How Serious Is Trump About Greenland?
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I had to hire an electrician to deal with some ground fault control stuff to be up to code so we can get our new dishwasher installed. Very exciting. That stuff's actually easy to do yourself. I'm not going to mess with electricity. Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to. Well, like electricity and also plumbing. I'm more apt to try something with plumbing than I am electricity. Really? Okay. See, I would not cook something like that up. I'm not likely to try something with plumbing, but I'm saying I'd be more game to try because it probably can't kill me.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Nathaniel Rakich. And yes, I am once again sitting in for Galen Druk. But don't worry, he'll be back from vacation later this week. Last week, we said goodbye to a president as Jimmy Carter was laid to rest with funeral services in Washington, D.C. and Plains, Georgia. Next week, we'll say hello to a new president or should I say an old president as Donald Trump takes the oath of office and reassumes the role of commander in chief.

So today, we'll be looking both forward to a future presidency and back on a past one. Here to do that with me are senior politics reporter Monica Potts. Monica, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while. Hi, Nathaniel. Thanks for having me. Also joining us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Jeffrey, happy New Year. Happy New Year to you.

After Trump was reelected, I think it was fair to expect a return to some controversial policies, some more outrageous comments, and some of the nonstop news cycles that marked his first term. But one thing most people didn't have on their bingo cards was a new era of American expansionism, at least if you take Trump's recent comments literally. In recent weeks, Trump has re-upped his calls from 2019 for the U.S. to take Greenland from Denmark.

He's also called for the U.S. to reclaim the Panama Canal, which was returned to Panama decades ago. And he joked, we think, about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Capping it all off, he said he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, as well as rename Denali, the tallest mountain in the U.S., back to Mount McKinley. Interestingly, this is all coming from a president who has long been critical of U.S. involvement overseas. Now, I want to talk about what these kinds of comments can tell us generally about Trump's approach to governing, and also how seriously we as political analysts should take them. But first, let's get one thing out of the way. How realistic is it that any of these things will actually happen?

Seems highly unlikely. You know, I doubt Canada, which, by the way, has been like more or less sovereign since like the turn of the 19th to 20th century. OK, obviously, the Canada one was, I think, the most joking one. But, you know, Trump actually kind of seems serious about Greenland and maybe the Panama Canal. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think Greenland is complicated because it has an interesting relationship with Denmark. Denmark says it doesn't own it, but they handle foreign policy for the island. They handle a lot of other things for the island. The island is very small and sparsely populated and

It also wants an independent movement. So I don't think that it would want to necessarily join the United States. There would have to be a lot of complicated foreign policy actions for Greenland first to become independent and then decide to join the U.S., none of which seems very likely. It's also interesting in the sense that in

You know, you think about Trump and people who maybe describe themselves with a particular style of American nationalism. We know global warming is making the Arctic more passable. I think in the long run, there's been talk about how you might eventually have shipping lanes that cross the Arctic Ocean in a way they do not currently, or at least have only begun to barely. And so this could be sort of the next frontier of international conflict or international...

Trade, conflict, all the things that can come into foreign policy and the interaction between sovereign nations. You could even kind of lump this in with the idea of the madman theory, which is something that Richard Nixon, sort of the school of thought around his foreign policy, had to do with the idea that they wanted –

foreign adversaries to think it was possible the U.S. would be willing to do lots of things that maybe it wouldn't actually be willing to do, but because they sort of left the universe of possible actions behind,

more open and unknown, more unpredictability made those other countries more fearful and perhaps more willing to go along with things the U.S. suggested. You can see a little bit of that in what Trump's doing. The degree to which he is actively thinking about the term madman theory, I do not know, but I'm just saying that it's, I think you can see that he's done this in the past and he's sort of doing it again.

Okay, so just to get it out of the way, you know, the fun question that we always get, if somehow Canada did become a state, if Greenland did become a state, how would it affect American politics? How would they vote? Jeffrey? Well, we know from polling action for the 2024 election that Canadians would have pretty overwhelmingly backed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. So if Canada somehow became...

single state out of the United States which oh by the way it's six times larger than Alaska in land area and Alaska is about a fifth of the lower 48 right so we're talking stupidly large state but if you're not splitting Canada into like 10 11 12 states or whatever you know corresponding more or less to the current provinces that this the country has

It would be probably a pretty solidly democratic state. It would be either the largest or second largest, sort of depending on the timing of when the census data you're looking at state by population competing with California for that. So we'd be looking at like what, like 50 electoral votes or something? Yeah, it would be like roughly 50 electoral votes and and, you know, close to 50 seats in the House.

