What the Crisis over Greenland Reveals about the Real-Life Perils of “Citizens United”

The Illegitimate Ruling of the Roberts Court Continues to Vandalize American Democracy 16 Years Later

Today marks the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, issued in 2010 by a partisan group of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That ruling has profoundly degraded the American political system in the 16 years since, allowing the ultra wealthy to throw their weight behind politicians and policies that benefit them, often at the expense of the rest of us. In that edict, the nation’s highest court–helmed by Chief Justice John Roberts–grafted onto our First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech the radical notion that money is speech, and that Congress has no power to restrict such “speech” (that is, spending) by outside groups seeking to influence elections.

The Roberts Court claimed that such spending would be of little value if it could not be controlled by the candidate, even though it is self-evidently valuable to have others get their hands dirty on attack ads while candidates maintain a plausible distance. The ruling is also illegitimate because Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself even though his billionaire benefactor–big-time Republican donor and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow–had secretly bankrolled Thomas’s wife Ginni with a $500K donation to help her launch a Tea Party group poised to exploit the 5-4 ruling where her husband was about to cast the decisive fifth vote.

As of 2023, Crow had spent at least $13.8 million influencing federal elections since Citizens United.

Building on that farce, subsequent judicial decisions have struck down limits on contributions to “independent expenditure committees,” allowing billionaires to spend unlimited amounts to affect election outcomes, provided their names are disclosed. Other rulings allowed nonprofit groups, called (c)(4)s, to donate to Super PACs while disclosing only the group’s name. The (c)(4)s routinely keep their big donors secret.

It is a complex chess game the Roberts Court has been playing with American democracy, one that has decimated anti-corruption reforms designed to limit the power of the super rich in the representative democracy America presents itself to be.

Let’s consider one of the most dramatically disruptive and recent consequences of Citizens United and its progeny: Donald Trump’s assault on Greenland’s independence.

Trump’s menacing words and actions are shattering alliances that have helped keep Americans safe for decades. The unnerving situation we and the world find ourselves in is not just the consequence of Trump’s egomaniacal and seemingly demented threats. It is also a world-shaking effect of America’s broken “campaign finance” and anti-corruption system, which is directly due to the partisan interference of the Roberts Court in election law–and in creating anti-constitutional criminal immunity for Trump.

How did we get to the brink of a hot war with Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? The answer is money in U.S. politics, money that is now proving to have disastrous effects not only here at home, but on a global scale.

It is also a combination of greed and Trump’s obsession with dominating people and places. As he once told Billy Bush, there was a pretty woman he wanted “to f*ck” so, though she was married, he “moved on her like a b*tch” and “failed.” But this time, it is not a woman–or unwilling women, like E. Jean Carroll–but an unwilling island bound to Denmark and the European Union, some of America’s closest allies.

According to The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, the origin of Trump’s plan to take over Greenland was spawned by Ron Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetic fortune, who backed Trump’s election. Here’s the story in that book:

‘A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,’ Trump told [National Security Advisor John] Bolton, ‘What do you think?’ Lauder then came to see Bolton, revealing that he had been discussing Greenland with the president and had offered himself up as ‘the back channel to the Danish government to negotiate Greenland,’ as Bolton would later recount.

When the Wall Street Journal broke the news of Trump’s obsession with Greenland in 2019, its ministry responded succinctly that the island was “open for business, not for sale.”

Since Trump returned to the White House in 2025, his fixation has only intensified. Lauder has been stoking the fire from the jump and wrote an op-ed titled “I’m a Greenland expert — these 3 paths can make it America’s next frontier” just days after Trump’s second inauguration. In it, he stated he had “worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.” Oh, really? He then touted the rare earth minerals that lie beneath the island’s ice and rock. While Lauder did not propose a military invasion in that op-ed, his talking points about Greenland’s strategic value have been echoed by Trump sycophants like Ted Cruz, in defense of Trump’s goal of just “taking” the big island and his desire for us to “own” it.

Would it surprise you to know that Lauder is invested in pursuing rare earth minerals, including mining operations in Greenland? Maybe not, at this point. But it’s true. And Trump has seemingly been working hard for his benefactors, which include other billionaires, too. From the outset of his second term, Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainian president to trade access to rare earth minerals for U.S. aid. Volodymyr Zelenskyy ultimately gave into that pressure last year.

