The NPR Politics Podcast - Defiant Trump continues calls for acquiring Greenland

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

The president continued his fight to acquire the Danish self-governing territory of Greenland during a speech billed as an address related to domestic affordability issues. We explain what happened.Then, members of Congress met with Danish and Greenlandic officials in Copenhagen last week to discuss the increased tensions with the U.S. We talk about how the meetings went, and what Danes are thinking about it all.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced and edited by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Data Bricks, the data and AI company. Are your AI agents working? Most aren't reliable for business. You need AI that's accurate. Agent Bricks, AI agents grounded in your data and built for your goals. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast for Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. I'm Miles Parks, and I cover voting. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we are recording this podcast at 1220. p.m. just a few hours after President Trump addressed the World Economic Forum, a meeting of business officials and world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. And ahead of this speech, Danielle, the White House was framing this as a speech on affordability that he was going to address a thing that is on many voters' minds, the rising cost of living in America. But I gather he hit a lot more than that. Yes, which, you know, is not surprising if you ever listened to a Trump speech, which I know we all have. I've heard a few. Yeah, I mean, as have our listeners probably. Yeah, because he always goes in many, many different directions, which is something he did hear. And I mean, first of all, one striking thing was that he got into a lot of sort of campaign speech territory. He railed against Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative from Minnesota.

He insulted Somalia and Somali people. He, you know, talked about the 2020 election and said it was rigged. So lots of stuff that usually fits into one of his stump speeches here in the U.S. But of course, the thing that got the most attention quite understandably was Greenland, because in the run-up to Davos this year, Trump was really antagonizing U.S. allies with continued insistence that the U.S. get to acquire it from Denmark. A big headline coming out of this speech was that he did say that he was not going to use military force to take Greenland. Let's just listen. We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable.

But I won't do that. Okay? Now everyone's saying, oh, good. That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. Domenico, I still don't feel like this is exactly reassuring the international community on the Greenland issue.

Well, right. I mean, Trump was vacillated back and forth on this. He started talking about Greenland early in his presidency. Then it sort of went away. Then after Venezuela and the action that the U.S. took there militarily, suddenly Greenland became another discussion point. Now, you know, look, there's a lot of domestic politics behind this, too, because really there's very little support. You've heard Republicans on Capitol Hill even say that they don't think that the president should do this. It's not something that you hear them do often about anything. But look, Trump's musings are, also kind of a volatility. And, you know, people aren't quite sure where he's going to land at any given day, at any given moment. Yeah. And that quote that you played, to me, there are two ways you can take that. Because, again, what he said was, listen, I could use force. And if I did, the U.S. military would be unstoppable in taking over Greenland. However, I'm not going to use force. I don't think I will. Now, you can take that, I think, in a couple of ways. One is that, Trump just can't help himself in saying, hey, we're the best, we got the best military,

our military can do anything, which, you know, plausible that he thinks that. The other way of taking it is, hey, look, I got this big army here. It could do a lot of damage, but I'm not going to do that, but just so you know I got this. And like Domenico says, we don't know what's in Trump's head. I mean, no one does, and he is very unpredictable, so we're not sure what he's saying here. I'm craving a sense of zooming out on Trump's thinking right now because I think when you take this speech at Davos in this traditional place where you have the entire world watching and he decides to go on all these different tangents, all these different directions. It sounded very similar to what happened in the White House briefing room yesterday, bringing up the Somali immigrants saying some pretty offensive things there as well. And I guess I just don't know that I understand the broader strategy or if anyone has any thoughts on what he's going for here. especially doing this at Davos, where, I mean, this is also an economic issue. I think I've heard a lot of people bring up the volatility point on like, this is not necessarily

good for investors to kind of feel like they have no idea what is happening on the world stage. And he went on musing about how the stock market should be going up at different times and they wind up going down. And the stock market went down because he was talking about taking over Greenland, not because of growth or earnings, as he describes it. The United States is not a corporation to be able to say, oh, we had a great earnings quarter. The stock market should go up. It has nothing to do with that. And it's really not looking in the mirror at all to say, gee, you know, maybe some of the saber rattling that's really irritating allies is destabilizing.

