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From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily.

I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland.

In a recent address before Congress, Donald Trump talked once again about his big ambitions for Greenland.

We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America we need.

But he ended his message with a threat.

I think we're going to get it. One way or the other, we're going to get it.

Today, my colleague Jeffrey Gettelman on what Trump wants from of Greenland, and whether he may actually get it.

It's Tuesday, March 11. Jeffrey, President Trump has repeatedly said that he wants Greenland.

Before we get into whether that is even possible, can you just explain to us why is the President so interested in this place?

Well, there's a few reasons. The first reason is its size and its location. Greenland is enormous. It's the largest island in the world. It has only 56,000 people, but it's this gigantic space. It's located in a very strategic spot along the Arctic Ocean, where shipping lanes are increasingly important as global warming melts ice that had blocked those areas for forever up until now. There's a lot of interest in controlling that space by Russia, by China, by European nations, and by the US. There's There are also vast mineral resources on Greenland. There are huge deposits of iron, zinc, copper, platinum, rare earth elements that have become really important in high tech industries. That's another reason why Trump and his circle are really interested in taking over the island. But there's one big problem. Greenland is actually part of Denmark. It's been like that for more than 300 years. The Danes colonized Greenland in the 1700s. Denmark still controls its foreign policy, its defense, and other important issues, even though Greenland is part of North America.

That is so interesting because when Trump first started talking about Greenland, it just felt, I think to me and to a lot of people, random and also outrageous. But what you just laid out, those reasons for why the US might be interested in Greenland actually sound quite compelling and strategic.

Totally. It seemed really random when it first came up. But this isn't the first time a US President has been interested in Greenland. The US has seen Greenland as this important piece of territory for a long time. In the 1860s, the US had purchased Alaska from Russia, and Greenland was seen as the next big piece of territory to expand America's ambitions in the North American continent. It didn't go anywhere, and it just died. It then came up again in 1910. There was an American plan to acquire Greenland through a trade of different islands, but that didn't go anywhere either. Then in World War II, Nazi Germany took over Denmark as part of its expansion across continental Europe. The United States was really worried that there could be a Nazi incursion on Greenland as a stepping stone towards the United States. And so the US established these bases all around Greenland. Then after the war, America thinks, Hey, it just makes perfect sense that we take over Greenland forever. The United States offered $100 million in gold to Denmark, which had been shattered by World War II. But the Danes were not interested. Again, they just did not want to get rid of this territory.

Okay, so it sounds like there's also a long history here of Denmark making it very clear that Greenland is not for sale.

Absolutely. After World War II, Denmark decided, We need to keep Greenland And in 1953, they made a decision to take it from being a colony to being part of Denmark. What that meant for Greenlanders was that they were now citizens of Denmark. They were entitled to the same rights to the same benefits. They were Danish citizens. That led to more investment, more development, a closer connection between Greenland and Denmark.

So then how does Greenland end up back in the international conversation?

For decades, it really was not in the international conversation. The Cold War was happening. The US seemed to be happy with having its military bases on Greenland, both Denmark and the US or members of NATO. And so Greenland was seen as a NATO territory, and the American government did not pursue a serious plan to take it over until 2019. That's when Donald Trump, during his first term, floats this idea that the US should buy Greenland from Denmark. A small team is set up to work on this, and there's several meetings between American officials and Danish officials to discuss this, but it's all kept secret.

President Trump has reportedly raised the possibility that the US might buy Greenland. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has discussed the purchase with varying degrees of seriousness during his talk.

Then the story begins to leak out. Bbc news has confirmed President Trump has talked to aides and members of Congress about possibly buying Greenland. This is a very good idea. In fact, we could move one of the Red Sox spring training camps there. It was mostly taken as a joke.

Can we buy the Maldives? I desperately need a vacation.

The whole bizarre story prompted Conan O'Brien to make the trip over to Greenland. Hello, I'm here to buy your country. Hello, I'm here to buy your country. Why on Earth would the US want to buy Greenland? Returning to Washington, the President confirming it is no joking matter.

So the concept came up, and I said, certainly, I'd be strategically, it's interesting.

Then Trump responded.

Essentially, it's a large real estate deal. A lot of things could be done.

That it could be a great real estate deal, but it wasn't a priority.

We're looking at it. It's not number one on the burner.

All this culminated in the Prime Minister of Denmark very publicly announcing that Greenland was not for sale. She even Then called this whole idea absurd.

All they had to do is say, No, we'd rather not do that, or, We'd rather not talk about it.

Don't say what- And Trump seemed to take real issue with that.

She's not talking to me. She's talking to the United States of America. You don't talk to the United States that way, at least unto me.

But then it just went away.

Until now.

Until just a few weeks ago when it came back with a vengeance. With all this talk about Greenland, Greenland suddenly in the news, I thought it was important to go there and try to understand how the people of Greenland are looking at this enormous geopolitical situation and to figure out what do the Greenlanders want..

I flew to Greenland, and I spent almost two weeks talking to different people from different walks of life.

And what I found was this surprising openness to having a closer relationship with the US.

We'll be right back.

