Donald's Green(land) With Envy

Trump & Tech tag-team-up on the icy isle

Trump warned us on the first day of his second Presidency.

Among the first Executive Orders he signed was “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” Actually, there was only one name “restored” by the E.O. He re-renamed Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley:

President William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, heroically led our Nation to victory in the Spanish-American War. Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed rapid economic growth and prosperity, including an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation. President McKinley championed tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive U.S. industrialization and global reach to new heights. He was tragically assassinated in an attack on our Nation’s values and our success, and he should be honored for his steadfast commitment to American greatness.

The order—which echoed his reference to McKinley during his inaugural speech earlier that day—also criticized President Obama for “stripping the McKinley name from federal nomenclature,” which the E.O. characterized as “an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice.” Foremost among McKinley’s “achievements” was the acquisition of territory.

It’s not a stretch to think of McKinley as the godfather of American Empire. The Spanish-American war gave the US direct control over Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines … and Cuba became a protectorate. McKinley annexed Hawai’i. McKinley also tried to get the Panama Canal project underway, although the commission he formed recommended a route through Nicaragua. An assassin took his life before it could get off the ground, but he did play a key role in its genesis and, more broadly, in establishing the US as a global colonial power. As Lewis L. Gould, Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Texas, explained:

During his tenure, the United States acquired overseas territories, fought and won a war with a European power, and attempted to set international norms regarding trade with China. In short, the United States emerged on the world stage in new and unprecedented ways. There is little agreement among scholars, however, on exactly why this occurred. Some historians argue that economic considerations and the search for open markets drove America's foreign policy in these years. Others contend that a sense of moral responsibility—the "white man's burden"—led America into Cuba and the Philippines. Geostrategic concerns, according to other scholars, launched the United States on an imperial path. Still other historians assert that a desire to protect and enhance notions of America's "manhood" led the United States into conflict in Cuba and toward imperialism.

As you can see, many of the issues that may have motivated McKinley’s expansionism then are not dissimilar to those that may be driving Trump’s imperial ambitions today. Frankly, it’s no wonder that Trump sees himself as a latter-day McKinley. It’s not unlike his Bannon-stoked obsession with President Andrew Jackson during his first term. This time, though, Trump doesn’t have Bannon whispering into his ear and, it seems, he arrived at his attempt to embody McKinley on his own.

The New Yorker’s Daniel Immerwahr quibbled with Trump’s comparison. Writing in June of last year, Immerwahr thought Trump was more of throwback to William Jennings Bryan than William McKinley. But he also noted that Trump was, historically speaking, still in the ballpark:

Trump’s knowledge is thin, but his instincts are sharp, and if he picked the wrong individual he nevertheless picked the right era. McKinley sprang from an age when the United States’ relationship to the world was fundamentally different. It was a time of trade barriers and colonial wars, a time before what political scientists call the “liberal international order.” Trump grew up in the shadow of that order and came to resent it enormously. His attraction to the nineteenth century seems to derive from his desire to be free of liberal internationalism. But, in reaching back to that past, what sort of future is he steering toward?

Six months have passed and the course Trump is charting becomes clearer with each passing day. Re-rechristening Mount McKinley was just an appetizer. The main course is full-blown, 19th Century-style imperialism.

Venezuela has been decapitated and he’s openly pillaging its oil. He’s bombed six other countries and he’s threatened a half-dozen more … including empire’s old stomping grounds in Cuba. He’s repeatedly said the Panama Canal belongs to the United States. And he’s proposed an Anschluss-like absorption of Canada. But his greatest obsession seems to be Greenland.

Trump claims he’s motivated by national security. According to him, Russia and China are poised to take it away from the ill-equipped Danes. It’s an oft-repeated, wholly uncorroborated claim Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen dismissed after a White House meeting:

“We had the opportunity to challenge the narrative of the president," he said, adding the “narrative that we have Chinese war ships all around the place” is not true. “There hasn’t been one (Chinese ship) for a decade or so," he said citing Danish intelligence.

