https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5677459-tillis-slams-white-house-adviser-steven-millers-comments-on-greenland-amateurish/
Republican Senator Thom Tillis excoriates Steven Miller’s comments as amateurish
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Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.) on Wednesday slammed senior White House adviser Stephen Miller’s comment that Greenland rightfully belongs to the U.S. and that no one is going to stop the Trump administration from seizing it.
Tillis called Miller’s remarks “amateurish” and suggested that White House advisers pushing a takeover of Greenland should lose their jobs.
The comment stirred speculation on Capitol Hill over whether President Trump might threaten military action to pressure Denmark, a NATO ally, into selling Greenland to the United States.
Tillis, the co-chair of the Senate NATO Observer Group, stood on the floor to blast what he called “amateurish behavior with respect to the treatment of our NATO allies.”
He said he was referring to an “interview that I saw with one of the president’s senior policy advisers, Stephen Miller, on CNN a couple of nights ago.”
“Mr. Miller said that (Greenland) should be part of the U.S. That is absurd,” Tillis declared on the Senate floor.
“I think it was an amateurish comment and something that a deputy chief of staff and senior policy adviser should not have taken the position on,” Tillis added, referring to Trump’s top policy aide. “He doesn’t speak for the U.S. government.
“He should talk to people like me who have an election certificate and a vote in the U.S. Senate,” he added. “I can’t imagine why he’d make the comments that he did the other night in a television interview.”
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Tillis slams White House adviser Stephen Miller’s comments on Greenland: ‘Amateurish’
by Sylvan Lane – 01/07/26 3:55 PM ET
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Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.) on Wednesday slammed senior White House adviser Stephen Miller’s comment that Greenland rightfully belongs to the U.S. and that no one is going to stop the Trump administration from seizing it.
Tillis called Miller’s remarks “amateurish” and suggested that White House advisers pushing a takeover of Greenland should lose their jobs.
The comment stirred speculation on Capitol Hill over whether President Trump might threaten military action to pressure Denmark, a NATO ally, into selling Greenland to the United States.
Tillis, the co-chair of the Senate NATO Observer Group, stood on the floor to blast what he called “amateurish behavior with respect to the treatment of our NATO allies.”
He said he was referring to an “interview that I saw with one of the president’s senior policy advisers, Stephen Miller, on CNN a couple of nights ago.”
“Mr. Miller said that should be part of the U.S. That is absurd,” Tillis declared on the Senate floor.
“I think it was an amateurish comment and something that a deputy chief of staff and senior policy adviser should not have taken the position on,” Tillis added, referring to Trump’s top policy aide. “He doesn’t speak for the U.S. government.
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“He should talk to people like me who have an election certificate and a vote in the U.S. Senate,” he added. “I can’t imagine why he’d make the comments that he did the other night in a television interview.”
Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that “nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared.
Tillis said the comments, which have driven a wedge between the U.S. and a NATO ally, undermined an important national security relationship.
He noted that Denmark was one of NATO’s “most disproportionately high contributors” to the allied war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
He pointed out that Denmark deployed 18,000 of its soldiers to Afghanistan and 43 of them died fighting alongside American soldiers “defending our freedom and holding the Taliban and al Qaeda responsible for the events of Sept. 11.”
He said Trump should fire advisers who are pushing for a U.S. takeover of Greenland, which he called a “distraction” from the successful mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“I want good advice for this president, because I want this president to have a good legacy. This nonsense is a distraction from the good work he’s doing and the amateurs who said it was a good idea should lose their jobs,” he said.
Tillis called the chatter about challenging Denmark’s control of Greenland as “stupid.”
“You know what makes me cranky? Stupid. What makes me cranky is when people don’t do their homework. What makes me cranky is when we tarnish the extraordinary execution of a mission I fully support in Venezuela by turning around and making insane comments about how it is our right to have territory owned by the Kingdom of Denmark,” he said.