Early Saturday, Denmark’s Arctic Command made an important announcement: It had evacuated a crew member of a U.S. submarine in need of medical attention, transporting the sailor to Greenland for emergency care.
Soon after, instead of expressing gratitude, Donald Trump published a bizarre statement to his social media platform. According to the American president, he and his administration were deploying “a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.” The Republican concluded, “It’s on the way!!!”
No one seemed to have any idea what in the world he was talking about. When a CNN reporter asked the Pentagon for some kind of explanation, it referred him to U.S. Northern Command, which in turn referred him to the Navy, which in turn referred him to the White House, which didn’t want to talk about it.
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.
The incumbent president has earned his reputation as an unusually prolific liar, but this is a specific kind of mendacity. Trump isn’t merely peddling nonsense about his perceived enemies or his record; this is a kind of dishonesty rooted in a disconnect from future events: The American president keeps telling the nation and the world about steps he’s going to take, only to decide later not to bother with them, without offering any kind of explanation for the shift.
After his major defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, Trump said he’d impose global tariffs at a 15% rate. That wasn’t quite right, and when the policy was announced soon after, the actual rate was 10%.
The Republican said he was going to cap credit card interest rates, and then he didn’t. He said he was going to impose steep economic penalties on any country that does business with Iran, and then he didn’t. He even said he was going to decertify aircrafts made in Canada, and then he didn’t.
For Americans who want to know what’s likely to happen with their own government, it’s generally a good idea to pay more attention to what Trump and his team do than to what they say, because what he says has little bearing on reality.
