"My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China, and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster." That is a real quote, on the record, from Tom Dans — Trump's appointed chair of the United States Arctic Research Commission — to New Yorker journalist Ben Taub over lunch in Washington. He offered it as a reason to acquire Greenland.
Here is the part that collapses the whole pitch: Red Lobster already brought back Endless Shrimp. It returned in April 2026, priced at $24.99, up from the $20 deal that helped push the chain into its 2024 bankruptcy. The company's CEO had previously said he'd never revive it "because I know how to do math." They did it anyway, without acquiring any Danish territory.
So the shrimp problem was solved months before a federal official cited it as foreign policy justification. That distinction matters, because the line went viral as proof of how the plan was being sold, and one OSINT account's post of the quote drew more than 8,500 likes. [1]
The plan the quote was attached to
Taub's investigation, headlined "Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland," describes how Dans and a small group of officials turned Trump's fixation into an operational proposal. One element: deploying Chinook helicopters from the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to Greenland under the cover of transporting dogs for a national dogsledding race. "Nobody was saying no," Dans told Taub. The operation was never carried out.
That regiment is not hypothetical muscle. The same aircraft and unit flew Delta Force into Caracas at 1 a.m. on January 3, 2026, in the raid that captured Venezuela's president.
The administration's stated case rests on rare earth minerals and Arctic military positioning. Taub's reporting undercuts the minerals argument: the US already holds more domestic rare earth deposits than it could use, and the bottleneck is permitting, not supply. Blocking China from Greenlandic concessions doesn't require owning Greenland either. It requires outbidding China for them.
The Greenland push has drawn open resistance abroad, including from French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited the island and publicly opposed bringing it "under U.S. control." [2] Online, the annexation talk has fed sweeping theories about resource grabs and debt. [3]
Red Lobster has not commented on the acquisition plans. The shrimp, for now, remains endless and the island remains Danish.
Sources
Primary source: US Official Pitches Greenland Annexation as a Way to Save Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp
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