What did Donald Trump do today?

He took a routine medical evacuation as a personal insult and made sure everyone knew it.

Denmark's military announced today that its Joint Arctic Command had participated in the medical evacuation of a crew member from a U.S. submarine in the waters near Greenland's capital, Nuuk. According to the statement, the crew member was taken by Danish helicopter a short distance to a hospital in Nuuk.

Both the event and the announcement were unremarkable. Cooperation between allied military forces like this is normal and expected. 

This routine act of humanitarian aid seems to have been taken as a personal insult by Trump, though, who has become obsessed with seizing Greenland from Denmark. His reaction was to declare that he would send one of the US Navy's two hospital ships to Greenland, to "help with the many people who are sick" who—he claimed—were suffering from neglect by Denmark. He has not acknowledged the Danish sea rescue. 

The USNS Comfort

 

Greenland does face unique health challenges, mostly due to its small population, many of whom live in extremely isolated communities cut off by rugged terrain from regular travel to the capital. (Similar problems exist across the Arctic, for example in Alaska.) There is no chronic or acute health care shortage in Greenland that a ship meant to handle combat medicine or large-scale humanitarian disasters could help with.

Probably the simplest and most damning way to summarize the state of health care in Greenland is that Greenlanders have regular, no-cost access to health care that is not much better than what Americans with health insurance can get—but still much better than what the tens of millions of Americans who can't afford it can get. That number is sharply rising due to Trump's refusal to fund the United States' own healthcare system. 

About 15 million Americans—or about 272 times the entire population of Greenland—are expected to lose health care in the coming year due to the lapse of those subsidies in Trump's 2025 budget bill. 

Why does this matter?

• A U.S. sailor receiving emergency medical care from an ally nation isn't an insult and any president who gets mad about that is too emotionally unstable to serve. 

• Americans need the United States government to look after their health care more than Greenland does.