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Donald Trump spoke to a journalist in the White House in 2021 about his desire to acquire Greenland: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’”
He might not have mentioned the 16th-century Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, but the US president was clearly channelling the distorted impression that Mercator’s eponymous — and now ubiquitous — map projection gives of the Arctic Danish island.
A map of the world using Mercator’s projection shows Greenland as an enormous landmass, roughly equivalent in size to Africa. In reality, 14 Greenlands could fit inside the continent — at 2.2mn sq km, the Danish island is smaller than Algeria, let alone Africa.
Greenland is by no means small — it is larger than Alaska, which at about 1.5mn sq km is the largest US state. But its position in the northern latitudes means that Greenland’s size and shape is prone to enormous variations in how it is portrayed on global maps.
That is because all map projections are imperfect, as they wrestle with the challenge of representing the curvature of the globe on a flat, two-dimensional surface such as a paper map. There is always a trade-off to be made: cartographers can preserve size or shape but not both simultaneously everywhere.
An enormous variety of map projections therefore cater for specific needs: “conformal” projections, such as Mercator, preserve local shape and angles but greatly distort area, especially towards the edges of a map. “Equal-area” projections, by contrast, preserve area but distort shapes.
So in many ways, criticism of Mercator’s map is unfair. His landmark map of 1569 was produced as an aid for navigators, with a straight line representing a constant compass bearing. And many of the areas of the globe his map is accused of distorting had not actually been discovered in the 16th century.
Today, the modified Mercator projection used by Google Maps and other mapping services still makes navigation intuitive, especially at street level — but it loses credibility when mapping large landmasses near the poles.
University College London professor James Cheshire, author of the Library of Lost Maps, argues that people are so conditioned by the now dominant projection that the idea that maps can use a projection other than a Mercator has been lost on the public at large. “Maps were much more editorialised in the 1940s and 1950s — designed for specific purposes with projections chosen to support a specific presentation,” he said.
Trump’s conscious or unconscious use of manipulated maps does not, however, stop at the use of different projections.
This week the US president posted a photo on Truth Social, in which he appears to be presenting a map of Greenland as part of the US to a group of European leaders assembled at the White House.
However, the image is AI generated. The original photo was taken in August 2025. The attendees were there — but the map being shown was the frontline of the war in Ukraine.
And after his first election win in 2016, Trump also famously welcomed into the White House a county-level results map. Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, the map shows America predominantly Republican red — thanks to the domination of large but sparsely populated areas — with just small pockets of Democrat blue.
Cartographers reacted with as much disdain then as they do today to Trump’s distorted representations.
“Maps are facts, but they can also be arguments — and Trump recognises that,” said Cheshire. He suggested that Trump’s love of a real estate deal, where schematic plans become reality, may be behind his love of maps, “whether he’s consciously doing this or not”.
Most of the FT’s recent maps of Greenland have used an “Arctic polar stereographic” projection because it works well for shape preservation and there is minimal distortion near the poles, while size and location relative to other landmasses is also acceptable.