I wouldn't say that. From the article; "The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is":
Dear Jonas:
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
For your information: The Norwegian Government refers to it as a letter from the President of the United States to the Prime Minister of Norway. So no, this is not a random tweet.
If I remember correctly, the message was originally sent as a text message, but when a head of state sends a written message to another head of state, and that message is then circulated as an official FYI to the sender’s ambassadors, it is widely regarded as official communication.
The article itself is an opinion piece, yes, but the letter has been extensively reported across Europe and internationally. I could just as well have referenced one of those reports.
As a Norwegian, I am genuinely curious how US citizens are reacting to Trump’s letter To Norway and demands.
Setting politics aside for a moment: Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark? I see polling suggesting that the overwhelming majority of Americans, around 75%, oppose the idea of purchasing or seizing Greenland. It clearly isn't a popular demand among the general public. But do the people who voted for Trump actually back him on this specific issue?
To us in the Nordics, this is baffling. Greenland has been Scandinavian territory since the year 10th century. It was part of the establishment of the nation of Norway in 1261 and remained with Denmark after the Kalmar Union ended. The land has been inhabited by the Thule people and Scandinavians for over a millennium. Yet, the US Government now argues it 'should' belong to the USA and is threatening close NATO allies with tariffs to force a sale.
I am especially curious about the 'Golden Dome' justification. President Trump claims full control of Greenland is 'vital' for this new missile defense shield. Do Americans accept this narrative? From our side of the Atlantic, it looks like a pretext—existing treaties already allow the US to operate the Pituffik Space Base for exactly this kind of defense. Why is annexation suddenly considered 'vital' when the current alliance has worked for decades?
High-profile Republican Senators have publicly called the idea 'absurd' and 'weapons-grade stupid.' How is it, then, that the US Congress and Senate seem unable to stop these threats?
I would appreciate an American perspective: Is this seen as a legitimate foreign policy move or an overreach by the executive branch? Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?
I am a Texan and no, I didn’t vote for who shall not be named.
> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?
I don’t think so. Americans are notoriously ignorant about geography; I doubt many can place Greenland on a map.
> To us in the Nordics, this is baffling.
As far as I am concerned, the same person threatened to execute US Senators for treason for telling US military they should refuse illegal orders. The US military swore an oath to defend the constitution; disobeying illegal orders is what is required in the US military code.
> Why is annexation suddenly considered 'vital' when the current alliance has worked for decades?
It is not vital. I personally believe he is trying to derail NATO and make our allies turn against us.
> Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?
Yes. Congress and the Supreme Court are acquiescing to his driving US foreign policy into the toilet.
Iv seen few tweets by hardcores going from 'lol its obviously fake and stupid ragebait' to 'yes yes this is totally rational' after learning letter was real.
Disclaimer: I didn’t vote for Trump but I will try to write objectively.
> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?
No, Trump’s campaign promise was to improve lives of average Americans. Instead, he’s escalating conflicts with countries on the other side of the world and funding state sponsored terrorism domestically. Americans are overwhelmingly against Imperialism.
Over several decades, Congress has given up nearly all their power to stop this to the executive branch. Even if they tried, Trump has proven that he’d do it anyway, overtly curtailing congress, courts and the law.
> Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?
As an American, my opinion is that I think we are.
> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?
As you said, this is executive branch overreach enabled by GOP control over all three branches of government. Republicans may call it 'absurd' and 'weapons-grade stupid', but they're actively enabling Trump's behavior.
> As a Norwegian, I am genuinely curious how US citizens are reacting to Trump’s letter To Norway and demands.
Almost all of the people around me are ashamed about this, and more than a little fearful. There is a huge opposition to the notion, not only because it's betraying our allies and weakening our place on the world stage, but also because it's an impossible-to-miss sign that our nation is in the process of collapse.
If there's anything that mutes the response to this, it's the fact that the feds are violently attacking our own citizenry and that's a more immediate problem.
It's time to seriously consider that Trump is Poetin's puppet and he's basically executing on Poetin's wish to destroy the west. Or Trump has just completely lost it.
do the people who voted for Trump actually back him on this specific issue?
Please excuse me if I am repeating something you've heard. Some fraction of the people who voted for Trump don't back him on this, or maybe any other issue. The US mass media is owned by oligarchs, and the oligarchs like Trump, so he has not been reported on completely or honestly since 2017, early in his first term. That fraction voted for someone who doesn't exist in reality.
A large fraction of Trump voter almost certainly do back him on this. There really is a cult of personality around Trump. I'm not sure Trump himself caused it, but he certainly took advantage of it when it started. The Qanon bullshit is a primary example of this. The US Republican party has made itself more and more rigid and lock-step over the years, Trump was able to take it over, to his advantage.
This part of Trump's voters would back anything he'd say or do, regardless of relation to reality. Luckily, the oligarch owned press is nearly omnipresent, and does not report honestly or completely on Trump, his behavior, so that fraction of voters can keep on believing in Trump as God King.
