On the eve of Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders and Loro-clad business titans where the future of the free world is plotted out, President Donald Trump lobbed a grenade: an angry text, sent to Norway’s prime minister, that ratcheted up tensions between the United States and Europe, while revealing the calculus that’s driving his hostile campaign to acquire Greenland.
In the text, Trump rejected an overture from Norway’s Jonas Gahr Store to “de-escalate” his demands that Greenland be sold to the United States or taken by force. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote in the text, which was first reported by PBS News.
“That’s rhetoric that we’ve never seen from a US president before,” Ambassador Mike Carpenter, a senior director for Europe on the Biden administration’s National Security Council, told Vanity Fair. “He’s essentially saying, if you read between the lines, ‘you didn’t give me the Nobel Peace Prize, so I’m going to use coercive force to take territory from one of your neighbors.’”
The text was so striking that some on social media doubted its authenticity. But it is real. A European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me the text was forwarded to their ambassador in Washington. The text is one of those Donald Trump era shockers that unites the right and left in slack-jawed horror. Even before it was first reported, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board had published a piece decrying the Greenland campaign as “reckless” and “nonsensical.”
“This is the fucking Mad King tweeting and it’s just remarkable how many senior people in this administration have no fucking balls, no fucking spine, and are peddling this crap like it’s rational,” said one incensed former NSC official I spoke with Monday morning, who declined to be named in order to speak candidly. “Truly, those names need to be kept on a sheet of paper and remembered in the future, what they said and did at this moment.”
What of Trump’s case for why the United States needs Greenland? “The world sees this as the Mad King pontificating,” the anonymous official reiterated. “And it’s only a certain narrow circle of Americans, somehow, that is trying to gaslight themselves into believing that it’s true. It’s crazy.”
