UPDATE: Tuesday, Feb 24, 2026 · 9:16:04 PM +00:00
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annieli
Soon after, an apparent explanation for the confusion came into focus. The Wall Street Journal reported:
The Pentagon has received no orders to deploy any U.S. Navy vessels to Greenland, according to U.S. officials, despite President Trump’s claim that a hospital ship is ‘on its way’ to the self-governing Danish territory.
The U.S. has two hospital ships, the East Coast-based USNS Comfort and the West Coast-based USNS Mercy, which are designed as floating medical-treatment facilities. Both vessels are in a shipyard in Mobile, Ala., according to maritime tracking information. The Comfort is undergoing repairs that are expected to be completed in April, while the Mercy is in the middle of a one-year maintenance period that began last July.
Oh. So when Trump publicly declared that a U.S. hospital ship was “on the way” to Greenland (with three exclamation points), that apparently wasn’t true. (The Journal’s report hasn’t been independently verified by MS NOW, though several news organizations have reported in recent days that the Navy has two hospital ships, both of which appear to be in dry dock in Alabama.)
If the reporting is correct, it’s probably a good thing, for a variety of reasons, that there is no hospital ship en route to Greenland. It doesn’t appear to be necessary, and Greenland didn’t want it there anyway.
But the larger significance here is that yet again, there is no meaningful connection between what Trump says he’s going to do and what he actually does.
www.ms.now/...
How stupid is he?
Likely someone told Trump that a submariner during a mission had to be flown to Greenland for a medical emergency.
The stable genius tried to do some of his usual PR on Truth Social. But there’s a glitch in his logic.
All US naval hospital ships are in drydocks, but Trump implies Greenland healthcare is inferior by sending hospital ships only to be told in no uncertain terms thanks, but no thanks.
Yet the ships are on the way?
This is an example of the weaponization of healthcare as a gauche and cynical imitation of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic’s mobilization of US hospital ships to places like NYC.
This gesture is a means of “doubling down” symptomatic of other Trumpian behaviors this time in reaction to the actions of the EU and NATO rebuffing Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland. The irony of the GOPhascist nihilistic destruction of the US healthcare system should not be lost on us:
Trump announced on Saturday via social media that the United States will send a hospital ship to Greenland to provide medical care, posting alongside an illustration of the USNS Mercy that “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!!!”
The USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are the U.S. Navy’s only two hospital ships, each measuring 894 feet in length with a displacement of 69,552 tons. The vessels can accommodate up to 1,200 military personnel in addition to 71 civilian mariners, and are designed to provide mobile, acute surgical medical facilities for U.S. military operations and disaster relief missions worldwide. The USNS Mercy’s home port is Naval Base San Diego, California.
gcaptain.com/...
