Seizing Greenland Might Be the Least Popular Idea in American Political History

President Donald Trump’s push to seize Greenland might be the least popular idea in American political history.

Is that hyperbole? If so, that’s only because reliable and fast public polling is a relatively recent development within our 250-year experiment in self-governance.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found a staggering 4 percent of Americans favor the idea of seizing Greenland with military force. Among Republicans, the idea is actually twice as popular: 8 percent say taking the island is a “good idea.”

Even if the Trump administration is using the threat of military force as a bluff, the idea of acquiring Greenland at all remains deeply unpopular. The same poll found that just 17 percent of Americans (and just 40 percent of Republicans) support the effort.

That poll does not appear to be an outlier. A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday found similarly striking results, with 86 percent of respondents opposing a military takeover of Greenland and just 9 percent favoring it.

But it’s the 4 percent figure in the Reuters/Ipsos poll that really stands out to me, for two reasons. 

First, do you know how hard it is to get such a minuscule percentage on a public opinion survey? Congress’ approval rating typically hovers in the high single-digits, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who is happy about how Congress is conducting itself—which is, of course, very different from how people feel about their own representatives. 

Secondly, there’s the Lizardman’s Constant. That’s a term coined by Scott Alexander in 2013 to describe the surprisingly consistent finding that 4 percent of people will say they believe utterly outlandish things when polled—things like “human-sized lizards wearing skin suits control the world.” 

Note that I didn’t write 4 percent of people believe that. They just say that they do. Some of them might truly believe such a thing, but mostly the Lizardman’s Constant is a reminder that any poll will contain some responses from people who are trolling or giving answers at random (or who are deeply disconnected from reality).

All of which means we can’t be certain that Trump’s threat to seize Greenland by force is actually supported by 4 percent of Americans. It’s just as likely, given Lizardman’s Constant, that there may not be hardly any Americans who genuinely support this idea—excepting, of course, the current occupant of the White House and some of his most sycophantic allies.

It is nearly impossible to believe that Trump would blow up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and start a war with longtime American allies over a bit of land that poses no threat to the United States—on account of it being controlled by a fellow NATO ally who has happily allowed U.S. troops to be deployed there for decades.

Yet we seem to be inching towards that insane possibility. By all accounts, Wednesday’s meeting with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen at the White House did not go well. Denmark and Greenland “still have a fundamental disagreement” with Trump’s ambition to control the territory, Rasmussen said after the meeting. Now, France, Germany, and Sweden have announced plans to send troops to Greenland to defend against possible American aggression.

The American people clearly do not want any of this to happen. If Trump ignores that fact, then Congress must block him from doing something disastrous.