“It’s disturbing and, in many ways, completely inappropriate,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told broadcaster DR. “It’s obviously a sign that the U.S. president still harbors some kind of maximalist vision in his own mind. We need to rein that in.”
Icelandic Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir summoned U.S. Ambassador Billy Long on Tuesday, with her ministry saying it made clear that the post was “entirely inappropriate.”
The U.S. president has also repeatedly mixed up Iceland, a sovereign country, and Greenland, a self-governing Danish overseas territory. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he referred to Iceland four times while discussing issues relating to Greenland, including blaming “Iceland” for a drop in U.S. stock markets.
Trump’s map also included French, British and Dutch territory. The French Caribbean and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, off Canada’s coast, were covered by the U.S. flag. Left-wing presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Macron should “send the aircraft carrier to maintain control over our sovereignty and reassure the populations under threat.” Conservative politician Xavier Bertrand was more restrained in an X post on Wednesday: “Our sovereignty is not reshaped by a series of edited posts on social media.”
The latest post landed as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Greenland on Monday, declaring the island was making a “clear choice” to deepen ties with Europe and unveiling a €200 million investment package.
The star-spangled map was part of a wider burst of Truth Social posts over recent weeks in which Trump claimed Apple Maps had joined Google Maps in renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” declaring the change “complete, ratified, and binding.”
