Fake map of the US president: stars, water and kilometers

Iceland is around 103,000 km² in size. And it belongs to Europe. So based on current understanding. Even though the Icelanders recently made it clear in a referendum that they do not want to belong to the European Union, purely geographically the small island with just under 400,000 inhabitants is located in the far northwest of Europe.

Of course, none of this interests the man in the White House. He recently posted a graphic on his propaganda channel Truth Social that wraps Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Cuba and yes, Iceland in the stars and stripes. The next madness of the power-hungry US president? There was no need for a comment under the fake map. She was taken seriously that way.

The US ambassador to Iceland was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Rejkjavik: This appropriation is forbidden. The Canadians stayed cool: They are in the middle of the tariff war started by Trump, and it is more dramatic than a graphic. The EU is already vying for resource-rich Greenland with the status of an autonomous territory of Denmark with the combined forces of EU Commission President von der Leyen and Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen. And in Mexico and Cuba, Washington's desires have been known for 200 years.

The profession of cartographer is a relatively new term, as it first appeared in this form in the 19th century. Before that, people who drew the world were called world describers, cosmographers, map painters or map makers. They wanted to use their means and political mandates to allocate land, to name it, and to depict it in the power imbalance of history. Some of their bases for this: the stars, square kilometers, water boundaries. In despotic times also the king's instructions.

Trump probably sees himself in the tradition of the latter. At least somewhere several centuries before modern times. When the UN General Assembly recently voted to replace the 500-year-old Mercator projection of the world map with a new one in which the proportions are shown more realistically, only the USA voted against it.