I'm Jonathan Swann. I'm a Whitehouse for the New York Times. I have a pretty unsentimental view of what we do. Our job as reporters is to dig out information that powerful people don't want published, to take you into rooms that you would not otherwise have access to, to understand how some of the big decisions shaping our country are being made. Then painstakingly, to go back and check with sources, check with public documents, make sure the information is correct. This is not something you can outsource to AI. There's no robot that can go and talk to someone who is in the situation room and find out what was really said in order to get actually original information that's not public, that requires human sources, we actually need journalists to do that. As you may have gathered from this long rift, I'm asking you to consider subscribing to the New York Times. Independent journalism is important, and without you, we simply can't do it.

Jeffrey, you went to Greenland, which I think it's fair to say a lot of Americans have never been to. First, can you just paint a little bit of a picture of what life is like there?

I found Greenland beautiful and very different from any place I had ever been. It's really icy and snowy. All you can see is white. White mountains, white snow on the ground, icebergs floating in the ocean, and that ice defines life. I went to this one place on the West Coast called Ilu Liset, which is a town of about 5,000 people. One morning, I went with a family and we got to a place where there were all these guys standing around these holes that they had smashed into the ground, wheeling up these lines and catching lots of fish. In this little town, everything revolves around fishing, even though it's a very difficult environment to work in. Minus 20 degrees below zero celsius, winds blowing. I met this fisherman named Frederick. He's gutting one fish after the other, throwing the scraps on the snow and pulling out another fish, doing it again and again. We talk to everybody in the world. I just started talking to him, and right off the bat. America and Trump is a headline. He tells me there are all these headlines about Greenland in the US. He's really aware of this conversation that's going on about the fate of Greenland.

What do you want for Greenland? I want freedom away from Denmark. Frederick felt that Greenland should break off from Denmark. I hope that Greenland can sell to America. He tells me that he's frustrated that Denmark still controls many aspects of life in Greenland. One of those is its fishing industry. He felt that all this attention that Trump is putting on Greenland is going to create more opportunities where they're going to be able to strike up its own relationships and trade agreements, and that will open doors for all kinds of business, including the fishing business. Business. How many people are in USA? Three hundred and fifty million. They are hungry. Maybe they will eat this. That would be good, right? Yeah. Another person I met that day was Laila. Her family runs a small tourism business, and she took us out across the ice on her dog slits.

I start my own company 2021. I want to show tourist dog sliding, ice fishing. I want to show it, but some of the Danish agencies don't use me.

Laila told me that her business has really struggled to compete with these bigger Danish companies that have come to the island. She says they have more resources and much better connections abroad.

Tourists always come to our town because they want to see the icebergs or the glaciers. But lately, Danish companies came to our town to make money only doing on the high seasons.

Given all that, I asked her, did she want to break off from Denmark? Do you think independence would help Greenland?

I want to be our country independent.

Why?

We know our land better. We want to make our own rules.

She thinks that with independence, there will be more opportunities for locals like her. When you heard this news a couple of weeks ago that Trump wanted to take Greenland, how did you feel?

If we are going to be independent, of course, we can cooperate with another country like America.

Do you want to be part of America?

I don't want to be part of America. I just… Maybe we can make deals.

Leila sees herself as a Greenlander. She said that she's not European, she doesn't want to be American. She feels very strongly about her Greenlandic identity. But she did say that she wanted closer relations with the US, and she felt very confident that if that happened, it would improve the lives of Greenlanders. But not everybody I talked to was so excited about all this attention that Trump is putting on Greenland. Do you feel Danish? What Danish? A little Danish? No.

I'm Greenland.

I met the mayor of Ilulicet. His name is Pele Jeremia-Sin, and he's pro-independence just like everybody we met there. But he's also worried. Do you see all this attention with Trump in the US as an opportunity?

It's frapping me a little bit.

What makes you a little scared about this Trump?

His attitude is, I will have some soldiers down in the border. I will take Panama back. We have been talking about Greenland so many times. What do you do about Greenland?

He's been paying close attention to everything that Trump is doing. He brought up the Panama Canal, troops being sent to the US-Mexical border. His point to me was, Trump says one thing, it seems really outlandish, and then he does it. Or maybe he doesn't do it. His capriciousness and unpredictable ability is what makes the mayor nervous.

I can't figure him out because this way of thinking is so opposite, but You're thinking like European or something, Greenlandic. So he makes a decision. You can't do that. But he does.

And he was asking me, So what do you think Trump is going to do about Greenland? He was pointing right at me. What do you predict?

I don't know what he's meaning.

I don't. And I just shrugged and said, I really don't know. The mayor shook his head and he seemed genuinely upset and said, We're a tiny country.

He's a superpower country. So what can we do when he comes?

What can we do if Trump comes? What can we really do.

Jeffrey, you've met a range of Greenlanders, some of whom are enthusiastic about Trump's attention, some of whom are worried about the attention, but they all seem to agree that they want independence from Denmark. Can you talk a little bit about why, specifically, Greenlanders want to break away from Denmark, so much so that even people like the mayor might wearily be interested in closer relationships with the US?