And so if Democrats were adding that, that'd probably be great for them electorally if we're still operating with 538 total electoral votes and you need 270 to win. Democrats are sitting at like 250 or so to start with, just based on sort of states that regularly vote Democratic. So that would be, I think, real handy for Democrats in that sense if they added Canada. I'm sure actually what Democrats would really love if this were

We were actually to play this scenario out is that they would love to add multiple Canadian states because then you'd get more of an impact in the Senate, right, where every state is guaranteed to members. Greenland, on the other hand, I think it's worth noting, has something like 56, 57000 people.

And that makes it less populous by some distance than the U.S. Virgin Islands, which had 87,000 people in 2020, and just a little bit more populous than tiny American Samoa in the Pacific, which had about 50,000 people. You know, if we make Greenland a state, that would be a pretty radical departure from, you know, the fact that we haven't made any of these other territories states that are particularly small. And I think that's worth noting because when the election for House Speaker happened,

Stacey Plaskett, the delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, basically raised an objection that none of the delegates or the residential commissioner from Puerto Rico, that their names had not been called on the vote for House Speaker, making clearly a public protest of sorts that basically that they don't really have voting representation, even though you're talking about a few million people who are American citizens but do not have voting representation in Congress.

Thinking about Greenland as a state connects back to the fact that a lot of these other places are not states yet and may never be. It's really odd to think of Canada as being one state, this huge geographic territory with so many people in it.

who already identify by their provinces in some sense. You know, there's a big Cabo Croix independence movement. And so it's hard to imagine Canada just being like, OK, we're one state. No, I don't think that they would like that. Right. Obviously, we're talking this is one of those scenarios that is not going to happen. So this is completely fanciful and hypothetical.

But to turn back toward, you know, the more serious aspects here, you know, if these scenarios aren't going to happen, why is Trump proposing all of these things?

That's really the question. And there are a lot of theories, one of which is that, you know, this is part of Trump's kind of a style. It's part of what he does. He says a lot of things. He just says whatever he wants. And some of them are outrageous and people decide whether to take them seriously or not. And in the meantime, he's also doing things as president. And so your intention is kind of

or president-elect, or he's planning to do things as president again for his second term. And so your attention is kind of divided and it's hard to know where to look. So I think that's one of the more prevalent theories is this is part of his just way of being a politician and also part of a kind of a strategy, however loosely that may be defined, to kind of throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

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Yeah, I mean, kind of, Jeffrey, to your point, I'm not sure how much strategy Trump is using here. It might just be kind of, you know, he's acting from his id, as he so often does. But I think it is still worth considering.

asking why or how he's kind of conjuring up these these kind of bizarre statements you know I mentioned at the top like he is very skeptical of American foreign intervention and like wars and stuff like that but at the same time he's very like America first and I don't think those ideas are incompatible and in fact I

think that the idea of America first is like rah, rah, America. And like, that's what matters. And I think part of that is the, you know, obviously like the nationalism that the Trump has really brought back into style. And obviously nationalism is closely related to the idea of like manifest destiny back in the day and territorial expansion and stuff like that. And I think he is perhaps acting from that kind of instinct. Monica, to your point,

I think you're right. And, you know, this is, I think perhaps a good segue, you know, Trump was asked, you know, would you use military intervention to take over Greenland, to take over Panama? And he wouldn't rule it out. And it's the kind of thing where it's like, well, okay, I don't really think that Donald Trump is going to use military force to invade these places. But the fact that he didn't rule it out is, you know, means that you can't rule it out. Um,

And we deal with probabilities here at 538, and I do think the probabilities are quite low, but it's worth remembering that they're not zero and that stranger things have happened.

These are obviously hardly the first comments that Trump has made that have made kind of political observers glance around at each other and say, like, what? Like, is he serious about this? This kind of goes to the debate about Trump, which we've talked about for so, so long about taking. Do we take him literally? Do we take him seriously? Both. Is there a good way to tell what Trump is serious about and what he isn't?

