Why Trump’s 'meaningless' obsession was always going to fail: Michael Wolff

Donald Trump's pursuit of Greenland appears to be winding down for the time being, and according to his one-time biographer, this particular obsession was always "meaningless" and doomed to go nowhere.

Michael Wolff is a veteran reporter and author best known for his book Fire & Fury, a behind-the-scenes account of the tumultuous first Trump administration. In a recent episode of his podcast for the Daily Beast, "Inside Trump's Head," he argued that the president's bluster about Greenland was never actually about achieving anything tangible or gaining territory for the U.S., but rather it was about feeding his desire for attention.

“We are some of the few people who said from the beginning this means nothing,” Wolff explained to his co-host, Joanna Coles. “He is not going to take Greenland. He is not going to apply these tariffs. This is meaningless.”

He continued: "The only meaning here is that this is a new Trump chapter, which will close. He’s going to squeeze this for all of the attention he can get... and it is really an offering to him because it’s attention.”

For most of the new year so far, Trump has escalated his assertion that the U.S. must annex Greenland from Denmark, giving various vague rationales based on "national security" concerns that critics said did not make any real sense. In the face of fierce opposition to this campaign from European leaders, Trump threatened to levy new tariffs against any nation that did not back his plan to take Greenland.

Despite all that, after meeting with several leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Trump backed off these plans and said that no tariffs would be issued, claiming that a tentative agreement had been reached on a deal to give the U.S. more presence in Greenland. Reports indicate that this might include granting the U.S. sovereignty over certain pockets of land on the Arctic island for defense purposes.

Wolff argued further that this push for Greenland acted for Trump as both a way to distract people from less flattering stories, like the Epstein files, and to help keep him at the center of the global political conversation.

“I think people understand this,” Wolff said. “He distracts from whatever happened yesterday. He distracts with whatever happens today. But the distraction in itself—whatever he does—also has this value to him, which is attention. That’s what he wants. He is one more day at the center of the world... One of his aides said to me, ‘You know, he sets these fires constantly, but it’s really not the fire that he focuses on. What he focuses on is the fire engines rushing to put the fire out.'"