Hello and welcome to the Punch Bowl News Reback Podcast. I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen,

and this week I'm joined by Andrew Desiderio, who's talking to us about his very unique experience

on a Kodell to Copenhagen. Andrew, how you doing? Hey, Max, doing great. A little jet lag still, but I'm all right.

It was a really quick trip, and it was a trip that came together very quickly as well.

And, you know, we were just talking before we recorded about how different this congressional

delegation was to anyone you had been on and anyone, even the lawmakers themselves, had been on.

Talk to me about what you experienced on the ground in Copenhagen, of course, all in relation

to President Donald Trump's threats to take Greenland and to really create tension between

one of America's closest allies that goes back a very long way.

Yeah, I think you set it up really well there, Max, because, you know, this was a Kodel that

included people like Dick Durbin, Gene Sheen, Steny Hoyer, Lisa Murkowski, Tom Tillis.

The first few that I mentioned there have been in Congress for decades, and they've been on tons and tons of Kodels before, right?

They've even been on Kodels before where they had to do a reassurance mission, right? Like this one clearly was.

But this one stood out from all of them. Dick Durbin, for example, has been in Congress for 40 years. He's about to

retire at the end of this year after a very long career. He's been to so many different countries

for so many different reasons over the years. And he said it was just surreal to him. I mean,

like taking the politics out of it, right? Like if you're a Democrat, you're going to want to

go in harder against President Trump on this issue and slam him for his rhetoric and, you know, the terrorists that he announced and then has since pulled back from, obviously. But, you know, taking the politics aside from it, you can see why it was such a surreal experience for them. You know, usually when you're going to, you know, a capital city of a NATO member nation,

you know, you're greeted with open arms, you are, you know, people are cheering the fact that you're there.

There's very little controversy, right?

And the Danes were still, and the Greenlanders were still welcoming

them with open arms. But it was open arms out of sort of a sense of relief that a bipartisan

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