The New Yorker:

There’s no Trump Doctrine, just a map of the world that the President wants to write his name on in big gold letters.

By Susan B. Glasser

In the fall of 2021, I flew down to Mar-a-Lago with my husband, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the Times, to interview Donald Trump for a book we were writing on his first term in office. After an hour and a half, an aide moved to end the conversation, but we threw in one last question: why had he pursued the purchase of the Danish territory of Greenland—to the shock of European allies and the general bemusement of much of the American public? Trump presented his interest as the musings of a canny businessman: “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”

Greenland was hardly headline news at that point. We had asked Trump about it because, in conducting interviews for the book, we had been surprised to learn that his pursuit of it had not been the transitory whim that it had initially appeared to be, when, in the summer of 2019, it was first made public, but a persistent demand over several years of his Presidency. Several former officials had told us that Trump’s insistence had prompted serious internal study. Trump’s college friend, the cosmetics magnate and philanthropist Ronald Lauder, had planted the idea with the President, we were told, and even presented himself to Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, as a possible secret envoy to Denmark. In the summer of 2018, according to Bolton, Trump mused about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. After an early Oval Office meeting during which Trump expounded on buying Greenland, another mystified Cabinet member was struck by how delusional the President sounded. “You’d just sit there and be, like, ‘Well, this isn’t real,’ ” the secretary later told us. “But then you’re, like, ‘Oh, well, maybe this is real in his mind.’ ”

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