‘Trump is Recycling the Kremlin Playbook In Order to Take Over Greenland’

As authors of a book on Russian disinformation, we see a striking resemblance between the Russian regime’s falsification of history and an eerily similar tendency now emanating from The White House.

Indeed, the new disinformation narrative being pumped out in MAGA world regarding Greenland sounds so familiar that it might as well have been written by the Kremlin itself: The Russian playbook on Ukraine is now being recycled in the US.

In Denmark, most people follow the facts on the ground and the attitudes within the Commonwealth closely. Eighty five percent of Greenland’s citizens have rejected becoming part of the United States.

Múte B. Egede, the outgoing prime minister of Greenland, has told the Americans in no uncertain terms to stay away, while his successor, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, disparages the American “disrespect”.

A recent documentary by the public broadcaster Danmarks Radio has fuelled a discussion about the actual wishes of the Greenlandic people, and you could always argue the merits of this or that opinion poll. Every analysis, including this one, is an interpretation. It is nonetheless one that is anchored in facts.

However, in MAGA media, viewers are presented with a different reality. This reality has nothing in common with our reality, but functions as a post-truth parallel universe. Loyalty does not gravitate around the truth in this universe, but is instead bound only by loyalty to the new Trump Government and attempts to please it through support of its disinformation narratives. 

Within this postfactual media bubble, Greenland is portrayed as a malnourished and neglected urchin being oppressed by a distant Copenhagen regime. Annexation is simultaneously framed as a matter of US national security. The people of Greenland are in fact waiting for their liberators and their future role as a prospering American vassal.

Back in the real world, the US voluntarily gave up most of their bases in Greenland. In the post-truth world, Denmark is the negligent party and a “bad ally”. Greenland needs to be saved in other words — from itself. 

If you think we’re being hyperbolic, here’s a little peak into the disinformation bubble, which is currently being erected around the US far-right media landscape.

On FOX News, Jesse Watters tells his audience that the US might: “… have to burn down a few bridges with Denmark to take Greenland. We’re big boys. We dropped an A-bomb on Japan and now they are our top ally in the Pacific… America is not handcuffed by history.”

On Real America’s Voice, Brian Glenn explains that the official Greenlandic rejection of the vice president couple’s overtures doesn’t reflect “the real attitude of the people”.

One is led to the conclusion that the US will soon be greeted by its people donning MAGA-caps and draped in the stars and stripes. Similar narratives are being disseminated on One America News Network, where Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on Greenland is being lauded as “the art of the deal”.

While the rest of the world laughs at JD Vance complaining about the weather in Greenland, being unable to find even a single local willing to meet and greet and waving into the nothingness, the disinformation bubble uses his failed trip to further a narrative which might be priming the public for an invasion.

Here, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the US interest in Greenland probably stems from a Russian disinformation campaign: A forged letter prompted senator Tom Cotton to contact Trump in 2019 regarding the possibility of Greenlandic annexation.

A Russian playbook, sure — but also one that quickly attracted an American audience. The US annexation plans are simultaneously a prism into the alternate reality which is now being erected in the whole country.

Every authoritarian regime draws its power from a core narrative of representing the true will of the people. Critique and dissent are in themselves acts of treason towards this imagined collective will.

The regime also needs an external enemy and a permanent state of crisis or war. From your average person’s perspective, war is a terrible thing, something to be avoided at all cost. To the authoritarian ruler, however, a quick skirmish against, say, Canada or Greenland, is merely a golden opportunity to rally the nation.

To this end, the new US regime can draw inspiration from the Kremlin’s repeated use of this technique, where the people unite behind a brutal war of aggression. Following the illegal and internationally condemned annexation of Crimea in 2014, Vladimir Putin’s popularity soared from 60% to 80% of the Russian people. This drastic rise was dubbed ‘the Crimea effect’. Perhaps Trump has started dreaming of a similar ‘Greenland effect’?

To support this dissemination of a revisionist, propagandistic narrative to its people, the authoritarian regime also needs to control the narrative in a wider sense.

