Remember, back in 2019, when Donald Trump asked his lawyers to look into buying Greenland like it was a storefront in Midtown he was going to turn into a 7/11? And then, after Denmark, which Greenland is part of, unsurprisingly declined, deeming the idea “absurd,” Trump threw a massive hissy fit, called the Danish PM “nasty,” and canceled his trip to the country? Well, it turns out that, somehow, there is more to that story.
In their forthcoming book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, authors Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that while it might have seemed like Trump just woke up one day and thought to himself, “I’d like to buy Greenland,” the idea was actually put in his head by billionaire Ronald Lauder, after which the president spent months pestering his advisers about it. “A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Trump reportedly told John Bolton, his national security adviser. “What do you think?” Again, to be clear, the president was talking about buying a country here—not an Atlantic City casino. According to Baker, “one mystified cabinet member was struck by the delusional nature of it,” while “other advisers tried to keep the idea from leaking out for fear that it would cause a diplomatic incident.”
At the time, Bolton was worried about China’s growing influence in the Arctic, and was reportedly interested in the idea of “an increased American presence in Greenland.” But he knew that a literal purchase of the country was not going to happen. However, Trump, who famously has the mind of a child, insisted it could get done. And at one point, per Baker, the former president “suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico” to fund the deal. He also “suggested outright trading Puerto Rico for Greenland.” While this is obviously a completely insane proposition, it’s not at all hard to picture the ex-president pitching the deal given that 1) he’s one of history’s biggest morons and 2) he spent his entire presidency shitting on Puerto Rico.
In the end, of course, Trump did not close on this particular real estate deal. Yet incredibly, two years after the scheme was made public, leading to a wave of mockery from the press, he apparently still wanted people to believe he came up with the idea all on his own. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’” he said in an interview last year for Baker and Glasser’s book. “You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” He added, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
Speaking of real estate, The Divider also reports that Trump once offered what he believed was “a great deal” to Jordan’s King Abdullah II: control of the West Bank. Naturally, Trump seemed blithe to the political implications of what this transaction would entail, to say nothing of the fact that the US does not control the West Bank and it was not his to give. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” Abdullah II told a friend in 2018, according to the book. “I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled-over.”
Elsewhere in the book, which was reviewed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, we learn that Trump, one of the human race’s most repulsive creatures, “harshly criticized women for their looks, telling visitors that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an example of why women should be careful about plastic surgery and that he would not pick Nikki Haley, his United Nations ambassador, as a running mate because she had a ‘complexion problem’.”
There’s also this charming anecdote, per The Times:
According to Baker, “Trump’s mercurial approach to the presidency so baffled…Kelly…that [he] secretly bought a copy of a best-selling book by a group of psychiatrists questioning Mr. Trump’s mental health. Mr. Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.”