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Trump: U.S. Needs Greenland for Purpose of National Security; The World is Watching as Trump Reshapes U.S. Global Role; Parents Can Now Set Daily Time Limits on YouTube Shorts. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired January 15, 2026 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

DON RIDDELL, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Gambling has been legalized in many states over the last few years, and through the first three quarters of last year, it was an industry worth more than $11 billion. Sadly, this kind of corruption seems to be a byproduct of gambling in sports.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID METCALF, U.S. ATTORNEY, EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA: When criminals pollute the purity of sports by manipulating competition, it doesn't just imperil the integrity of sports betting markets, it imperils the integrity of sport itself. And everything that sports represent to us, you know, hard work, determination, and fairness. And when that happens, the Department of Justice will step in to protect what is a sacred institution of American life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RIDDELL: And that is such an important point beyond the crime here. Many of us love watching sport just for the thrill of it. But if we can't believe that what we're seeing is legitimate and fair, then sport as entertainment pretty quickly loses its value.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Yes, so true. You start wondering, what am I watching? And then maybe you don't.

Don Riddell, thank you so much.

A new CNN poll reveals how Americans feel about the president's efforts to control Greenland. We break down those numbers next.

[14:35:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: There was a new CNN poll out today looking at President Trump's ambitions to take control of Greenland. The results are overwhelming. 75 percent of Americans say they oppose the U.S. taking over the world's largest island, even as President Trump vows to do just that. Trump's actions have thrown the decades-old NATO alliance itself into a crisis, and the prospect of its most powerful member annexing part of another. In response, several European NATO allies announced that they are

sending military personnel to Greenland. I'm joined now by the former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, now the chair for America First Policy Institute, Carla Sands, who served during Trump's first term. Thanks so much for joining.

CARLA SANDS, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO DENMARK UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP: I'm so happy to be with you, Jim. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: So the president says that this is about securing Greenland. As you know, the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement gives the United States everything it claims to want to do now, troop deployment, base construction, operational control of forces on the island. Why not just increase the U.S. military presence there under that existing agreement?

SANDS: Well, there's a couple of reasons, Jim. Number one is the Greenlanders want economic development, not just security. And there's only three countries, really, that can do it.

Two, I'm sure, that can do it, and that's U.S. and China. Greenland is going to go independent in the 21st century and leave the kingdom, just like Iceland left the kingdom in the 20th century. So as that happens, President Trump is looking at the Western Hemisphere and saying, how do we secure the homeland?

And Greenland is actually part of the Golden Dome. It's Alaska and Greenland that are part of that. If you look at his actions in Venezuela, Panama, Mexico even, how he is getting our Western Hemisphere in a, I would just say, a safer condition, a better, more prosperous, secure condition.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in 2019, when he said to her, Greenland's not secure. You need to secure Greenland, because it's Denmark's problem. Well, she said, sure, we'll invest $200 million.

You know what she did? She invested 1 percent, $2 million, and it wasn't even in security of Greenland. They have no intention of securing Greenland.

SCIUTTO: You say the Greenland people want economic development, but an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders, 85 percent, in fact, said they do not want to leave Denmark for the U.S. So you're saying it's OK for the U.S. president to do this over the support of the people of Greenland?

SANDS: Well, Greenlanders want to be Greenlandic. They don't want to be Danish or American. They want their independence.

And Denmark has now done a sigh-up on these people. They've done all kinds of propaganda to them, America bad. When I left, we had a great relationship with Greenland.

The fact is the Danes are terrified to lose their sort of status as an Arctic nation. They don't want to lose Greenland, but they can't afford to develop it or defend it. It's like owning a building. SCIUTTO: But it's Greenlanders saying they don't want the U.S. to take

it.

SANDS: I understand. It's like owning a building you can't afford to upkeep or make the payments on. You have to sell it.

That's just how it works. The Greenlanders want economic prosperity. Denmark has no intention.

Otherwise, they would have developed Greenland. They haven't. The U.S. can develop it. China can develop it. President Trump's making sure it's not China that is their new best friend.

SCIUTTO: But the trouble is the Greenland people and their leaders, and I've met with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland this week, as they've met, and I'm just saying they've expressed quite clearly to me and have said quite publicly, they will refuse U.S. pressure to do so. It's a hard no from them. So I wonder why the president is applying so much pressure to an ally, as I'm sure you know, given you were an ambassador to Greenland.

Denmark did hard combat duty in Afghanistan. When I went there, they did frontline duty and lost as a percentage of their population more than any other country.

SANDS: They have.

SCIUTTO: Why is the president bullying such a close ally?

SANDS: It's not bullying. He's living in the real world, not a fantasy world. So Denmark is one of the founding members of NATO, and we appreciate that.

But the fact is that they can't afford to defend their own territory. In the NATO Charter, there's Article 3, and that is that every NATO ally has the ability to defend their own territory. Then Article 5, come to the defense of others.

