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Fox News host Jesse Watters grumbled on Wednesday over Europe pushing back against Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, wondering aloud why the nations’ leaders won’t “give daddy what he wants.”
Besides referencing NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s infamous description of the president during a fawning press conference last summer, Watters also appeared to be echoing MAGA’s long-running obsession with calling Trump “daddy” – something the Fox News star himself has helped contribute to.
In recent weeks, despite the American public overwhelmingly disapproving of the idea, Trump has revived his efforts to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
This latest push, which follows the president’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, has included Trump leaving open the option of seizing the large island with military force. The prospect of one NATO member invading the territory of another could result in the implosion of the security alliance.
“It really is a deal breaker in the trans-Atlantic relationship,” NATO analyst Steve Rynning told the New York Times.
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With troops from several European countries arriving in Greenland amid the president’s escalating threats while Trump attempts to coerce NATO into allowing him to take control of the Danish territory, Watters scolded America’s allies for not yielding to the president’s demands.
“NATO called Trump ‘daddy’. Why won’t they give daddy what he wants?” Watters pondered during Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox News’ The Five.
Jessica Tarlov, the panel show’s lone liberal co-host, reacted by telling Watters that “sometimes daddy needs to be told no,” prompting the MAGA opinion host to retort: “By who?!”
“By anyone who has the guts to do it, and it seems like the Danish foreign minister, the Danish prime minister, the head of Greenland, that they’ve got the stuff and they’re saying NATO will disband if this happens. It will be an attack on a NATO country,” Tarlov replied.
“Whose side are you on?” Watters balked, leading Tarlov to insist she was “on the side of America and also Greenland” before criticizing the Trump administration for “the lack of respect” it was showing to a sovereign nation and longtime ally.
“I get it that you like the way that Trump does diplomacy maybe more than I do. You like the way that he talks. You understand his weaves or his bobs or whatever. But you have a pan-European fleet coming to back up Greenland,” she continued, prompting Watters to jump in to mock her.
“A European fleet! That’s the funniest thing you’ve said all day,” he guffawed. “What do they have, one aircraft carrier?”
Watters is far from the only MAGA figure who has been cheering on Trump’s Greenland expansion fixation. With right-wing lawmakers introducing Congressional bills proposing to make Greenland the 51st state and Trump officials saying no one would stop the US from seizing Greenland by force, pro-Trump media has jumped on the bandwagon.
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““We should have Greenland,” conservative podcaster Tim Pool declared earlier this month, while one of his show’s panelists suggested making the territory into “Liberia 2.0” and a “Black ethnostate” with Flava Flav as prime minister.
“If you fly a flag in the Western Hemisphere, that flag might soon be the stars and stripes,” Fox News host Will Cain exclaimed last week, while other pundits at the conservative cable giant urged Americans to “cheer” on Trump for looking to take over other nations.
This also isn’t the first time that Watters has advocated for America seizing Greenland, as he declared last week that the US needs oil from the island territory “more than they do” and that “Denmark better wise up.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to calling Trump “daddy,” the moniker has been a favorite of the MAGA crowd since October 2024 following an off-the-rails speech by Tucker Carlson at a Turning Points USA event.
“Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s p***ed. Dad is p***ed,” the fired Fox News host ranted at the time. “And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.’ And it has to be this way.”
Watters himself has long leaned in on the “daddy” nickname for Trump and has even gone so far as to praise the president for his “dad strength.” Team Trump has even tried to cash in on the phenomenon, hawking “DADDY” t-shirts emblazoned with the president’s mugshot following Rutte’s use of the term.