This part of Trump's voters would back anything he'd say or do, regardless of relation to reality. Luckily, the oligarch owned press is nearly omnipresent, and does not report honestly or completely on Trump, his behavior, so that fraction of voters can keep on believing in Trump as God King.
But the oligarchs would probably not be happy about a devastating trade war (I guess some are happy to buy up all assets and move to the _post-democratic age_ or whatever). So, why aren't they trying to stop the Greenland nonsense?
I think you mean "oligarchs" for they. I have no answer, I'm just a peasant in today's America. My economic interests absolutely do not align with oligachs'. I expect the oligarchs as a class don't think they'll personally be too handicapped by trade wars, and see some way to make more money out of it. Maybe Trump has promised them fiefdoms in a fragmented and demoralized US.
My specific knowledge does not allow me to say why they aren't (or are, behind the scenes) trying to stop the Greenland nonsense. It seems likely that Trump has promised them a slice of the extraction wealth, or that the oligarchs as a group don't see much trouble arising from a Trump takeover of Greenland, so they're just letting him do it rather than annoy him, or his easily angered base.
For what it's worth, I don't know a single person that thinks this is a good idea. However, I'm a software developer living in NYC, so the context of my socioeconomic/cultural bubble isn't representative of the average American's.
A few folks have already posted good points. This is a classic Trump/asshole negotiation tactic. This distracts from the clamor to release the Epstein files.
But what I think is pretty depressing to me is that, as someone else posted, lots of people (even the ones I personally know who don't like Trump) are just so sick of politics and inured against all this madness that they prefer to think about other things. There's also a feeling of helplessness, as it's true that there's not much that an individual can do to affect immediate, meaningful change. My best friend and I went door knocking in PA in 2024 to try to turn out votes for Kamala Harris. He was super passionate about politics. Since then he's shrugged and has literally said to me, "Well, we tried. Let's just focus on our own individual lives." When I try to bring this topic up with other folks, including my best friend, I often get a - "Well they voted for this. Our live are still good. Let them suffer." And when tariffs and other international relations, such as Greenland come up, most people I know tend to just shrug and don't have much to say.
It's a really strange and interesting phenomenon I've observed. Since I strongly believe that smart phone and social media addiction have deranged most individuals, I of course have a bias to think that most people are a mixture of easily distracted by this very distressful situation and psychologically uncomfortable with the aforementioned feeling of not being able to do anything with an immediate result, i.e. no instant gratification that we've been conditioned to expect. But then I read books about history, and it seems like this behavioral pattern isn't unique to this smart phone era, so maybe it's just human nature. Most people probably don't believe in an abstract principle strongly enough to really sacrifice or even be that uncomfortable about it. I'd like to think this isn't the case, so I've tried to modulate my conversations to pleading with people I know (again, most of whom are against Trump and all this), to at least have a conversation where we can agree this sucks. But then, it's another maddening thing, where a lot of folks have told me - That's obvious, why do we need to talk about it.
Regardless - I can only speak for myself when I say that I am wholly, 100%, and passionately against this. I'm just guessing, but I suspect that your confusion on why there's no strong movement against this stems from a large-scale prisoner's dilemma (most individuals here are optimizing for their own local maxima, which leads to our collective minima), and the distressing phenomenon that most humans probably don't like to just be assholes, they try to follow the rules and norms of society, but we have here an asshole who doesn't, so it's difficult to combat him and this administration.
Sigh. Sorry for the long post. Maybe it helps. I don't know, it's a strange time. Even taking the time to at least explain what I've personally witnessed is only my attempt to try to put out the right karma in the universe against this anti-intellectual, indecent behavior.
No need to apologize, quite the opposite. This is exactly the kind of insight I was hoping for. I read the NYT and other U.S. papers and get the editorial perspective, but I still feel, and many here in Scandinavia feel the same, that we can’t fully understand what’s going on at the level of everyday experience in the U.S. That’s why your ‘street‑level analysis’ is valuable and much appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I feel for you and understand (though disagree with) the nihilism of your friends. As an outsider, it saddens me to bear witness to the beginning of the sunset of the American epoch. What a bold, noble experiment the USA was!
I think the feeling of helplessness is reasonable.. Maybe they see how much more they have to sacrifice a lot more to fight this tyranny of stupidity. Only when the population has lost a lot more will they get mad enough to say "well we've lost too much" (if you see how protests go big in other oppressive regimes - the famous quote is "civilization is 3 missed meals away from riots").
Maybe it's all the Nazi thuggery of ICE scaring them, that keeping quiet feels much more safer.
Have been following Trump since the 1970's. This is a negotiating tactic of his and actually it's a somewhat common negotiating tactic that many people follow when in a negotiation for something they want. Behaviorally anything less than the original demand seems more acceptable. Think of if you were diagnosed with a dreaded disease and then found out you had a lesser disease. The lesser disease by contrast seems less threatening.