Denmark has not the manpower or the money. It's an economy about the size of the state of Colorado. They don't have the money to defend Greenland.

[14:40:00]

And the people, the taxpayers in Denmark, would refuse because they want the taxes coming to them in social welfare benefits.

SCIUTTO: So why doesn't the U.S. then send those forces under the existing agreement, which you know allows for exactly those steps to be taken by the U.S.?

SANDS: Too many variables. Too many variables. You have 56,000 people that can be easily swayed by Danish propaganda or some other country. They have said to me, money has no color.

This is the Greenlanders. We want investment. If it doesn't come from the U.S., we'll go to China.

SCIUTTO: You say that it's propaganda that moves these people. I've asked Greenland politicians. I've asked members of Parliament whether President Trump's pressure and threat, in effect, to take it by force, if necessary, whether that's made them more or less interested in being closer to the U.S. And they've said less interested. Is that propaganda, or is that them reacting to force from the outside?

SANDS: Well, President Trump does speak very plainly and sometimes brusquely. That's just his way. But that's his first salvo.

Remember, he wrote the book "The Art of the Deal." He's going to do a deal, and he could go down in history, like President Thomas Jefferson, that did the Louisiana Purchase. So I think it's to be determined.

SCIUTTO: If he attempts a deal and the people of Greenland continue, as they do today, to oppose it by large measures, should he walk away then? Or are you saying he should continue to move forward even over the objection of the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark?

SANDS: So President Trump is an America-first president, just like the prime minister of Denmark is a Denmark-first prime minister. He puts the needs and security of the American people first. Greenland is essential for our country.

If you look at what China has done in other areas, say the South China Sea, how they've militarized the Spratly Islands. Look what happened having communism in Cuba.

SCIUTTO: Which the U.S. opposed that as an illegal land grab.

SANDS: But they did it anyway. So can you imagine China controlling the world's largest island just off our northeast coast, and think of the mischief that they could get into against the United States?

SCIUTTO: The Greenlanders say that they have not seen an active Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade.

SANDS: So I will just tell you, President Trump has the best information. He understands the threats above, on, and below the sea. And I think Prime Minister Frederiksen knows a lot of them, too.

SCIUTTO: Just to be clear, if the Greenland people, as they do today, and the representatives, and the people of Denmark, as they do today, and their representatives, continue to say no to this demand, are you saying the president should do it over their objections?

SANDS: Well, I think there are many ways the president could get to a good place. One is a COFA, like a free association, where the Greenlanders have their own government, they elect their own officials, make their own laws, but they're part of the security blanket of the United States, and American businesses can invest there, because we have Development Finance Corporation, EXIM Bank, so we have sort of, it's like U.S. government backstop to tough places to invest in, like Greenland, which is a tough place to invest in. SCIUTTO: So perhaps free association is on the table. Former Ambassador Carla Sands, we appreciate you joining the program and taking the hard questions.

SANDS: Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: Please do stay with CNN. We'll be right back.

[14:45:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: President Trump is reshaping America's role in the world. The question is whether it's for the better, and the answer may lie in how the rest of the world is responding to his often unpredictable, abrupt shifts. My next guest has been examining that very question.

We're joined by Terry Moran, former co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline, and now the publisher of "Real Patriotism" on Substack. His latest piece is titled, "The World is Learning How to Live Without America". You're talking about de-risking.

These countries are de-risking, and you go through a lot of them. In this post, you start off saying, "If you were running a country -- or a global corporation -- would you bet the future of your people or your firm on the stability, reliability, and sanity of the USA in the coming years?" Increasingly, America's closest allies and many other nations are answering that question the same way, no.

So talk a little bit more about what this means and why people in, I don't know, say, Oklahoma should care.

TERRY MORAN, FORMER CO-ANCHOR, ABC NEWS' NIGHTLINE: Well, it's happening because Donald Trump has almost single-handedly ended the era that we all grew up in, and that the world got rich in much of it, and that was the post-World War II liberal order. America is strong, powerful, and in those decades, cooperative. It guaranteed international institutions.

It traded open trading systems around the world. Trump is kind of knocking all that down. So if you're the leader of any country in the world, and if you're the leader of a major corporation, you have to think, OK, it's a new world now.

What's it going to look like? And that means you cannot be exposed to this changing United States. The prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, said it best.

He said, we have to stop thinking that we trade north and south, meaning with the United States, and we have to think east, west, Europe and China.

KEILAR: You talk about Canada reaching out to China, German arms manufacturing, sort of domestically rather than relying on American industry, Asian countries hedging their bets. But if there were to be a devil's advocate, they might say, well, unpredictability can be good. You know for instance, Iran might look at this Venezuela operation and say, oh, my gosh, he might actually do something.

And they might sort of catch themselves for a moment and be somewhat controlled by Trump's rhetoric. Certainly, that's how he's spinning it.

MORAN: Yes, that's known as the crazy man theory of leadership. Richard Nixon was the guy who started it. You didn't know what he was going to do.

