Can Congress stop Trump from trying to take Greenland?

Since the United States announced it would “run” Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has openly floated similar interventions elsewhere in Latin America.

But the country Donald Trump has fixated on most isn’t an adversary — it’s an ally. Greenland, a NATO member and longtime partner of the United States has repeatedly found itself in the president’s crosshairs.

These threats, delivered largely through unilateral executive action, have once again raised questions about Congress’s role as a check on presidential power. And with Trump in his final term, even some Republicans are showing small but notable signs of concern. 

Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon spoke with Annie Grayer, a senior reporter at CNN, about how Capitol Hill is responding — and where those fractures inside the GOP may be heading.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do we expect more Republicans breaking more with Trump to change now that it’s 2026 and not 2025?

Well, certainly Republicans know it’s an election year. The spotlight is on them, and I think we’re starting to see some openings for cracks. But I put so many caveats there because whenever we think there could be an opening for a real Republican split, as we saw play out on the Hill with the war powers vote, Trump and his team are really good at keeping Republicans in line through a public and private pressure campaign. 

But his ability to do that is going to get increasingly more difficult as Republicans start campaigning and have to figure out how to run on what Republicans in Congress have done so far. There are a lot of moderates who are looking at the calendar, looking at what’s coming in 2026 and know that they have to carve out their own lane here.

Trump’s foreign interventionism definitely seems like the latest flash point in the GOP relationship with him. We did see five Republicans break with the White House and support that war powers resolution. What changed?

A lot of Republicans were publicly saying, I fully support how this operation went down and that this does not need an intervention from Congress. Clearly behind the scenes there were five Republican senators who felt very strongly this actually does require an act of Congress and congressional intervention. What we saw play out is Trump’s true pressure campaign and what it means to be a Republican in Donald Trump’s party. 

Immediately after the vote, Trump took to Truth Social and name-checked all five of those Republicans and said they should not be elected to Congress again. These are members of his own party. Now, some of these Republican senators are in opposition to Trump, like Sens. Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins, but Todd Young and Josh Hawley — that really took the president and his team by surprise. So those were the two that they focused on, thinking that they were going to be the ones they could peel off. 

But what we saw here was the role that Secretary Rubio played, who’s a former senator, who has personal relationships with all of these individuals and was able to sit with these senators, give them more information and give them assurances on their red line. Both Todd Young and Josh Hawley said that their red line was they did not want boots on the ground in Venezuela. 

So Republicans did get something out of it. But you can ask yourself what really changed, and it really is the full-court press that these Republicans received from Trump and his team.

What have Republican members in Congress been saying about the military use of force in Greenland?

So Greenland, we are seeing an even bigger break potentially than what we saw with Venezuela and from a cast of characters that aren’t the usual critics of Trump.

Republican senators specifically are sort of like, what are we doing here with Greenland? Certainly people are not on board with  military force: the speaker of the House, the leader of the Republican Senate, have said military action in Greenland would not be a good idea. 

And then even when it comes to the purchase of Greenland, you have the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who came out of a meeting with Danish officials and said, we should not be talking about the purchase of Greenland. That’s not what these officials want. 

And there’s a lot of Republicans, even more so privately who I’m talking to who are kind of hoping that Trump isn’t serious about this. And so I think Republicans are trying to not get ahead of where the president is here. They don’t want to draw a firm line until they see exactly what Trump is going to do. But there is this sort of trepidation in this sort of, I don’t know, maybe even quiet finger crossing that Trump is going to drop this, he’s going to move on, and that what he’s saying about Greenland isn’t actually going to come to fruition.

Is there any kind of willingness for Congress to reign in that power right now, if we think even beyond the war powers resolution? How much is there discussion of Congress’s own role? How much are members talking about that?

It’s a huge topic of conversation.I think that’s why the war powers resolution votes were such a big deal because this question is front and center for both Democrats and Republicans. This is no longer a partisan question, but this is about protecting the institution of Congress, the legislative branch, and when it comes to the foreign intervention. 

More specifically, when I’ve been asking this question to Republicans, they are pointing to a number of examples in recent history that show that the degradation of Congress, specifically when it comes to war powers, has been happening for a long time. If you go back to Obama and the bombing of Libya and going into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden, those were things that happened without congressional approval.  

And so yes, what’s happening right now is putting a real spotlight on the issue. But I think for people to really understand this, we have to go way back. This is something that Congress has sort of been ceding power bit by bit, and it finds us in this potential crisis that we’re in now. 

And I think the real question that I continue to ask in my reporting, and I still don’t find an answer to, is what is going to be the red line that gets people to actually say, okay, enough is enough.