August 17, 2019

The Daily News Just Hit Trump With a Headline for the Ages

“Fjord to Trump: Drop Dead.”

A sailboat travels through the mountainscapes in East Greenland.Getty

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The Saturday edition of New York’s Daily News elbowed President Donald Trump in the wake of backlash against reports that the president had inquired about the possibility of the United States purchasing Greenland. “Fjord to Trump: Drop Dead,” it read.

The headline was a reference to criticism that members of the governments of Greenland and Denmark directed President Trump’s way on Friday after a report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that the president had hopes of purchasing the European island nation, which is considered a semiautonomous territory.

“Greenland is not for sale and cannot be sold, but Greenland is open for trade and cooperation with other countries—including the United States,” Kim Kielsen, Greenland’s premier, said in a statement according to Danish news agency Ritzau. “I hope it is a joke—to not just buy a country but also its people,” Martin Lidegaard, the chairman of the Danish parliament’s foreign policy committee told the Washington Post.

The president had reportedly been interested in the island because of its vast natural resources—in particular, its anticipated richness in offshore oil resources that will be made available as the country’s vast ice sheets melt due to climate change. He also sees the island, which is the world’s largest, as a strategic national security perch in the northern realms of the Atlantic Ocean.

Greenland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs seized the unexpected spotlight to remind the world of its admirable qualities—like its emphasis on renewable energy and adventure tourism business—with a subtle tweak at the president. “We’re open for business, not for sale,” it tweeted from its official account on Friday.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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