And that's why a lot of investors are a little freaked out right now. You know, and also to the point of Greenland, just because he said he's not going to use force, doesn't mean he doesn't think that he's still entitled to it. You know, he said that this is an enormous, unsecured island that's actually part of North America on the northern frontier of the Western Hemisphere. That's our territory, Trump said. So he has this view, which we saw with this national security memo that had been floating around a little while back about how Trump and this Trump administration believes that the United States really needs to assert itself in the Western Hemisphere and that anything in the Western Hemisphere is sort of under the Aegis of the United States. really is this sort of regional, territorial, strong man kind of view that the United States is in charge of the Western Hemisphere and anything that happens here has to go through us. Right. Yeah. That's one other really fascinating, to put it mildly, thing that Trump said about Greenland. He repeatedly framed it as if the U.S. has a right to Greenland almost because the U.S. put military installations there during World War II as a way to help protect against

potential access invasion. So Trump seems to say that, well, since we went and helped out during World War II specifically in Greenland and did all this defense there, then maybe we should be able to take it over. That was one of the big logical leaps he made in the speech. Now, to actually respond to the rest of your question, though, Miles, you know, we talked recently. on this podcast about how Trump's foreign policy in this second term, he doesn't have the guardrails up, right? He doesn't have the more establishment thinking types of, you know, Rex Tillerson or John Bolton that he had around in his first term to tell him, hey, please don't do XYZ. He is just doing as he pleases with foreign policy. And to me, my view is you have Trump doing whatever he wants on foreign policy,

like attacking Venezuela or going after Greenland. Meanwhile, he's still trying to do the domestic policy thing of talking about affordability, or at least saying he's going to talk about affordability. And then he's getting in his own way. He's trying to make his supporters happy, but he just keeps overshadowing himself and drawing his own attention away from that. I mean, did he say anything notable on the affordability issue specifically? I mean, is there anything to take away here? Yeah, to some degree. I mean, this was a more than hour-long speech. And towards the end, he got into, for example, his plan to temporarily cap credit card interest rates at 10%. Also, he talked about an executive order that he signed last night. The idea there is to prevent large institutional investors from purchasing single family homes, which therefore can, you know, diminish the amount of houses available to just normal everyday individual buyers, which, you know, drives prices up.

So he talked about those things and really seemed to be trying to tout them. He also just uses speech, as he often does in speeches, to tout how great he thinks the U.S. economy is doing. Now he tends to exaggerate that quite a bit. Yeah. I also thought it was interesting, though, he talked about housing and said that he doesn't want housing prices to be lower because so much of people's wealth is wrapped up in housing that he'd rather not actually see housing prices come down.

So he continues to sort of talk himself into a corner when it comes to. comes to the cost of living or affordability because we saw him say fairly recently that really it's just a sales job that needs to be done. I was getting flashback to the Biden administration in really kind of not understanding that people feel the pinch in their pockets at the grocery stores and just saying, you know, we just got to sell it better. Well, I mean, good luck with that when people feel the way they feel. It's not quite the same as being able to say, here's this vague threat that you're not really feeling in your life, but I'm going to put in front of you so that you can feel like it's a bigger threat. Now, this is something that people are actually saying

is affecting their real lives. Well, these sort of international summits, I feel like are a good time to also take a temperature check on how other countries are responding to this sort of leadership. And I've been kind of monitoring quotes from a number of the world leaders. This one from Canada's Mark Carney caught my eye. The middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, were on the menu. But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. I wonder if you guys have noticed this, too, that international leaders seem to be responding to Trump a little differently right now than maybe we've seen in the past. Mark Carney there is not just saying, hey, Trump bad. I don't like what he's doing.

