“We’ll Get Greenland. Yeah, 100%,” Trump Tells NBC News

In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on Saturday, President Donald Trump said he is actively pursuing annexing Greenland and has “absolutely” had real conversations about taking over the semiautonomous Danish territory.

“We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%,” Trump said, adding that there is a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that he wouldn’t “take anything off the table.”

Trump’s claims come after Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance visited Greenland this week and went to Pituffik Space Base, a US Space Force base there, to speak to service members.

When Trump was asked what annexing Greenland would do for international relations with Russia and how the move could be perceived by the rest of the world, the president said he wasn’t concerned.

“I don’t really think about that. I don’t really care. Greenland’s a very separate subject, very different. It’s international peace. It’s international security and strength.” Earlier this week, Trump said that the US would “go as far as we have to go” to get control of Greenland. Trump has reportedly been musing about buying or acquiring Greenland since 2019.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede described the visit by Vance and others this week as a “very aggressive American pressure against the Greenlandic community.” A pressure campaign, he said, that the international community should rebuke.

“We are not Americans, we are not Danes because we are Greenlanders,” Egede said on social media in response to Trump’s comments this week. “This is what the Americans and their leaders need to understand, we cannot be bought and we cannot be ignored.”

In the around 10-minute conversation between Trump and Welker, they discussed the president’s growing Greenland fixation and the financial impacts of the 25 percent tariffs on all foreign-made cars and car parts that Trump announced he would impose. The president also said that he would not fire members of his administration who were in the Signal group chat discussing attack plans in Yemen as The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg sat in unbeknownst to them.

On the call, Trump called the Signal story “fake news” and a “witch hunt” against the cabinet members who were in the group chat—which included national security adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and others.

Since Goldberg’s reporting that he was added to the group chat by Waltz, Trump has faced pressure—even from his allies—to fire Waltz.

“I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts,” Trump said, adding that he still has confidence in Waltz and Hegseth. “We had a tremendously successful strike. We struck very hard and very lethal. And nobody wants to talk about that. All they want to talk about is nonsense.”

Trump also claimed to not know what Signal—an American open-source, encrypted messaging service—was.

“I have no idea what Signal is. I don’t care what Signal is,” Trump said on Saturday. “All I can tell you is it’s just a witch hunt, and it’s the only thing the press wants to talk about, because you have nothing else to talk about.”

The president also said he didn’t care if automakers raised prices after he announced on Wednesday that he would impose 25% tariffs on all foreign-made cars and car parts. (After the interview, according to NBC, an aide to the president followed up to say that Trump was referring specifically to foreign car prices.)

“I couldn’t care less if they raise prices,” Trump said when asked to comment on reporting from the Wall Street Journal that he told CEOs not to raise prices, “because people are going to start buying American-made cars.”

Not caring, according to NBC’s reporting on the call, was a throughline for Trump—when asked about the potential impacts on his hopes for taking Greenland, the platform where his cabinet members were talking about imminent attack plans in a group chat with a journalist, and the projected increase in prices for American buyers of foreign cars or car parts, the president said he doesn’t think about it, doesn’t care, and couldn’t care less, respectively.