Bleak Times in Copenhagen: Danes Feel Betrayed and Bewildered by Trump

 

Bleak Times in Copenhagen: Danes Feel Betrayed and Bewildered by Trump

 

The American president’s vow to get Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory, has thrown the tiny, pro-American Nordic nation into crisis.

 

Elisabeth BumillerHilary Swift

By Elisabeth BumillerPhotographs by Hilary Swift

Reporting from Copenhagen

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/world/europe/denmark-greenland-trump.html

Jan. 18, 2026

 

Henrik Bager, a Danish soldier who served with Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, said President Trump’s vow to get Greenland from Denmark and his insults about Denmark’s military were “a punch to the gut.”

 

Rasmus Jarlov, a voluble center-right member of the Danish Parliament and the chairman of its Defense Committee, said that “we know full well that the Americans can destroy us,” but should Mr. Trump, who has not ruled out military force, attack a fellow NATO ally, “of course we will fight back.”

 

In the next breath, Mr. Jarlov said it was “absolutely so weird to be uttering something like that.”

 

Casper O. Jensen, a Danish pollster who has lived in the United States and calls it “close to his heart,” sounded like a jilted lover. “I thought we had a really good thing going on,” he said. “Apparently not.”

 

These are bleak times in Copenhagen, where Danes say they feel betrayed, bewildered and frightened by Mr. Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory and a source of national identity and pride. Greenland, 50 times the size of Denmark, has long made the tiny Nordic nation more of a player on the world stage.

 

“We’re not small when you add Greenland,” said David Trads, a political commentator and the author of three books on the United States, including his most recent, “America Turns the Clock Back.” “It makes us more important.”

 

Mr. Trump’s view is that the United States needs to take over Greenland because Russia and China pose a security threat in the Arctic, and because the island is essential for the “Golden Dome” missile shield he wants to build to protect the United States.

 

Denmark, NATO allies and most security experts say Mr. Trump already has all the access to Greenland that he needs given existing treaties and the willingness of Denmark, long one of the most pro-American countries in Europe, to do anything — short of giving up Greenland — that the president wants.

 

This past week in Copenhagen, where wall-to-wall television coverage of the crisis seemed to match the mood of the dark Scandinavian winter, Danes pored over every utterance from Mr. Trump.

 

By Saturday, thousands of Danes had packed Copenhagen’s City Hall Square before marching to the U.S. Embassy in protest, while hundreds demonstrated in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. Hours later, Mr. Trump said he was putting new tariffs on Denmark and other European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell him Greenland.

 

Danes have been particularly stunned by Mr. Trump’s taunts that Denmark relies on “two dog sleds” to defend the Arctic island.

 

“It’s like fifth graders bullying the small guy in the corner,” said Company Sgt. Maj. Bager, the Danish soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Danes in his unit died during his 2009 deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, he said, and the rhetoric from the White House hurts.

 

“First time you get disappointed, then you get angry, and then you start feeling sad, you know?” he said. “I can’t remember when we haven’t been with you. You asked us to go. We went.” You asked us “to send airplanes, we sent airplanes.” Denmark, he said, “never said no.”

 

Too Crazy

Adam Price, the creator of “Borgen,” a Danish TV political drama that became an international hit, set its fourth and final season in Greenland. In episodes that aired in 2022 in the United States, a geopolitical struggle unfolds between the United States, China and Russia after large reserves of oil are discovered on the island.

 

Mr. Price likes to take real events and push them beyond what has actually happened. But in an interview this past week, he said that had he pitched a story line to Netflix that an American president was vowing to get Greenland from Denmark “one way or another” — the exact words of Mr. Trump — “I would have been laughed out of the pitching room.”

 

“They would have said, ‘It’s too much, it is too crazy,’” Mr. Price said in his Copenhagen office, where a large photograph of sled dogs and icebergs in Greenland covers one wall. “I mean, you wouldn’t have an American president that would actually threaten a NATO ally.”

