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The Planetary Crime of a Trump Invasion of Greenland
In a rational world, the conversation about the island would be about the melting ice sheet that could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out.
Jan 07, 2026
When President Donald Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the US, it sounded farcical—a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:
First off, I think it’s a very real possibility.
Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?
MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO.
TAPPER: So force is on the table?
MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland.
And here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:
Trump: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.
Reporter: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?
Trump: The EU needs us to have it.
None of this makes any actual sense—Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united Tuesday to say, “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.
In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades—not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976. In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense—a poll last January found that 85% of the population opposed the idea.
Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want. He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20th century.
Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.
I’ve been up on this ice sheet—I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.
I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about US imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to US bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.
They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile.
We were camped above the Eagle Glacier—Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.
Greenland holds 23 feet of sea-level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century—it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: They passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling—the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).
I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on Earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals, and microplastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.
Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously, it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously, it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Stephen Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).
But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot—on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about 1°, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.
And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast US (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
And yet there’s a generosity to their witness—a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater…
None of us is immune.
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money…
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
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Did Centrism Help Democrats Win in Virginia and New Jersey? Or Was It ICE's Brutality?
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right.
Nov 19, 2025
The Democratic centrists are at it again, looking to show that the road to success is paved with middle-of-the-road candidates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York is being written off as the fluke product of a deep blue city, while the newly elected governors are hailed as the very model of successful centrist Democratic messaging.
Rahm Emanual, former Obama staffer, Mayor of Chicago and Wall Street advisor said:
If you are trying to win national campaigns that bring in a whole slew of swing voters, is the test Park Slope, Brooklyn — or what happens in New Jersey and Virginia? I am less interested in the Upper West Side and more interested in the Upper Peninsula. That is how you win.
Others argue that in substance Mamdani’s platform is not radically different from those of the moderate governors. Ry Rivard and Madison Fernandez wrote in Politico:
For all their ideological differences, Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger found a shared language that aims at the heart of President Donald Trump’s populism: the high cost of everyday life.
Their wins suggest a recalibration of Democratic politics — from moral crusades to kitchen-table math.
Affordability is the new mantra, to be sure, but the moderates are not ready to take on the fundamental causes of unaffordability. Those require you to take on the Democratic donor class. To truly make America affordable again, you need to slap major controls on Wall Street-financed oligopolies and rein in the wealth extraction machines that are private equity and hedge funds. Since the Democrats are not about to bite the donors’ hands that feed them, moderation is their best and only policy.
But maybe that timid moderation isn’t the reason the Dems won in this abbreviated cycle. Maybe the moderates won for a completely different reason that has little or nothing to do with affordability, like the fact that ICE has been coming after Hispanic immigrants, often with extreme violence, often arresting citizens and jailing them without cause. This everyday cruelty is ripping people from their communities and families across the country. It’s ugly and lots of voters of all persuasions don’t like it.
If that’s the case, I would think we would see a big shift in Hispanic votes from Trump in 2024 to Sherrill and Spanberger in 2025. And as best I can tell, that’s exactly what happened.
About 16 percent of all eligible voters in New Jersey are Hispanic. The two counties with the largest concentration are Hudson and Passaic. In Hudson County, the Hispanic vote shifted away from Trump by 23 percent, while it shifted away by 18 percent in Passaic County. “Sherrill carried Latino men and women alike, and even flipped 18% of Latino Trump voters,” reported CBS News.
While only 9 percent of Virginians are Hispanic, the two counties with the highest Hispanic concentrations (over 40 percent) are Manassas and Manassas Park. Although these are small counties, in Manassas Spanberger picked up 9 percent more votes than Harris did in 2024, while also picking up 13 percent more in Manassas Park.
It’s not hard to understand why Hispanic voters might be turning against Trump and his ICE machine. Many Hispanic citizens live with some undocumented immigrants, often family members. And Hispanic citizens have friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are Hispanic, all of whom know they might get stopped by masked members of ICE based on how they speak or the way they look or during a raid of their workplaces. Trump promised to deport serious criminals, but his administration has pivoted to targeting anyone who might be in the US without papers based on how they look. That includes many hardworking immigrant citizens.
The latest Kaiser Family Fund/New York Times poll confirms these fears:
“One in five immigrants say they personally know someone who has been arrested, detained or deported since January. Four in ten worry they or a family member could face such action. Many immigrants, including naturalized citizens and those who are lawfully present, say they feel less safe, are avoiding activities outside their home, and no longer view the U.S. as a good destination for immigrants.”
The Democrats would be wise and righteous to come to the defense of these working people, rather than dance the moderate two-step (“let’s work on affordability but leave the wealthy alone”).
As we’ve noted repeatedly, a strong majority of voters want a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. Our Rust Belt survey showed that 63 percent of the voters of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin support granting citizenship to undocumented workers who have been here three years, paid their taxes, and have not committed a felony crime. That support includes 36 percent of 2024 Trump voters.