Mark Carney in that speech outlines what he thinks is an entire paradigm shift in the international order. What he is saying is that this isn't a gradual change happening right now. The word he uses is rupture, that the order that we have known for decades of relatively peaceful cooperation between at least the bigger, more advanced economies in the world, at least most of them, is falling apart. and that we middle countries who are not China or the U.S. or Russia, we need to keep our eye on the ball here. We need to figure out what we're doing. He was saying if places like the U.S. are not going to help look out for us via things like NATO, we need to start wondering what on earth are we going to do. All right. Well, we can leave it there for now. Danielle, thank you so much for talking with us. Absolutely. Let's take a quick break when we come back more on foreign policy and more on Greenland.

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And we're back. And a reminder, just hit that follow button on whatever podcast app you do. use to listen to this podcast to make sure you get our most up-to-date episodes in your feed. And we're going to talk more about foreign policy right now with congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt. Hi, Barbara. Well, hello, Miles. So you're pretty fresh off the plane. You were traveling with this group of American lawmakers who last week met with Danish and Greenlandic officials. I can only imagine what the vibes, for lack of a better word, are in a meeting like that.

Yeah, it was interesting because there is this tension. But it's not really between, like, the congressional delegation that went there and the people they were meeting with. They're singing from the same songbook. The tension is coming from a White House that is making statements that make the sort of thesis of this trip to turn the temperature down very difficult. I spoke to several lawmakers during the course of this trip, and they talked about how the goal was to remind people not only on the political side because they met with many members of government from both Denmark and from Greenland, but they also met. with economic leaders, Danish economic leaders, because there is a lot of economic relationship between these two nations as well. And so they were trying to sort of tamp the temperature down and reaffirm that there is still a lot of support in the United States towards the longstanding

alliance that these nations have had. And they also used it as an opportunity to come out and give these press conferences where they would kind of fact check gently the claims of President Trump. Trump, as you guys have talked about before in the pod, has made all sorts of assertions about why he wants to acquire Greenland. And one of them is this idea that Russia and China are encircling and that the U.S. has to get their first. And lawmakers repeatedly came out and said that is not happening. We did not see any intelligence that suggests that that is an imminent threat of any kind. And then the other thing that I think is part of their objective is actually when they're coming back to the United States. because I think that they described a lot of education that's needed about Denmark itself.

You know, obviously Denmark is an ally. But what they described is how much Denmark is in many ways sort of the model ally. People in Denmark are obviously generally opposed to the idea of the United States taking Greenland. But I am curious, Domenico, what we know. Do we know anything about how Americans feel about this concept? Yeah, I mean, they're very much against it. You know, I mean, we've seen. polling from the economist, UGov, that showed 72% of people were against the United States

taking Greenland. Just 9% were in favor of it. So it's not like you've got some huge well of support that Trump is running on here. And he's already at the lowest point in his presidency or thereabouts when it comes to a whole host of issues, whether it's the economy, immigration, foreign policy, he has not had a rack of wins where people are, you know, suddenly saying independence or suddenly saying, you know, he's doing a great job. In fact, it's been the opposite. I feel like at this point, anything over 70 percent when I look at polling, that's when my ears start perking up because it does, it's a signal that we're like out of that sort of like hyper-partisan lens where I feel like so many issues are like 55, 45 or something like that.

I was just going to say 53, 56. Yeah. You sort of seeing the traditional Trump not being seen very favorably, a lot of it's through the Trump lens. But anything above 60 percent, I mean, you're getting to some bipartisan area. So what about people in Denmark, Barbara? What did you hear from them about how they feel about all of this? My big takeaway coming back from this is that I don't get the sense that people in the U.S. understand how grave the situation is there. And I didn't feel that until I got there and started talking to people. In conversation after conversation, there were words that kept coming up, betrayal, sadness, grief. I mean, these are words describing a relationship with an ally.

