Greenland: Trump’s biggest deal yet?
“Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland, because of course he does,” said Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star. The real estate mogul turned president has been talking about it to his staff for months. “If only they had tittered, the world might have been spared this.” But instead Trump’s sycophants resorted to their customary “Right as usual, Mr. President” or “Do you know that Nuuk doesn’t have a single decent hotel?” As a result of their cowardice, Trump really is talking publicly about making an unsolicited offer to purchase a glacier-covered expanse of emptiness owned by Denmark and inhabited by just 56,000 hardy Inuits. “We’ll talk to them about it,”
Trump said. “Essentially, it’s a large real estate deal.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen immediately pushed back, insisting, “Greenland is not for sale.” Here to America’s north, we sincerely hope the Danes stand firm. For surely, “after buying Greenland, Trump will turn his eye on Canada.”
“Don’t laugh,” said Quin Hillyer in Washington Examiner.com. “Trump’s idea of buying Greenland isn’t entirely wacky.” At 836,330 square miles, the world’s largest island is rich in rare earth metals needed by industry and is of great strategic importance as a bulwark against Russia’s expansionist designs on the Arctic. Indeed, it’s a “brilliant idea,” said Matthew Walther in TheWeek.com. “The only real upside” to global warming is that it’s melting glaciers in Greenland that cover vast mineral resources. America might as well profit from the climate catastrophe by mining all of that suddenly accessible ore.
So what’s a fair price for Greenland? asked Christopher Ingraham in The Washington Post. Alaska’s a good comparison, and the U.S. bought it from Russia for a mere $7.2 million in 1867, or $130 million in today’s dollars. In 1946, President Truman considered offering Denmark $100 million in gold ($1.4 billion today) for Greenland. But both those figures seem “awfully low.” Perhaps we should just trust Trump on this one. Back in 2011, when Trump’s dream of occupying the White House seemed absurd, he appeared on a Discovery Channel program called Curiosity: What’s America Worth? He insisted it was possible to put a dollar value on the entire country. Staring intensely into the camera, our future president said: “Everything has a price.”