Donald Trump just admitted in writing that he’s threatening to invade a NATO ally’s territory because he didn’t get a shiny medal.
THE DETAILS: On Monday, Trump sent a letter to Norway’s Prime Minister explicitly linking his threats against Greenland to being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize.
According to The Daily Beast, the letter stated that after losing the Nobel Prize, Trump no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of peace,” and that he “can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”
Let that sink in: the President of the United States wrote down, on official correspondence, that his commitment to peace was contingent on winning an award.
OF COURSE: Seth Meyers had a field day with this on Late Night, pointing out the absurdity of Trump’s geographic confusion in the process. “He threatened to invade Greenland, which is a part of Denmark, because he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, which he thinks is decided by Norway, which it’s not,” Meyers explained, before introducing a segment called “Seth Rubs His Temples and Tries to Dissociate For 15 Minutes.”
Meyers attributed the whole situation to Trump’s “desperate craving for awards,” adding: “‘You didn’t give me the Nobel Peace Prize, so now I have to invade another country’ is an insane thing to say.”
BUT BUT BUT: Trump’s letter also claimed that “the world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland.” Meyers’ response: “I love that he’s basically saying, ‘Here’s how important Greenland is. If you’d given me a shiny new medal, I would have let you have it.'”
The late-night host compared the logic to telling his kids, “You didn’t get me a World’s #1 Dad coffee mug, so I’m moving to Thailand to blow your inheritance.”
WHY IT MATTERS: This isn’t just a late-night punchline. Trump has been complaining about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize for months, and now he’s using that grievance to justify threatening military action against territory belonging to Denmark—a NATO ally. The President explicitly wrote that his commitment to peace was transactional, dependent on receiving personal recognition.
America has never had a president whose foreign policy could be swayed by award ceremonies. As Meyers put it: “America’s been through a lot over the years, but the one thing we’ve mercifully never had to deal with was a president who had a boner for winning awards.”
Until now.