Trump’s claims also fail to reflect Denmark’s participation in NATO. He says the Danes are relying on “two dog sleds” to fend off non-existent Chinese or Russian interlopers when the reality is that Greenland is under the umbrella of the world’s most powerful military alliance. It’s an alliance that allows the US to maintain a military presence on the continent-sized island, which it already does. But that’s not enough for Trump. After his meeting with JD Vance and Marco Rubio, Rasmussen said, "It's clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland."

If “national security” is, much like Venezuela’s “narcoterrorism,” just another thinly-veiled pretext, the question remains: Why Greenland?

The answer is found where Trump’s delusions of grandeur intersects with Silicon Valley’s arrogant opportunism.

Although he’s often been called Putin’s “useful idiot,” Trump is better understood as Silicon Valley’s useful narcissist. His desire to be forever-known as a 21st Century McKinley is a perfect match for the Valley’s megalomaniacal pursuit of AI. Their quest for an industry unbound from the chains of social, cultural and environmental responsibility has found a champion in Trump.

And Trump has delivered.

From the very start, he made AI his administration’s top priority and they’ve removed every roadblock they can for his generous donors and dinner guests.

Trump is eliminating climate change as a regulatory impediment to burning hydrocarbons for energy-hungry data centers. So, too, is the Clean Air Act being reinterpreted to allow “dangerous nitrogen oxide (NO_x) pollution from new gas-burning turbines used in power plants and industrial facilities.” Trump’s EPA has followed those recent moves with yet another reinterpretation of the Clean Water Act that will, as AP reported, advance “the Trump administration’s goal of accelerating the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure and data centers.”

The Clean Water Act’s first reinterpretation was came in a July Executive Order titled “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure”:

The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency shall assist in expediting permitting on Federal and non-Federal lands by developing or modifying regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq.); the Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.); the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (42 U.S.C. 9601 et seq.); the Toxic Substances Control Act (15 U.S.C. 2601 et seq.); and other relevant applicable laws, in each case, that impact the development of Qualifying Projects.

“Developing or modifying regulations promulgated under” the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act is a green light for EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to simply rewrite or ignore laws. That’s music to Silicon Valley’s ears … but not just because they need unfettered access to energy, but they also need unfettered access to water. That combination is driving up utility costs for Americans who live near data centers. In some areas near data centers, wholesale electricity is up a whopping 267% over the last five years. And just a one of those loudly whirring facilities can consume up to “5 million gallons of water a day — as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.”

That’s because hyperscaled data centers run hot. Very hot. And it takes a lot of water to keep ‘em cool. But that’s making Americans hot under the collar. Electricity bills and water use bled into recent campaigns and will no doubt be featured in numerous Congressional races in the coming year. As the watchdogs at Data Center Watch recently reported, “opposition to data centers is accelerating”:

In Q2 2025 alone, an estimated $98 billion in projects were blocked or delayed, more than the total for all previous quarters since 2023. As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.

How perfect, then, is Greenland? A frigid, sparsely populated expanse brimming with crucial minerals that just-so-happens to have melting glaciers and a massive, melting ice sheet is a made-to-order home for the sprawling data centers they need to transform AI from a fanciful pastime to an omnipresent intermediary between humans and everything.

That’s why Silicon Valley has been working in concert with Trump on Greenland since day one. They saw in his ambition to accumulate adulation and fame a perfect means for their ends. One of those ends is, as PitchBook recently explained, Greenland’s “swathes of rare mineral resources that power everything from smartphones to satellites.” PitchBook also reported that a few of the usual suspects have been pouring money into a mining company since 2022:

Mineral exploration startup KoBold Metals raised more than $1.2 billion from Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, among others, to drill in Greenland. Meanwhile, Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, invested in Critical Metals Corp., which holds a mining license.

How about that last bit? Lutnick’s conflicts of interest have been mostly lost in the fetid miasma of corruption that is the air Trump’s Administration breathes, but it’s another telling sign that Trump’s Greenland fixation didn’t randomly pop into his head. For that matter, a Reuters report last July indicates it is unlikely that Trump’s drive to strike a peace deal in the Congo was a flight of fancy:

KoBold Metals, the mining company backed by U.S. billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has signed an agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo that positions the U.S. firm to acquire the contested Manono lithium deposit and launch large-scale critical mineral exploration, it said on Friday.

