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January 22, 2026 — 5:58am
Watching Donald Trump speak in Davos, you couldn’t help but wonder: what would Joe Biden make of this?
Specifically, what would Biden make of Trump mistakenly referring to Greenland as “Iceland” no fewer than four times – something he’d also done the day before in Washington.
The repeated error will only inflame concerns – mostly from Trump’s political opponents, yes – that the US president, who turns 80 this year, might be suffering some of the same cognitive setbacks as his predecessor.
“Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me,” Trump said of Europe and NATO. A minute later, he added: “They’re not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland’s already costing us a lot of money.”
It’s one thing to momentarily mix up the names of countries; it’s another to repeatedly misname a country you want to coerce another government into selling you, and which you, until today, were threatening to invade.
To be fair to Trump, this was the same error four times within quick succession. He named Greenland correctly earlier multiple times in his speech. It is different to Biden’s frequent struggle to articulate thoughts and finish sentences, or his tendency to non-sequiturs, as we saw in that debate.
But given how hard Trump and his team went against Biden – and how Trump continues to accuse the cancer-stricken former president of having no idea who or where he was, or what he was doing – it’s only right Trump cops it for his own mistakes.
Of course, the White House won’t do that. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied Trump mixed anything up. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is,” she told a reporter on X. “You’re the only one mixing anything up here.”
To the substance of Trump’s address: Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief – as he himself pointed out– that he seemingly took military action off the table. It was hardly realistic anyway, but it might help grease the wheel to say aloud that the threat is no longer there.
Undiminished was the president’s determination to take control of the Danish territory. His description of the Danes in particular as “ungrateful” will sting. Although Trump’s focus on Greenland waxed and waned in 2025, the Davos speech made clear this issue is not going away.
Trump was actually more persuasive in his off-the-cuff comments during the sit-down Q&A that followed the speech, when he pointed out that Greenland is expensive place for a small country such as Denmark to run, and that its location makes it strategically important for not just homeland defence but for international security.
US control would make it “impossible for the bad guys to do anything against the perceived good ones”, Trump said. He also argued the US had assisted Europe significantly on the Russia-Ukraine war and that “without us, I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would have gone all the way”.
The US already has the right to virtually unlimited military presence in Greenland thanks to a post-World War II agreement with Denmark. But it seems clear now that there will have to be some tough negotiations that at the very least revise that deal.
Trump was dismissive of a lease – psychologically, he said, you don’t defend something you only rent. But the idea of using American taxpayers’ money to buy the world’s largest non-continental island is not popular. A YouGov/Economist poll this week put support at 29 per cent, rising to 58 per cent among Republican voters.
Europe appears to be drawing a line in the sand over Greenland, but it not yet clear that Europe is willing to declare, as Canada’s Mark Carney did, that time must be called on the era of American hegemony.
As Joshua Shifrinson at the University of Maryland’s Centre for International and Security Studies points out, Europe is heavily reliant on the US for defence. It strengthens Trump’s hand and weakens theirs.
And yet, if Europe wants to play hardball, Trump just gave them a gift. Not an ace by any stretch. But they can always say to the US president: “You want Greenland so badly? You couldn’t even get its name right.”
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