Transcript
A (0:00)
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com hi there, it's Alastair here. This week we're releasing the second episode in our miniseries on the battle for the Arctic. It is a vital, often overlooked political issue that is so significant to so many of the big names in global politics. So in this episode, we're looking at why does Donald Trump really want Greenland? We're looking at China's role in the region and also some of the incredible stories of how Russia is spying using whales to help it. If that sounds good to you, here is a clip from the episode. To hear the full thing, get all the benefits of a trip membership, sign up@the restispolitics.com let's just turn now to Trump and Greenland. It is incredible how I mean, it's true he mentioned it in his first term and he talked about it, but he said it's not a top priority. I'd like it one day, maybe that can happen. But then I came across this, partly because I was looking into the Epstein files, came across this story about a guy called Ronald Lauder. Now, the most famous Lauder that I know is Harry Lauder, who's a former Scottish musician, but Estee Lauder Cosmetics, this is her son, a billionaire, a Trump supporter. And it turns out he's the guy who put into Trump's mind the idea that maybe part of making America great again is to make America bigger. And Greenland is really, really. And he then went and started to invest in Greenland, as others have done. As I read somewhere, you've had Sam Altman, you've had Bill Gates, you've had Jeff Bezos kind of sniffing around some of the investments that there might be in Greenland. But what's your take on why you're president? I know you're not a supporter of his, but what's your take on why he went from that first term? Yeah, kind of interesting. Might look at it one day to it seeming to be literally almost as big an obsession as the Arctic is with you.
B (2:05)
Well, according to two independent reports, Lauder, who went to the Wharton School of Business with Trump back in the day, is the one who whispered in his ear that Greenland could be valuable for X number of things. I think we can under our mind the notion that Trump is a lame duck president. He's got three years left. He might lose the House and the Senate in the midterm elections. So he's going full bore on a lot of different things. He's also taking credit for a lot of the agreements that the Biden administration struck, whether it be the. The port, the deep water port in Nome that's being constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, or the ice pack between Finland, Canada and the US to build icebreakers. So I think that it's become more important for Trump because he's on his way out, But I think that there's a desire in his administration to claim successes that were already had. For instance, when Trump was in Davos, he met with Mark Rude, the Secretary General of NATO, and they struck this quote, unquote, framework that nobody knows the details about. But ostensibly, it's just an acknowledgment of the 1951 agreement between the Kingdom of Denmark and the US and so as long as the US populace remains uneducated about Greenland, Trump can claim victory on that the same way he did with Chinese tariffs, first making them astronomically high and then lowering them to the rate that they were initially and claiming a win. So I think that there's a desire to just chalk up more and more victories that are on their face, false.