Trump's Decolonial Backlash: Greenlandic Sovereignty and Belonging in Danish Media

Postcolonial media representation matters profoundly for how citizens understand sovereignty and belonging of autonomous territories, yet we know remarkably little about whether and how external triggering events can reshape these deeply entrenched discursive patterns. Media coverage doesn't merely reflect postcolonial relationships; it actively constitutes them, shaping everything from attitudes toward decolonization to the actual self-determination of the autonomous territories. Trump's stated intentions for Greenland have changed how Danish media discusses the Arctic nation in terms of status, sovereignty, and belonging. Trump's comments are often discussed as changing the landscape of political communication, yet rarely has Trump impacted something so entrenched and complicated as the postcolonial relations of Denmark and Greenland in the commonwealth. Using Denmark as a least likely case scenario, we investigate how Trump's ambitions to annex Greenland have inadvertently increased the importance of Greenland in Danish media and made Greenland's belonging visible. We scraped 2,469 headlines from the 7 largest newspapers in Denmark from 2019 to 2026 that mention Greenland, this time frame captures the three seperate instances where Trump stated his intentions to 'acquire' Greenland, 2020, 2024, and 2025. Using interrupted time series models and content analysis, we analyse the rate of publication and trends in the framing of Greenland's sovereignty and belonging. We find evidence consistent with a Trump backlash effect for 2024, but not for 2020: coverage volume in 2024 increased sharply following the event and remained elevated for 6 weeks before decaying to baseline. Manual coding of all headlines reveals a concurrent compositional shift, with sovereignty and belonging framing increasing significantly at the expense of resource framing. Agency coding reveals that Greenland appeared more frequently as grammatical subject in post-event coverage, suggesting increased perception of agency. The so-called 'Donroe doctrine' has indirectly jump-started a discursive shift in an otherwise frozen conversation of Greenlandic sovereignty, allowing Greenland to transition from a perceived expense, object of concern, to an active subject. The persistence of agency gains despite volume decay suggests that Trump's influence has led to unprecedented qualitative and quantitative shifts in the media visibility of Danish-Greenlandic postcolonial relations, restructuring coverage in ways not anticipated by prior literature.