The president’s fixation on ‘piece of ice’ Greenland carries an echo of Vladimir Putin’s claims about Crimea
The good news headline from Donald Trump’s trip to Davos was that he seemed to rule out force for now in his urgent quest to acquire Greenland. The bad news: he started talking about Iceland as well.
What might have been a big reveal about the next step in Trump’s imperial ambitions was more likely a slip, though all speculation about the workings of the presidential brain is by now a guess at best.
It was possible to trace the origins of the glitch. Every time Trump expounded on his desire to own Greenland at Davos, he described it as a big or beautiful “piece of ice”, pronounced with the same lascivious relish as a Sopranos wiseguy sizing up a female character’s attributes.
As a statement of geology, it was plainly untrue. Greenland is a significant landmass – the biggest island on the planet – but the notion of a “piece of ice” has clearly lodged in Trump’s mind, and from there it was a short mental hop to talking about Iceland instead.
