Trump’s risky public health charade rings hollow

Last Saturday, Denmark’s Arctic command forces staged a rescue mission of an American crew member who needed urgent medical attention. Joint Arctic Command said on Facebook that it had evacuated a crew member from a U.S. submarine in Greenlandic waters, scooping them up in a Seahawk helicopter approximately seven nautical miles off the coast of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.

The incident seems to have triggered a bizarre reaction from President Donald Trump, who the next day threatened or promised to send a “great hospital ship” to Greenland, claiming on a Truth Social post that it would help “many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!”

The order, accompanied by an AI-generated illustration of a World War II-era hospital ship flying the U.S. flag, was confusing to many, and justifiably so. It wasn’t clear  what had motivated Trump’s supposed gesture of generosity, or why the post made no mention of the submarine rescue. Denmark’s leadership politely said “no thanks,” but it turns out they didn’t have to: No ship was ever “on its way” in the first place. The U.S. operates two hospital ships: one is currently docked at an Alabama shipyard while the other is on its way to Panama, which is pretty much in the opposite direction from Greenland. No presidential order has been issued to send any ships of any description to the island nation in the North Atlantic — and even more to the point, none was needed.

As many others have noted, Denmark and Greenland have health care systems that are far superior to our own. Polls have shown Greenlanders prefer what they’ve got. If anyone should be receiving hospital ships, it might be lower-income Americans struggling with the rising cost of health insurance, which the Trump administration has made much worse.

As to why Trump made this strange pronouncement, reporting by the Wall Street Journal suggests it was the result of a convoluted game of telephone between the White House, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (who is also Trump’s envoy to Greenland) and a native Greenlander who apparently supports the proposed U.S. seizure. But none of that entirely explains why Trump said something was happening that definitely wasn’t, and that hadn’t been discussed in any official capacity, beyond the fact that stuff like this happens a lot with this administration.

That entire pseudo-event was one one of those blink-and-you-miss-it moments that get drowned out in the endless baying insanity of our collective reality. But as metaphors go, there couldn’t be a better one for the hobbled state of public health under Trump: aimless demands for things that won’t materialize and that no one asked for. Unfortunately, as amusing as this is on a certain level, it will have real-world consequences that could take decades to repair and cause millions of needless deaths.

Nothing is more acute here than Trump’s recent announcement of what could be called his own made-up version of the World Health Organization. As the Washington Post reported last week, the administration is working on a “global disease surveillance” project that seems designed to duplicate the WHO’s work under the United Nations, but at roughly three times the cost. It comes only weeks after the U.S. officially withdrew from the WHO — that announcement was one of Trump’s first acts in his second term — while also completely gutting USAID, the foreign-aid wing of the U.S. government, a move that has led to an estimated 834,000 deaths so far, more than two-thirds of them children. By 2030, the death toll from these and other cuts could rise to 22 million people.

The secretiveness of Trump’s WHO clone proposal suggests that he, or someone in his administration, actually understands that protecting public health on a global scale is important. So long as human bodies are fallible to disease, we will need labs studying viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites to see which ones could cause major problems. We also can’t do this work in isolation, because pathogens like bird flu and Nipah virus don’t respect borders. If we want to have a global economy, that means inviting the risk of outbreaks, disease and mass death. Indeed, history is filled with examples of this, from the medieval Black Death hitchhiking along the Silk Road to the “Russian flu” pandemic of the late 19th century that was accelerated by trains and steamships.

All of this is precisely why the WHO was formed in 1948, just two years after Trump was born, with outsized influence from the U.S. Its professed goal is to prevent sickness that hurts our economic interests and overall wellbeing. Americans crafted this global organization in ways that directly benefited our nation, and for the most part it worked. The WHO helped eradicate smallpox, established a framework that led to a dramatic worldwide reduction in tobacco use and helped control numerous pandemics, from Ebola to mpox to Zika.

Many valid criticisms can be raised about the WHO, especially regarding its important mistakes during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were regrettable delays in admitting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is airborne, along with inconsistent messaging, and a pattern of rolling out vaccines in rich countries well ahead of poorer ones.

