Donald Trump’s aspiration to acquire Greenland : understanding ‘issue-attention’ cycles in news coverage and their relevance to small states and territories

Abstract

The value of understanding ‘issue-attention’ cycles in news coverage has been recognised since the 1970s and has been elaborated in various forms, most recently with regard to how populist political figures can exploit such cycles through both conventional media interaction and through use of social media. This article applies such perspectives to a particular news event that occurred in August 2019: the revelation of (then) US president Donald Trump’s interest in purchasing Greenland, his flirtation with the idea and his subsequent abandonment of it due to adverse reaction. The article specifically focusses on two aspects and the disparities between them. The first concerns international anglophone media coverage and the manner in which the fate of an autonomous territory (i.e., Greenland) was bandied about with minimal consideration of the country’s constitutional status, its right to self-determination and its right to participate in debates about its potential acquisition by another power. The second involves the response to international media coverage of Trump’s statements in Greenland and related Greenlandic responses to Danish politicians’ engagements with the news event. In addition to examining Trump’s disruptive presence on the global stage, the article highlights the manner in which his government’s geo-political gambits both substantially resembled previous US ones and ignored Greenland’s recent trajectory towards autonomy and/or future independence. The issue-attention cycle concerning Trump and Greenland illustrates the highly limited power that small states and territories have to respond to international news cycles, let alone set agendas for these.