I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it) but there is an angle he is pursuing with this. Trump is a master of FUD and also you can't typically tell what things he says he'll do that he does vs. those that he decides not to pursue further (and tha tis part of the magic of how he gets what he wants the unpredictability).
To answer your question of course it's an over reach happening in plain site but people tend to be numb to it at this point since it doesn't directly impact them day to day.
I fear that there is no other angle to this. He just wants the 'added land to the US' and 'won a Nobel peace prize'-accolades next to his name as one of the few presidents.
It's going to be difficult to explain to anyone looking back on this time how they managed to keep up the pretense that this was a functional adult with his faculties intact.
Here you are imbuing a "master of FUD" angle to a letter that might as well be written with crayons.
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths some people will go to in order to sane wash the batshit crazy things that the President says and does. And just like all the other rationalizations before this, this one is no different: "negotiating tactic" (aka 4D Chess)
> I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it)
You don't? It seems pretty clear to me. He states it in the first sentence of his letter:
"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace..."
That's it. That's the reason. It's not very complicated and it doesn't require any thought. Childish? Sure. Unbecoming of an elected official in any capacity? Absolutely. But this is who he is and this is how he operates. I can't think of any President before Trump that required special whisperers to translate everything he says and tell us what he really means.
I find this article strange in its logic. If the use of AI generated content is problematic as a principle I can understand the conflict. Then no AI should be used to "transcribe and interpret a video" at all - period. But if the concern is accuracy in the AI "transcript" and not the support from AI as such, isn't it a good thing that the AI generated text is deleted after the officer has processed the text and finalized their report?
That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?
Personally I do not think it is a good idea to use AI to write full police reports based on body camera recordings. However, as a support in the same way the video recordings are available, why not? If, in the future, AI will write accurate "body cam" based reports I would not have any problems with it as long as the video is still available to be checked. A full report should, in my opinion, always contain additional contextual info from the police involved and witnesses to add what the camera recordings not necessarily reflect or contain.
My worry is at scale AI from one vendor can introduce biases. We wont know what those biases are. But whatever they are the same bias affects all reports.
That is something to worry about, agreed. So, the quality and the reliance of AI is what we should focus on. In addition we should be able to keep track (and records of) how AI has used and build its narrative and conclutions.
The EFF's angle is that the police can use an LLM's initial report maliciously to 1) let incriminating inaccuracies generated by the LLM stand or 2) fabricate incriminating inaccuracies. Afterwards, because the LLM generated the initial report, the officer would have plausible deniability to say they themselves didn't intentionally lie, they were just negligent in editing the initial report. So it's about accountability washing.
>That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?
I follow the author's arguments and agree completely. He perfectly articulated how the creative industries have long operated as a "protection racket" with skewed economics. It’s extraordinary how many artists and writers seem not to understand this game. You'd think their collecting societies would, but they don't. It is sad, and the artists loose.
If you are using X to conduct political discourse, you are the internet equivalent of Bobby Boucher riding his lawnmower to the pep rally. There hasn't been a serious microblogging social movement since what, 2018?
The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not a concern for the music industry or the major labels.
The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might ultimately harm its own interests—by jeopardizing valuable archival resources—rests on a misconception: that the industry cares about art and artists. It doesn’t. The industry's focus is shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians, prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario, history is not a resource—it’s competition.
I think it is increasingly clear that Europe, Canada, the UK, and other Western liberal democracies are laying the groundwork for a new strategic direction, one where the United States is no longer viewed as a dependable superpower or a guaranteed partner.
This does not mean the US will be written off entirely, at least not in the foreseeable future. However, the era in which the US could dictate the global agenda, particularly in Europe, appears to be coming to an end. A recent example is the US Vice President’s speech in Germany, followed by meetings with the AfD rather than the German Chancellor - an unmistakable signal that Washington no longer prioritizes its European allies in the same way.
A similar shift may be seen in the area of technology. Reliance on American tech companies and investments is likely to decrease, with governments and businesses seeking alternatives. Even China could play a role in this transition, despite the security risks it presents. Economic growth depends on global trade, and many nations may be unwilling to let US protectionism dictate their technological and economic choices.
It is an unexpected turn, but in hindsight, one we could have seen coming. The transformation of the US Republican Party, coupled with growing public support for politicians who embrace extreme rhetoric, reject objective facts, and show little respect for science or democratic principles, has reshaped the country’s global standing. Many of these figures claim to uphold democracy but, from an outside perspective, promote an increasingly authoritarian vision through their policies and rhetoric.
Ultimately, it is up to the American people to choose their government and shape their society. However, the US has become increasingly unstable and polarized, straying from both common sense and the ideals of a liberal democracy. As this internal turmoil continues, it is no surprise that its traditional allies are beginning to seek a future less dependent on American leadership.
It’s reassuring to see an expert bringing facts and perspective into the public discourse. Whether the right people will read it is another matter, but I find this article both thorough and clear.
Dear Jonas:
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
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