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What Next - President TACO’s Greenland Gambit

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

News, Business, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Donald Trump isn’t one for clear policy objectives, but one of his top priorities, apparently, is making Greenland part of the United States–even at the expense of alienating our allies.


Guest: Joshua Keating, senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy. 


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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

This week has been a week of speeches.

0:09.0

Speaches both punchy and not, speeches both here and abroad, and a lot of speeches about Greenland.

0:17.0

This speechifying took place as world leaders were set to meet face-to-face in Davos, Switzerland.

0:25.3

And as President Trump ratcheted up his pressure campaign to buy Greenland, which I must emphasize is not for sale.

0:35.5

One member of the European Parliament was pretty succinct about how he felt going into these meetings.

0:40.6

Let me put this in words you might understand.

0:44.7

Mr. President, walk off.

0:48.5

The markets, they did not seem so hot on gobbling up Greenland either.

0:53.2

Today, markets reacting sharply to a fresh

0:55.7

flare up in transatlantic tensions amid President Trump's efforts to own Greenland.

1:00.8

What were the vibes heading into the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week?

1:08.0

Um, the panicky.

1:11.2

Josh Keating reports on foreign policy over at Fox.

1:15.0

He's been keeping track as the president's Greenland obsession has gone from an eccentric

1:20.8

lark to a five alarm fire.

1:24.1

And, you know, the prime minister of Denmark essentially said if Trump tries by force to take Greenland, it would be the end of NATO, it would be the end of the transatlantic post-war transatlantic alliance.

1:35.1

Have you heard anything like this before from European leaders? Like, is this precedented territory? No, not, not, not like this. You know, speaking a bizarre thing,

1:47.4

several European countries, including Denmark, have now sent troops to Greenland, which also

1:53.0

Trump was very upset about and made threats about, you know, and so there's a contradiction

1:58.7

in the argument. His whole thing is, you know, we don't

2:03.5

think the Europeans are doing enough to protect Greenland and then they send troops to Greenland. And he's

2:09.6

like, no, not like that. It's hard to talk about this because a lot of it doesn't make sense.

...

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