Meet the Guy Who Reportedly Told Trump to Buy Greenland

President Donald Trump was reportedly convinced to try annexing Greenland by cosmetics billionaire and college friend Ronald Lauder. Greenlanders, meanwhile, are not sold on the idea.Mother Jones illustration; Evan Vucci/AP; Michael Kappeler/Picture Alliance/Getty

The United States has been trying to annex Greenland for centuries.

The massive island in the Arctic—which is home to 56,000 people and holds vast oil and mineral reserves—is currently an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward planned to purchase Greenland, but the deal fell apart; in 1946, President Harry S. Truman tried to buy it for $100 million. He failed, too. 

The most recent attempt at grabbing Greenland came in President Donald Trump’s first term in office. As New York Times journalist Peter Baker and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser reported in their book The Divider, an unexpected friend of Trump’s planted the idea: Ronald Lauder of Estée Lauder, the $29 billion makeup brand.

The cosmetics billionaire reportedly pitched Trump on buying Greenland—though by 2019, Trump was claiming it as his own brainchild. According to the Times, Lauder “offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate.”

The two men have a long relationship. Lauder and Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business together. Since 2016, Lauder has donated well over $1 million to pro-Trump organizations. In 2022, he reportedly backed away from supporting Trump. Lauder’s donations on OpenSecrets show funds sent to Nikki Haley’s campaign in October 2023. It seems things have been patched up since then. Lauder, according to reporting from CBS News, attended Trump’s inauguration.

Lauder’s motives for introducing the idea of buying Greenland are unclear. As Trump told Baker and Glasser in 2021, the idea was “not so different” from his own approach to real estate development in New York City. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,” Trump explained. 

“I love maps,” the president continued. “And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”

Lauder has not publicly commented on Trump taking credit for thinking of buying Greenalnd himself. (Lauder, who recently retired from Estée Lauder’s board, did not respond to a request for comment.) According to Baker and Glasser, Lauder reportedly offered to go to Greenland to help facilitate the purchase himself. “A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,” Trump told an adviser at the time. 

Still, the cosmetics mogul—whose net worth is estimated at $4.7 billion—has a history of throwing himself and his money into various right-wing causes and campaigns in New York state. (He was, in this way, an early adopter of the au courant embrace of the right wing among American luxury fashion brands.)

Lauder has been one of the largest donors in New York politics for at least 20 years, a legacy that includes a failed self-funded bid for New York City mayor in 1989, in which he ran to the right of Rudy Giuliani. And this isn’t his first time involving himself in international affairs, either. A staunch supporter of the state of Israel, Lauder has traditionally aligned himself with the right-wing Israeli Likud party (stepping away to criticize the right in a rare move in 2018). When current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was running for prime minister in the mid-1990s, Lauder allegedly helped bankroll that campaign, though he denied those reports at the time. For nearly two decades, he has led the World Jewish Congress and more recently made headlines for loudly withdrawing his donations from the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2023 after the university held a Palestinian literature festival.

Although Lauder’s exact reasoning on Greenland is not clear, current explanations for grabbing the island are varied and becoming talking points beyond backrooms in the State Department.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders have cast Greenland as potentially critical to national security in a warming world. The island hosted American nuclear weapons storage during the Cold War and is located on the shortest air route between the continental United States and Russia. And while its rare-earth mineral deposits are notoriously difficult and expensive to access, that hasn’t stopped American leaders from eyeing them. 

In Trump’s case, the initial motivation may have been the whim of a cosmetics billionaire. But he took it seriously enough that he assigned then-national security adviser John Bolton to lead a committee investigating the matter. At certain points, he suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico to fund the purchase, as reported in The Divider.

Then, as now, the people of Greenland were not interested. Ninety percent of Greenland’s population is Indigenous, and a majority of Greenlanders support independence from Denmark—to say nothing of the United States. Greenland’s prime minister, Múte B. Egede, spent much of January saying the same things Greenlanders said the first time around: that they are not simply a topic for theoretical discussion, but a people with their own economic and political interests. 

“We don’t want to be Americans,” Egede said Tuesday. “Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.” 

As reported in The Divider, Bolton essentially slow-walked the Greenland purchase idea until he resigned from his post in late 2019.

But this time, Bolton is one of the people pushing the whole Greenland thing back into the mainstream. In an interview earlier this month with Bari Weiss of the Free Press, he confirmed that to his knowledge, Lauder raised the idea initially. And then signed on to purchase the island, for more Bolton-esque, geopolitical reasons: “With global warming, that Northwest passage becomes a more viable maritime route,” he told the Free Press. In 2022, Bolton used similarly expansionist rhetoric—citing Chinese and Russian influence in the Arctic—as reason enough to force the annexation of Greenland. 

For some Republican lawmakers, the reasons are less realpolitik and more morale-oriented. “Does anyone regret the Louisiana Purchase or the acquisition of Alaska?,” Rep. Mike Rulli (R-Ohio) asked in a press release attached to a bill sponsored by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), titled the “Make Greenland Great Again Act.” 

Under international law, you cannot just buy a colonial territory. But Trump hasn’t ruled out the use of military force or aggressive tariffs—and the Make Greenland Great Again Act would formally authorize him to “enter negotiations” with the king of Denmark over Greenland.

The acquisition, Rulli said, would “restore national pride and optimism.” And it would do so by restoring explicit colonialism to the American people—something echoed in Trump’s inaugural address, in which he called for the United States to return to what it’s done for most of its history and start conquering territory outside its borders again. 

“President Trump’s vision for Greenland is exactly what is needed to reignite the spirit of Manifest Destiny that once propelled Americans to greatness,” Rulli said. “A historic presidency deserves a historic beginning. Let’s Make Greenland Great Again!” 

In Trump’s mind, this Manifest Destiny, too, is “just real estate,” Bolton said. “He wants to put a Trump casino in Nuuk.”