With its striking Arctic artworks, tasteful decor and gently tinkling grand piano, the cocktail bar in Greenland’s plushest hotel, the Hans Egede, is not the sort of place where boozy brawls break out.
At least it wasn’t, until Donald Trump declared his designs on the country.
One minute Jorgen Boassen, a local bricklaying company boss who vociferously champions the ‘Make Greenland American’ cause, was enjoying a beer in the hotel, in the capital city of Nuuk. The next he’d been knocked off his stool by a vicious punch from behind.
Being a former boxer, Boassen, 51, more than held his own in the ensuing scrap last month. But it was not the first time he has been physically attacked since he was enlisted as a guide and unofficial ambassador by Trump’s visiting Arctic envoys.
When I last spoke to this pugnacious Greenlander, precisely a year ago, his pro-Trump exhortations on social media were regarded with amusement or mild contempt by most compatriots.
As Trump acolytes took to the streets of Nuuk in that biting winter to hand out dollar bills and red MAGA baseball caps to win the support of teenagers who had seldom ventured beyond their icebound outpost, the U.S. President’s rhetoric was thought to be little more than a fleeting blast of hot air.
Yet as Boassen told me from his exiled base in Denmark yesterday, the tension in Greenland has since ratcheted up so dangerously that he seriously fears the world’s biggest island could be on the brink of ‘civil war’.
Arguments over whether Greenland should remain part of Denmark, which has controlled it for more than 300 years, or agree to U.S. annexation, are now so rancorous that families are being torn apart.
Greenlander Jorgen Boassen (pictured), a local bricklaying company boss, says his business has been ‘blacklisted’ due to his vociferous championing of the ‘Make Greenland American’ cause and he felt forced to flee to nearby Denmark
Mr Boassen’s cause has not always endeared him to his fellow Greenlanders. He told the Daily Mail that recently he was sucker punched while enjoying a beer in a hotel in the capital city of Nuuk due to his campaign
The issue of Greenland’s sovereignty has been thrown into sharp relief following moves by Donald Trump to annex the territory – the US President has said ‘we have to have it’ for national security reasons
Indeed, Boassen says he has been forced to split up with his fiancee – who had shared a home with him and their teenage daughter in Nuuk – because members of her family despise his campaign for Americanisation.
He also claims it is no coincidence that his erstwhile partner was fired from her senior post with Air Greenland, a nationalised Danish carrier for whom she had worked for 30 years, soon after he attended MAGA events to celebrate Trump’s inauguration in Washington.
‘The Danes control 95 per cent of all the businesses here, and they are hunting down people like me with independent dreams of working with America,’ Boassen told me yesterday.
‘My bricklaying company has closed because people have blacklisted it, and the same thing is happening to other businesses who show support for Trump.
‘I’m staying in Copenhagen for now because people back home are afraid to associate with me. That’s how it is in Greenland now. Those who really want the Americans to take over dare not speak out. There is a climate of fear.’
Though Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate, serious violent crime is relatively unusual.
As Trump widens his ambitions northwards from Central America, however, Boassen (who perhaps fancifully describes himself as a ‘revolutionary’) believes the country is teetering on a knife-edge.
‘I really think a civil war could happen in Greenland,’ he says. ‘The tension is so great – and if they [his opponents] can attack me, they can attack anyone.’
Mr Boassen says he has even been forced to split up with his fiancee – who had shared a home with him and their teenage daughter in Nuuk – because members of her family despise his campaign for Americanisation
An aerial view shows icebergs floating in the waters off the capital city of Greenland, Nuuk
Speaking on CNN, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller (right) flatly declared that Greenland ‘should be part of the United States’ – and insisted that no country would dare fight Washington over the Arctic territory’s future
Danish military forces participate in an exercise with hundreds of troops from several European NATO members in the Arctic Ocean in Nuuk, Greenland in September 2025
Darkly, he adds that there is enough armoury for such a conflict, because ‘in Greenland almost every home has a gun for hunting’.
‘So, I say to the EU and the UK – to Sir Keir Starmer – before you step in, you should be very careful, and you should know the truth about Denmark: they are repressing our people.’
While he stops short of envisaging a scenario where Greenlanders take up arms against one another, Kuno Fencker, a pro-independence Greenland MP, agrees that divisions are becoming ever more fractious, with ‘families falling out’ with one another.
After centuries of heavy-handed colonisation, Fencker tells me he believes the great majority of Greenlanders yearn for freedom from the Danes. Like Boassen, he draws on opinion polls such as one last year showing 84 per cent of the population favour independence.
Of course, as I pointed out to him yesterday, that doesn’t mean they wish to be governed from Washington.
Describing the latest bellicose noises from the White House as ‘positive and exciting’, however, Fencker envisages a free association agreement such as the one between the U.S. and the Marshall Islands, whereby Greenland would retain its sovereignty but permit American companies to share in the exploitation of its rare earth minerals and retain military bases there to deter Chinese and Russian incursions.
Security is a task palpably far beyond the Danes, claims Fencker. They retain just a few hundred soldiers and two or three icebreaking naval patrol vessels in Greenland, and whose surveillance equipment is so poor that they are incapable of detecting Russian submarines.
