{"id":5201,"date":"2026-02-08T16:22:39","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T16:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/5201\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T16:22:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T16:22:39","slug":"denmark-is-sick-of-being-bullied-by-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/5201\/","title":{"rendered":"Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although Greenlanders have had a sometimes fraught post-colonial relationship with Denmark\u2014in 1953, the island became a part of the Danish kingdom, rather than its colony, and it has gradually adopted more home rule since then\u2014few of them seem eager to be subsumed by a chaotic superpower intent on reviving McKinley-era colonialism. Responding to Katie Miller\u2019s Stars-and-Stripes-stamped map of Greenland, Nielsen called it a \u201cdisrespectful\u201d image. According to a 2025 poll, only six per cent of Greenlanders want to become part of the United States. Aaja Chemnitz, one of Greenland\u2019s two members in the Danish parliament, told me that the talk of annexation made her constituents \u201cquite anxious.\u201d She now keeps in her parliamentary office a MAGA-style red baseball cap. Its one-word slogan, \u201cNAAGGA,\u201d means \u201cno\u201d in Greenlandic.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration has also been undermining Denmark economically, launching a sustained attack on wind-power technology, one of the country\u2019s major exports. In August, the Administration ordered work stopped on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm in New England which is eighty-seven-per-cent complete, according to its co-developer, the partly state-owned Danish energy company \u00d8rsted. Revolution Wind, which began construction in 2023, was expected to power some three hundred and fifty thousand homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island, to reduce carbon emissions by eleven million metric tons, and to create about a thousand unionized jobs. After the project was halted, \u00d8rsted\u2019s stock fell to an all-time low, and the company, which announced that it had spent five billion dollars on the project, sued the Trump Administration. In October, \u00d8rsted revealed that it would be cutting a quarter of its workforce in the next two years.<\/p>\n

Danes feel proud of \u00d8rsted, which has succeeded financially while combatting climate change, a national priority. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School who has co-written a case study on \u00d8rsted, told me that wind power can generate up to a hundred and forty per cent of Denmark\u2019s electricity demand. \u00d8rsted, formerly a state-owned fossil-fuel company, underwent a corporate conversion experience about a decade ago, renaming itself and becoming the world\u2019s largest developer of offshore wind power. Berthelsen, the Danish political consultant, told me, \u201cWe think of ourselves as having developed this energy and spread it across the world.\u201d Wagner warned that the abrupt reversal on Revolution Wind would have knock-on effects for the U.S. \u201cWhat European company\u2019s board is going to sign off on a billion-dollar investment in the U.S. right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

Provocatively, the Trump Administration\u2019s stop-work order cited \u201cnational security\u201d reasons for cancelling Revolution Wind. On CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum offered this rationale: \u201cPeople with, you know, bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm.\u201d This struck many experts as silly. Wind farms can interfere with radar-detection systems, but the wind industry has developed effective methods for countering that interference. James Rogers, an expert on drone warfare at Cornell University, told me, \u201cThe industry works closely with ministries of defense and with those responsible for air and coastal defense to make sure mitigation measures are in place.\u201d The Pentagon approved the Revolution Wind project in 2023.<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/a><\/p>\n

Cartoon by Edward Steed<\/p>\n

The far likelier reason for quashing the project is Trump\u2019s aversion to green energy in general, and to wind in particular. (In 2011, he failed to shut down an offshore wind farm that, he thought, marred the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland.) Over the years, he\u2019s offered, without evidence, a motley array of objections to wind power\u2014that it\u2019s increasing cancer rates in humans, that it\u2019s driving whales \u201cloco.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration, again citing national security, also initiated a federal investigation of foreign-made wind turbines. The argument was that, because most turbine components are manufactured abroad, America could be held hostage by nations seeking to \u201cweaponize their control over supplies of wind turbines and their parts.\u201d The investigation could produce a recommendation for heavy tariffs on foreign turbine equipment, of which Denmark is a major supplier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although Greenlanders have had a sometimes fraught post-colonial relationship with Denmark\u2014in 1953, the island became a part of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5007,27,26,5006,4399,5008,5009],"class_list":{"0":"post-5201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-denmark","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-danmark","10":"tag-denmark","11":"tag-letter-from-copenhagen","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","14":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}