But the WHO’s failures aren’t happening in a vacuum. As a 2025 scoping review put it:

The politicization of global health governance, intensified by nationalist populism and the decline of liberal internationalism, posed significant ethical and operational challenges to the WHO during the pandemic. These dynamics constrained the organization’s ability to act independently and exposed vulnerabilities within global health systems. Moreover, great power competition, disinformation and the rise of authoritarianism further undermined the WHO’s mandate to ensure equitable health outcomes globally.

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Trump’s criticisms of the WHO are markedly different from those. He has accused the organization of being “China-centric” and downplaying the severity of the virus as it first began spreading in the Chinese city Wuhan. He did the exact same thing, of course, once COVID began spreading in the U.S., which is a major reason why the WHO became so useful to him as a deflection. For its part, the WHO has refuted Trump’s accusations that it played favorites or responded too slowly, while underscoring that it’s trying to learn from its mistakes.

Trump is correct in saying that the U.S. has paid a much higher proportion of WHO costs than other nations. His replacement idea, however, will cost about $2 billion, according to the Post’s investigation. That’s roughly three times higher than the previous average average of $680 million per year in U.S. WHO dues. Arguably some of the initial costs of Trump’s venture are related to building infrastructure, but none of that will be nearly as easy as the president seems to think. As far back as Trump’s first term, public health experts argued that “Withdrawal from WHO would have dire consequences for U.S. security, diplomacy, and influence,” because the organization “has unmatched global reach and legitimacy.”

The WHO’s secret ingredient isn’t money. It’s trust, something that took decades for the WHO to earn through repeated successes. And trust is exactly what America lacks around the world right now as Trump bullies other nations, abducts their leaders and threatens war in the Middle East, not to mention his saber-rattling against longtime allies like Greenland.

It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s version of the WHO will spur the development of new polio vaccines, work to advance health equity for migrants and displaced populations or seek to negotiate a ceasefire in Sudan. Yet these are all things the WHO has done just within the last several months, amid decades of similar accomplishments. It’s not like other organizations haven’t sprung up to compete with the WHO. But outfits like the Gates Foundation and World Bank still don’t have the same level of resources, let alone command the same kind of global respect. Much like Trump’s absurd Board of Peace, which is geared up to operate like a less democratic U.N. clone, his WHO initiative has no hope of accomplishing its stated goals if most of the world resists it. Just this week, Zimbabwe rejected a health deal from the U.S. worth some $360 million over concerns about how the Trump administration would handle the data.

It took generations to get public health to the point we enjoy now, where average life expectancy in many places exceeds 80 years and we don’t have to worry too much about diseases like polio, smallpox or even relative newcomers like HIV. Instead of leaving the WHO, we should be reinforcing its mission. Again, no one claims the WHO is perfect and there’s much room for improvement. Such gaps are not abstract — they represent real human lives that are lost or mangled. Yet it’s pretty clear that Trump’s attempts to reinvent the wheel here will create more such gaps, not less.

This is yet another Trump-manufactured crisis whose consequences will be hard to fully wrap our heads around for decades. Pandemics and health disasters have ripple effects that churn through generations. Our government is only inviting more of them with this phony attempt to create a global public health body that puts America first. Electing someone else in 2028 won’t be nearly enough to change course. It will take a lot more time and effort to rebuild.

Trump’s fake WHO is only a small slice of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is about removing most of the government’s responsibility to help people stay healthy and instead blaming ordinary people for getting sick. For Trump’s administration, dumping the WHO and recreating it to MAHA specifications comes with the added benefit of controlling and dismissing undesirable or overly “woke” health information, as we’ve already witnessed under the stewardship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of Health and Human Services. Roughly half of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveillance databases have gone dark, while some U.S. health data has disappeared entirely. Despite the old saying, what you don’t know can hurt you. Trump is driving us back to the days before germ theory, when infection and disease transmission were mysterious. But not understanding what made you sick won’t stop it from killing you.

As for sending that hospital ship to Greenland, Jeff Landry still wants to make that happen. He loyally told the Wall Street Journal that it might need to wait until summer, when one of the U.S. hospital ships will complete its maintenance. Landry emphasized that he wouldn’t consult either Greenland or Denmark about it; whether they need or want the damn thing is apparently irrelevant. That’s the Trump health care brand in a nutshell: You’ll get less and pay more, whether you like it or not.

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