President Donald Trump threatened to tariff other nations that do not support the U.S. in acquiring Greenland during a Friday morning event.
During an event touting the administration’s investment in rural health, Trump recalled threatening European nations, such as France and Germany, with 25% tariffs for not paying more for prescription drugs as part of a “most favored nations” deal.
“I may do that for Greenland, too,” Trump warned. “I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that.”
The president’s comments come as a bipartisan congressional delegation, led by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), has traveled to Denmark to demonstrate their support for the NATO ally after Trump has rattled much of Europe over his persistent desire to acquire Greenland either by military force or through financial incentives.
TRUMP DODGES ON WHETHER HE WOULD LEAVE NATO TO GET GREENLAND
Denmark and Greenland’s top diplomats, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday.
The meeting did not result in Trump backing down from his desire to take Greenland, a Danish territory, but officials announced a high-level working group to find a common way forward.
Trump, notably, neither confirmed nor denied whether he intends to use force to make Greenland a U.S. territory, which would likely blow up NATO, of which the U.S. and Denmark are members, when talking to reporters Wednesday.
The president’s threats to enact more tariffs came during an event touting the Rural Health Transformation Program.
The program is a provision included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law last summer as an effort to win over skeptical Republicans worried about rural hospital closures.
The $50 billion initiative provides grants to all 50 states to invest in healthcare in rural areas over five years, with $10 billion of funding available each fiscal year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced allocations of the first $10 billion to states in late December, with each state receiving $100 million.
But the other $25 billion that is shelled out won’t be distributed equally among states. Of the first $10 billion installment, officials claimed the average payout for states is $200 million, ranging from $145 million to $281 million per state. CMS officials said funding will be based on a variety of factors, including rural population and rural health infrastructure, although critics have bemoaned the uneven distribution of funding to states.
“With the Rural Health Transformation Program, we are getting rural communities the health support they need, and we’re getting it immediately,” said Trump, who was flanked by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “These funds will go to empowering rural hospitals, strengthening their workforce, modernizing facilities and technology, and ensuring that rural Americans get world-class health in their own community.”
TRUMP OUTLINES NEW ‘GREAT HEALTHCARE PLAN’ FOR CONGRESS
Trump also branded the program “the largest investment in rural healthcare in American history.”
The president excoriated former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, as an inefficient plan to tackle health insurance. “Obama didn’t care about the rural community, to be totally blunt,” he said. “What he did care about is insurance companies, and this was a bill to make insurance companies wealthy, and they did.”
The event comes one day after the president released the “Great Healthcare Plan,” which calls on Congress to codify past executive orders, including lowering prescription drug prices and insurance premiums, and maximizing price transparency in the healthcare market, into law.
“Our proposal is the massive discounts on prescription drugs that my administration is achieving through our most-favored-nation provisions,” Trump boasted. “The bottom line is, we’ll be paying the lowest price of any nation in the world. Whoever is paying the lowest, we match it.”
The plan, notably, doesn’t include any language to renew expired Obamacare subsidies, although Trump reiterated his desire to send funds directly to the public.
“Our plan would reduce your insurance premiums by stopping government payoffs to big insurance companies and sending the money directly to the people,” Trump said.
