Trump sends allies into meltdown with leaked personal texts and Greenland flag meme as world row explodes: Live updates

Donald Trump posted a text message from President Emmanuel Macron on Truth Social late Monday.

The French leader told Trump, ‘I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.’

Macron also explained some of his differences and similarities to Trump on policy.

‘My friend, we are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran,’ Macron wrote. ‘I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland. Let us try to build great things.’

In the text, Macron promised to assemble a G7 following the World Economic Forum in Davos and asked Trump to have dinner with him in Paris on Thursday before he returns to the US.

US stocks were braced for a sharp sell-off on Tuesday after Donald Trump escalated his push to acquire Greenland.

Wall Street had been shut since Trump made the threat on Saturday due to the American holiday, but traders have still been able to trade futures — giving an early signal of investor reaction.

Trump threatened new tariffs on eight European countries that oppose the deal. Trading in futures suggest heavy losses when stock markets open at 9.30am ET in New York.

Dow futures pointed to losses of around 680 points. S&P 500 futures were down about 1.4 percent. Nasdaq futures were off roughly 1.7 percent. Shares fell in Europe where markets open earlier.

Gavin Newsom tore apart European leaders for ‘embarrassing’ themselves by ‘rolling over’ to Donald Trump in the president’s pursuit to rip control of Greenland from Denmark.

The California Democratic governor, and potential candidate for president in 2028, on Tuesday blasted Europeans looking to negotiate with Trump as ‘pathetic.’

‘I can’t take this complicity. People rolling over. I should have bought a bunch of knee pads for all the world leaders,’ Newsom told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

‘I hope people understand how pathetic they look on the world stage, at least from an American perspective. It’s embarrassing.’

Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio planting the American flag in Greenland.

United States Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent was overheard reassuring European allies at Davos as Trump threatened to impose tariffs on those countries who opposed his purchase of Greenland.

‘Take a deep breath. Do not retaliate. Do not retaliate,’ he said.

‘The president will be here tomorrow, and he will get his message across. I believe he is going to have meetings and again, also have an open mind.’

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said 10 percent tariffs would come into effect on February ‍1 on Denmark, Norway, ​Sweden, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Finland.

They would increase to 25 percent on June 1 unless a deal is reached for the US to take ‘complete and total purchase’ of the Arctic territory.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that Donald Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland is unrelated to him being denied the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘I think it’s a complete canard, and if there’s any kind of equivalence with the Nobel Prize,’ he told CNBC.

‘This has been on the president’s mind since his first term. It’s been on the presidential mind for 150, 160 years the US has been trying to acquire Greenland. This is not something new.’

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that Greenland is ‘strategically important’ for Donald Trump’s Golden Dome defense plan.

‘It’s strategically important for his Golden Dome project to protect the US. He’s invited Canada into that if they want to pay their fair share,’ she said.

‘It’s important the US has control of Greenland and that will stop and kind of a kinetic war. So why not preempt the problem before it starts?’

President Trump’s renewed tariff threat against Europe puts into sharp relief two questions that matter more than any single trade dispute: how the president and his team are doing at remaking America’s standing in the world, and whether they are actually succeeding at reinvigorating the US economy.

Those twin missions rest, more than anywhere else, on the shoulders of two men: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

By some combination of luck, design and political survival instinct, Rubio and Bessent have emerged as the two most broadly respected senior advisers in the Trump orbit.

They are widely viewed — across Wall Street, foreign capitals, television green rooms, Capitol Hill and elite opinion-shaping circles — as smart, serious, qualified and genuinely accomplished.

That may sound obvious, but it is not trivial. The same adjectives would not be applied, in too many cases, to several other cabinet officials, whose reputations are more ideological, performative or controversial. Vice President JD Vance is a separate and sui generis case, one I’ll save for another day.

When President Donald Trump revived the idea that Greenland should become part of the United States, predictable snickering followed.

His critics insist that the White House‘s designs on the ‘Land of Ice and Snow’ is some newfangled aberration.

Yet despite the late-night jokes, there is a serious argument for America’s annexation of Greenland that is rooted in history, geography and 150 years of US strategic security thinking.

American leaders have long eyed Greenland, not as a whimsical real-estate dream, but as a vital asset for national defense and global influence.

Sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses, the French president told the ⁠World Economic Forum in Davos on ​Tuesday: ‘It’s… ‍a ​shift towards a world without rules, where international law ‍is ‍trampled underfoot and where the only law that seems ⁠to matter is that of ⁠the strongest’, adding that what he called ‘imperial ‍ambitions’ were resurfacing.

Red baseball caps similar to Trump’s Make America Great Again hats are becoming a symbol of Danish and Greenlandic protest as the president ramps up efforts to acquire the arctic region.

The hats, created by Copenhagen vintage clothing store owner Jesper Rabe Tonnesen, feature the slogan ‘Make America Go Away’ have gained popularity as protestors against Trump have donned them at recent demonstrations.

Although the first release of the caps in 2024 flopped in sales, Tonnesen said he saw a surge in orders after Trump’s rhetoric to seize the territory ramped up.

‘When a delegation from America went up to Greenland, we started to realise this probably wasn’t a joke – it’s not reality TV, it’s actually reality,’ said Tonnesen.

‘So I said, “OK, what can I do?” Can I communicate in a funny way with a good message and unite the Danes to show that Danish people support the people of Greenland?’

The hats also feature the Danish phrase ‘Nu det NUUK!’, a twist on the Danish phrase ‘Nu det nok,’ meaning ‘Now it’s enough.’

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserted that there are no plans to capture Greenland at a press conference on Tuesday.

‘We have no plans to capture Greenland. It’s not our issue. We think Washington knows well about the absence of such plans both in Russia and China,’ Lavrov said.

He also denied any intentions by Russia and China to threaten Greenland, as Donald Trump has suggested.

‘When they justify what’s going on around Greenland by saying that otherwise Russia or China would seize it, there is no proof of that. And in the West, economists and political scientists are already refuting them,’ he said.

‘We have nothing to do with this issue. We will monitor the situation.’