The MP argues that Greenlanders who fail to accept the need for change have been living under the Danish yoke for so long, and have become so reliant on its subsidies, that they are terrified by the prospect of change.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is said to have dismissed the idea of a Venezuela-style operation in Greenland but plans to visit the territory for talks next week about a potential purchase
Katie Miller, wife of Steven Miller, posted a map of Greenland covered by the American flag on X just hours after the US captured deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro
Whether or not he is right, few of the Greenlanders with whom I remain in contact relish the idea of swapping Danish rulers for Americans; and, apart from Boassen, not one can countenance kow-towing to Trump.
For everything about his brash, boastful persona is anathema to the unassuming Inuit people. And, with his ‘drill-baby-drill’ mantra, they fear what might become of their homeland’s pristine environment – their most cherished asset – should he take charge.
Among the many Greenlanders whose minds are now dominated by fears of an imminent U.S. invasion is Hedvig Frederiksen, a retired 65-year-old whose flat overlooks Nuuk International Airport.
As I spoke to her via Facetime yesterday, she suddenly jumped up from her armchair and dashed to the window – a regular reflex, so her English-speaking daughter Aviaja Fontain tells me.
For since Trump’s lightning strike on Venezuela, Hedvig fears the American invasion is beginning whenever she hears a plane landing.
‘Mum has also put an aircraft tracking app on her mobile phone so she can monitor the flights leaving Pituffik [the U.S Space Base in northwest Greenland] in case they are heading down here,’ says Aviaja. ‘Many Greenlanders are doing the same now.’
Neither Hedvig and Aviaja, who has three teenage children, have any time for Trump, but when she considers what life might be like under America’s auspices, the older woman’s views are less clear-cut.
They are shaped by her own early experiences, and those of her Inuit forbears. She was raised in a remote village in southern Greenland, where her father worked as a cook for a Danish company mining cryolite, a rare earth mineral once used in aluminium production, and one which Trump is doubtless keen to exploit.
Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen (pictured) warned earlier this week that if the US attacks the territory of a Nato ally ‘then everything would stop – that includes Nato and therefore post-second world war security’
A scattering of brightly coloured houses covered by snow next to the sea in Nuuk, Greenland
Hedvig says the Danes treated him like a virtual slave and paid him a pittance, a story one hears repeatedly from the Inuit. Her mother, who worked in a fish processing factory, was treated equally badly.
Then in 1974, when she was 14 years old, the Danish authorities sent her and her classmates to finish their schooling in the town of Paamiut. The fate that befell them, a couple of days after they arrived, is one of many shameful events in Greenland’s colonial past.
All the girls were ordered to line up outside a room without having an idea what was to happen to them. As they emerged, a few minutes later, they were crying, for without any consultation with their parents, they had been fitted with contraceptive coils.
It later emerged that they were victims of a chilling Danish government plan to save costs on welfare, housing, health and education by limiting the Inuit population to about 50,000.
It worked to good effect. Today, the world’s biggest island – a landmass nine times bigger than the UK – has around 57,000 inhabitants: fewer than Margate in Kent.
It was only after she met Aviaja’s father, in her early 20s, and they failed to conceive, that Hedvig discovered what had been done to her. Thankfully, after the device was removed, they were able to have Aviaja, now 40.
Small wonder that Hedvig and her daughter – along with 75 per cent of native Greenlanders, according to a poll last year – would welcome independence.
With the future of her children in mind, Aviaja, an undergraduate at Nuuk’s Danish-subsidised university, would prefer that independence to be absolute. Should America and its culture descend on Greenland, she fears it would lower the country’s moral standards and bring such horrors as mass shootings at schools.
US Vice President JD Vance visited Greenland last March, specifically the US military’s Pituffik Space Base
Young Greenlanders wearing MAGA hats stand near the Hotel Hans Egede during Donald Trump Jr.’s visit to Nuuk on January 07, 2025
But Hedvig admits to an admiration for the United States and its people. It stems from stories passed down by her own mother and grandmother, who remember the kindness shown to them by Americans who occupied Greenland as a protectorate after the Nazis took Denmark in the Second World War.
The Danes, in their determination to keep the Inuit community from developing, forbade them even the most everyday household accessories, such as oil lamps, and expected them to wear clothes made from the fur of animals they hunted.
By contrast, the Americans gave them fabrics and machines to make clothing, and handed out parcels with sweets for the children.
Hedvig, who subsists on a £940 monthly pension, also thinks she would be better off were the economy to be underpinned by the dollar and boosted by U.S. businesses more egalitarian than the Danes, who insist everything – including Greenland’s much-prized fish stocks – must be exported via Copenhagen.
And she is acutely aware that, should ‘World War III break out’, the Americans could stand up to the Russians or Chinese – unlike the Danes, with their dog-sleigh patrols and tiny fleet. So, I ask her, why not come out openly in favour of a takeover? She answers with one word: ‘Trump.’
Aviaja nods in agreement and expands. ‘It’s just the way he talks and acts, and the way he treats us. Like saying, so casually “Maybe we’ll attack Greenland, maybe we won’t.” And I’ve seen clips of him mocking Greenlandic people on social media.
‘So, someone like Trump is not appealing to us at all. We Greenlanders can shout when we really need to, but our culture is to be quieter. We often communicate just with mimes and facial expressions.’
As if to emphasise this chasmic cultural difference, Aviaja’s mother sits for an age in silent contemplation.
She is about to express another viewpoint when the roar of jet engines fills the room, and she scurries fretfully back to the frosted window.
[H/T Daily Mail]
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