In Trump’s case, the initial motivation may have been the whim of a cosmetics billionaire. But he took it seriously enough that he assigned then-national security adviser John Bolton to head a committee investigating the matter. At certain points, he suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico to fund the purchase, as reported in The Divider.
Then, as now, the people of Greenland were not interested. 90 percent of Greenland’s population is indigenous, and a majority of Greenlanders support independence from Denmark—to say nothing of the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte B. Egede, spent much of January saying the same things Greenlanders said the first time around: that they are not simply a topic for theoretical discussion, but a people with their own economic and political interests.
“We don’t want to be Americans,” Egede said Tuesday. “Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.”
As reported in The Divider, Bolton essentially slow-walked the Greenland purchase idea until he resigned from his post in late 2019.
But, this time, Bolton is one of the people pushing the whole Greenland thing back into the mainstream. In an early-January interview with Bari Weiss, of the Free Press, he confirmed that to his knowledge, Lauder raised the idea initially. And then signed on to purchase the island, for more Bolton-esque, geopolitical reasons: “With global warming, that Northwest passage becomes a more viable maritime route,” he told the Free Press. In 2022, Bolton used similarly expansionist rhetoric—citing Chinese and Russian influence in the Arctic—as reason enough to force the annexation of Greenland.
For some Republican senators, the reasons are less realpolitik and more morale-oriented. “Does anyone regret the Louisiana Purchase or the acquisition of Alaska?,” asked Congressman Mike Rulli (R-Ohio), in a press release attached to a bill sponsored by Congressman Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), titled the “Make Greenland Great Again Act.”
Under international law, you cannot just buy a colonial territory. But Trump hasn’t ruled out the use of military force or aggressive tariffs—and the “Make Greenland Great Again Act” would formally authorize him to “enter negotiations” with the King of Denmark over Greenland.
The acquisition, Rep. Rulli said, would “restore national pride and optimism.” And it would do so by restoring explicit colonialism to the American people—something echoed in Trump’s inaugural address, in which he called for the United States to return to what it’s done for most of its history, and start conquering territory outside its borders again.
“President Trump’s vision for Greenland is exactly what is needed to reignite the spirit of Manifest Destiny that once propelled Americans to greatness,” Rulli said. “A historic presidency deserves a historic beginning. Let’s Make Greenland Great Again!”
In Trump’s mind, this Manifest Destiny, too, is “just real estate,” Bolton said. “He wants to put a Trump casino in Nuuk.”
