WASHINGTON – President Trump has cancelled his planned visit to Denmark after learning that Greenland is not for sale. We truly wish we were making that part up, as it would be a brilliant satire headline on its own, but it’s true. When word leaked that the president was interested in purchasing Greenland, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen immediately noted that Greenland is not for sale, leading Trump to make a second offer, this time to purchase the state of Vermont.

“Greenland, Green Mountains, either way, I’ll take it,” Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning, despite advisers informing him that Vermont was already technically part of the United States. Trump acknowledged that he had been told about the current status of the 14th state, but did not believe his advisers to be telling the truth. “Someone just told me I already own Vermont. Wrong! I would have heard of it. #sad #fakenews”

According to sources inside the White House, the leaked Greenland strategy comes at a very bad time for the president, who had been hoping to use the announcement in two weeks as a distraction from a planned attack on bilingual US citizens. September 2nd was to be the day ICE started confiscating and invalidating passports for any US citizen who speaks both English and Spanish fluently, and the White House was expecting to turn the country’s eye with another ridiculous display of smoke and mirrors. Now, they are employing a similar strategy to keep the media at bay with this new offer of accepting Vermont into the United States.

“I’m not sure if we’ll get enough traction out of this to carry us through September,” said one anonymous source, “but it should at least keep people from paying attention to the fact that we’re going to kill all the bald eagles and polar bears in order to get even richer. And if Vermont refuses to sell to us and the whole thing dies down early, we have a backup backup plan of trying to purchase the moon. You know, for Space Force headquarters.”