Trump’s attack on the WHO over coronavirus is an incredibly desperate act of international harm

Editorial: Even if the organisation has been wrong on occasion, this is not the moment for it to be starved of money or reformed. This is an emergency. The US president should deal with it accordingly

President Donald Trump speaking at his daily briefing on Tuesday (Stefani Reynolds/Pool)

After a bad day at the office, most might choose to take out their frustrations in the gym, relax with a novel, or settle for a nice cool gin and tonic. Not Donald Trump. When he gets criticised and contradicted he takes it out on the nearest international body – the World Health Organisation. Even if it has been said all too often before, he has gone too far.

Fresh from a new round of accusations that he complacently ignored the coronavirus epidemic (“a fake”) for too long (which he did), that he is acting unconstitutionally to override state governors (which he is) and is being abandoned on this issue by previously reliable friends such as Fox News (at last) he reacted in the only way he knows – by turning on the WHO, the only global agency devoted to public health and the control of pandemics. For low-income countries in particular, this will prove a disaster. Squeezed as they are, the other richer nations must make up the deficit left behind by America’s monumental act of spite.

Even by the petulant, childish, abjectly self-defeating standards of this devalued White House, it is a ridiculous and, far worse, deeply damaging thing to do. Even so, it isn’t entirely irrational. As an instinctive distraction tactic, it fits in well with the long-established Trumpian pattern of chucking a dead cat on the table when things start to get a bit tense. It is designed, albeit crudely, to pass the blame for the suffering and needless death of thousands of Americans onto a UN agency with zero executive power over the United States government. It might play well with “the base”, as the November election nears, but most Americans must see this for what it is – an act of national self-harm and international outrage. It is desperate.

Of course, the WHO is not incapable of improvement. It is, like so much of the United Nations organisation and its many agencies, flawed. Nor is the animosity between Washington and the UN anything new. Republican and Democrat presidents as far back as Ronald Reagan have been holding back funds for Unesco, and the UN has been in a near-permanent state of hostility about US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East. Many Americans view it with mistrust. The UN did, after all, promote the likes of Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi to goodwill ambassadors, icons of its unworldly eccentricity, at best.

It may be true, as well, just as President Trump alleges, that the WHO had too much faith in early optimistic Chinese assessments of the spread of Covid-19. Its initial warnings were muted. Yet the WHO has been consistently right about the central question of testing – Trump’s key failing – and on strict lockdowns. Yet even if the WHO has been wrong on occasion, this is not the moment for it to be starved of money or reformed. This is an emergency.

The WHO needs the resources to do its job across the world and to help save lives. It should be free to speak out with its expert advice. Instead, it is being bullied into agreeing with Mr Trump’s version of science, the half-baked ideas of a man publicly rebuked by his own health chiefs.

Mr Trump cannot pronounce half of the long scientific words on the script he laboriously lumbers through in his daily “ratings hit” news conferences. They are tuned into all over the world, yes, because this is America speaking, but also because the world cannot believe the spectacle of this inarticulate man trying and failing to deal with a pandemic that has simply overwhelmed his powers of comprehension. Kicking the WHO just confirms the terrible reality that when the world needs a leader, all it has is a vain bully.