Is Trump serious about Greenland? Gaming it out

President Donald Trump seems to be running out of ways to assure everyone that he’s dead-serious about taking over Greenland.

“We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not,” he said Friday.

“One way or the other, we’re gonna have Greenland,” Trump said Sunday.

“Anything less than that is unacceptable,” he added Wednesday on social media.

It’s to the point now where, if Trump doesn’t actually get Greenland, it will look a whole lot like a major second-term failure.

Yet the prospect – which Trump has floated dating back to 2019 – still seems unthinkable enough that many appear to be struggling to grasp it or figure out what to do with it.

Even in recent days, prominent Republicans who have warned Trump against the unpopular idea have layered their commentswith apparent wishful thinking that Trump doesn’t really mean it.

So what’s going on? Is Trump serious? Let’s game out a few possibilities.

He’s trolling or distracting – or expanding the Overton window

One of the most popular theories when Trump says something outlandish is that he’s just doing it for effect.

To Trump’s critics, they’re deliberate “distractions” from the really important things we should be paying attention to

To Trump’s allies, they’re wily bits of “trolling” that prove Trump’s psychological edge over his foes – four-dimensional chess, and all that.

“I mean I know that y’all — they’ve trolled y’all into taking the bait,” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said last week about Trump using the military in Greenland.

And that’s certainly possible here. Maybe Trump thinks it’s better to talk about this than persistent inflation or the ICE shooting in Minneapolis last week.

Maybe he just likes to needle everyone.

Maybe he’s trying to stretch the Overton window – that is, he’s talking about something as drastic as taking Greenland so that his other expansionist goals in the Western Hemisphere sound a little more realistic.

But we’ve also seen Trump lodge this idea for a very long time now. He often talks about it even when there’s not something that he’s obviously trying to shift attention away from.

He’s now set it up so that failing to get Greenland would be a pretty significant broken promise. He hasn’t just said this is a goal; he’s said it will happen, somehow.

This also happens to fit very neatly with what appears to be Trump’s big foreign policy initiative right now: the domination of the Western Hemisphere. His administration previewed this goal in a national security strategy document last month, and the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and efforts to commandeer control of that country’s oil in recent weeks suggest it’s a serious endeavor.

Trump certainly loves a big piece of real estate. Greenland also makes sense as a target for many of the reasons Venezuela does – strategically and natural resource-wise.

Of course, ousting Maduro with an hourslong operation – and otherwise leaving the government in place – is not the same as taking over a semiautonomous territory, which just so happens to be under the control of NATO ally Denmark.

The president has so far kept the option of military force on the table, which would be an extremely drastic option. It would apparently necessitate other NATO countries coming to Greenland’s defense under the charter’s Article 5 mutual defense provisions – against the United States.

All of which points to perhaps the most likely option: Trump is attempting to coerce Denmark and Greenland.

The United States has a longstanding defense agreement with Denmark and Greenland, dating back decades, and it has used the island for a number of different purposes. The United States actually has a historically small presencethere right now, compared to previous decades.

“I have yet to hear from this administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Wednesday on the Senate floor.

But Trump has said defense agreements wouldn’t be good enough. He’s argued that ownership is necessary because, he claims, otherwise Russia or China will take it over. He’s repeatedly alluded to Russian and Chinese ships in the area that don’t actually appear to exist.

Trump told the New York Times last week that owning Greenland is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

“I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty,” Trump said. “Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

He’s taken a maximalist approach here. And it seems we’re about to find out just how serious he is – and how much he can and will commit to that approach.