I mean, I think that it's possible that the way to take him seriously is to see sort of what actual follow through there is. Are we are we maneuvering military squadrons to positions where they could actually be used in some sort of action? Yeah, Monica, I know that you're writing a story for the site for the end of this week about basically what Trump's first 100 days might look like. How are you going about thinking about what he might do?

You know, I think it's hard to remember, but to go back to 2016, when he won before, he said he was going to do things like ban travel from Muslim countries, and he tried to do that. And there were a lot of protests, and there were a lot of efforts to stop him legally in the courts, and those things took a while. In the meantime, real people's lives were affected. He followed through on his threats to attempt to overturn the election on January 6, 2021.

It's really difficult to know sort of what he actually is going to follow through on. You know, you have to pay attention to what really happens, like Jeffrey said, what the follow through is. It is always really hard with Trump. We have never seen a politician like him in our lifetimes. And so it is really hard to know. And we do have to cover what he says because he is going to be the president again.

Are you guys maybe saying slightly different things, though? Monica, you're kind of saying he does have this track record of following through with things. And so as journalists or as political observers, you should be paying attention to some of the things that he says, even the silly things like, you know, trying to take over Greenland or the Panama Canal. But Jeffrey's kind of saying, let's wait and see what happens actually next week or in the next several months as he as he takes office. Or do you think there's a way to make those two things compatible? Yeah.

Yeah, I think you can sort of square that circle in the sense that what is what is Trump sort of most focused on? What is he talking about the most? What did he campaign most ardently on? Clearly, he's going to take actions surrounding immigration in some way. There's no way he's not right, given what how he ran. But with stuff like this regarding sort of foreign policy, we know that he is a skeptic, you know, in terms of NATO, even though he's argued that his approach to

approach has gotten NATO countries to spend more. So sort of his commitment to NATO and obviously talking about at least partial possession of a NATO ally in Denmark is awkward at the very least, but could fit into the kinds of things he's said about NATO in the past. Clearly his

not necessarily great resolve to help Ukraine against Russia. And obviously, NATO having a relationship with Russia and NATO countries generally supporting Ukraine. So I think maybe you could fit this into a larger disinterest in the post-World War II foreign policy system that Trump has. And so in that sense, maybe it is worth taking it more seriously than we might have in, say, 2019 when he first talked about it, because he's back, headed back to the White House and

and is going to continue pushing on these things like he did his first term, and that could end up producing results. I think it's just difficult to say, you know, are we going to walk in and invade Greenland? Probably not, to your point. But if we're sort of looking at a larger picture commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Northern Defense, maybe, you know, more changes are coming on that front. And this is just a part of that.

Yeah, I agree. I think they're reconciled in that I think it's important to always be aware of and catalog what he is saying and what he says he's going to do, while at the same time not doing so uncritically and not amplifying it without context. Like, just to sort of listen to what he says, consider that anything might happen, and pay attention to what happens next.

Do we have any data on what Americans think, like how seriously they take him on some of these more unusual promises or extreme policy proposals?

There was a data for progress poll from October 2024. And when presented with a range of his most outlandish statements, fewer than foreign voters thought Trump actually believed them. Democrats are more likely to believe some of the things that he says than Republicans who tend to

dismiss some of the more outrageous claims. There was a question, does Trump generally believe that the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons to stop incoming hurricanes? 53% of Democrats said yes, 30% of independent or third party voters said yes, and only 17% of Republicans said yes. And so I think we see this pattern a lot where when Trump says things, people sort of

think what they want to think about them. You know, Republicans who tend to give Trump the benefit of the doubt may dismiss it and say, oh, he wasn't being serious or he was just trying to make a point or he was just joking. And his supporters will say that on television often, while Democrats tend to want to believe that he does believe conspiracy theories and other things like that.

I also think, you know, when I in the stories that I've worked on both after the election and then I'm working on now, people do think that he will try to do some of the things that he says that that he's going to do. But they also believe that there are institutions that will stop him from doing things that they don't like, that Congress will stop him, that there are courts and other sort of deep state institutions that will stop him. You know, I think a lot of it is just kind of what people bring to it, what they want to believe.

