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.
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.

Greenlander Jorgen Boassen (pictured), a local bricklaying company boss, says his business has been ‘blacklisted’ due to his vociferous championing of the ‘Make Greenland American’ cause and he felt forced to flee to nearby Denmark

Mr Boassen’s cause has not always endeared him to his fellow Greenlanders. He told the Daily Mail that recently he was sucker punched while enjoying a beer in a hotel in the capital city of Nuuk due to his campaign

The issue of Greenland’s sovereignty has been thrown into sharp relief following moves by Donald Trump to annex the territory – the US President has said ‘we have to have it’ for national security reasons
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.”