People feel completely let down, worried about the future. There was a protest, a really big protest on Saturday in Copenhagen, and people marched from the city hall, thousands and thousands of people to the U.S. Embassy, you know, in protest of President Trump's comments and in support of Greenland. It was this mixture of like really interesting things. On the one hand, it showed a lot of solidarity between Denmark and Greenland. I saw a lot of red hats that looked like. I was almost like, oh, this looks like protests in the U.S. No, it was a make America go away hat. People were very polite. They were happy to talk. And there were a few kind of themes that kept coming up. One that I think is important is in talking with people who are from Greenland, they describe sort of an

insult to injury situation in the sense that in Greenland, the whole idea of owning property itself is not how we think of it in the United States. The indigenous population has a deep respect for the land and the way that they think about that is different than the way that Americans think about it. And so I had person after person tell me like, I'm just so offended. Not only that your country is saying that you're going to take my country, but that anyone could pretend to take ownership of a land. And the other thing is, you know, people just saying how shocked they were, that the U.S. is making this turn in general. So I talked to Peter Jensen outside of the protest.

We were wrapping up this conversation, and he said something really interesting to me at the end. Remember that we love America, we love you, but the present administration is just making chaos, you know. And I heard this from person after person, this idea, like we have all of these criticisms of the government of the United States, particularly the White House right now.

Please don't take away that we are anti-American. And please don't let other forces weaponize that against us because we want a strong relationship. I'm always struck hearing from international voices, frankly, on the nuanced take on foreign affairs. I'm not sure that people hear, everyone here has such a nuanced take of what's happening. Yeah, no, I think that the danger here for the United States just generally is that Europeans could go in a different direction. You know, I mean, if other countries, other powers, like a rising power, like China, as we've seen in polling, if they offer a better deal and Trump is threatening tariffs or threatening to invade sovereign lands, that's something that could hurt the United States long term and after Trump is in office.

I mean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO has been seen as one of the strongest and most important alliances of the last 70 years, 70, 80 years, because it has meant power in numbers and all being together to fight off what we're seen as. other threats that were anti-democratic lower D countries. That's just how Trump has changed this sort of new world order. Barbara, your reporting got at this about this population of people who feel the most complicated or the most intense about this issue. Actually, in a lot of cases, are the military, like people who were involved in the Danish military, right? Yeah. Yes. This was something that was really striking to learn when I was there and to talk to veterans who have served alongside American soldiers, you know, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder in. conflicts that honor the alliance between these countries. And as Domenico was, you know, describing about NATO, you know, Article 5, it's the central principle of collective defense. An attack on one is an

attack on all. It has only been invoked once after 9-11. By the United States. By the United States. And Denmark lost more soldiers per capita than the U.S. did in Afghanistan. And the memory of that is very strong. And I talk to veterans, families of veterans. And even people who don't have a personal connection to someone who lost their life while serving, it is embedded in the memory. What are you watching Barbara on the hill over the next couple of days? You know, I'm interested in whether this is sort of the straw that breaks the GOP camel's back in terms of sort of an outpouring of opposition to some of what President Trump has said. the threat of fundamentally imploding a longstanding alliance and decades and decades, 80 years of sustained peace in the way that we know it. We'll see.

I feel like we've been saying what is the thing that would make Republicans on the hill have some sort of issue with the Trump administration? We haven't found it yet, but it sounds like this might be it. I think this could be it. And there were two Republican senators on the delegation. And one thing that stood out to me was Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. said, don't let the numbers, you know, fool you. Like, just because there's only two of us here doesn't mean that there aren't more Republicans in the House and Senate that feel the way we do. So, you know, proofs in the pudding. We'll see.

The more unpopular Trump's policies are, especially among Republicans, is where you might see Republicans on the Hill, at least politely distancing themselves from some of Trump's policies because they've got to consider their own survival here. All right. And that's a good place to leave it because tomorrow we have a conversation specifically about what undecided voters ahead of midterms are thinking in the current moment. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Barbara Sprint. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanar, senior political editor and correspondent.

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