Vice President JD Vance and other top U.S. officials arrived at a military base in Greenland on Friday52bet, as President Trump declared in Washington that the United States had an urgent need to acquire the island.

“We have to have Greenland,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office, reiterating his desire to get a territory that has been controlled by Denmark since 1721. “It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.”

Mr. Vance is being joined on the one-day trip by Usha Vance, the second lady; Chris Wright, the energy secretary; Michael Waltz, the embattled national security adviser; and Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, according to the White House.

The Vances were having lunch with members of the military stationed at the base before receiving briefings. The temperature when they landed was minus 3 degrees Fahrenheit, prompting Mr. Vance to joke that he didn’t realize it would be so cold. “Nobody told me,” he said to laughs, according to a pool report.

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Mr. Trump has said the United States has a security imperative to acquire the world’s largest island. A landmass larger than Mexico,betef Greenland is home to glaciers, icy mountains, prized earth minerals and some 56,000 people, roughly enough to fill Dodger Stadium.

The president has vowed to acquire the island “one way or the other,” declining to rule out using military force. He said Friday that global security relied on American ownership of the island, expressing concern about Chinese and Russian warships.

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In 2000, Mr. Silberman, who was then a contributing editor at Wired magazine, knew little about autism beyond Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Raymond Babbitt, a man with the condition, in the 1988 film “Rain Man.”

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