In Russia, the Kremlin’s ruler has systematically eliminated independent, critical media since his ascension to power. Putin forced the oligarch Boris Berezovsky to sell off his Channel 1 media empire from his British exile in 2001.

One year earlier, the network had heavily criticised his handling of the Kursk disaster, where the eponymous nuclear submarine had sunk to the bottom of the sea, drowning all 118 sailors while Putin refused assistance from the West and arrogantly dismissed the tragedy on CNN. Berezovsky was later found hanged under suspicious circumstances, to say the least. 

Around the same time, independent Russian news outlets like NTV had also started critically examining the circumstances around the 1999 terror attacks. Something seemed… off. Then the network’s owner, Vladimir Gusinsky was suddenly charged with phony allegations of corruption and thrown into a cell in the infamous Butyrka prison.

His release was expedited once he agreed to hand over the NTV reins to the Russian state. The Moscow Times stopped handing out physical papers in 2017 and moved its entire operation out of Russia following the full-scale invasion in 2022. Following in their path of exile was Novaya Gazeta, Proekt, Rain TV, and every other outlet even mildly critical of the government. 

A similar purge has now commenced in the US media sphere. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump called on his loyal Republican foot soldiers in Congress to remove all funding of independent public broadcasters like NPR and PBS, framing them as partisan Democrat outlets.

The president’s discourse around the free press as “the enemy of the people” not only echoes through his own ranks, where head honchos like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have declared war on the media, but also bears a striking resemblance to authoritarian regimes throughout history and across borders. In Russia the newspaper Noyaya Gazeta-Mir Ludei was branded in similar fashion in 1997. A few years later they were shut down.

At the same time, a slew of media has started appeasing the new government. At the Washington Post, which once styled itself as a defender of a democracy that otherwise “dies in darkness”, owner Jeff Bezos has notified his workers that they are no longer allowed to publish content which contradicts the “two pillars” of personal liberties and free markets. Opinion editor David Shipley promptly resigned.

At the LA Times you are no longer permitted to criticise Trump without “presenting the opposing view”.

CNN’s hard-right turn has made prominent journalists like Dan Rather sound the alarm. While the Associated Press have had their press credentials revoked, or at least severely curtailed, podcaster Tim Pool, who was revealed in September 2024 to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russian propaganda outlet RT, has been invited to occupy the empty chair of real reporters. 

Controlling the media is important to any aspiring autocrat. If you really want to control the public narrative, however, you also need to reign in the world of academia. In this regard, the development in the US also mirrors the Russian playbook.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University have been forcefully dispersed, while activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung are being kidnapped and forcefully expelled from the country.

The new regime has threatened 50 universities with lawsuits if they fail to comply with the new ideological agenda. This is a carbon copy of Putin’s authoritarian transformation of the Russian universities through the last 25 years, where somewhat independent research institutions have been turned into propaganda factories.

One of the tools has been a return to the Soviet practice of appointing conformist, loyal deans and rectors who are willing to limit academic freedoms and revising the history books in a manner pleasing to the Kremlin. 

This has resulted in an exodus of researchers, public intellectuals and teachers. A similar story might soon be unfolding in Trump’s America where prominent scholars like Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley recently announced that they would be departing their tenures at the prestigious Yale University in favour of teaching 700kms further north at the University of Toronto.

A fresh study from Nature shows that 75% of their fellow academics are considering joining them in exile. 

This would leave the United States with a slew of pseudo academics like Ben Shapiro and Curtis Yarvin; intellectual lightweights, yes, but also wholly loyal to the regime agenda and willing to provide its imperialist ambitions with a thin layer of academic varnish.

Shapiro calls the hostile takeover of Greenland of ‘vital interest’ to the US, while the neoreactionary Yarvin fantasises about a series of ‘network states’ in which Greenland could be the fiefdom of one of his American oligarch friends.

The nomination of Ken Howery as new ambassador to Denmark needs to be understood as part of this agenda: Howery goes way back with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to their time together at PayPal and dispatched the ‘entrepreneurial’ Dryden Brown in November 2024 to explore ways of acquiring the island. 

