One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”
The businessman, Bolton learned, was Ronald Lauder. Heir to a makeup fortune – the global cosmetics brand Estée Lauder – he had known Trump, a fellow wealthy New Yorker, for more than 60 years.
The proposal seems to have stirred Trump’s imperialist ambitions: eight years on, he is mulling not just buying Greenland but perhaps taking it by force.
Like many of those around the president, Lauder’s policy suggestions appear to intersect with his business interests. As Trump has ratcheted up his threats to seize Greenland, Lauder has acquired commercial holdings there. Lauder is also part of the consortium whose desire to access Ukrainian minerals appears to have spurred Trump to demand a share of the war-torn country’s resources.
Lauder has said he met Trump in the 1960s when they went to the same prestigious business school. After working for the family cosmetics business, Lauder served under Ronald Reagan at the Pentagon, then as ambassador to Austria, before running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1989.
A leaked November 2023 letter sent by the head of TechMet, a mining company, to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, named Lauder as part of a consortium hoping to exploit a lithium deposit in the war-torn country.
Lauder said at the time that he had not discussed Ukrainian minerals with Trump himself but had “raised the issue with stakeholders in the US and Ukraine for many years up to the present day”. Leading Republicans joined a campaign for the US to gain a hold on Ukraine’s prodigious resources. Trump became its loudest proponent.
Weeks after Lauder’s Maga Inc donations, Washington and Kyiv signed a deal to jointly exploit Ukraine’s minerals. It went some way to preserving Trump’s support for Ukraine following his televised Oval Office tirade against Zelenskyy for what he deemed insufficient gratitude for US backing.
The lithium deposit was the first to be tendered under the minerals deal. This month, the Lauder consortium reportedly won it. TechMet, the company leading the consortium, declined to comment, as did Lauder. His Greenland business partners and the White House did not respond when contacted by the Guardian.
For such a powerful office, he sure likes to be led around an awful lot...