The US president takes a page straight out of White Chicks and channels his inner Wilson Sisters
On Monday, news broke that not only are China now supportive of an independent probe into the origins of the coronavirus, but that Chinese president Xi Jinping has pledged 2 billion dollars to the World Health Organization (WHO) over the course of the next two years. It’s great news and all but also kinda fishy if you think about it.
That being said, we knew Trump would not be happy about it and unhappy he was. The US president took a page straight out of White Chicks and went all Wilson sisters on the WHO, sending a letter to the head of the WHO threatening to pull US funding permanently over Covid-19.
The letter pretty much criticises WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus response to the pandemic, insinuates that the WHO is China’s puppet and outlines a 30-day deadline for the body to commit to “substantive improvements” or risk losing millions and US membership altogether. How do we know this?
Trump posted his letter in full on Twitter, of course!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1262577580718395393
He’s right about one thing, the letter is pretty self-explanatory. Now Trump’s allegations are pretty serious but knowing Donald Trump however, it’s hard to believe that there are any factual basis to what he’s saying here.
Yes, it IS rather suspect that China agrees to an independent review of the origins of the coronavirus at the same time it’s announced that the country has pledged $2 billion to the WHO. At the same time however, Trump has also repeatedly tried to displace the pressure he’s facing for doing a sh*tty job at handling the pandemic by placing the blame on China for its failings in its coronavirus response.
Getting back to the letter, Trump holding funding to the WHO at ransom seems to have backfired spectacularly for him. In the conclusion to his letter, he writes that “repeated missteps” by Dr Tedros and the WHO had been “extremely costly for the world”.
The reality is that Trump is the one that’s making it costly for the world, but you can bet your house that he doesn’t see it that way. He ends his letter by calling for the organisation to commit to “major substantive improvements” within 30 days, without clarifying what exactly this means.
Given that he also wrote that “The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China,” I think we can all safely guess though.