Within this post-truth playbook, the wishes of the Greenlandic and Danish peoples matter little to none. What the new American regime does care about, however, is convincing the People of its perceived threat to national security. To this end the authoritarian coup has not yet been completed.

While Trump and his accomplishes have taken control in all three branches of government, its power is still porous. In the House of Representatives their majority is so slim that Trump recently withdrew Elise Stefanik’s nomination as UN ambassador due to concerns that her seat could be lost in a special election. Even more troubling for the regime, only 19% of the population were supportive of annexing Greenland according to a recent poll. 

What the Trump government needs is a crisis which can alter the narrative, rally the doubters and paralyse opposition. Such a crisis could also serve to justify a more fundamental purge of opposition media, troublesome civil servants, stubborn academics, and potential obstacles within the military.

Hitler had his Reichstag fire in 1933, Erdogan his ‘coup attempt’ in 2016. In Russia, Putin consolidated his position following a series of terrorist attacks; initially ascending to power in the wake of the apartment bombings in 1999, later tightening his grip after the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2002 and the Beslan school siege in 2004.

Many historians and investigative reporters (including us) strongly suspect that one or more of these incidents were staged; false flags meant to transform Putin the unknown bureaucrat into Putin the strong leader of Russia. 

Unfortunately, similar schemes are no longer outside the realm of imagination when it comes to the US. It’s also quite possible that Greenland could be set to play a role.

Vance has already been sowing the seeds of such a fabricated crisis by telling us that Russia and China have their own nefarious agenda for Greenland. It’s not hard to imagine who he envisions as the saviour of Greenland from this fictitious threat.

So far, we haven’t seen a shred of the “very strong evidence” that Vance pretends to possess — it seems to mainly exist in his own mind and the right-wing media bubble. We are once again reminded of the post-truth narrative that the Kremlin has spun around Ukraine, where neo-Nazis, an ongoing genocide against Russian minorities, and an unsubstantiated fairytale about CIA involvement forced Russia to act against a fabricated threat to national security. 

It’s remarkable to notice the many similarities between the Trump Government and the regime that has overseen the gradual dismantling of Russian democracy through 25 years.

From a Danish and Finnish perspective there’s also one major difference. Russian propaganda outlets have mostly been turned off or relegated to the fringes of society. Rossiya-1, RT, and Sputnik are not part of our tv packages, and the multitude of lies being spewed by the Russia regime is overwhelmingly treated like the radioactive waste it is.

The authoritarian turn in the US, on the other hand, has the potential to devastate our own digital infrastructure on a wholly different scale. 

If the US was to continue its current downward trajectory towards authoritarianism, the consequences would be massive in terms of our ability to combat disinformation. Our shared digital platforms are largely controlled by a small group of US billionaires who have already started bending the knee to the new regime.

On Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg has removed fact checking to appease Trump, while Twitter/X under Musk is — obviously — in immanent risk of becoming a pure disinformation vessel.

What are we going to do if the US Government suddenly orders these social media platforms to remove all critical coverage of the US attempt to annex Greenland? Or if Google stops showing search results about Greenland’s desire for independence free from the US? Three out of four European cloud services are being operated by three American tech companies. Do we have a plan if Trump orders them to cut the cord?

Let’s be clear that the United States of America hasn’t been turned into Russia. Yet. Reporters are still able to provide critical coverage without risking murder or imprisonment. Regular citizens are still able to take to the streets in protest as we saw just this weekend — although the recent crackdown against protesters at Columbia University shows that basic freedom of speech is already under heavy pressure.

The Trump Government does not yet hold the firm grip on power that it projects onto the stage and is buckling under the pressure from civil disobedience, leaks on Signal displaying a stunning incompetence, and a stock market in free fall. 

The disinformation narrative surrounding is nonetheless a canary in the coal mine. It’s trying to warn us that the Kremlin playbook has entered the White House and that we can no longer trust the US Government’s designs on Denmark. It’s time we started listening to its tune before the walls come crashing down around us.