There's a sense that Denmark doesn't respect Greenland and that there's this long legacy of racism, exploitation, treating Greenlanders as second-class citizens. Greenlanders Islanders come from a different culture. They're part of this wider Inuit community that lives in the Arctic circle, in Alaska, in Canada, in parts of Russia. They have their own language, their own traditions, their own history of how they survive in this very hostile environment. I met a number of people who said that they were mistreated, they were made fun of, that they were called racial slurs. I also heard a lot about the colonial legacy and things that Denmark had done when Greenland was a colony. They destroyed local traditions. They outlawed some of the religious practices that Greenlanders had been doing for centuries. There was this scandal in the 1960s and '70s, where Danish doctors were inserting IUD birth control devices into Greenlandic girls as young as 12 in an attempt to keep the population down. They did this to thousands of girls without them really understanding what was being done to them. This was kept secret until just a few years ago. When this scandal broke and the news spread that all these women in Greenland had been subject to this, it caused a lot of anger towards Denmark.

All these things together, that's what brings us to this moment where just about everybody now wants independence.

Let's talk about independence for a minute because I want to understand what would it actually take for Greenland to become independent?

Greenlanders have the right to call a referendum and declare independence. They only got that right in 2009. But they haven't done it yet because there's a lot of big, sticky issues that they have to solve before they can become their own independent country.

What?

More than 50% of Greenland's budget comes directly from Denmark. Hundreds of millions of dollars each year comes from Denmark to pay for roads, schools, social services, education, just about everything. If they became independent, they'd need to fill that hole. One solution, many Greenlanders say, is developing their mineral industry. But it's been really hard developing this sector because of the extreme cold weather, the ice that blocks ports, the fact that there's very few roads on Greenland. The mineral trade seems like a long term solution, but not necessarily what Greenland would need right now if it declares independence.

In a perfect world, what did the Greenlanders you spoke with see as the ideal relationship they wanted to have with the US?

That's a really good question. I talk to a lot of people about exactly that. What I kept hearing was talk about a free association agreement. The US has relationships with the few countries in the South Pacific where America pays for many of their expenses and In turn, these countries allow the US to use their territory for military bases. They vote with the US at the UN. They're very loyal allies of the United States of America. Several people I met in Greenland, including politicians, but also less political types, had the same thought. They said, We should establish a free association agreement with the US where we are an independent country, but we have a very close relationship with the US.

I can understand why having a strong relationship with the United States would benefit Greenland economically. But just looking at how the United States is treating its most important allies right now, slapping tariffs on Mexico and Canada and telling Europe it's basically on its own to defend Ukraine. If I'm a Greenlander, aren't I looking at all of this and feeling like the mayor you spoke to who's really nervous about the idea of closing up to the US right now?

Yeah, a lot of Greenlanders feel that way. But even from the ones who are a little nervous, I get the sense of enjoyment and comeuppance that finally we're giving it back to Denmark. All already all the attention that the US has put on Greenland is helping the Greenlanders extract certain concessions from Denmark. There are things that they have been asking for for years, like Greenlandic being established as a national identity, being able to export their fish directly to world markets. These are things that Denmark resisted for a long time. Just in the past few months, with Trump breathing down their neck, they They have agreed to make these concessions.

So all of what you just said makes a lot of sense. But we're still talking a lot of theoreticals right now, both in terms of, will Greenland become independent? Will the US try to take it over? Can you just help us put everything into context here? How likely do you see any of the major shifts we've talked about actually happening?

I don't think a US invasion of Greenland is very likely. But I do think that after 150 years of trying to take over Greenland, the US is closer today than it's ever been. Even if Greenland doesn't become part of America, most people there want to break off from Denmark, and many of them want a closer relationship with America. What this means is that the US is essentially pulling an enormous chunk of territory away from Europe at a time when things really couldn't be worse between the US and Europe. It would also mean that the US establishes a big foothold in a very strategic area, the Arctic. And so this place that no one was really talking about 5 or 10 years ago, it could actually turn out to be one of the more dramatic examples of a new geopolitical realignment.

Jeffrey, thank you so much.

My pleasure.

On Tuesday, Greenlanders vote on a new parliament in what is likely to be one of the most closely watched elections that the island has ever had. Different political parties are presenting their different visions of the future, with some wanting a closer relationship with the United States and a quick independence from Denmark. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Wall Street had its worst day of trading this year after President Trump refused to dismiss the idea that his aggressive stance on trade could plunge the US into a recession. The S&P 500 fell 2. 7% on Monday as the Canadian province of Ontario and China began to implement retaliatory tariffs on farm products and energy. And the Trump administration is trying to revoke a green card for a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead campus protests against Israel. The administration is relying on an obscure statute to try and make the case that the former student can be deported since he was involved in pro-Palestinian protests that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says undermined a US policy of fighting anti-Semitism. The deportation would mark an escalation of the President's crackdown on both immigration and universities that Trump has argued are too liberal.

It also raises questions about the White House's attitudes towards free speech. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Cheung and Olivia Nat. It was edited by Maria Byrne and fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Diane Wong, Alicia Beatup, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of WNDERly.

That's it for The Daily.

I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow..