Greenlanders don’t want MAGA hats, apparently.
Governor Jeff Landry found no takers when he reportedly offered children “all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat” to come to his mansion.
Nothing creepy about that, Jeff.
President Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, came to the island this week on a self-proclaimed good-will mission to “make a bunch of friends.”
So far, he has not found many.
Within hours of landing on Sunday in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Mr. Landry was touring the town in a cold drizzle when one Greenlander gave his entourage the finger.
After he offered some MAGA hats to Greenlandic children, several shook their heads.
He even told some kids that if they came to his mansion in Louisiana, they could have “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”
The next day, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, expressed his discomfort with the whole thing.
“We have our red lines,” he told DR, Denmark’s public broadcaster. “And no matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”
When asked about that later, Mr. Landry said, “There’s only one line and it’s red, white and blue.”
Mr. Landry’s high-profile visit — his first since being appointed in December as Mr. Trump’s point person on Greenland — comes at an exceedingly awkward time. Confidential negotiations over Greenland’s future have been unfolding in Washington, and officials have told The New York Times that Greenland’s leaders are wary of the direction in which the talks are headed.
The United States is insisting on a much bigger role in Greenland, perhaps not as drastic as seizing the island as Mr. Trump has threatened, but with major oversight over the country’s economic and security affairs.
The Trump administration wants effective veto power over any sizable investment deals to box out competitors like Russia and China, officials said. And the American officials are pushing to insert a forever clause into a decades-old military agreement so that if Greenland ever becomes independent, U.S. troops will remain on the island.
Mr. Trump has said he needs Greenland for national security reasons, and there is no doubt that the Arctic island is a huge piece of the North American security picture. It is more than 1,500 miles long and 600 miles wide, and sits high up in the Arctic Circle, a region that is increasingly contested by China, Russia, the United States and Europe.
But the way Mr. Trump has constantly threatened the island, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, and vowed to “get” it, “one way or the other,” has frightened, angered and alienated many Greenlanders.
There’s something rotten in Washington
I’m calling it Pyongyang until we get the Dear Leader out of there.