One of the officials at the center of Donald Trump’s push to take over Greenland explained his reasoning, and it somehow comes back to Red Lobster. In a new investigation, The New Yorker’s Ben Taub reported that Tom Dans, the man Trump appointed in December 2025 to chair the United States Arctic Research Commission, laid out his vision over lunch in Washington. “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,” Dans said, “and you could bring back all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster.” That was the part he wanted on the record.
To be clear about what was actually said, Dans did not stand up and formally propose an invasion just to refill a shrimp platter. The Red Lobster line was his pitch for why controlling Greenland’s seafood would pay off, offered inside a much larger and very real effort to bring the island under American control. But the internet did what the internet does and boiled it down to its most ridiculous form, and you cannot fully blame people for that, because a top official really did tie a potential land grab in the Arctic to a chain restaurant promotion.
The bigger story is the one the shrimp quote is attached to. Taub’s piece, titled “Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland,” details how Trump’s fixation on the island turned into actual policy. Trump has wanted Greenland since 2025, refused to rule out using military force to get it, and threatened a 25 percent import tax on several European nations unless Denmark handed the territory over. Greenland is a self governing territory of Denmark with about 56,000 people, and acquiring it by force would violate Danish sovereignty, breach international law, and put the future of the entire NATO alliance in question. Dans, described as Trump’s man in Greenland, was no minor character in that plan. He was one of the people tasked with making the fantasy operational, which is what makes the Red Lobster framing land so hard.
That is the comedy and the alarm sitting in the same sentence. A man helping draft a plan that experts said could shatter NATO reached for all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster as a selling point. The New Yorker reported that the effort went well beyond talk, with officials sketching out how American aircraft could move into Greenland under cover stories, and Dans telling Taub that inside the administration “nobody was saying no.” The operation was never carried out, but the fact that the seafood pitch came from someone that deep in the planning is exactly why the quote went everywhere.
Here is the part that turns the whole thing into a punchline. The United States did not need to annex anything to get the shrimp back. Red Lobster brought back its Endless Shrimp promotion on April 20, 2026, at select locations, announcing the return in a press release that pointed to thousands of social media mentions begging for it. No troops, no tariffs, no breach of international law, no threats to a NATO ally. Just a menu decision out of the company’s Orlando headquarters. The new version runs $24.99 per person, up from the roughly $20 price that helped sink the chain the first time around.
That history matters, because Red Lobster knows exactly how dangerous this deal is to its own bottom line. The endless shrimp offer was so popular when it became a permanent staple that it cost the company around $11 million in losses in a single quarter, which helped push it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024, alongside problems with private equity ownership and its shrimp supply chain. Red Lobster’s CEO, Damola Adamolekun, had flatly said in late 2024 that the promotion would never come back “because I know how to do math.” He reversed himself in April 2026 and brought it back anyway, citing customer demand, which means the only force that revived all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster was American appetite, not American foreign policy.
So the timeline is almost too perfect. A Trump appointee floated seizing Greenland’s seafood to resurrect a deal that the restaurant chose to resurrect on its own, weeks later, with a price hike and a press release. The Red Lobster comment was already obsolete the moment it was reported. Strip away the maps and the Arctic strategy and the talk of cutting out China, and what is left is a senior official who looked at one of the most destabilizing foreign policy ideas in recent memory and saw, somewhere in it, a plate of shrimp that you could already order for $24.99 without invading anyone.