 

Many Danes believe Mr. Trump wants to own Greenland because, as he put it to The New York Times in an interview this month, “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

 

Aaja Chemnitz, one of two members of Parliament who represent Greenland, said in an interview that “maybe you should take it up with his therapist if it’s a question of making sure that he feels better.”

 

Ms. Chemnitz, who said Greenlanders were having trouble sleeping for fear of an American invasion, was host last week to a bipartisan congressional delegation led by Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, to Denmark. In her view, Mr. Trump is more interested in the minerals and oil in Greenland than anything else.

 

That sentiment was echoed by Oliver Haagensen, 21, a medical student at Aarhus University, who was skating the other day at an outdoor rink in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn neighborhood. Like everyone else, he was keeping up with the news on Mr. Trump. “He knows that Russia and China want the minerals and oil, and he wants to get there first,” Mr. Haagensen said.

 

There was some short-lived relief in Copenhagen after a meeting on Wednesday in Washington, where Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, emerged from talks with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Mr. Rasmussen said that although a “fundamental disagreement” remained with Mr. Trump and that the American president “has this wish of conquering Greenland,” there would be a “working group” to continue talks.

 

But on Thursday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the Danes and Greenlanders had agreed “to continue to have technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland,” which Denmark and Greenland said was not the case at all.

 

Mr. Trads, the political commentator, had been skeptical that the meeting would produce anything. On Wednesday over coffee near the Danish Parliament, he said that the only thing that Denmark had on its side against Mr. Trump was time.

 

The Danish government hopes that Mr. Trump’s party will lose the midterm elections, he said.

 

“If that doesn’t happen, then we’re just waiting for the three years to pass,” Mr. Trads said. “It’s a long time, but we don’t have anything else. So that’s the whole tactic, just to make sure it goes on and on and on, and somehow he is preoccupied with something else.”

 

Denmark colonized Greenland in 1721, and over the centuries, Greenlanders often felt mistreated by the Danes, particularly by a past policy of forcing contraception on young women and girls. In recent decades, the island has moved to home rule. Denmark, which still sends the island of 56,000 people large economic subsidies, now supports its gradual path to independence.

 

There have been tensions along that road, but Mr. Trump has had the effect, Danes said, of pushing the former colonizer and the colonized closer together. “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Greenland said last week.

 

What is extraordinary about Mr. Trump’s involvement, said Martin Breum, an Arctic expert and TV journalist and the author of “Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North,” are the president’s repeated falsehoods about Greenland.

 

“There is extreme consternation that your president appears completely immune to data, facts, arguments and common knowledge,” Mr. Breum said. “He continues to state what is obviously, factually wrong. This seems unbelievable to many people in this country. We cannot understand what is happening. We wonder what is next.”

 

Carsten Jensen, a prominent Danish novelist and the author of “We, The Drowned,” a work of historical fiction about a century of Danish seafaring, said he knew what was next if Europe did not stand together.

 

“I’m 100 percent convinced that Greenland will become American within a short time,” he said gloomily in an interview. “One day, there will be a lot of American military presence in the airport of Nuuk, and that’s it.” NATO will protest, he said, but he predicted it would not end the alliance.

 

“European nations won’t break up NATO because of Greenland,” he said. “It’s too insignificant.”

 

On a less dark note, Anne Bech, 60, a schoolteacher who was volunteering last Wednesday at Copenhagen’s central library for a session of the Danish tradition of morgensang — communal morning singing — said the theme of songs for the day, about caring for others, had been selected long before.

 

“But today it’s even more important,” she said as retirees, students and people on their way to work filed in and picked up songbooks. “We’re very anxious about your president.”

 

For the next half-hour, a chorus of voices, accompanied by a piano and flute, filled the library’s top floor. The lyrics at the end of Song No. 150 seemed fitting.

 

Now there’s winter darkness at my door

 

I’m empty and sad like never before

 

Show me a way, just a tiny path

 

out of the darkness I’m caught in.

 

Lisa Abend contributed reporting.

 

Elisabeth Bumiller writes about the people, politics and culture of the nation’s capital, and how decisions made there affect lives across the country and the world.