"There's no Trump Doctrine, just a map of the world that the President wants to write his name on in big gold letters. 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."
""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.'""
Donald Trump pursued the purchase of Greenland and framed territorial ambitions in real-estate terms, citing maps and size as justification. The interest persisted across several years of his presidency and prompted internal study among senior officials. A longtime friend, Ronald Lauder, promoted the idea and offered to serve as an envoy, while John Bolton recalled Trump musing about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. The proposal surprised European allies and bemused the American public, reflecting a transactional, symbolic approach to geopolitical expansion and a preference for visible, territorial markers of influence.
Read at The New Yorker
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