Donald Trump Jr. in Greenland: the Trumpist imperial project of a Great America in two exclusive maps

Don Jr.’s announced visit to Greenland today, Tuesday, January 7, has sparked much speculation about the reasons for his trip. Since December, President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to purchase or annex the constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark during his second term.

• Greenland’s Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Mininnguaq Kleist, said the visit was not of an official nature. Don Jr. is not expected to meet representatives of the Greenlandic government, as neither he nor his father currently hold positions within the American administration.
• The Danish press is following the sequence with great attention, with several media even having devoted live coverage to the plane’s landing.

• Several analysts were surprised by the cancellation of the visit of the Prime Minister of Greenland Múte B. Egede to the King of Denmark Frederik which was to take place tomorrow, Wednesday January 8 in Copenhagen . The Prime Minister delivered a New Year’s speech which seemed to respond to Donald Trump’s statements, by relaunching the debate on independence: “it is time to take a new step for our country”.

• According to sources consulted by ReutersDon Jr.’s trip is reportedly to film video content for a podcast . The show launched in January 2023 by the president-elect’s son, “Triggered with Don Jr.”, is the most listened to on Rumble, a platform very popular with the American conservative right. The president-elect, however, welcomed this trip on Truth Social, before relaunching his ambition to annex Canada.

Greenland is one of the multiple facets of the imperialist project designed by Trump and his allies.

• For several days we have been witnessing an acceleration in the rhetoric of the next President of the United States, systematically targeting several sovereign territorial areas.
• In particular, alongside Greenland, which he had already proposed to buy in 2019, Donald Trump has signaled on numerous occasions his intention to make Canada “the 51st American state” and to “retake control of the Panama Canal” .

This project would mark a historic break. As the American historian Daniel Immerwahr shows, the United States was built politically by denying its imperial project and refusing territorial expansion since roughly the Second World War.

• Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who had governed both the Philippines and Puerto Rico — two annexed territories — admitted that the United States was not “fit to carry out a long-term colonial objective. » Rexford Tugwell, governor of Puerto Rico, agreed, saying that the United States was “unsuitable for colonial administration.”
• More recently, George W. Bush declared in his first foreign policy speech: “America has never been an empire. We are perhaps the only great power that had the opportunity to become an empire, but refused it, preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

In Trumpist circles, a map showing an America extending to the Mediterranean and the South China Sea has been viewed more than 5 million times on X, Elon Musk’s social network .

The map above originated from the American discussion site Reddit. It would have been posted there for the first time three years ago in a sub-section of the site (subreddit) dedicated to “alternative history” through the prism of cartography .

• This is part of the current “ Ameriwank », a trend that emerged on the Internet in the early 2000s in which users reinvent the cartography of a country, in this case the United States, by imagining an alternative history. This map, probably seen by a significant part of the Trumpist world, initially consisted of imagining what the geography of the United States would look like if all the territories temporarily occupied or having been the subject of claims — more or less advanced — had been incorporated into the country.
• Among the most shared messages on built magnificent cities and sent men to the moon. America deserves a future as great as its past.”
• “Mr. Trump’s proposal was a serious idea and it is even more serious today than it was when he first proposed it. Expansion is a time-honored American tradition. (In a fundamental sense, this is the very essence of the American ethic).”

In this representation of a Great America we find Greenland and Canada, but also a planetary expansion.

• Northeastern Sicily, used for its ports by the American army during the Second World War, the island of Cuba (occupied following the Spanish-American War of 1898), the German port of Bremen (used for the supply of the American occupation zone in Germany from 1945 to 1949) or the islands of Mindanao and Luzon in the Philippines (occupied by the forces of General MacArthur in 1945).

The vast majority of Canadians oppose any incorporation of their country into the United States. According to a poll conducted in December, only 13% would be in favor of the idea of ​​“becoming the 51st American state”. However, men are significantly more in favor of it than women: 19% on average compared to 7%. .

• Trump believes that “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity for the United States for reasons of national security and global freedom.”
• When he was president, Greenland was only mentioned 5 times in the 19 pages of the Department of Defense’s Arctic strategy published in June 2019. .
• Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton says president-elect wants to ‘build a casino in Nuuk’, Greenland’s capital . However, he recalls that this idea – suggested to Trump by Ronald Lauder, according to Bolton – occupied the president a lot in 2019 but that the exploration of the feasibility of the project had been abandoned internally due to the too much publicity given by Trump before to have been able to study all the possibilities. In August 2019, Trump himself declared that the purchase of Greenland was “essentially […] a major real estate transaction. With Don Jr.’s visit to Greenland, the president-elect’s strategy appears to be the opposite.
• By reactivating the notion of Habitat – Bolton, who is however considered a hawk by MAGA Trumpists – legitimizes this annexation based on a vital American interest. The Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, is in fact closer to Washington than to Copenhagen: “if you look at a map [le Groenland] is part of the North American landmass, making it a vital security interest for the United States.”

Trump’s purchase of Greenland would be the largest territorial acquisition in US history in terms of area, surpassing the Louisiana Sale of 1803. During his New Year’s speech, Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede said appeared to open the door to an independence referendum and now seems to set the conditions for a possible deal.