President Donald Trump tweeted a humorous meme on Monday about his reported interest in purchasing Greenland from Denmark for the United States, showing a gold high-rise tower rising along the rocky, glacial coastline.
“I promise not to do this to Greenland!” the president joked.
The meme appears to have been the work of Jon Gabriel, editor-in-chief of Ricochet, a conservative online publication. Gabriel tweeted an image of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, photoshopped into an image of the tiny town of Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland. He added the caption: “Greenland in 10 years.”
The U.S. has offered to buy Greenland before, though not since President Harry S. Truman. It occupies a strategic position in the Arctic and is thought to be rich in resources — although many of them are inaccessible beneath a massive ice sheet. The island also occupies a key position along the flight path between Europe and many cities in the continental U.S.
Trump has said the purchase of the island is under consideration, though not a high priority. His critics have mocked the idea, and Greenland’s foreign minister, Ane Lone Bagger, told Reuters: “We are open for business, but we’re not for sale.”
However, as Trump once wrote in The Art of the Deal, “To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big” (p. 46).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.