Greenland’s prime minister publicly rejected Donald Trump with a scathing takedown after the president announced he was sending a “hospital boat” to the Arctic island to care for its “sick” people.
“It’s a no thank you from here,” Jens Frederik-Nielsen said in a statement on Sunday.
“President Trump’s idea of sending an American hospital ship here to Greenland has been noted,” the 34-year-old prime minister continued. “But we have a public healthcare system where treatment is free for citizens. That is a deliberate choice—and a fundamental part of our society. That is not how it works in the USA, where it costs money to go to the doctor.”
Frederik-Nielsen followed up his blistering jab at the U.S. healthcare system by saying that Greenland is open to dialogue and cooperation.
“But please talk to us instead of just making more or less random statements on social media,” he added.
The biting reply came after 79-year-old Trump, who is obsessed with acquiring Greenland, issued a bizarre Truth Social post on Saturday suggesting the island’s residents are in need of help.
“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!” Trump wrote alongside what appeared to be an AI illustration of the USNS Mercy hospital ship sailing into the sunset.
The Washington Post reported that maritime tracking data doesn’t show any U.S. hospital ships currently lined up to sail to Greenland. The U.S. Navy’s two hospital ships, the Mercy and USNS Comfort, were reportedly at a maintenance facility in Alabama on Sunday.
Trump appointed Landry as his new envoy to Greenland in December last year, shortly before threatening to take over the island, an autonomous territory of Denmark, by military force.
But he backtracked dramatically at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, saying he would not use force to obtain the island, even while claiming that the U.S. needed Greenland for national security.
In a Sunday TV appearance, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen noted that “Trump is constantly tweeting about Greenland” and called it an “expression of the new normal that has taken hold in international politics.”
Like Frederik-Nielsen, he noted, “The Greenlandic population receives the health care it needs.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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