Trump says he is sending the San Diego-based Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy to Greenland

President Trump said Saturday that he will send the San Diego-based Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy to Greenland to “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.”

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social app, adding that the nearly 40-year-old Navy vessel is “on the way!!!”.

The ship has been dispatched on quick notice before. It was sent to Los Angeles in 2020 to help fight the Covid pandemic. But Mercy is currently at a shipyard in Alabama undergoing maintenance. It hasn’t been on deployment since 2024 when it spent four months in the Indo-Pacific on a humanitarian and disaster relief mission. It returned to San Diego in February of that year and later made the temporary move to Alabama Shipyard LLC in Mobile.

Trump’s remarks appear to have caught the government of Denmark off guard. In a statement Sunday, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said, “That will be ‘no thanks’ from us … 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.”

Greenland is part of the kingdom of Denmark and a major source of controversy. Trump indicated earlier...