Frozen assets: Why Trump wants Greenland and Canada

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After President-elect Donald Trump told reporters he was going to force our NATO ally Denmark to cede Greenland because it’s essential to our “national security,” I posted on Facebook (where you can now say anything) that he’s imagining golf courses and country clubs.

“Steal ‘Green’ land. Exacerbate global warming. Bring in the bulldozers and the carts,” I wrote.

Trump no doubt sees money-making opportunities in Greenland — and Canada, which he says he wants annexed as our 51st state — but resorts would just be a bonus.

What Felon and Elon and their oligarch pals want is the mineral resources of the thawing Far North.

Trump has often called climate change a hoax — fake news propagated by scientists bent on crippling capitalism — but he knows it’s real. He just sees it as business opportunity rather than an existential threat.

Never mind that rising oceans will swamp lower-lying lands and cause famine and more refugees and suffering. That’s going to happen mainly in places he’s already called sh$%holes. And if it happens in Florida, his primary state of residence, big deal. He’s got other homes and the resources to relocate wherever he wants.

So why bother trying to slow or reverse climate change? Why alienate people who love their SUVs and luxury pickups and don’t want the inconvenience of changing old habits?

Keep on drilling.

Keep on burning fossil fuels.

Speed climate change up.

The sooner Greenland and Canada thaw, the sooner we can start plumbing their mineral resources, the sooner he and the super-rich can start making even more money.

That’s one explanation.

Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive, is that he and Musk and the boys envision a new world order in which three great autocratic powers Russia, China and Trumpania — rearrange the globe into three superstates, like Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in George Orwell’s novel “1984” and expand their territories. If Vladimir Putin gets Ukraine, Trump gets Greenland, and so on. Divvy, divvy, divvy. If pipsqueak countries like, say, Denmark object, woe be unto them. The big boys call the shots.

A third possibility involves Trump’s penal envy. Like Russia’s Putin, Trump has many enemies. But unlike Putin and the Russian czars and dictators who preceded him, Trump has no Siberia, no huge, frigid territory where he can imprison dissidents and other democracy advocates.

Greenland and upper Canada will do nicely, at least until they thaw.

The fourth possibility is that Trump is no more serious about swiping Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico than he is about finishing the wall along our Mexican border. It’s just a tactic, an outrageous announcement that distracts us from real goals like replacing career civil servants with loyal toads.

Which scenario is true?

Maybe all, maybe none. Your guess is as good as mine.

Noel Holston was the Star Tribune’s TV/radio critic from 1986 through 2001. He’s the author of two memoirs, “Life After Deaf” and “As I Die Laughing.” His features and commentary appear regularly on Substack as The Grassy Noel.