President Donald Trump’s bizarre plan to deploy a hospital ship to Greenland drew a chilly response Sunday from Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederick Nielsen, who politely told the president “no thanks” to his unusual proposition.
On Friday, Trump made the strange announcement that he would be sending a “hospital boat” to Greenland on an apparent humanitarian mission, which he said would help “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.” There is no documented health crisis in Greenland, and its citizens are all entitled to universal health care.
Nielsen apparently caught wind of Trump’s plan and issued the president a soft rejection in a social media post on Sunday, writing that such help wasn’t needed on the arctic island.
“That will be ‘no thanks’ from us,” Nielsen wrote in a post on Facebook, The Guardian reported. “President Trump’s idea to send a US hospital ship here to Greenland has been duly noted. But we have a public health system where care is free for citizens.”
Trump’s announcement came amid his ongoing campaign to acquire Greenland for the United States, and is theorized by some to be a direct response to an incident that unfolded on Friday just hours before the announcement.
Earlier on Friday, Danish forces evacuated an American service member aboard a U.S. submarine after they had fallen ill, and took him to a Greenland hospital. As to why Trump would respond to such an incident by deploying a hospital ship to Greenland, critics were mostly left baffled by the apparent connection.