Daniel DePetris

Trump is desperate to find someone to blame for his coronavirus failings

If there is one thing Donald Trump likes more than patting himself on the back, it’s a convenient scapegoat to shift the public narrative. In what has become a daily ritual, Trump held a coronavirus news conference in the White House Rose Garden yesterday to announce a suspension of U.S. funding to the World Health Organisation. The reason for Trump’s decision: the WHO’s supposed lack of independence from China, which the president cited as a key factor in the global spread of Covid-19. 

‘The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable,’ Trump said. In the president’s mind and in the minds of many Republicans in Washington, the agency failed while tens of thousands of people, young and old alike, lay gasping for breath in hospital beds. The funding cut is going to hit the WHO hard; in the last two-year budget cycle, the U.S. pledged nearly £717m ($900m) to the agency, roughly a fifth of its total budget.

As one might expect, Trump’s move to starve the WHO of money has not gone down well. German foreign minister Heiko Maas took to Trump’s favourite social media forum to say that casting aspersions won’t help the situation. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell condemned the decision, writing that ‘there is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic.’ U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a statement of his own, where he reminded the world’s governments that international cooperation is the only way to snuff out the virus for good. Democrats on Capitol Hill lashed out as soon as Trump made the announcement, categorising it as a one big, fat, diversion from the main source of the problem: Donald Trump himself.

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Written by
Daniel DePetris

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.

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