Mamdani openly supports a path to citizenship, but do the new governors?
Instead of giving marathon speeches and shutting down the government, Democrats would make a powerful statement if they went out into the streets to protect immigrants from deportation. What would the public’s reaction be if every Democratic member of Congress got arrested standing up for due process and immigrants at ICE raids and facilities? Their mugshots would be a badge of honor, noticed by a public hungry for human solutions to real problems, not political terror. They would likely have more impact than counting on “affordability centrism” to stop Trump and his billionaire friends.
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right. It is just an excuse for ducking the hard task of taking on the monied elites who are sucking wealth away from working people.
Jim Hightower, the old-school populist columnist who served as Texas Commissioner of Agriculture for eight years, always had disdain for political centrists. As he pointed out many moons ago, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
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'It Must Stop': New Yorkers Protest After Violent ICE Raid on Canal Street Sparks Chaos
"Once again, the Trump administration chooses authoritarian theatrics that create fear, not safety," said NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Oct 22, 2025
More scenes of chaos and community anger erupted Tuesday night in downtown New York City as federal agents under the orders of President Donald Trump targeted a popular area for street vendors, many of them immigrants struggling to get by, and shoppers looking for more affordable bags, clothing, and other accessories than what's available in retail stores.
Illegal street vending is a well-known practice in the Canal Street area of Chinatown. Still, the arrival of masked agents and military-style vehicles on Tuesday devolved into another episode of violence in Trump's America, with frightened vendors running for their lives and passersby expressing outrage over the violence being used against the unlicensed retailers.
According to local WABC 7:
NewsCopter 7 showed arrests taking place between Lafayette and Center streets in Chinatown, an area typically busy with merchants selling T-shirts, handbags, perfumes, and designer knockoffs, as New Yorkers faced off against federal agents.
The scene grew chaotic as vendors packed up their tables and attempted to flee, with several people seen running and falling as authorities from multiple agencies, including Homeland Security, ICE, DEA and the FBI, pursued them.
As agents tried to detain individuals, crowds of New Yorkers gathered, shouting and pushing in an attempt to intervene. Some bystanders were heard cursing at officers, one officer was seen pointing his taser at the angry crowd, and several arrests were made.
Footage from Canal Street posted online showed agents tackling vendors and the angry response from the crowds witnessing the heavy-handed raid:
Trump's Nazi ICE Gestapo has come to Canal Street in New York City to kidnap residents — and New Yorkers are having none of it. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/olGgtLvjli
— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) October 21, 2025
"Trump's Nazi ICE Gestapo has come to Canal Street in New York City to kidnap residents—and New Yorkers are having none of it," said social justice activist Bill Madded in a social media post, pointing to the footage.
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani also condemned the raid.
"Federal agents from ICE and HSI—some in military fatigues and masks—descended on Chinatown today in an aggressive and reckless raid on immigrant street vendors," Mamdani said in a statement. "Once again, the Trump administration chooses authoritarian theatrics that create fear, not safety. It must stop."
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for DHS, told the New York Times that the operation was led by ICE and others, including the FBI and Border Patrol, but did not, the newspaper reported, "immediately indicate the number of people arrested or disclose their immigration status." Witnesses said agents were demanding proof of immigration status from those detained.
The surprise raid, noted many observers, came just days after right-wing political commentator Savanah Hernandez, a Trump loyalist, posted a video of herself on Canal Street documenting the street vending scene and denigrating many of the immigrants who find work there.
"A few days ago, this far-right poverty tourist and provocateur discovered Canal Street," noted Justin Brannan, a member of the New York City Council, referencing Hernandez's recent video segment. "Today, Trump’s ICE cowboys marched in. They're not hiding it. They're telegraphing it now."
As masked federal agents target street vendors on Canal Street, THE CITY watched one street vendor being detained.
As the operation carried on, agents were confronted with a spontaneous crowd of protesters.
MORE HERE: https://t.co/DsHGCcdDMV pic.twitter.com/jvAbm0jVgQ
— THE CITY (@THECITYNY) October 22, 2025
While members of the New York community denounced the raid, Hernandez, who is not from New York City, took a bow for what she accepted as her role in instigating it.
"Illegal immigration and the crime tied to it have been plaguing your city," Hernandez said with pride. "I make no apologies for reporting on what real New Yorkers have to deal with every single day."
A statement from the office of New York's Democratic Governor, Katherine Hochul, described Hernandez as "a bigot" and denounced the operation in the city.
The afternoon raid sparked an impromptu protest in lower Manhattan outside federal buildings that lasted late into the evening, with residents denouncing Trump and the behavior of the agencies operating in the city.
"I am so angry. What are they doing to our city? It's terrible," Nicole Parcher, a New York City resident who attended the protest, told WABC.
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