LOS ANGELES – With its striking Arctic artworks, tasteful decor and gently tinkling grand piano, the cocktail bar in Greenland’s plushest hotel, the Hans Egede, is not the sort of place where boozy brawls break out.
At least it wasn’t, until Donald Trump declared his designs on the country.
One minute, Jorgen Boassen, a local bricklaying company boss who vociferously champions the ‘Make Greenland American’ cause, was enjoying a beer in the hotel, in the capital city of Nuuk. The next, he’d been knocked off his stool by a vicious punch from behind.
Being a former boxer, Boassen, 51, more than held his own in the ensuing scrap last month, but it was not the first time he has been physically attacked since he was enlisted as a guide and unofficial ambassador by Trump’s visiting Arctic envoys.
When I last spoke to this pugnacious Greenlander, precisely a year ago, his pro-Trump exhortations on social media were regarded with amusement or mild contempt by most compatriots.
As Trump acolytes took to the streets of Nuuk in that biting winter to hand out Dollar bills and red MAGA baseball caps to win the support of teenagers who had seldom ventured beyond their icebound outpost, the US President’s rhetoric was thought to be little more than a fleeting blast of hot air.
Yet, as Boassen told me from his exiled base in Denmark yesterday, the tension in Greenland has since ratcheted up so dangerously that he seriously fears the world’s biggest island could be on the brink of ‘civil war’.
Arguments over whether Greenland should remain part of Denmark, which has controlled it for more than 300 years, or agree to US annexation, are now so rancorous that families are being torn apart.
Indeed, Boassen says he has been forced to split up with his fiancee – who had shared a home with him and their teenage daughter in Nuuk – because members of her family despise his campaign for Americanisation.
He also claims it is no coincidence that his erstwhile partner was fired from her senior post with Air Greenland, a nationalised Danish carrier for whom she had worked for 30 years, soon after he attended MAGA events to celebrate Trump’s inauguration in Washington.
‘‘The Danes control 95 per cent of all the businesses here, and they are hunting down people like me with independent dreams of working with America,’’ Boassen told me yesterday.
‘‘My bricklaying company has closed because people have blacklisted it, and the same thing is happening to other businesses who show support for Trump.
‘‘I’m staying in Copenhagen for now because people back home are afraid to associate with me. That’s how it is in Greenland now. Those who really want the Americans to take over dare not speak out. There is a climate of fear.’’
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