Greenland’s Prime Minister Wants the Nightmare to End

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox.

“Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population 20,000). Egede, who is 37, wore a green zip-up sweater, stared straight ahead, and was walking toward me. He said nothing.

“Prime Minister Múte Egede,” I tried again, using his full name this time, for some reason.

He remained … mute.

I made one more attempt—“Have you talked to President Trump?”—to no avail.

As he walked out the door, Egede looked flushed and somewhat stunned. The briefing room had been tense, crowded with about three dozen journalists, several from other countries. This is—I’m guessing here—two and a half dozen more journalists than typically show up at his press conferences.

“This is not usual for us,” said Pele Broberg, a member of the Greenlandic Parliament and an off-and-on Egede nemesis, who had come to enjoy the spectacle and watch Egede squirm.

The briefing had lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of Egede giving a canned statement and then taking eight or nine questions, all on the same topic.

“Do we have reason to be afraid?” one Greenlandic journalist asked.

“Of course, what has happened is very serious,” Egede replied in Greenlandic. He projected the grave aura of a leader trying to be reassuring in a time of crisis; his tone and language seemed better suited to a natural disaster than a geopolitical quandary.

“We have to have faith that we can get through this,” Egede said. His hands shook slightly as he sipped from a glass of water.

“In Greenland,” he said, “there is a lot of unrest.”

Extreme cold was predicted for Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., so I figured I’d decamp to somewhere warmer: Nuuk.

Temperatures in the icy capital were in the