Who stands to gain from access to those minerals? According to the New York Times, a “consortium including TechMet, an energy investment firm partly owned by the U.S. government, and Ronald S. Lauder, a wealthy friend of Mr. Trump, has engaged with Kyiv to bid on a Ukrainian lithium field.” Earlier this month, Techmet secured a deal with Ukraine. Those fields are valued in the trillions of dollars, and Greenland’s could be, too.

That’s a pretty good potential return on investment. Lauder backed Trump during his 2016 campaign and, after Trump won, the two men were photographed shaking hands at Mar-a-Lago a month later. Trump then reportedly deployed him on secret “diplomatic challenges” in his first term, while Lauder gave $100,000, twice, to the “Trump Victory” PAC.

Though their relationship briefly cooled when Trump was out of power and dined with antisemite Nick Fuentes, their relationship has warmed again with Trump’s re-ascendance. Not only did Lauder continue his push for Trump to get control of Greenland last February, he also gave $5 million to MAGA Inc. last March. They’ve known each other since college, but Citizens United and its progeny have helped amplify Trump’s expectations of tribute for access or favors and his self-aggrandizement as the world’s best dealmaker. As with Venezuela, Trump views Greenland as a way to seem powerful by rewarding those who back him with the spoils he seizes–befitting the only convicted criminal to be elected president in U.S. history. Trump is a walking, talking, grifting result of the influence machinery the Roberts Court let loose.

Lauder has done nothing wrong under the rules the Roberts Court has remade to allow the super-rich to set the policy agenda of elected officials. Those rules permit donors to max out on direct donations and then pour millions more into Super PACs and other groups. Notably, Lauder has spent millions over several years on an attack ad group, initially aligned with the Tea Party, called “National Horizon.” It was created with help from C. Boyden Gray, who worked with Leonard Leo to install all six judges in the Roberts Court majority. Lauder has also been a major funder of an attack-ad group called “Safe Together New York,” which recently settled an investigation alleging unlawful coordination with Republican Lee Zeldin, without conceding any wrongdoing.

Though Lauder is not even the biggest spender among the billionaires currying favor with Trump, his history of spending in politics helps illustrate the impact of Citizens United. In the twenty years before that decision, he gave a total of $681,676 to federal candidates and committees. Since 2010, Lauder has spent over $32 million on candidates and PACs–not including any secret contributions to (c)(4) groups, which remain unknown. Although Lauder was super rich before 2010 and a regular funder of Republicans, only 2% of his political spending happened before the Citizens United ruling when such soft money and dark money spending was more restricted. Overall, 98% of his money in politics came after the Roberts Court blew the dam wide open.

Those millions–like the $5 million he gave to MAGA Inc. last year–are politically potent, but a pittance to him personally. With an estimated net worth of nearly $5 billion from his family fortune and various investments, that $32 million in political spending constitutes just 0.64% of his wealth. That’s like an American household with a median net worth of $192,900 spending $1,234–or roughly $6 a month–on politics since Citizens United. Such comparatively miniscule spending by ordinary voters would never bring America to the brink of war to seize a foreign territory. In a healthy democracy, no one–no matter how good they say their intentions are–should be able to spend so much and wield such outsized influence on our nation’s actions.

Billionaire money to influence elections and divert public policy doesn’t just speak, it yells.

Citizens United has unmoored America’s democracy from its founding aspiration of governance by We the People (the demos), not by kings or their patrons. If our democratic republic is going to survive, we will have to reform the Roberts Court and restore common-sense brakes on the distorting power of billionaires.

We can fix this. We must. The deadly crisis of Trump pillaging Greenland is just the tip of the iceberg if we don’t.

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What I’m Reading:

• The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by investigative journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

  • I use Kindle to search books, like this one, for excerpts on key happenings, but now I am going to read the book from cover to cover.

• My book–I just finished the recording of the introduction and the publisher is preparing the full book for its audio release! I am over the moon about it!

• And, the Declaration of Independence, which is especially illuminating now as we bear witness to what Trump and his paramilitary force are doing to Minneapolis.

  • Many sentences jump out, including: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

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