A satirical counteroffer to President Donald Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland has popped in the form of a petition that suggests that Denmark should buy California.
More than 200,000 people have signed up for the plan, which says the Scandinavian country needs “more sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.”
“Måke Califørnia Great Ægain,” reads the top of the petition website, replacing some English letters with Danish ones.
Among the listed “supporters” of the petition are the ancient Scandinavian king Sven the Viking, Karen from accounting and Lars Ulrich, the Danish drummer and founding member of the band Metallica.
“Imagine swapping your rain boots for flip-flops,” the petition says, perhaps cognizant of the fact that during the dark winter months Denmark gets just an hour of sunlight a day. By contrast, California gets 300 days of sunshine a year.
As part of the buyout plan, the petition — launched on the website denmarkification.com — has set a crowdfunding goal of $1 trillion, “give or take a few billion,” and a target of 500,000 signatures.
Denmark’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
And at the bottom of the petition’s website, which does not mention Greenland, is a message reading, “Disclaimer: This campaign is 100% real… in our dreams.”
The United States has considered buying Greenland at least twice, in 1867 and again in 1946, when President Harry S. Truman proposed purchasing it for $100 million.
Trump has suggested several times that the United States should buy Greenland, the largest island in the world, which sits between the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean and is technically part of North America. It has been under Denmark’s control since the 14th century, but it became a self-governing territory in 1979.
Denmark has repeatedly rejected his overtures, insisting that Greenland is not for sale.
Last week, the Danish Parliament passed a bill to prevent political parties in the country from receiving foreign or anonymous contributions.
The bill “must be seen in light of the geopolitical interests in Greenland and the current situation where representatives of an allied great power have expressed interest in taking over and controlling Greenland,” the document said.
While there has been a popular and long-standing movement calling for independence from Denmark in Greenland, most of the island’s 56,000 inhabitants — the majority from Inuit tribes — appear to agree that it is not for sale.
“Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish; we do not want to be American,” the territory’s prime minister, Múte B. Egede, said last month.
Xåvier Dutoit, “chief pastry officer” of the campaign, said the idea for the petition came to him one night in the Philippines, where he was having a beer with some friends.
“While on vacation, I was at a bar with some friends, and overheard a rather loud American tourist discussing Donald Trump’s bid to buy Greenland from Denmark,” he wrote in an email. “That American didn’t seem to grasp how unhinged and absurd it was for any country’s President — especially in a stable democracy that the USA claims to be — to offer or threaten to take over another sovereign country’s territory.”
The following morning, he wrote, he pulled together a “funny campaign website” that “was fully intended to entertain my friends for a few days.” Instead, it went viral.
The campaign began to have explosive growth Tuesday, Dutoit said, and it’s now getting up to 1,000 new signatures an hour.
“We’ve been especially touched by lots of warm and enthusiastic support from Californians — and laughed when folks from other parts of the US raised their hand asking to have their state purchased by Denmark!” he wrote. “It seems that a lot of people needed this little bit of fun and levity, at a time when much of the public discourse is increasingly tense and worrying.”
Whether Californians will be open to the petition’s proposition that Denmark should own it remains to be seen, although it does promise to send executives from the Danish toymaker Lego to secure the state, calling them the country’s “bestest negotiatiors.”