Yeah, actually, to that point, you know, looking at that poll from Data for Progress, it's interesting because you can also see a little bit of the issues that are most important to sort of different groups or that they were most animated by in the election. With the example of the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons to stop incoming hurricanes, very few Republicans thought Trump was serious about that, whereas like half of Democrats thought he was serious. And Democrats in general are more likely to think that Trump is being serious.

But then his statement that Israel wouldn't won't exist in two years if Kamala Harris becomes president is

Almost two-thirds of Republicans thought he was being serious there, whereas only about two in five Democrats thought so. And then at the same time, if you're sort of starting out from the point that Democrats are more likely to think he is being serious, his comment about Haitian immigrants eating our dogs and cats, which was this conspiracy theory that came up during the election that he promoted or added fuel to the fire on in Ohio –

You know, about half of Republicans thought he was being serious about that. And we know that a lot of Republicans believe that was actually a thing happening. Obviously, what issues are most meaningful to different groups of Americans also play into maybe how seriously they take him.

All right. Well, we don't have long to wait until we found out exactly what Trump is serious about and what he's going to try to do and whether Americans are going to be surprised about it or not. So stay tuned, folks. We'll obviously be with you next week for that. We're going to move on and talk about former President Jimmy Carter's legacy. But first, a break.

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Last week, former President Jimmy Carter was remembered, honored, and laid to rest. You all probably know the broad strokes of his life story. A humble peanut farmer rises through the ranks of Georgia politics, then parlays his reputation as an honest Washington outsider to get elected president in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

But his presidency is a tumultuous one. Runaway inflation, gas shortages, Americans held hostage in the Middle East, then a botched attempt to save them. He comes nowhere close to winning re-election. But then, in a strange twist, Carter redefines what a successful post-presidency looks like, and his humanitarian work at the Carter Center helps him win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Here at FiveThirtyEight, though, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the public opinion and electoral legacy aspects of Carter's career. So let's talk first about the polls. What did Americans think of Carter while he was president? What were some of the high and low points of his presidency?

Carter, during his presidency, sort of on the whole, was probably in the lower end in terms of average approval across his presidency, at least based on data from Gallup, historical polling average data. He was relatively popular at the outset of his presidency, just like many presidents have traditionally been, although that seems to be changing as we get into a more polarized era where a president might not start out with 70% approval rating.

But then it slid as you got into things like

difficulties with gas prices and because of gas access. It did jump when we had the Cant David Accords, which basically worked out an agreement between Egypt and Israel, so they stopped fighting each other. His numbers were really low. And then when the Iran hostage crisis started late in 1979, there was a rally around the flag moment for him, where his approval rating really shot up back into the mid to high 50s.

But then as that situation did not improve and eventually there was a failed rescue attempt and, oh, by the way, the economy I think shrank like 8% in the second quarter of 1980. Things worked out very poorly for Carter in terms of just his electoral circumstances to get such a one-two punch with a foreign policy crisis that was not going well and then an economic crisis. And obviously some of this –

redoubts to him as president. Like, you know, you get to own the wins and you have to take the losses. But I think he also struggled in general during his presidency with the fact that he had very poor relations with people in Capitol Hill. He brought a bunch of people from Georgia with him who had very little experience with

working on the Hill. And maybe that doesn't seem so weird now in our world of people like Donald Trump getting elected president and outsiders and what have you. But especially at a time when Democrats did have control of Congress, Carter...

struggled to work with them. There were a lot of disagreements about just like sort of give and take, people in Congress asking for things and the Democratic majority and Carter being like, well, I don't want to give that to you and disagreements on policy. And I think that that also really affected his ability to make headway as president.

Yeah, and I think he really set up, as you said, he kind of helped create this model of the outsider running for president who's going to go in and change Washington. And then his presidency also showed the shortcomings of that approach, which is that it's hard to get things done if you actually don't. Like what people say they want as president is an outsider who changes D.C., but actually they want to get things done. And to do that, you have to, to some extent, become a creature of D.C. And so I think it really, that kind of set up a lot of what we saw later with like

Bill Clinton's presidency and how we see Trump approaching campaigning and what we're going to see happening. So it's just an interesting dichotomy.