The deal represents a dramatic escalation in the battle for Manono in northern Congo, considered one of the world’s largest lithium deposits, crucial for electric vehicle batteries.

Obviously, what often appears on its face to be another deranged reverie from the mind of Trump is just as likely to be the public launch of a privately hatched plan. Take, for example, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to Denmark. His name is Ken Howery and he just-so-happens-to-be one of the co-founders of PayPal. You might be familiar with a couple of his fellow co-founders … like Peter Thiel (who just-so-happens-to-be JD Vance’s benefactor and mentor) and Elon Musk. Howery’s proximity to Thiel, Trump and Greenland is no coincidence.

In fact, Howery is key player in the “Freedom City” movement popular with so-called “libertarian” tech billionaires. And yes, Greenland is on their radar, too:

The freedom-city movement reflects a fascination with settling new American frontiers, rooted in nostalgia for the nation’s 1800s western expansion. Expanding to Greenland “can be the dawn of a new Manifest Destiny,” said tech investor Shervin Pishevar, referring to the 19th-century philosophy that America was an exceptional nation with a God-given mission to conquer territory.

Thiel, a libertarian and early Trump supporter, wrote in 2009 that he no longer considered democracy compatible with freedom and has advocated escaping politics by colonizing outer space or seasteading — building communities in ungoverned oceans.

Fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal advisor to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is part of a tech-investor consortium seeking to build a city on grazing land outside San Francisco. Another venture capitalist and informal DOGE advisor, Joe Lonsdale, also promotes low-regulation cities. In a statement to Reuters, Lonsdale celebrated “expanding our country to Greenland” but did not comment on plans for a city there.

The discussions are in early stages, but the idea has been taken seriously by Trump’s pick for Denmark ambassador, Ken Howery, who is expected to be confirmed by Congress in the coming months and lead Greenland-acquisition negotiations, the people said. Howery, whose involvement with the idea hasn’t been previously reported, once co-founded a venture-capital firm with tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a leading advocate for such low-regulation cities. Howery is also a longtime friend of Elon Musk, a top Trump advisor.

Reuters filed that report a couple weeks after Thiel acolyte JD Vance made his contentious trip to Greenland last March. Like Howery, Vance’s meteoric rise from author and Trump critic to Vice President and the White House’s point-man on Greenland is unlikely to be a coincidence. Thanks again to PitchBook, we now know none of this is a coincidence:

Early last year, it was reported that several Silicon Valley figures—among them PayPal alumni Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, who is also Trump’s hand-picked US ambassador to Denmark—had lobbied the Trump administration to develop a “freedom city” in Greenland.

Now Vance is leading meetings with Danish and Greenlandic officials in the White House … and Howery is meeting with Danish and Greenlandic officials in the island’s capital of Nuuk. For his part, Trump is doing what he does best—hammering home his “national security” sales pitch like a fifteen second radio ad. But, as of this writing, the American people are not buying what’s he’s selling (or attempting to buy, as the case may be):

Just 17% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's efforts to acquire Greenland, and substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans oppose using military force to annex the island, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Ironically, that may not dissuade the Adulationaholic-in-Chief. As the Danish Foreign Minister noted, he seems committed to “conquering” the ice-covered island in spite of the implications, particularly for the NATO alliance. Foreign Minister Rasmussen told FOX News it would “be the end of NATO,” which sounds more like an incentive than a warning for the alliance-averse Trump. It might even be a feature of his proposed conquest instead of a bug.

Even more ironic, though, is the fact that Trump’s defiant rejection of green energy may finally vindicate Erik the Red’s decision in the 10th century to call the icy island “Greenland,” which the Danish Institute for International Studies characterized as “an attempt to lure more Norse settlers to Erik’s settlement in Southeast Greenland.”

Now, in the 21st Century, Donald the Orange is doing everything he can to speed-up the melting of its vast ice sheet and fast-moving glaciers. If successful, he will lure tech bros to the thawing tundra where they will accelerate the process by processing our data in vast, unregulated facilities. Soon enough there will be no need to re-christen Greenland … although it is probably Donald’s wish that President Vance re-name it Trumplandia.

After all, McKinley just got a mountain.

---