President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry, touched down in Nuuk on Sunday, saying he arrived “simply to build relationships,” and to “see if there are opportunities” to expand them.

The U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, arrived on Monday to take part in this week’s Future Greenland 2026 conference. Landry is also expected to attend.

President Donald Trump has suggested the U.S. should take over Greenland. The New York Times reports that negotiators from the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark, have been in talks about Greenland’s future. Greenland and Denmark have been adamant that the U.S. cannot acquire Greenland.

The vast majority of Greenlanders, who are part of the Kingdom of Denmark, have said they do not want to be acquired by the United States. Denmark has also stated Greenland’s future is not up for negotiation, and several European leaders have stressed that the United States cannot interfere with Greenland — with at least one, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, warning that if Trump were to engage in a military incursion it would mean the end of NATO.

“I would like to make a deal,” Trump told reporters in January.

“You know, the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re gonna do it the hard way,” the president said.

In March, Danish public broadcaster DR, via a Google translation, reported that Trump’s remarks, when he threatened that the U.S. could acquire Greenland the easy way or the hard way, had accelerated the governments’ plans.

Denmark had formed an alliance with France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, flew heavily armed Danish F-35 fighter jets and troops to Greenland with bombs to blow up its own runways if necessary to prevent U.S. aircraft from landing, and prepared for casualties by flying bags of blood to the autonomous territory of roughly 56,000 residents.

On Monday, according to video posted by Orla Joelsen, a native Greenlander and a prison official in Nuuk, the GOP governor spoke with some local children.

“If you come to Louisiana,” Governor Landry says in the video, “and you come to the governor’s mansion — all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

Governor Landry, to Greenlandic children:

“—If you come to the Governor’s Mansion in Louisiana, you can have all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

—DR pic.twitter.com/oah6tDfggO

— Orla Joelsen (@OJoelsen) May 18, 2026

Image via Shutterstock

President Donald Trump remains “obsessively focused” on “personal glory and enrichment” — ignoring the economic suffering of the working people he last week dismissed as the “little man,” Jeet Heer writes in The Nation.

“Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East,” writes Heer, The Nation’s national affairs correspondent. Trump would be “exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans.”

Americans are paying roughly 40 percent more at the gas pump than they did before Trump started his war in Iran three months ago, Heer notes. But in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week, Trump said, “I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”

Meanwhile, Republicans’ response “to the harm caused by Trump’s policies” is not to change course “or even to appear sympathetic about their effects,” but rather, “to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people.”

Heer looks at a Bloomberg report from last week that revealed Trump or his financial advisors made over 3,700 trades during the first quarter of this year, “a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”

Trump won the White House — twice — by promoting a message of economic populism, but that has gone by the wayside. Heer writes: “allowing Trump to steal the rhetoric of economic populism” was one of “the most catastrophic mistakes” Democrats have made in the last decade.

Now, Trump is making the same messaging error Biden did — an error that cost Democrats the White House in 2024. But that error opens the door for Democrats to “reclaim economic populism” as their own message.

Citing the “apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” Heer writes that Trump said: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

Image via Reuters 

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s book tour was met with staunch criticism by the far-right, but underneath the anger, political scientist Daniel Ruggles writes, was a critical revelation: the conservative movement is split between hard-right MAGA nativists and mainstream constitutionalists.

Writing at The Bulwark, Ruggles notes that at his core, Justice Gorsuch — like all conservatives to varying degrees on the Roberts Supreme Court, is an originalist: he believes the constitution should be interpreted as it was understood when written.

But the MAGA hard right has not embraced originalism, and, Ruggles writes, “originalism’s slow seep into both conservative and mainstream constitutional law will not be easily undone.”

“Fundamentally, originalists accept the democratic constraints of the Constitution and believe them to be a core component of America’s political tradition,” Ruggles writes. “Postliberals and their nativist fellow travelers” — MAGA, for example — “have begun to reimagine the American state without any such constitutional guardrails.”

Gorsuch’s book tour enraged MAGA because he kept focusing on “creed.”

“The United States is a ‘creedal’ nation—that is, a nation unified by common belief in rights, liberties, and democratic institutions,” Ruggles writes.

Gorsuch explained that Americans share a “heritage,” but, Ruggles said, “it’s one of ideals, not ethnicity. Being an American requires not lineage, but belief.”

“It was a gentle rebuke of nationalism—and it drove the hard right nuts,” Ruggles wrote.

Ruggles added that the “clash over an American ‘creed’ portends something dark as well, to the degree it shows deep tensions between the extremist, illiberal right and its originalist predecessors.”

The MAGA hard right is rising, and has sought “key privileges in the Trump presidency,” Ruggles explains, while originalists have a “critical institutional advantage on the bench of the Supreme Court and other courts” that insulates them from MAGA’s populism.

“Who wins this battle,” Ruggles warns, “will fundamentally redefine America.”

Image via Reuters