With its striking Arctic artwork, tasteful décor, and the soft, steady notes of a grand piano, the cocktail bar inside Greenland’s most luxurious hotel, the Hans Egede, is hardly the kind of place where drunken fights are expected to erupt.

At least, it wasn’t—until Donald Trump publicly signaled his ambitions for the country.

One moment, Jorgen Boassen, a local bricklaying company boss and outspoken supporter of the “Make Greenland American” movement, was quietly drinking a beer at the hotel in Nuuk. The next, he says, he was knocked off his stool by a brutal punch from behind.

A former boxer, Boassen, 51, says he managed to hold his own in the brawl that followed last month. But he insists it was not the first time he has been physically targeted since being recruited as a guide and unofficial ambassador for Trump’s visiting Arctic envoys.

When I last spoke to this combative Greenlander exactly one year ago, his pro-Trump posts on social media were largely met by fellow Greenlanders with amusement—or, at most, mild disdain.

Back then, as Trump supporters walked the streets of Nuuk in the bitter winter handing out dollar bills and red MAGA baseball caps in an effort to win over teenagers who had rarely traveled beyond their frozen outpost, many locals dismissed the U.S. President’s rhetoric as little more than a temporary burst of bluster.

Now, Boassen says the situation has escalated to such a dangerous level that he genuinely fears the world’s largest island is nearing “civil war.”

The debate over whether Greenland should remain part of Denmark, which has controlled it for more than 300 years, or accept U.S. annexation, has become so toxic, he claims, that families are being ripped apart.

Boassen says his own relationship has collapsed under the strain. He claims he has been forced to separate from his fiancée—who had lived with him and their teenage daughter in Nuuk—because members of her family despise his campaign for Americanisation.

He also alleges it was no accident that his former partner lost her senior role at Air Greenland, a nationalised Danish carrier where she had worked for 30 years, shortly after he attended MAGA celebrations for Trump’s inauguration in Washington.

“The Danes control 95 per cent of all the businesses here, and they are hunting down people like me with independent dreams of working with America,” Boassen told me yesterday.

He says his own bricklaying business has shut down because people blacklisted it, and he claims other firms have faced similar retaliation for showing support for Trump.

“I’m staying in Copenhagen for now because people back home are afraid to associate with me,” he said. “That’s how it is in Greenland now. Those who really want the Americans to take over dare not speak out. There is a climate of fear.”

Although Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate, serious violent crime is relatively uncommon.

But as Trump expands his focus northward from Central America, Boassen—who describes himself, perhaps grandly, as a “revolutionary”—believes Greenland is now balancing on a knife-edge.

“I really think a civil war could happen in Greenland,” he says. “The tension is so great—and if they can attack me, they can attack anyone.”

THE NEW ‘GREAT GAME’: WHY TRUMP WANTS CONTROL OF GREENLAND

Military bases and shipping routes around the Arctic Circle

He adds, ominously, that the country has the means for such a conflict because “in Greenland almost every home has a gun for hunting.”

“So, I say to the EU and the UK—to Sir Keir Starmer—before you step in, you should be very careful, and you should know the truth about Denmark: they are repressing our people,” he said.

While he stops short of predicting that Greenlanders will literally take up arms against each other, Kuno Fencker, a pro-independence Greenland MP, agrees that the divisions are deepening, with “families falling out” over politics.

After centuries of heavy-handed colonisation, Fencker argues that most Greenlanders want freedom from Danish rule. Like Boassen, he points to polling—such as a survey last year indicating 84 per cent favor independence.

As I noted to him yesterday, support for independence does not necessarily mean people want to be governed from Washington.

Still, Fencker calls the latest aggressive messaging from the White House “positive and exciting,” and he imagines a free association arrangement similar to the agreement between the U.S. and the Marshall Islands—one in which Greenland would keep sovereignty while allowing American companies to share in extracting rare earth minerals and permitting the U.S. to maintain military bases to deter Russian and Chinese encroachment.

Security, Fencker insists, is far beyond Denmark’s capabilities. He says Denmark has only a few hundred soldiers in Greenland, just two or three icebreaking naval patrol vessels, and surveillance equipment so limited it cannot reliably detect Russian submarines.

He argues that many Greenlanders who resist change have lived under Danish control for so long—and become so dependent on Danish subsidies—that the prospect of a different future frightens them.

Whether or not that is true, few of the Greenlanders I remain in touch with are enthusiastic about replacing Danish rule with American influence. And apart from Boassen, none are willing to bow to Trump.