Yeah, that's interesting. We kind of started to get into it, but what are some of the ways in which Carter changed the course of electoral history in the U.S.? Well, there's no question that his presidency kicked off truly a new phase of the presidential nomination process. Now, it really starts in 1972 with George McGovern winning the Democratic nomination, but Jimmy Carter basically set up shop in Iowa, right?

many, many months before the Iowa caucuses, which were the first contest by chance, mind you, this was like an accident of the calendar, uh,

that the Iowa caucuses were the first thing on the board, and there was more attention being paid after the 1972 race to all these caucuses and whatnot, because people realized, oh, they're important. You can build early momentum if you do well. And so Carter's campaign essentially prioritized the early states in a way that ended up really redounding to his benefit. He ended up winning Iowa technically, actually unilaterally,

Uncommitted actually won, but he finished first among the named candidates. And that started him off basically in 1976. And people were like, Jimmy who?

When he won, but then he goes on to win the Democratic nomination. Obviously, it was also well-timed because in the aftermath of Watergate, looking to somebody who would change Washington, someone different, someone outside – from outside of Washington who seemed like this honest peanut farmer from Georgia was such a contrast to LBJ, Richard Nixon, Watergate, and so on.

And the Vietnam War period and people's, you know, increasing lack of faith in institutions and public officials. Carter was, you know, a breath of fresh air in that sense, obviously, with consequences for how he actually was able to conduct his presidency. And then in 1980, he ends up losing reelection to Ronald Reagan, which ushers in a new era of conservatism, a modern conservative Republican Party era.

That put us on a course where we are today. So in that sense, both his nomination victory in 76 and his nomination victory in 1980, actually, because he got a very stern challenge from Ted Kennedy, but managed to pull various levers as the incumbent president to move some state, get some states to move to different positions on the calendar.

to ensure support from certain parts of the base, even though Kennedy led him in early polls among Democrats. And then the Iran hostage crisis actually ended up helping. A real piece of evidence about how rally around the flag can help you. Electorally, his number shot up in the Democratic primary after the Iran hostage crisis began as part of his approval rating improving so markedly. And he was able to hold on to his position as the leader of his party and win renomination, but then lose badly in the 1980 race.

Reagan revolution, essentially, and usher in a new era of sort of modern conservative politics in the United States. Yeah, for sure. And when he left office, he was very much not popular. He had an approval rating of 34%, according to Gallup. But obviously, his image has recovered and people really celebrated him last week. You know, Monica, can we quantify that? Yeah, actually, Gallup came out with a poll in June 2023 and 57% approved of him. And

And so, you know, it kind of shows how his post-presidency actions kind of changed the way people viewed how he had served as president as well. He was a well-known humanitarian. He really changed the face of what a post-presidency should look like. He helped eradicate diseases around the world, especially diseases that affect the global poor the most. He would build houses with habitat.

for humanity, like through his 80s, he was actually getting out there and working on building houses with his hands and helping volunteers and working with them and not like above them. And you can see his effect in that and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton creating the Clinton Foundation after their presidency. And so you just kind of see this humanitarian history, you know, that helps people view him in a new light. And I think one

One of the things about that that's interesting is people thought Carter was a really good guy. They seemed to think he was a moral, upstanding person. And they don't necessarily see that as what it takes to be a good president. And that is kind of interesting and I think something that is still affecting our politics today. And, you know, obviously he had a very long life. He's what?

the longest living president ever, right? Hitting 100. I think it's a good example of how time can complicate how people are viewed in the long run. You know, what will we be saying about George W. Bush in 10, 20 years? You know, I don't know. People remember the Iraq war very poorly, the economy,

was obviously falling apart at the end of his presidency. But then you even see in some recent polling that people have more mixed opinions about him now, perhaps because even some Democrats are thinking about, well, that's what a Republican president used to be. And now we have Donald Trump. So it's, you know, the people who come after can, to your point, Nathaniel, can affect how the people who came before are viewed.

All right. Well, that is all the time we have for today. I want to thank you guys very much for coming on to talk about presidencies past and future. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us, Nathaniel.

My name is Nathaniel Rakich. Galen Druk will be back later this week. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian. If you want to get in touch, our email is podcast at 538.com. If you're a fan of the show, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you soon.

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