After Donald Trump suggested he might take over Greenland by force, the consensus among the island’s population appears to be bewilderment and anxiety.
Christian Ulloriaq Jeppesen remembers how this all started.
In 2019, during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president, Mr. Trump floated the idea of the United States buying the island of Greenland. At the time, most people in Greenland (and Denmark, the European country that controls it) thought his suggestion was a joke.
“Everyone said, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t just buy a country, he doesn’t mean it,’” Mr. Jeppesen, a native Greenlander and a radio producer, said by telephone. “Obviously that was the wrong way to take it. Look at where we are today.”
Now Mr. Trump has doubled down on his insistence that the United States needs to annex Greenland for security reasons. And that has Greenlanders asking the same questions as everyone else, but with a lot more urgency.
Is Mr. Trump just being bombastic again, floating a fanciful annexation plan that he may know is a stretch?
Or is he serious?
Based on his comments in the last few weeks, Mr. Trump appears completely serious. Never mind that Denmark’s leadership has said the territory is not for sale, and its future must be determined by the local population.
“For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Mr. Trump wrote in late December in a social media post announcing his choice for ambassador to Denmark.