The president has, in recent days, dramatically ramped up his rhetoric about the United States taking control of the semiautonomous Danish territory.
On CNN’s “The Source,” guest host Kasie Hunt asked Haberman, who has reported on Trump for years, if she could “help us understand exactly what is driving the president when it comes to Greenland, and how far he’s prepared to take it?”
Haberman acknowledged she didn’t know how far Trump would go with his pursuit of the island, and suggested the president may not even know himself, noting a split in opinion on his current, aggressive tactics among his aides and advisers.
“But what he wants is conquest,” she said. “I mean, it’s really not much more complicated.”
Trump “sees it as territory that he should be able to have,” Haberman continued. “He’s been talking about this since his first term. He treated it as something of a joke, frankly, in his first term, and climbed down from it.”
“But there was effort put into looking at whether some kind of an acquisition was possible on a strategic basis,” she noted. “That’s very different than what he’s talking about right now, which is, ‘I want it. I should have it. I’m going to tariff countries that don’t support this.’”
