Will Trump Make A Deal Over Greenland?
Newscast
BBC
4.3 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum at Davos to confirm he wants ‘immediate negotiations’ to acquire Greenland but ‘won’t use force’.
Adam is joined by Faisal Islam, who was in the room watching Trump speak, and Caitriona Perry in Washington to decode President Trump’s wide-ranging speech.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.9 | Hello, I'm just heading out on Wednesday evening after recording today's newscast, |
| 0:10.4 | which was all about Donald Trump's big speech, which he did at Davos at the World Economic Forum, |
| 0:15.1 | where a lot of it was about his designs on Greenland, where he said that he wasn't going to use military force, |
| 0:19.9 | but he still really wanted to incorporate it as US territory, and he wanted to start negotiations. |
| 0:25.4 | So we recorded the podcast on that basis. And then as I was walking down the street, I got a push |
| 0:30.2 | notification from BBC News saying that Donald Trump had had a meeting with Mark Rutter, the |
| 0:34.5 | Secretary General of NATO. He has now taken off the table the tariffs he was going to impose on Denmark and its allies, |
| 0:42.4 | including the UK, on the 1st of February. |
| 0:44.8 | And he says there's going to be the start of a process involving members of the Trump administration |
| 0:49.4 | like Steve Wickoff and Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and the Europeans, |
| 0:54.1 | about a new framework for how |
| 0:56.6 | Greenland is administered in a way that improves US security. So from my cursory reading of that, |
| 1:05.3 | it looks like the tension's being dialed right down, but we are now in a new process, which could potentially bring some new |
| 1:12.5 | tensions and consequences of its own. So the sort of the top line, as we say in the news, |
| 1:17.0 | has changed a little bit since we recorded this episode, but all the analysis of what's been |
| 1:20.8 | happening in Davos still stands on this episode of Newscast. Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. |
| 1:29.3 | Fat boy sliver me in the classroom doing our violin lessons. |
| 1:32.3 | I was the tappletail in the class. |
| 1:33.3 | Can I have an apology, please? |
| 1:35.3 | I trust almost nobody. |
| 1:36.3 | That daddy has to sometimes do strong language. |
... |
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