They view his loud, boastful style as fundamentally incompatible with Greenland’s reserved Inuit culture. And with his “drill-baby-drill” mindset, many fear what could happen to the country’s pristine environment—its most cherished asset—if he ever gained control.

Among those now consumed by anxiety over a possible U.S. invasion is Hedvig Frederiksen, a retired 65-year-old whose apartment overlooks Nuuk International Airport.

When I spoke with her via FaceTime yesterday, she abruptly rose from her chair and rushed to the window—an instinctive reaction, her English-speaking daughter, Aviaja Fontain, explained.

Since Trump’s “lightning strike” on Venezuela, Hedvig has become convinced an American invasion could begin at any moment, especially whenever she hears a plane landing.

“Mum has also put an aircraft tracking app on her mobile phone so she can monitor the flights leaving Pituffik [the U.S Space Base in northwest Greenland] in case they are heading down here,” Aviaja said. “Many Greenlanders are doing the same now.”

Neither Hedvig nor Aviaja—who has three teenage children—has any affection for Trump. Yet when Hedvig considers what life might look like under American influence, her feelings are more complex.

They are shaped by her own childhood, and by the experiences passed down through her Inuit family. She grew up in a remote village in southern Greenland, where her father worked as a cook for a Danish company mining cryolite, a rare mineral once used in aluminum production—and one Trump is presumed eager to exploit.

Hedvig says the Danes treated her father like a virtual slave and paid him next to nothing—a story she says is widely echoed among Inuit families. Her mother, who worked in a fish processing plant, was treated just as poorly.

Then, in 1974, when Hedvig was 14, Danish authorities sent her and her classmates to continue school in the town of Paamiut. What happened a couple of days after they arrived remains one of the most disturbing episodes of Greenland’s colonial history.

The girls were ordered to line up outside a room without being told why. When they came out minutes later, many were in tears: without parental consent or consultation, they had been fitted with contraceptive coils.

It later emerged they were caught up in a chilling Danish policy intended to limit welfare, housing, healthcare, and education costs by holding the Inuit population to around 50,000.

The plan, Hedvig says, achieved its aim. Today the world’s largest island—nine times bigger than the UK—has about 57,000 residents, fewer than the population of Margate in Kent.

Only years later, after meeting Aviaja’s father in her early twenties and struggling to conceive, did Hedvig learn what had been done to her. After the device was removed, she was able to have Aviaja, now 40.

It is hardly surprising that Hedvig and her daughter—along with 75 per cent of native Greenlanders, according to a poll last year—support independence.

Aviaja, an undergraduate at Nuuk’s Danish-subsidised university, says she would prefer independence to be absolute. She fears that if American culture arrived in force, it could erode Greenland’s moral standards and import horrors such as mass school shootings.

Yet Hedvig admits she has long felt admiration for the United States and its people, rooted in stories from her mother and grandmother about the kindness Americans showed when they treated Greenland as a protectorate after the Nazis occupied Denmark during the Second World War.

She recalls that Danes, determined to prevent Inuit development, even restricted basic household items such as oil lamps and expected people to wear clothing made only from animal fur they hunted.

By contrast, she says, Americans provided fabrics and sewing machines, and delivered parcels of sweets for children.

Hedvig, who lives on a £940 monthly pension, also believes she might be financially better off if Greenland’s economy were strengthened by the dollar and supported by American businesses she sees as more egalitarian than the Danes—who, she says, insist that everything, including Greenland’s valuable fish stocks, must be exported through Copenhagen.

And she is acutely aware that if “World War III” were to erupt, the United States would be able to stand up to Russia or China—unlike Denmark, with its dog-sled patrols and tiny fleet.

So why not openly support a takeover? Hedvig answers with a single word: “Trump.”

Aviaja agrees and explains further: “It’s just the way he talks and acts, and the way he treats us. Like saying, so casually ‘Maybe we’ll attack Greenland, maybe we won’t.’ And I’ve seen clips of him mocking Greenlandic people on social media.

“So, someone like Trump is not appealing to us at all. We Greenlanders can shout when we really need to, but our culture is to be quieter. We often communicate just with mimes and facial expressions.”

As if to underline the depth of that cultural gap, Hedvig sits in silence for a long time, lost in thought.

She appears ready to add another perspective when the roar of jet engines suddenly fills the room—and she hurries anxiously back to the frosted window once again.

Share or comment on this article: “I fear Greenland is on the brink of civil war”: Families are torn apart as locals express their anger at both Denmark AND Trump