Doug Burgum’s Crisis

One thing has long stood out about U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: Even before he ran for office, he talked a lot about freedom. It’s really striking, even for a Republican.

Perhaps you don’t know Burgum’s story. He grew up a shaggy-haired boy in tiny Arthur, North Dakota. In 1983, he mortgaged a part of his family farm to fund a software company, Great Plains Software. The company was a success, and it made him wealthy as a young man.

Burgum talked about the startup — and the new technology industry to which it belonged — as something nobler and higher than just a hustle. The software industry, he told lawmakers in 1998, helped make the people who participated in it free because it helped them flourish. “Part of the appeal of this industry is the freedom to succeed or fail based solely on one’s own abilities,” he said. He was known as a good boss.

Microsoft bought his company, making Burgum a billionaire. He stayed there for a few years, then became an investor and a real estate developer. In 2016, he ran to be North Dakota’s governor and won by a landslide.

Observing Burgum for a few years now, I’ve seen him talk about freedom in a few ways. He is a federalist. Although he praised the First Amendment’s liberties, which he describes as inherent and God-given, he speaks often about the Tenth Amendment, too — the part of the Bill of Rights that says powers not delegated to the federal government are retained by the states and the people.

That idea, he said while running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023, was something national Republicans too often forgot. “When I see the Republican Party try to get into things where we’re also overreaching, it also goes against this principle. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all federal rule — it should be returned to the states,” Burgum said.

Even his criticism of President Joe Biden’s “green fantasy energy policies” was rooted in this understanding of freedom. It wasn’t just that Biden’s policies limited consumer choice, he said, but that they empowered freedom’s enemies. They kept U.S. oil in the ground while encouraging Americans to buy electric vehicles and critical minerals from China.

“To defeat those adversaries, we must have a leader who understands the power of free societies and free markets,” he said.

Burgum didn’t win the 2024 nomination, and he wasn’t — as some hoped — picked for vice president on the ticket, either. But he won control of Trump’s energy agenda. Today, Burgum not only runs the Interior Department, but also chairs the National Energy Dominance Council, an ad hoc body that oversees energy and environment policy.

He’s kept talking about freedom in his new role — and he connects liberty to the eternal human struggle to flourish. “Human flourishing in this world has always been dependent on affordable and reliable energy,” he told Stanford students last year.

Which is why I was astounded to see this post last week:

Now, Burgum is a light-hearted guy, and obviously, we’re meant to chuckle. It’s a joke. Alaska and Washington, D.C., are part of the “old interior,” but Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, is the “new interior” — future American territory.

Burgum defended himself on Fox News last Thursday. “Who knew that posting a factual map of Alaska and Greenland would be triggering to those folks who do not fully understand the importance of Greenland and the strategic nature of protecting the United States of America?” he said.

Burgum is wrong. His map was not factual: Greenland is not part of the American interior; it is part of Denmark. To describe it as the “interior” of America should humiliate Burgum’s liberty-loving soul. But what we can tell from this tweet is that Burgum is mentally preparing himself for a terrible betrayal of the values and ideas he once celebrated.

What would that betrayal be? Nothing less than the open theft of Greenlanders’ most fundamental freedoms. On Fox, Burgum said that Trump wanted to “buy” Greenland — but this is such a twisting and abrasing of the truth as to make a patriot yelp. Trump desires Greenland by any means, and he is willing to use the military to bully Denmark and the Greenlandic people into selling their sovereignty.

This is not friendly commerce between two equals, as a free market requires, but rather petty and corrupt gangsterism. Trump is shoving a gun in Denmark’s face, muttering, We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Burgum claims to see nothing wrong with this degeneracy.

He should. Less than two years ago, Burgum praised the Constitution and “the historic and aspirational vision presented by our Founding Fathers.” That cohort’s insight — the reason we remember its members now, despite their flaws — was that the most fundamental political freedom is political self-determination. “All men are, by nature, equal and free,” wrote James Wilson, one of only six men to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution. “No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”

Yet Burgum would help establish Trump’s authority over more than 55,000 Greenlanders without their consent and over their objections — a government that would reek of illegality from its birthpangs. And Burgum would be its midwife. The Office of Insular Affairs, which he oversees as part of the Interior Department, manages America’s territories and freely associated states, such as Puerto Rico and Palau. Greenland could soon fall under its purview, too. Burgum could easily become Greenland’s colonial governor, its federal subjugator.

All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it. I have been to Greenland. It is an austere and beautiful country, home to a population of independent and freedom-loving people who want to prosper, raise their families, farm, hunt, thrive, and flourish. It should sound familiar: Greenlanders are not so far from Burgum’s old North Dakota constituents.

Either Burgum will now see the resemblance and desist from Trump’s corrupt attack on liberty, democracy, and the principle of self-government itself — either he will block it, delay it, never defend it in public or in private, and never joke about the wicked betrayal of an ally again — either he will review and revise the resignation letter in his desk drawer — either he will, in other words, act as a free man, or he should stop lying to Americans about his love of freedom and admit that he now believes instead that might makes right — that Donald Trump’s word is law, or close enough to it — and clarify for us, at last, that he has already become one of the president’s moral degenerates.

“Ronald Reagan famously told us, ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,’” an earlier version of Doug Burgum once told us. It was 2024, and he was running for president, addressing Republicans in Florida. His political prospects had never looked better.

Burgum paused for a second. He wanted the audience to think about the quote — to stick with Reagan’s words.

“Sometimes people remember that [line],” he said, “but they forget the second part of the quote, and I think it’s the most important: ‘Freedom must be fought for and protected, or we’ll spend our later years telling our grandchildren what it was like when America was free.’”

To fight and protect freedom — what would such an act demand of Doug Burgum in this moment, when a president is threatening America’s neighbors and trying to impose the very definition of unfreedom on its friends? Burgum was a thoughtful politician once: an independent and heterodox leader who loved liberty and wanted to see Americans flourish. Will he now do his duty to America and the world? Or will he push the country and its imperial subjects — no longer free citizens — into an unfreedom that will aggrieve and impoverish us well into our grandchildren’s lives. The choice is his. He has his freedom, now let him use it.