In 2019, during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president, Mr. Trump floated the idea of the United States buying the island of Greenland. At the time, most people in Greenland (and Denmark, the European country that controls it) thought his suggestion was a joke.
“Everyone said, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t just buy a country, he doesn’t mean it,’” Mr. Jeppesen, a native Greenlander and a radio producer, said by telephone. “Obviously that was the wrong way to take it. Look at where we are today.”
Now Mr. Trump has doubled down on his insistence that the United States needs to annex Greenland for security reasons. And that has Greenlanders asking the same questions as everyone else, but with a lot more uneasiness.
Is Mr. Trump just being bombastic again, floating a fanciful annexation plan that he may know is a stretch?
Or is he serious?