January 20, 2025

Trump, Greenland, and the Power of the Bully Pulpit

Presidents have remarkable power to quickly transform extreme or taboo ideas into the stuff of mainstream discourse.

Donald Trump’s comments about Greenland at his rambling Mar-a-Lago press conference on Jan. 7 were bizarre, menacing, and unforeseen. In an hourlong session that featured his views on everything from shower heads that don’t deliver enough water to changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to how electric heaters cause itching, the president-elect made the biggest splash by telling reporters that he would not rule out using military or economic power to gain control of Greenland, which has been a sovereign Danish territory for centuries.

“People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security,” Trump said. If Danish officials don’t cooperate with his bid to take over Greenland, he added, “then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.”

Trump raised the subject of Greenland last month, when he announced in a Truth Social post that he was going to nominate tech investor Ken Howery as ambassador to Copenhagen. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” he wrote, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” That sounded merely like a cruder, more insistent version of Trump’s offer to buy Greenland that he floated briefly in 2019 during his first presidency. His social media post came across as the usual Trumpian hyperbole, not a threat.

But it absolutely sounded like a threat when he was asked on Jan. 7 if he would “assure the world that … you are not going to use military or economic coercion” to obtain Greenland (he was also asked about the Panama Canal) and his answer was a terse “No.”

It isn’t surprising when Vladimir Putin speaks like that about Ukraine or Xi Jinping about Taiwan. But no American president has deployed such rhetoric in a century and half, not since James K. Polk threatened war (“Fifty-four Forty or Fight!”) if Great Britain didn’t surrender a vast swath of territory in the Pacific Northwest. For a president today, when America is the linchpin of the international liberal order, to even hint at pursuing territorial expansion by force — force against a close democratic ally, no less — is simply unheard of. Even for Trump, reckless and capricious as he often is, this was crazy talk. Why would anyone give it credence?

The Dispatch, a conservative-but-not-MAGA media site, put it well: “We don’t consider it our job to follow the once and future president down every rabbit hole he fancies. There’s enough coverage of his more outlandish statements already; we don’t need to add to the noise — particularly when it comes to off-the-cuff asides that don’t end up mattering much.”

But on the way to waving off Trump’s bullying comments about annexing Greenland as too absurd to waste time on, a funny thing happened:

The Overton window shifted.

Coined in the 1990s, the term “Overton window” refers to the range of policies or views that the public considers reasonable or at least debatable. As the Overton window shifts, once-unthinkable ideas become acceptable. Such changes are often slow-moving — think of how long it took for women’s suffrage or same-sex marriage to become broadly acceptable, for example.

But overnight, Trump’s insistence on acquiring Greenland seemed to go from ridiculous to almost reasonable.

On Jan. 8, The Wall Street Journal devoted 1,500 words to explaining “What Trump Wants With Greenland,” noting that the island’s “ample deposits in rare earths, oil and gas, as well as its commanding position astride crucial trade and military arteries, have made it a focal point for major rival powers including the U.S., China and Russia.” Foreign Policy weighed in the following day, with an equally lengthy examination of Greenland’s strategic value to Washington. “The island’s location makes it an essential part of the US military’s early-warning system for ballistic missiles,” the magazine’s Christina Lu reported. She quoted at face value a comment from former national security advisor Robert O'Brien: “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the island, the US will have to step in.”

The Economist, though it urged Trump “to retract his threat of force,” made the case that buying Greenland, whether from Denmark or from Greenlanders themselves, “could be the deal of the century.” Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, also crunched the numbers: “The United States really could make better use of the island than Denmark does,” he concluded. Bloomberg published an essay by James Stavridis, a retired US Navy admiral and former supreme commander of NATO, on why “Trump Is Right: Greenland Is Vital to US National Security.” Probably “no sale or military annexation is in the offing,” Stavridis wrote, but there are numerous ways for Washington to increase its defense resources in Greenland — everything from deploying the Coast Guard to taking the lead in special operations and firefighting.

In no time at all, the urgency of heightening America’s influence in Greenland became a topic of discourse everywhere, from think tanks to the House of Representatives to the confirmation hearings on Trump’s nominee for defense secretary to the latest Suffolk University/USA Today opinion poll. (Most respondents rejected Trump’s demand for Greenland, but a substantial minority — 40 percent — thought US ownership of Greenland was “a good idea.”) The front page of the New York Post depicted Trump with a map of North America on which Greenland was renamed “Our Land.”

Some of this was mere noise, some was more serious, but all of it reflected the normalizing of an idea that would have been universally deemed abnormal before this month. “I didn’t have on my bingo card that the first major national security crisis of the Trump presidency could be a showdown between the United States and Denmark,” Max Boot observed in a discussion with Washington Post analysts, “but here we are.”

All of which is a reminder that presidents have remarkable power to quickly transform extreme or taboo ideas into the stuff of mainstream discourse.

Recall Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China in 1972. The United States had no diplomatic relations with Beijing in the first decades of the Cold War; the idea of engaging with Mao Zedong’s regime was considered politically toxic. Nixon’s announcement in July 1971 that he would visit mainland China the following year stunned the world, dramatically undermining the stigma against engaging diplomatically with Mao’s totalitarian regime.

Thirty years earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass detention of Japanese Americans, likewise legitimized a policy that would previously have been deemed unimaginable in a democracy.

Examples abound. Ronald Reagan’s proposal for a missile defense shield, initially mocked as “star wars,” shifted the Overton window on the feasibility of destroying enemy missiles before they could reach their target — a technology now at the heart of defense systems like Israel’s Iron Dome. Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military in 1948, bitterly resented by many at the time, became a major catalyst of the civil rights movement.

The national discourse, for better or worse, is acutely sensitive to what presidents say and do. Whether Trump’s fixation on Greenland will leave a lasting mark or fade into irrelevance, it underscores something important: When the leader of the free world speaks, even the absurd can suddenly seem worth debating.

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