President Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland has inspired a new harebrained business venture, Rachel Maddow told her viewers on MS NOW Monday night — and it already appears to be falling apart.
But before that, she said with some bemusement, the venture actually tried to get her to promote it.
Several weeks ago, she said, her office got “a totally unsolicited, totally over-the-top PR pitch offering me an embargoed, confidential sneak peek at a new project from Dr. Phil,” announcing he was going to Greenland to do a TV show and asking if she’d be interested in covering it.
The “footage” they offered Maddow continued, “turned out to be footage in Greenland of an American guy talking about his plans to drill for oil in Greenland, which he apparently believed he had a right to do.” She put the video on.
“That’s why we’re here, to reposition the road-building equipment,” said a man in the clip, adding that “for a fact” they have all the authorizations to move forward with the work.
“The guy they’re explaining this to appears to say, ‘This is unlawful,’” Maddow noted. “It’s kind of hard to hear, but it sounds like that’s what he says.”
Nonetheless, “some PR firm, in its infinite wisdom, believed that I would find it an exciting opportunity to help promote a new Dr. Phil TV show about how exciting it would be to drill for oil in Greenland.”
Since that PR pitch, she said, things haven’t gone so well for this enterprise.
“First of all, you should know that in 2021, Greenland passed a national moratorium, a national ban on all future oil exploration,” said Maddow.
Despite this, once Trump resumed his public obsession with annexing Greenland, “for some reason, a new company formed in Texas called Greenland Energy,” who “said they were going to drill for oil in Greenland.”
Then, in June, they visited a remote part of Eastern Greenland with no roads, and “announced to the villagers there that this company, this Texas company, had permission … to start bringing their equipment, their oil drilling equipment to this untouched Arctic area of Greenland.”
Sadly for them, said Maddow, “the company later apologized and said, actually, they didn’t have permits to do that. They put out a statement sort of correcting the record, saying, quote, our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion.”
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