How a billionaire with interests in Greenland encouraged Trump to acquire the territory

One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”

It was an extraordinary proposal. And it originated from a longtime friend of the president who would go on to acquire business interests in the Danish territory.

The businessman, Bolton learned, was Ronald Lauder. Heir to a makeup fortune – the global cosmetics brand Estée Lauder – he had known Trump, a fellow wealthy New Yorker, for more than 60 years.

Bolton said he discussed the Greenland proposition with Lauder. After the billionaire’s intervention, a White House team began to explore ways to increase US sway in the vast Arctic territory controlled by Denmark.

Trump’s renewed pursuit of Lauder’s idea during his second term is typical of how the president operates, Bolton said. “Bits of information that he hears from friends, he takes them as truth and you can’t shake his opinion.”

The proposal seems to have stirred Trump’s imperialist ambitions: eight years on, he is mulling not just buying Greenland but perhaps taking it by force.

Like many of those around the president, Lauder’s policy suggestions appear to intersect with his business interests. As Trump has ratcheted up his threats to seize Greenland, Lauder has acquired commercial holdings there. Lauder is also part of the consortium whose desire to access Ukrainian minerals appears to have spurred Trump to demand a share of the war-torn country’s resources.

Lauder has said he met Trump in the 1960s when they went to the same prestigious business school. After working for the family cosmetics business, Lauder served under Ronald Reagan at the Pentagon, then as ambassador to Austria, before running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1989.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Lauder donated $100,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee. When Trump’s sanity was questioned in 2018, Lauder called him “a man of incredible insight and intelligence”.

That same year, Lauder said he was assisting Trump with “some of the most complex diplomatic challenges imaginable”. This seems to have included sowing the idea of Arctic expansion. The following year, the Wall Street Journal revealed Trump’s interest in Greenland. Denmark’s rulers expressed outrage. Trump responded by tweeting an image of a golden Trump Tower looming over a village, beside the caption: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”

‘A treasure trove of rare-earth elements’

‘Trump’s Greenland concept was never absurd – it was strategic,’ Lauder wrote. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Trump’s fixation with Greenland endured, as did Lauder’s. Last February, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, Lauder leapt to his defence when the president publicly contemplated a military takeover of the world’s largest island.

“Trump’s Greenland concept was never absurd – it was strategic,” Lauder wrote in the New York Post. He went on: “Beneath its ice and rock lies a treasure trove of rare-earth elements essential for AI, advanced weaponry and modern technology. As ice recedes, new maritime routes are emerging, reshaping global trade and security.”

With Greenland at “the epicentre of great-power competition”, Lauder argued, the US should seek a “strategic partnership”. He added: “I have worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.”

Since Lauder steered Trump’s attention to Greenland in 2018, as first reported by the US journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book The Divider, the cosmetics billionaire seems to have ploughed lots of his own money into the Arctic territory.

Danish corporate records show that a company with a New York address and unnamed owners has in recent months bought into Greenland.

One of its ventures is exporting “luxury” springwater from an island in Baffin Bay. When a Danish newspaper reported in December that Lauder was among the investors, it quoted a Greenlandic businessman involved in the endeavour. “Lauder and his colleagues in the investor group have a very good understanding of and access to the luxury market,” he said.

This group of investors is also reportedly seeking to generate hydroelectric power from Greenland’s biggest lake for an aluminium smelter.

It is unclear what effect a US takeover of Greenland – by invasion, purchase or persuasion – might have on Lauder’s commercial interests there.

Following Trump’s comments – in the aftermath of sending troops to capture the ruler of Venezuela – that the US needed Greenland “very badly”, Denmark’s prime minister warned that military action by one Nato member against another would break the alliance.

Trump appears unmoved. “We’re going to be doing something with Greenland,” he said last week, “either the nice way or the more difficult way.” After a White House meeting on Wednesday, the Danish foreign minster, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said: “We didn’t manage to change the American position. It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering Greenland.”

A deal to exploit Ukraine’s minerals

Donald Trump in a heated exchange with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February 2025. Photograph: Abaca/Rex/Shutterstock

Lauder’s apparent involvement in shaping US policy adds to mounting questions about conflicts of interest during Trump’s second term and the apparent self-enrichment of those close to the president. Trump’s two elder sons, Don Jr and Eric, have been on a global moneymaking campaign from Vietnam to Gibraltar.

They insist there is a “huge wall” between their business activities and their father’s position as the most powerful man alive. Trump’s spokesperson has said: “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” But foreign rulers have facilitated the enrichment of the first family, while sometimes seemingly securing the president’s favour.

Lauder, though, appeared for a time to have broken with his old friend.

In 2022, while he was out of office, Trump hosted the far-right agitator Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago club. Lauder, who heads the World Jewish Congress, joined the condemnation. “Nick Fuentes is a virulent antisemite and Holocaust denier plain and simple,” he said. “It is inconceivable that anyone would associate with him.”

But once Trump regained the White House, Lauder resumed financial support. In March 2025 he gave $5m to Maga Inc, a fundraising operation for Trump’s movement. The following month, Lauder was reportedly among the guests at an exclusive candlelit dinner with the president. Tickets were $1m each, payable to Maga Inc.

By then, Lauder’s business interests once again appeared to be overlapping with Trump administration policy.

A leaked November 2023 letter sent by the head of TechMet, a mining company, to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, named Lauder as part of a consortium hoping to exploit a lithium deposit in the war-torn country.

Lauder said at the time that he had not discussed Ukrainian minerals with Trump himself but had “raised the issue with stakeholders in the US and Ukraine for many years up to the present day”. Leading Republicans joined a campaign for the US to gain a hold on Ukraine’s prodigious resources. Trump became its loudest proponent.

Weeks after Lauder’s Maga Inc donations, Washington and Kyiv signed a deal to jointly exploit Ukraine’s minerals. It went some way to preserving Trump’s support for Ukraine following his televised Oval Office tirade against Zelenskyy for what he deemed insufficient gratitude for US backing.

The lithium deposit was the first to be tendered under the minerals deal. This month, the Lauder consortium reportedly won it. TechMet, the company leading the consortium, declined to comment, as did Lauder. His Greenland business partners and the White House did not respond when contacted by the Guardian.