On Greenland, Trump the realtor president is strong on the sell but hazy on details

Delivering a speech to a 5,000-strong crowd of business elites is daunting. Perhaps that’s why Donald Trump stuck to familiar territory.

Real estate is Trump’s first love; the hard prism through which sees the world. And, like an overly coiffed estate agent, he’s strong on the sell but hazy on the details when you ask what the neighbours are like or where to put out the bins.

Take Greenland. For Trump the question is really one of property, not security: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly,” he told The New Yorker early last year.

The question forefront in Trump’s mind is why would you start bulldozing the walls and building an extension without first owning the freehold? “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including the title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it,” he told World Economic Forum (WEF) attendees. “Who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?”.

Gaza is another example. During today’s convening of his “Board of Peace”, he revealed a “masterplan” for the territory he describes as a “beautiful piece of property” by the sea. Data shows that since the ceasefire began more than two months ago, 2,500 buildings have been demolished by Israel in the strip.

Real estate is the president’s obsession, and the place he feels comfortable. During his lengthy speech he mentioned the word “house” no less than 12 times. “Tariffs”, by contrast, barely came up.

Davos delegates weren’t expecting a tirade on the unaffordability of American housing, but they got one. Ahead of the midterms, Trump is blaming Wall Street and institutional investors buying up “hundreds of thousands” of single-family homes. Rather awkwardly, one of those investors to take the wrap, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, had invited Trump on stage yesterday. Trump now wants to sign an executive order to ban corporations like his from buying single-family properties.

And then there’s the question of rates. Trump’s real bug bear with “too late” Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, is that higher interest rates make it more expensive to borrow to buy property. That’s why he’s asking government-backed institutions to purchase up to $200bn in mortgage bonds to try and bring them down. Trump’s obsession with the Fed is no doubt due partly to the fact he built his own empire on cheap debt.

The president is a fundamentally acquisitive being. His career is a litany of vast, high-leverage projects that have frequently ended in bankruptcy (The Plaza Hotel) or litigation (The Old Post Office in Washington DC). The only difference now is that those loans to acquire new land are being underwritten by Uncle Sam, whether that’s in Gaza or Greenland.

“Sometimes part of making a deal is denigrating your competition,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Deal. That is certainly the tactic Trump sought to employ yesterday – and one he’s often used before: when local residents refused to sell properties that Trump needed in order to finish a golf resort in Menie Estate, Scotland, he ridiculed them as living in “disgusting” ramshackle hovels.

In this context, all the trash talking of Europe as “dead” and Greenland as “uninhabitable” all of a sudden sounds a lot like talking down an asset in order to snap it up at a discount. Whatever “framework” emerges for the fate of Greenland, you can bet it will be laid out in terms familiar to an insecure property tycoon.

Photograph by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images