And it can have beneficial effects in that way. But when you're planning for your future, for example, the United States dollar, the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. That enables us to have these profligate deficits and national debt that we have.

It maintains our status in the world because everybody's got to trade in dollars. People around the world are exploring how to de-dollar their economies. And that's a long-term project.

[14:50:00]

But that will make us poorer and weaker in the world as countries which were able to count on the reliability of the United States and not its unpredictability start decoupling from us because it's too risky to be an ally of the United States, ask Denmark, or to count on the stability of the United States in so many ways.

KEILAR: Yes, how are you seeing Greenland in this prism?

MORAN: Well, it is a shock to the heart of America's prosperity. We trade with Europe to an enormous amount of trade. And here we are basically declaring that if we can't get not just what we want, as Jim was talking about with the former ambassador there, you know, more security, access to the rare earth minerals and other things, but if we can't get actual control, sovereignty over Greenland, we're going to take it, which ends the transatlantic alliance, which was the foundation of our prosperity over the past many decades.

KEILAR: A lot of Americans do not think this is a good idea. Just 25 percent of Americans favor the U.S. attempting to take control of Greenland. Venezuela's a little different.

52 percent oppose U.S. military -- the U.S. decision to take military action in Venezuela. 48 percent, though, favor it. What do you think?

MORAN: Well, there's oil in Venezuela, and that is something I think that Trump has been selling to people. We will get richer. There is no plan that I can see in Venezuela about how we actually make that happen, considering it's a 10-year process to get the decrepit oil industry in Venezuela back on its feet.

And the American oil companies say, why would we do that, given the fluctuation in prices, given the problems we've had there before, and given the fact that the next president might change his mind? And so that's a problem. But on Greenland, that is the great good sense of the American people, saying no. KEILAR: Yes, I do want to ask you, finally, about this response by the vice president to something that you said. You said that President Obama deported 3 million people, and it did not involve, quote, masked gangs descending on neighborhoods. And we should remember that at one point, I think there were critics who called Obama the deporter-in- chief.

MORAN: Yes.

KEILAR: So he was deporting a lot of people. The vice president says that your argument is fake because, in part, in the Obama administration, they counted being turned away at the border as a deportation. And in the cities that are not sanctuary cities, the deportation process is orderly and normal.

What do you say to his response?

MORAN: Well, it's half true about Obama. Obama did emphasize enforcement at the border and gave it more process, and those became deportations. But he also turned away 2 million people just right at the border, just turned them around and sent them back.

So 5 million total removals and returns during the Obama presidency. He was the deporter-in-chief, and he did it in the interior. He didn't just do it on the border.

In Trump's first year, and you compare it with Obama's first year, Obama deported more people in the interior of the United States than Trump did in his first year. And you didn't see massed gangs of agents, of federal agents, rousting people out of their cars. We didn't see that.

And yet he bested Trump at deportations from the interior during that first year in office. So he's wrong about that. But as far as whether or not the country likes this, you know, it is clear that this is going to be a maximal effort, not just to get criminals out, the worst of the worst, but to change the nature of American society by getting as many immigrants out as possible and scaring others away.

KEILAR: Terry Moran, always great to talk with you. Thanks for coming on.

YouTube is adding some new controls that let parents set daily time limits on how long teens can scroll on short videos. Kind of teen crack, if you will. All right, we'll talk about that ahead.

You're watching CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

[14:55:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: YouTube will now allow parents to stop their kids from endlessly scrolling short-form videos. The feature is part of a new set of parental controls aimed at keeping children safe online. CNN Tech reporter Clare Duffy joins me now. And Clare, given that I have at least two teenagers who endlessly scroll online, can you explain to exactly how this would work?

CLARE DUFFY, CNN TECH REPORTER: Yes, Jim. I mean, this is something that parents have been asking for for so long, in large part because many parents have argued that these endlessly scrolling short-form video feeds, which now exist across most of the major social media platforms, that they essentially hijack your brain's reward system and make these platforms more addictive, especially for kids. So this new YouTube feature is going to allow parents to set time limits for how long their kids can scroll its shorts video feed.

It could be anywhere from two hours, all the way down to blocking the feeds entirely. They'll also be able to set custom take a break and bedtime reminders for their kids. And as you see there, this is one of a number of new parental control features that YouTube announced yesterday.

They're also introducing a new sign-up process where parents can more easily create supervised accounts for their kids. And they've also updated their content guidelines for teens so that the feed will prioritize showing young people videos about things like building life skills or that feed their curiosity or inspiration. This coming after YouTube already restricts teens from repeatedly viewing videos that could be harmful.

So things like videos that idealize certain types of body images, those videos teens already can't view over and over, but YouTube trying to make the feed more friendly for young people.

SCIUTTO: Hey, if it works, fantastic. I'm just going to be looking at the web for ways around those controls, which I'm sure someone's already working on ...

END