As the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 grows, Donald Trump looks for someone else to blame

WASHINGTON-This isn't a week where anyone in the U.S. has to go looking for problems. On Thursday morning, the New York Times reported the month's jobless claims reaching 22 million, the small business bailout program running out of money, insufficient testing capacity to lift social-distancing restrictions, and a grim nursing home crisis illustrated by 17 dead bodies discovered at facility in New Jersey.

So what was President Donald Trump's biggest announcement of the week? He's withholding U.S. funding from the World Health Organization (WHO). Someone must have botched this thing, and Trump has decided it's the WHO's turn on the firing line.

"The U.S. government has put a hold on funding to the WHO pending a review of the organization's coverup and mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak," Trump said Wednesday, and brought it up again in a video call with G7 leaders on Thursday morning.

With the benefit of hindsight, there's plenty of blame to go around. The WHO was initially kept in the dark by China, and remains slow to call that country out. But it was sounding the international alarm by late January, when Trump was saying coronavirus was completely under control. In mid-February, a WHO executive said China's internal lockdown was the correct strategic response, whereas in early March, Trump was telling infected people they could go to work. The WHO made a test available in late January, but the U.S. decided to develop its own, which caused weeks of delays.

An epidemiological model released Tuesday said shutting down the U.S. a week or two earlier could have saved tens of thousands of lives - a sentiment that the country's top expert in infectious diseases got into hot water for acknowledging recently. Dr. Anthony Fauci quickly walked that back while standing beside the president at a briefing, saying the question was hypothetical and, while earlier mitigation efforts would have saved more lives, you can't point fingers at people who were working with the best information they had at the time.

To paraphrase: hindsight is 20/20. And what we're reckoning with at this point in 2020 is the difficulty of foresight. Trump claims his own was perfect and that the WHO's was lacking. For that, he wants to punish it.

To what end? In addition to co-ordinating the international coronavirus response, the WHO is also trying to keep a lid on new outbreaks of ebola, polio and diphtheria. The U.S. is its largest source of funding. Is there any way that global health, or even U.S. health, benefits from this move?

"Nobody benefits from it except for Trump," said Robert Bothwell, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto's Munk School. "That's his only consideration."

It's also a very short-term benefit, he says, aimed at winning the news cycle and based on xenophobia and an impulse to blame someone else.

Bothwell says that for now, the practical considerations for the WHO may be minimal. "I think probably other people or other countries are going to step up to the plate on this," he said. "Don't forget, Bill Gates is the second-largest contributor to the WHO."

The bigger impact, Bothwell says, is a sharp reduction in U.S. influence on the WHO. "What would an international organization be like without the United States? Obviously, it would start performing in ways that simply ignored American views."

The immediate reaction from within the federal government had a different tone from Trump's. On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield said his organization continued to have "a productive public health relationship" with its "great partner" at the WHO. He said hindsight should wait: "I'd like to do the post mortem on this outbreak once we get through it together."

With the U.S. coronavirus death toll now over 30,000 and the number of new cases and deaths is still sharply rising, it would seem obvious there is enough to manage without picking fights about blame.

But pointing fingers is second nature to Trump. He's already made clear he takes no responsibility for the slow U.S. response, which experts seem to agree was a bigger factor than anything the WHO did or didn't do. Most also acknowledge the WHO was not perfect, and perhaps has been too deferential to China, which misled the world early on. But then, the WHO is a United Nations organization that must use careful diplomacy in addressing its operational concerns.

As Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University told Vox, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has praised China, "and perhaps he shouldn't have done it - but he also praised Trump, and perhaps he shouldn't have done that, either."

Trump is fixating on blame when doing so is unhelpful. He's accusing others of something he seems manifestly culpable for himself. He is taking an action that serves no immediately useful purpose and may hurt U.S. interests in the long run.

On the other hand, he's redirected some attention from this week's crisis headlines about the health and economy of the U.S.

"The choice of targets, by any rational calculation, it's insane," Bothwell said. "But, you know, very typical of Trump."

Edward Keenan is the Star's Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca