FJORD TO TRUMP: DROP DEAD
Denmark mocks Don’s desire to buy Greenland
Trump wants to buy Greenland. But Denmark says he just can’t af-fjord it.
President Trump has repeatedly mentioned buying Greenland in recent weeks even though it’s not clear why he wants the giant Arctic island or how much he thinks the American taxpayer should pay.
Most important of all: the mineral rich island is absolutely, positively not for sale.
“It must be an April Fools Day joke … but totally out of season,” wrote Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark, which controls Greenland as a semiautonomous territory.
“We’re open for business, not for sale,” tweeted Greenland’s government after hearing about Trump’s interest.
Presidential aides initially thought Trump was joking when he first mentioned purchasing the sprawling territory northeast of Canada, which is 1-1/2 times the size of Alaska, has about 56,000 residents and is packed with picturesque glaciers.
But the White House underlings started to take him seriously after he kept on mentioning the issue, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the ice on the story.
Needless to say, the locals are less than impressed with the idea.
“We take it as a sick joke by a crazy president,” Anna Kûitse Kúko, 63, an English teacher in the village of Tasiilaq, told NBC News after an intrepid reporter interrupted her vacation to get some reaction.
Enough of the chit-chat. How much would the place cost?
Estimates vary wildly from a dirt cheap $200 million (based on the fire sale price the U.S. paid to Russia for Alaska) to a cool $1.7 trillion (if you take its GDP and treat it the way you would treat a Wall Street-listed company’s earnings).
But hey, Native Americans “sold” Manhattan for a cool $24 so maybe Trump thinks he can talk Denmark down.
It wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. has floated an offer for the icy isle. President Andrew Johnson was the first to express interest, and get rebuffed, in 1867.
After World War II, President Harry Truman apparently offered $100 million for Greenland (worth almost $1.4 billion today) after World War II, citing its geopolitical importance.
And at least one congressman, Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher, thinks the idea is still a “smart geopolitical move.”
“This should absolutely be on the table,” he tweeted Friday.
And because we knew you were gonna ask: There is one golf course, a challenging nine-hole set of links in the capital of Nuuk, where duffers battle nasty gale-force gusts and snow squalls to keep their handicap from rocketing.