Not just stupid, short sighted, mean spirited, treacherous and strategically catastrophic.
Massively unpopular.
Like, head lice, yeast infection, Ebola, Brain eating amoeba unpopular.
President Donald Trump’s push to seize Greenland might be the least popular idea in American political history.
Is that hyperbole? If so, that’s only because reliable and fast public polling is a relatively recent development within our 250-year experiment in self-governance.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found a staggering 4 percent of Americans favor the idea of seizing Greenland with military force. Among Republicans, the idea is actually twice as popular: 8 percent say taking the island is a “good idea.”
Even if the Trump administration is using the threat of military force as a bluff, the idea of acquiring Greenland at all remains deeply unpopular. The same poll found that just 17 percent of Americans (and just 40 percent of Republicans) support the effort.
That poll does not appear to be an outlier. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday found similarly striking results, with 86 percent of respondents opposing a military takeover of Greenland and just 9 percent favoring it.
But it’s the 4 percent figure in the Reuters/Ipsos poll that really stands out to me, for two reasons.
First, do you know how hard it is to get such a minuscule percentage on a public opinion survey? Congress’ approval rating typically hovers in the high single-digits, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who is happy about how Congress is conducting itself—which is, of course, very different from how people feel about their own representatives.
Secondly, there’s the Lizardman’s Constant. That’s a term coined by Scott Alexander in 2013 to describe the surprisingly consistent finding that 4 percent of people will say they believe utterly outlandish things when polled—things like “human-sized lizards wearing skin suits control the world.”
Note that I didn’t write 4 percent of people believe that. They just say that they do. Some of them might truly believe such a thing, but mostly the Lizardman’s Constant is a reminder that any poll will contain some responses from people who are trolling or giving answers at random (or who are deeply disconnected from reality).
All of which means we can’t be certain that Trump’s threat to seize Greenland by force is actually supported by 4 percent of Americans. It’s just as likely, given Lizardman’s Constant, that there may not be hardly any Americans who genuinely support this idea—excepting, of course, the current occupant of the White House and some of his most sycophantic allies.
Just 17% of Americans approve of U.S. efforts to acquire Greenland and the public overwhelming says the use of military force to take possession of Greenland would be a bad idea a rather than a good idea (71%-4%), according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. In addition, two in three express concern that U.S. efforts to acquire Greenland will damage the NATO alliance and U.S. relationships with European allies.
The poll finds that Americans have mixed views on the importance of Greenland for U.S. interests: 33% see it as strategically important, 32% say it’s not that important, and 35% are not sure. While there is widespread opposition to the idea of using military force to take Greenland, there is more openness to the idea of the U.S. building additional military bases there under existing agreements (33% good idea vs. 29% bad idea).
This Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted January 12-13, 2026, among 1,217 Americans.
In the wake of discussions about the United States trying to either buy Greenland or use military force to take control of it, voters say:
- 86 – 9 percent they would oppose the United States trying to take Greenland by military force;
- 55 – 37 percent they would oppose the United States trying to buy Greenland.
