The Map on the Wall
The obsession, according to those who have tracked its origins, began with a map . Not the kind of map a president might study in the Situation Room, but the sort that hangs in boardrooms and country clubs—Greenland rendered enormous by the distortions of the Mercator projection, a cartographic illusion that makes the island appear roughly the size of Africa when it is, in fact, closer to the dimensions of Mexico . For Donald Trump, returning to the White House with the zeal of a man apparently convinced of destiny's second chances, that distorted landmass represented something irresistible: a territory rich in rare earth minerals critical to American industry, a strategic bulwark against Russian and Chinese encroachment in the Arctic, and—perhaps most compellingly—a prize no previous American president had managed to claim .