Reporter Asks Sec of State Blinken to Definitively Clarify that the U.S. Is No Longer Pursuing Wild Trump-Era Idea of Buying Greenland

Screenshot via CBS.

One of the weirder stories from the Trump era was when reporting broke in August 2019 that then-President Donald Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland.

That was a real thing that happened.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Greenland on Thursday when the subject came up, and he cleared up that no, this idea is not still in contention. Per the New York Times:

“I can confirm that’s correct,” Mr. Blinken said during an appearance in Greenland with Danish officials and the premier of Greenland, Mute Egede, in response to a reporter who asked him to “definitively say that the United States does not seek to buy Greenland.”

After that initial reporting broke in 2019, Trump publicly confirmed it’s something he was interested in, and days later his stated reason for postponing his meeting with the Prime Minister of Denmark was her comments shooting down the idea that Greenland would be for sale.

The idea was widely mocked because, well, of course it was, but Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed at the time calling Trump “crazy like a Fox,” deriding his critics, and saying the U.S. should buy Greenland.