On the Monday, January 26, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: Trump says he’s secured a win on Greenland, even as key questions remain unanswered. USA TODAY White House Correspondent Francesca Chambers breaks down the stakes and the gaps.

In the months since Trump began to call again for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, its history and relationships with Denmark and the U.S. have become the subject of heated discussion.

Greenland needs to be "in the hands" of the United States, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, hours before high-stakes talks in Washington. "The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security,

President Donald Trump says that NATO should help the U.S. acquire Greenland and anything less than having the island in U.S. hands is unacceptable. His comments in a social media post Wednesday came hours before Vice President JD Vance was to host Danish and Greenlandic officials for talks.

The last Nazis on Greenland were captured in October 1944, when American soldiers raided a hidden German weather station on the island’s desolate east coast and took dozens of prisoners. Within a year, Germany would be defeated and World War II would be over.

DONALD TRUMP’S FIXATION ON GREENLAND has had a strange and probably unintended effect: It has pulled a long-running NATO conversation into the American political spotlight.

The Arctic territory is of strategic importance, under the flight paths that nuclear-armed missiles from China and Russia could take on their way to incinerating targets in the United States, and vice versa.

“It’s very disrespectful.”

The White House started 2026 at a sprint, launching an array of surprising policy proposals and actions. The rest of the world is trying to catch up—processing implications and forming responses in real time.

By Humeyra Pamuk WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) - When officials from the United States, Denmark and Greenland met last month in the Arctic island's capital, the session was reassuringly normal, with no discussion of a U.