That guy is the greatest waste of space since Greenland.

So said an old friend, a longtime basketball coach, many years ago. He was muttering about a seven-footer who couldn’t seem to do anything right on the court — couldn’t shoot, couldn’t rebound, couldn’t play defense, couldn’t finish at the rim.

These days, however, no one is making jokes at the expense of the world’s largest, most barren, most forbidding island. Quite the opposite. To Donald Trump, Greenland is practically Manhattan real estate. It’s the apple of his eye, the belle of the ball — the first pick in the NBA draft, if you will.

Remember all the eye-rolls and the knee-slaps that greeted Trump back in 2019 when he first mentioned the idea of integrating the Danish autonomous territory into the American portfolio? “In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea.”

At the time, the jokes were downright Nigerian: “Honored sirs, I am PRINCE KIELSEN and I am contacting you with exciting opportunity. I recently inherited an island but need a small amount of cash. Send a money order for $600,000,000 to my account and…”

Despite these guffaws, Greenland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged Trump’s good taste in real estate while at the same time telling the world, I’m not that kind of girl: “Greenland,” the ministry tweeted, “is rich in valuable resources such as minerals, the purest water and ice, fish stocks, seafood, renewable energy and is a new frontier for adventure tourism. We’re open for business, not for sale.”

These days, Trump is like a terrier on a tibia, and no one is laughing about it. “We have to have the land,” the president says of Greenland, “because it’s not possible to properly defend a large section of this Earth — not just the U.S. — without it. So we have to have it, and I think we will have it.”

The U.S. has long had a national security foothold in Greenland. The Journal notes, “A decades-old defense treaty between Denmark and the U.S. gives the U.S. military virtually unlimited rights in Greenland at America’s northernmost base, Thule Air Base. Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile early-warning system. The base is also used by the U.S. Air Force Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.”

In addition, just as he’s doing with the Panama Canal, Trump is trying to stiff-arm the Communist Chinese. In 2018, the Pentagon blocked our nation’s foremost geopolitical foe from building three airports on the island. The Russians, too, have been showing a lot of interest in the Arctic of late.

If we can’t swing a deal for Greenland, it won’t be because Denmark has deeper pockets with which to ply the island’s 56,000 inhabitants. In fact, the Danes have been doing things on the cheap. “Though it has vast natural resources across its 811,000 square miles,” the Journal reports, “Greenland relies on $591 million of subsidies from Denmark annually, which make up about 60% of its annual budget, according to U.S. and Danish government statistics.”

$591 million is chump change — especially if we can scale back our funding of transgender operas in Colombia and LGBTQ comic books in Peru.

For the record, Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to have designs on Greenland. In 1946, the U.S. secretly tried to purchase the island from the Danes for $100 million in gold bars.

Accordingly, an American delegation, including Vice President JD Vance, his wife Usha, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Utah Senator Mike Lee, visited the island Friday to note the strategic partnership that the U.S. and Greenland have long enjoyed. They got a chilly reception, though, as the Danes weren’t consulted beforehand about the parameters of the visit. We suspect this breach of protocol was entirely intentional. Yes, Denmark is a NATO ally, but just as Trump uses social media to bypass the legacy media and talk directly to the American people, I get the sense that he wants to make his sales pitch directly to the people of Greenland.

The Vance delegation visited U.S. troops on Pituffik Space Base on the far northwestern coast of the island. There, the vice president didn’t mince words. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change.”

Greenland’s parliament was apparently indignant at Vance’s remarks, but that’s to be expected of an entity that gets its orders and its funding from Copenhagen. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also weighed in, calling her country “a good and strong ally.”

That may be true, but business is business. “I think that they ultimately will partner with the United States,” said a much more optimistic Vance. “We could make them much more secure. We could do a lot more protection. And I think they’d fare a lot better economically as well.”

As for Trump, he no doubt knows his history. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson nearly doubled the size of the U.S. with the Louisiana Purchase. In 1848, James K. Polk used his lone term in office to expand the American landscape by another third by securing California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. And in 1867, the otherwise maligned Andrew Johnson made the Alaska Purchase from the Russians. It’s impossible to overstate the historical significance of each of these land acquisitions.

So, too, Donald Trump is eying the land mass that mountaineer and author David Roberts once called “The Great Emptiness.” Said Trump on Friday, “Greenland’s very important for the peace of the world. And I think Denmark understands, and I think the European Union understands it. And if they don’t, we’re going to have to explain it to them.”