Turns Out Trump Hasn’t Actually Sent “Hospital Boat” to Greenland

Seemingly nobody in the federal government actually received instructions to send a hospital boat to Greenland.

The Pentagon has heard no official word about sending any such sort of humanitarian aid to the Arctic island, The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday.

Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the White House would be sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland, though exactly who would be responsible for the project—and why Greenland, which has nationalized health care, would need it—was not clear.

Trump included an AI-generated image of the USNS Mercy, despite the fact that the ship is based on the West Coast. The hospital ship situated on the East Coast is the USNS Comfort. Both are currently in the shop, with the USNS Mercy in the middle of a yearlong maintenance period and the USNS Comfort undergoing repairs that are expected to be completed in April.

Regardless, the Pentagon had not received instructions to send either Navy ship, reported the Journal.

In the days since Trump’s notice, not one agency or office potentially responsible for the unwanted project has recognized that the boat is a real thing that’s actually happening.

Pinning responsibility has been more like a game of hot potato: On Monday, the Pentagon referred questions to U.S. Northern Command, which redirected questions to the U.S. Navy, which in turn sent questions to the White House, CNN reported. The White House has so far failed to elaborate, with spokespeople pointing back to Trump’s social media post.

Greenland has expressed zero interest in Washington’s unsolicited aid package. The island currently has six hospitals that serve its 56,000 residents. Remote parts of the Danish-controlled territory have struggled with accessing specialized medical equipment—though that would hardly be addressed by a centralized boat at the coast.

Furthermore, the issue was tackled earlier this month, when the island’s capital city, Nuuk, settled on a new arrangement with Copenhagen that would allow Greenlanders to access specialized health care in Denmark.

“That will be ‘no thanks’ from us,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Greenlandic prime minister, wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. “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.”

Trump’s offer appears to be just another component to his relentless quest to annex the mineral-rich territory. Trump has claimed that America “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, especially in light of the fact that myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base. Danish and Greenlandic officials have repeatedly insisted that Greenland is not for sale.

Donald Trump is dropping his attempt to prosecute six congressional Democrats who made a video urging federal law enforcement and members of the military not to obey illegal orders.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., led by Jeanine Pirro, had sought to indict lawmakers two weeks ago, but a federal grand jury issued a rare denial. Pirro has subsequently decided to stop pursuing the case, NBC News reported Monday night. While another federal prosecutor in a different federal court district could still try to bring a case, there’s no indication that any will.

Trump had accused Representatives Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, and Chrissy Houlahan, as well as Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, of “SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” even suggesting that they should be executed.

It was a gross abuse of power, as none of the six lawmakers did anything except express their First Amendment rights and tell federal and military personnel not to follow illegal orders, which shouldn’t bother the White House if it doesn’t believe it’s issuing any. A federal grand jury agreed, and on some level, prosecutors in Pirro’s office must have known their effort was unfounded, as they couldn’t name any statute the members of Congress violated.

Trump’s State of the Union address will take place Tuesday night. It’s not clear how many of the six Democrats will be attending, but at least some of them will. It will be interesting to see if Trump decides to take a jab at them during his speech, or even acknowledges them at all.

The possibility of war with Iran is still very much a possibility, according to Donald Trump.

Top U.S. military officials have reportedly warned the White House against dragging the country into war with Iran, arguing that it could entangle America in a prolonged conflict.

But that is not the narrative that Trump wants circulated amongst the American public. In a lengthy Truth Social post Monday, the president claimed that “numerous stories” about Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine’s broad caution toward the Middle East situation were “100 percent incorrect.”

“General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see War but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won,” Trump wrote.

“He knows Iran well in that he was in charge of Midnight Hammer, the attack on the Iranian Nuclear Development,” he continued. “It is a Development no longer, but rather, was blown to smithereens by our Great B-2 Bombers.”

Trump ordered a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites on June 22 without the express approval of Congress. The attack damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan, though a postmortem battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, rather than the “years” that Trump had advertised.

“Razin Caine is a Great Fighter, and represents the Most Powerful Military anywhere in the World,” Trump said. “He has not spoken of not doing Iran, or even the fake limited strikes that I have been reading about, he only knows one thing, how to WIN and, if he is told to do so, he will be leading the pack.”

“Everything that has been written about a potential War with Iran has been written incorrectly, and purposefully so,” he wrote. “I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them.”

U.S. officials, including Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law—are expected to discuss the countries’ ongoing standoff with Iranian leadership in Geneva Thursday.

A whistleblower report revealed Monday that ICE has been cutting corners on essential training for federal agents—despite what ICE chief Todd Lyons told Congress earlier this month.  

In a lengthy memo produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, whistleblower documents indicated that new recruits were receiving significantly less training amid a surge in hiring, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.  

The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.

Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training. “Five days a week was five eight-hour days. We’ve gone to six 12-hour days,” he said.

Whistleblower documents included in the memo indicated that ICE had also made sweeping changes to its training syllabus and testing requirements for cadets. 

A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. 

The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. Among the more than a dozen exams that have been eliminated were tests on “Criminal Encounters,” “Judgment pistol shooting,” and “Determine removability.”

“All of these are now instead evaluated, if at all, mainly by open-book, multiple-choice written exams and without any graded practical examinations,” the memo stated.

These changes have come as Americans have witnessed ICE agents across the country practice excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. A new report Monday revealed that an ICE agent in Minnesota had accidentally discharged his weapon in a hotel room—nearly killing the person in the room next door. 

The memo was released ahead of another congressional hearing about ICE’s apparent abuses. 

Speaking at the hearing Monday was Ryan Schwank, an attorney who served as an instructor for new ICE recruits in Georgia. He claimed that ICE had cut firearms training, as well as legal classes on the constitutional limits of ICE’s authority and protesters’ rights.

Schwank previously tipped off Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office about ICE giving itself permission to forgo a judicial warrant in order to enter people’s homes. It was unclear whether he was the whistleblower behind the documents included in the newest report.

Utah, which has four seats in the House of Representatives, all held by Republicans, may soon add a Democratic congressional seat thanks to court-ordered redistricting.

A three-judge federal panel on Monday refused to block a new congressional map for the state that puts the mostly Democratic Salt Lake County, the home of state capital Salt Lake City, into one district, paving the way for the map to take effect in time for the 2026 midterms. It’s likely that Democrats would pick up the new seat.

The ruling comes after years of gerrymandering battles in Utah, and disrupts President Trump’s calls for Republican-led states to redistrict ahead of 2026. Utah Republicans’ proposed map would have ensured, as in previous elections, that the state’s entire congressional delegation would have remained Republican. In November, however, it was struck down by a state court, with Utah District Court Judge Dianna Gibson ruling that Republicans had divided Salt Lake County into four districts to help themselves.

Now, Democrats have a good chance to win a congressional seat in Utah thanks to a 2018 ballot initiative that created an independent redistricting commission and enshrined anti-gerrymandering legislation. Utah’s Republicans have undermined that initiative ever since, and their latest attempt prompted a lawsuit from activists including the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

Technically, Republicans can still appeal Monday’s decision, but the state’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, who is in charge of the state’s elections, previously said that the final 2026 congressional map had to be ready by Monday.

Trump won’t be happy with the news, considering his efforts to avert a Democratic landslide in November. He pushed for Indiana to redraw new congressional maps eliminating the state’s two Democratic seats last year, only to have that effort rejected by the state’s Republicans. What else is Trump going to try in order to rig the midterms in his favor?