Trump’s Biden moment on world stage as he repeatedly calls Greenland ‘Iceland’

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. He digresses, but it is different to Biden’s frequent struggles to articulate thoughts or his tendency to non-sequiturs, as we saw in that debate.

But imagine if Biden misnamed a country four times in one speech. 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 an expensive place for a small country such as Denmark to run, and that its location makes it strategically important not just for homeland defence but 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”.

After the speech, Trump backed off substantially and rapidly. As is customary, he withdrew his threats of tariffs and praised a “framework for a deal” that he apparently struck with NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte. It will likely expand US control over some parts of the territory without granting full sovereignty.

Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether the deal would still involve US ownership of Greenland, which he said was essential just a few hours earlier, Trump paused for several seconds and then said: “It’s a long-term deal.”

It’s probably what Trump sought all along. The US already has the right to virtually unlimited military presence in Greenland thanks to a post-World War II agreement with Denmark. And spending American taxpayers’ money to buy it is not popular at home. A YouGov/ Economist poll this week put support at 29 per cent, rising to 58 per cent among Republican voters.

As for Europe, it seemed willing to draw a line in the sand over Greenland, but it is not yet clear that it 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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