This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
The polling couldn’t be clearer: Americans definitely don’t want to conquer Greenland. They are not even sold on buying the semiautonomous territory that is part of Denmark and, importantly, not for sale.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
That has not muted President Donald Trump’s zeal for acquiring the world’s largest island and on Wednesday he doubled-down on his real estate DNA to buy, buy, buy. “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security,” Trump posted on social media hours before the top diplomats from Greenland and Denmark met for about 90 minutes at the White House with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Anything less than that is unacceptable.”
It’s a bold escalation against one the United States’ most consistent allies, a move that has left European diplomats, U.S. business executives, and even Republicans here in Washington increasingly bewildered. “I am sick of stupid,” Sen. Thom Tillis said last week in a speech about Trump’s expansionist dreams—a rare demonstration of a Republican in Congress showing they still have a spine.
But there remains a rub that leaves the President’s naysayers smarting: virtually no politician can move public opinion like Trump can among his fellow Republicans. Two weeks before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Economist-YouGov poll found just 22% of Americans supported military action; after, it hit 40%. The main source of that jump? Support among Republicans almost doubled from 43% to 78%.
Still, it’s one thing to dethrone a brutal autocrat in a narco-state. It’s quite another to try to seize a sparsely populated plot of Arctic land. Trump is not wrong to see the geo-strategic value in the territory; Greenland sits under the most likely route for ballistic missiles to fly from Russia to the United States. He may well be very wrong in gauging the appetite for action, especially if it threatens a post-World War II peace held together by NATO.
A raft of recent polling suggests Greenland remains a tough sell, even for someone as skilled as Trump. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week found just 17% of Americans want action on Greenland. But the partisan divide is worth heeding: 40% of Republicans approved while a meager 2% of Democrats said the same. On the question of using force, it was even more grim for the White House: 71% opposed it, including 60% of Republicans and 89% of Democrats. And on the existential question about the value of the NATO alliance, 40% of Republicans said they were concerned that Trump’s efforts to take Greenland could threaten the alliance. Among Democrats, that fear hits an almost unanimous 91%.
The Reuters numbers are not simple one-offs, either. Overall, 55% of Americans oppose the hypothetical purchase of Greenland, including 22% of Republicans, according to separate polling from Quinnipiac University. When using force is put on the table, a whopping 86% oppose the idea, including 68% of Republicans.
Trump has repeatedly shown an indifference to polling or policy that doesn’t match his perceptions. He has a history of seizing on an idea and running at it, often counting on his political base to fall in line and offset his toxic drag with Democrats. The question is often how long until his interest shifts. Recall, for a while there he was determined to make Canada a U.S. state before swerving to other fancies. He did not grow bored with the buzz about how to handle unrest in Venezuela. Ultimately, he simply decided to storm that nation and haul its leader to New York to face drug charges.
Hence, the serious stakes as one of the strangest diplomatic crises of the Trump era appeared to escalate on Wednesday. Ahead of an uneventful meeting at the White House, Denmark announced it was to increase “military presence in and around Greenland in the coming period, involving aircraft, ships, and soldiers” in cooperation with NATO allies. From the White House came a different message: a cartoon of Greenland dogsleds facing a choice between the White House or the Great Wall of China and the Russian Kremlin. Sticking with Denmark, in the drawing, was not an option, which explains why so many are unable to write this latest Trump tantrum as something that can be ridden out. The big unknown, of course, is how long Trump is willing to stay selling the idea, and whether Republicans will bend to his predilections.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
Leave a comment
