Iceland’s government summoned the U.S. ambassador in Reykjavik on Monday, September 7, 2026, after President Donald Trump published an image on Truth Social showing the island and a string of neighboring countries under the American flag.
In the picture, the U.S. flag covers Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean as well as the United States itself, with a single label — “United States of America” — spanning the entire landmass. The president shared it on his social media platform without saying what it was supposed to mean, and no explanation has surfaced since.
A Summons in Reykjavik
Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir summoned Billy Long, Washington’s envoy to Reykjavik, who formally assumed the role only in August. What Long heard was brief.
“The position was clearly expressed that the post was completely inappropriate,” Iceland’s foreign ministry told RUV.
Neither government has added much beyond that one line.
Whether the president posted the image himself is not known. Natalie Harp, 35, an executive assistant at the White House on a $150,000 salary, has been credited with helping to run his social media output, a role that has included approving and resharing artificial intelligence-generated images and videos from the account.
Coverage of the post elsewhere has used far blunter terms than the diplomatic exchange itself did. One account labeled the image a “doctored map,” called the post “deranged” and cast the affair as a serious diplomatic incident — characterizations of the 80-year-old president and his motives that amount to that outlet’s judgment rather than confirmed fact.
Greenland Money and Denmark’s Message
The picture surfaced in a part of the world already on edge over Trump’s insistence in recent years that the United States must take possession of Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory. Those declarations — together with his refusal to rule out taking the island by force — have put a strain on ties between Washington and Copenhagen, both NATO founding members, and have annoyed other European capitals as well.
Only hours before the president posted, the European Commission had unveiled a €200 million investment in Greenland, roughly $232.5 million, as its president, Ursula von der Leyen, visited the territory.
Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, took up the question of Greenland’s future head-on in Nuuk in remarks to the Danish news agency Ritzau. “The Greenlandic government and the Greenlandic people have said again and again that they do not want to be American,” she said, adding that she hoped nobody in the United States or anywhere else in the world was in any doubt about it.
Iceland’s Referendum and the U.S. Question
In Iceland, home to a little more than 400,000 people, the post came only weeks after the electorate had considered where the country belongs. Voters turned down a restart of European Union membership talks in an August referendum held partly against the backdrop of Trump’s ambitions in Greenland.
Supporters of resuming the negotiations had made the case that uncertainty about how far Washington could be counted on was itself reason to take a closer look. Analysts, however, attributed the result chiefly to anxieties over the domestic economy rather than to any debate about transatlantic security.
This is not the first time Iceland has come up in Trump’s comments, occasionally as a substitute for Greenland. Speaking in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he went after NATO for opposing an American takeover of Greenland but kept naming Iceland instead, telling the audience at one point that the allies would not be there for the United States “on Iceland.” In the same appearance he faulted Iceland for a stock market slide and said the country had already cost the United States a great deal of money. A former White House press secretary defended the remarks by explaining that the president had been referring to Greenland as a piece of ice.
The day before, he had confused the two countries as well, at a White House news conference where he was defending tariff threats designed to push Denmark into selling Greenland. “Iceland, without tariffs, they wouldn’t even be talking to us about it,” Trump said.
The president’s approach to other neighbors on the map has drawn similar objections. He has suggested Canada could become the 51st U.S. state, and he renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
Long, barely a month into his posting in Reykjavik, is left in the middle of the dispute. Iceland’s objection, as relayed to RUV, ran to a single sentence. What the image was meant to represent, and who put it on Trump’s account, remain unclear.