Donald Trump threw an “unswerving American ally” into “complete flux” with a mere phone call, according to someone who was viewing the events from inside the foreign nation.
Trump’s proposals related to the attempted acquisition of Greenland came to a head recently, when Trump reportedly held a call with Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister.
Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st-century disinformation, had an inside view of the results.
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“What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled,” the writer reported. “Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.”
Applebaum went on to say the “result” was that, “Mid-morning, I found myself standing on the Knippel Bridge between the Danish foreign ministry and the Danish Parliament, holding a phone, waiting to be told which direction to walk.”
“Denmark in January is not warm; I went to the Parliament and waited there. The meeting was canceled anyway,” she added. “After that, nobody wanted to say anything on the record at all. Thus have Americans who voted for Trump because of the putatively high price of eggs now precipitated a political crisis in Scandinavia.”
She further notes that, “In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough.”
“The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property,” the report states. “The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.”