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Trump Couldn’t Find Greenland On a Map. That Won't Stop Him

The president has got grand plans for Iran too.

Michael Wolff's avatar
Michael Wolff
Jan 13, 2026
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Photo illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

It was early last fall when Trump, ever superstitious, first started hammering on about this year’s mid-term elections, beginning a countdown to November 3, 2026, when, as he now frequently repeats, “we could be finished, finished, finished.”

He’d highlight the economy, especially concerned that “nobody’s hiring” (indeed, the end of the year jobs report would show the slowest labor market in more than 20 years); the “Epstein shit,” which, try as he might, he can’t escape; “these ICE videos that everybody is crying over” and “the Dems saying I’m fucking Joe Biden senile.” He was foreseeing his own doom, becoming ever more apocalyptic about what the GOP losing its majority in the House would mean and eyeing the possibility that the Senate too could fall. (“Then I’m back in court… won’t be pretty.”)



“We’re gonna,” he’d say, in what was mostly interpreted as Trumpian humor, “have to go for Greenland.” To anyone with the temerity to wonder if there might actually be something to this, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would just raise her eyebrows to say it was not worth commenting on. (Wiles, curiously, has often downplayed the possibilities of Trump acting on his most extreme impulses, only to see him do exactly that.)

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