FILE PHOTO: A member of the French armed forces walks on ice during a military drill as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian home guard units together with Danish, German and French troops take part in joint military drills in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, September 17, 2025. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File Photo
According to former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Miles Taylor, President Donald Trump initially proposed acquiring Greenland during his first presidency. Taylor, who served in the first Trump Administration but is now an outspoken Never Trumper, told MS NOW that conservative Trump officials, at the time, thought the proposal was absurd. But Trump revisited the idea during his second presidency and is being much more aggressive this time.
Officials in Greenland and its parent country, Denmark, were hoping that U.S. President Donald Trump would abandon his talk of annexing Greenland. Instead, Trump is doubling down.
On Air Force One, Trump told reporters, "We need Greenland.… It's so strategic right now." And he had a very threatening tone when, during a press conference with oil executives on Friday, January 9, he said, "We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not. If we don't do it the easy way, we'll do it the hard way."
In an article published on January 12, CNN's Matt Egan lays out some of the challenges the United States would face if it annexed Greenland.
"Although Trump has recently downplayed Greenland's natural resources," Egan explains, "his former national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News, in 2024, that the administration's focus on Greenland was 'about critical minerals' and 'natural resources.' But the reality is that Denmark's ownership of Greenland is not what's stopping the United States from tapping the island’s treasure trove. It's the punishing Arctic environment."
Egan continues, "Researchers say it would be extremely difficult and expensive to extract Greenland's minerals because many of the island's mineral deposits are located in remote areas above the Arctic Circle, where there is a mile-thick polar ice sheet and darkness reigns much of the year. Not only that, but Greenland, a self-ruling territory of Denmark, lacks the infrastructure and manpower required to make this mining dream a reality."
One of those researchers is Malte Humpert, a founder of The Arctic Institute.
Humpert told CNN, "The idea of turning Greenland into America's rare-earth factory is science fiction. It's just completely bonkers. You might as well mine on the moon. In some respects, it's worse than the moon."
Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics told CNN, "If there was a 'pot of gold' waiting at the end of the rainbow in Greenland, private businesses would have gone there already."
Read Matt Egan's full CNN article at this link.