Trump appointee claims he pitched Greenland as a way to refill Red Lobster's shrimp

[muriel_volestrangler]

One of the Trump administration officials who went all-in on President Donald Trump's far-fetched scheme of taking over Greenland pitched it as a bizarre way to rescue the Red Lobster restaurants, the New Yorker reported on Monday.
...
But Tom Dans, the Trump-appointed director of the United States Arctic Research Commission, has a much stranger pitch for why the U.S. needs control of Greenland.

"When I met him for lunch in Washington, earlier this year, he declined to speak further on the record, except to articulate a narrow, symbiotic vision for the future," reported Ben Taub. Specifically, Dans suggested, “My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China, and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.”

https://www.rawstory.com/greenland-red-lobster/

I suspect trolling the reporter, but these guys are so high on their own supply that he may have meant it. Here's the New Yorker article:

But the elevated language of the N.S.S. obscures the fact that Trump’s pursuit of Greenland has always been in the hands of a few ideologues and opportunists. Along with Cox, the Danish government has identified two other Americans as running private “influence operations” in Greenland: a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer named Tom Dans and a former Army Special Forces commander named Drew Horn, who has sought to dominate Greenland’s rare-earth-mining sector. Both men served in Trump’s first Administration—Dans at the Treasury, Horn in the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of Energy and Defense. But the Danish and Greenlandic governments were unaware that, during Trump’s first term, they had also represented their respective agencies on a secret National Security Council task force whose focus was the acquisition of Greenland.
...
Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump, has not returned to Greenland since his visit last March. But he has made a couple of appearances as a Greenland expert on One America News Network, where he spews inaccurate anti-Danish propaganda and has been falsely presented to viewers as having lived in Nuuk for most of last year.

Drew Horn returned to Greenland in February—just after the talk of invasion died down. He appears to have shelved his interest in mining there, and is now hoping to build a large data center in the sparsely populated settlement of Kangerlussuaq, where there is a Danish military station and the longest commercial runway in Greenland.
...
Jørgen Boassen joined us a few minutes later. He had left Greenland for the U.S. last fall, his life style funded by anonymous American benefactors. When I was in Nuuk, I was told by several people that Boassen was known for groping women and getting into drunken fights. (Boassen denies any such acts.) He has been banned from several venues, including a swimming pool, a martial-arts club, and the hotel where he’d brought Don, Jr. “I am the last revolutionary fighter,” Boassen told me. While Danish troops were preparing to defend Greenland, he attended a gathering at the Kennedy Center, at which Andy Ogles and other Republican lawmakers sliced into a Greenland-shaped cake.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/22/inside-the-ludicrous-deadly-serious-plan-to-take-over-greenland

(A data center in the middle of nowhere, with no apparent power source. That sounds like a scam, to me)

[underpants]

1. That's a motley crew right there.

[orthoclad]

2. Red Green Land?

Hmm. Maybe duct tape to fix the Pool.

[Omnipresent]

3. Watch out Greenland!!

Red Lobster needs all your f*#king shrimp!!

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

4. WTF. These people are fucking insane.

[Norrrm]

5. Several different reasons/theories for Red Lobster financial troubles.

Several different reasons/theories for Red Lobster financial troubles.

Buying a company to make it lose money...

Red Lobster was bought and manipulated to be a captive buyer.

https://youtube.com/shorts/oABYuYj2UYQ?si=-4vQsp8X3CJySk_h

--------------

Vulture capitalism for short term profit.
Stripped of its assets and forced to lease them back at high rates.

[DBoon]

6. I think of 19th century William Walker and his attempt to take Nicaragua

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Holy coup, Batman!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_%28filibuster%29

Wow

[DFW]

8. Never heard of a place called Louisiana?

Maybe they’ll start up a rival shrimp fast food chain:

Rubba Trump