Trump on Disbanding WH Pandemic Office in 2018: "I Don't Like Having Thousands of People Around When You Don't Need Them."

Now that more than 25,000 Americans have lost their lives due COVID-19 accounting for more than 20% of the Coronavirus fatalities worldwide, President Trump needed a new villain and appears to have found it with the World Health Organization. On Tuesday, Trump announced he was cutting U.S. funding to the UN agency. The United States contributed $400 million per annum to the WHO.

One can more than reasonably criticize the WHO for being too far effusive in its praise of China's response to COVID-19. But let us not forget that it wasn't so long ago when Trump was equally effusive in his praise of Xi Jinping in this regard.

Criticize China and the WHO to your heart's content. They didn't force Trump to eliminate the White House Pandemic Response Team in May 2018. When recently confronted with this decision, Trump called the question nasty and denied all knowledge of it having ever happened. But at the time Trump was abundantly clear in his reasoning for disbanding the pandemic team:

We can get money, we can increase staff—we know all the people. This is a question I asked the doctors before. Some of the people we cut, they haven’t used for many, many years, and if we have ever need them we can get them very, very quickly. And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

The sentence highlighted in bold summarizes both Trump as a person and as a President. To him, it does not make business sense to have a pandemic response team until there is an actual pandemic. No wonder Trump sloughed off the Obama Administration's pandemic playbook they provided a week before leaving office in January 2017. To say nothing of the fact that President Bush released a plan for a flu pandemic in November 2005. Yet Trump keeps insisting that nobody saw this coming. I would suggest that everyone saw this coming except for Trump.

But even if Trump did see a pandemic coming he would have considered it a waste of money to have people making preparations and undertaking research to prevent something that probably wouldn't happen. Only it did happen and now we are paying the price for his laziness, lies and obfuscation with gaslighting complete with tiki torches. Millions have paid with our jobs and livelihood while more than 25,000 of us have paid with their lives with thousands more soon to follow.

China, of course, has plenty of culpability and the WHO has aided and abetted their conduct. But if we had a normal President of the United States, Democrat or Republican, we would not be leading the world in Coronavirus infections and deaths. But because we don't have a normal President of the United States who believes preparing for a pandemic isn't a priority and is bad for business we are leading the world in Coronavirus infections and deaths and it's going to get worse. This is the one thing in his presidency for which Donald Trump can take full credit.