Trump floated idea of swapping Puerto Rico for Greenland despite criticism, new book claims

The former president once compared the purchase of the Scandanavian island to a ‘large real estate deal’

When Donald Trump floated the controversial idea to buy Greenland in 2019, it was not because of conversations with administration officials, as he said at the time. It was the by-product of a suggestion posed by one of his billionaire friends, a new book reports.

In August 2019, the former president compared the purchase of Greenland to a “large real estate deal”, stating that the notion had been planted in his head after ongoing conversations with members within his cabinet.

“The concept came up and....strategically it’s interesting,” he told a group of reporters on board Air Force One at the time. Later, a report from The Wall Street Journal would claim that the former real estate mogul became fixated on the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark after learning about its vast natural resources and geopolitical importance.

“First we have to find out whether or not they have any interest,” he said.

Despite the negative press, behind the scenes, Mr Trump reportedly continued to press forward. At one point, The Times reported, the former president even floated the idea of taking federal money from Puerto Rico to finance the endeavour. At another, he floated the US’s own island territory outright in exchange for Denmark’s.

A new book from New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser, set to publish on Tuesday, however, offers up an about-face on those previously believed order of events.

Ronald S Lauder, the heir to the New York cosmetics company Estée Lauder who has known Mr Trump since the pair attended the University of Pennsylvania together, was the one who reportedly put the Greenland bug in his fellow alumni’s ear.

“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different,” Mr Trump told the pair of reporters last year, claiming that the inspiration was a personal one not a sourced one, for their forthcoming book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.

Mr Lauder, estimated to be worth $4.6bn, has been known for not staying in his lane of inheriting family empires, often veering into politics either intentionally – such as when he served as ambassador to Austria under Ronald Reagan – or by proxy of the powerful figures he kept in his company – such as when his brother, Leonard, hosted business lunches where figures like Trump and the ambassador to Russia would be among the attendees.

According to the pair of veteran reporters, the cosmetics heir told his long-time college friend that to “get” Greenland was not only savvy, but within the realm of possibilities for the then-commander in chief.

“A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Mr Trump reportedly told John Bolton, his national security adviser at the time. “What do you think?”

Mr Bolton, who would go on tender his resignation just a few months after the “Greenland” optioning began, reportedly tapped his aide, Fiona Hill, to create a special team for the president who would assess the merits of the purchase and who would go on to draft a lease proposal that the authors say seemed to be “akin to a New York real estate deal”.

Mr Lauder had even offered himself as a “back channel” to discuss the purchase with the Danish government, but Mr Bolton opted to keep it within his department, viewing it as an opportunity to push back against China’s growing influence in the Arctic rather than one to outright buy the Scandinavian territory.

When news of Trump’s attempt at mixing geopolitical relations with real estate came to light after the Wall Street Journal broke the news, the pushback was swift and determined: the Danes did not want to be bought.

“We are open for business, but we’re NOT for sale,” said Greenland’s foreign minister Ane Lone Bagger, in a note to Reuters at the time the story began circulating.

“No thanks to Trump buying Greenland!” tweeted Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a Greenlandic politician representing one of two seats for the island in the Danish parliament.

Those efforts, much to the relief of his bewildered cabinet, ultimately failed.

“When it became public, they lost their political courage,” Trump said in the interview with the two journalists last year.

Mr Bolton, seeing his opportunity to hedge US security in the global north against China and Russia lost, cast the blame for the failure of the Greenland affair solely at his former boss’s feet.

“If Trump had just kept his mouth shut,” Mr Bolton told others, according to the book, “we could have found out. But it was just gone, just completely gone.”

The forthcoming book is due out on bookshelves on 20 September.