President Donald Trump wants everyone to believe him when he claims that nations around the world have praised his response to the coronavirus pandemic, but former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd penned a scathing op-ed revealing what the world really thinks.
Trump’s response to the coronavirus has resulted in the United States having the highest death toll of any other country and the most confirmed cases. Both numbers are only going to rise uncontrollably in the weeks and months ahead because Republicans are abandoning social distancing and stay-at-home policies. Trump hasn’t made the crisis any better either, with his promotion of false treatments for the virus, including injecting disinfectants into the body and taking hydroxychloroquine.
Despite the unfolding disaster on his watch that he is responsible for causing, no matter how much he protests, Trump has claimed that other nations have called him to praise his handling of the crisis.
But we all know that Trump often lies about these phone calls, and it really seems unlikely that other nations would congratulate him for the ongoing mass suffering we are going through right now.
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That’s why it’s important to know what other former and current world leaders actually think about what Trump is doing, and we got a glimpse of that from the former Australian PM.
“The world has watched in horror as an American president acts not as the leader of the free world but as a quack apothecary recommending unproven ‘treatments,'” Rudd wrote in a piece published by Foreign Affairs. “It has seen what ‘America First’ means in practice: don’t look to the United States for help in a genuine global crisis, because it can’t even look after itself. Once there was the United States of the Berlin airlift. Now there is the image of the USS Theodore Roosevelt crippled by the virus, reports of the administration trying to take exclusive control of a vaccine being developed in Germany, and federal intervention to stop the commercial sale of personal protective equipment to Canada. The world has been turned on its head.”
Indeed, Trump is even seizing shipments of protective gear meant for the states, robbing them of critical supplies to fight the pandemic and forcing governors to make secret purchases from other nations and hide the supplies in undisclosed locations.
Such behavior from the federal government just doesn’t make any sense. If states have been given everything they need as Trump claims, why seize the shipments?
Rudd went on to point out that Trump winning re-election would be disastrous for the United States and the world, but would greatly benefit China by continuing to create a power vacuum on the international stage.
“The Trump administration,” Rudd wrote, is “weakening the U.S. alliance structure (which in conventional strategic logic would have been central to maintaining a balance of power against Beijing) and systematically delegitimizing multilateral institutions (effectively creating a political and diplomatic vacuum for China to fill). The result has been an increasingly dysfunctional and chaotic world.”
Trump’s decision to defund the World Health Organization is the latest such example of American retreat that benefited the Chinese, who stepped in to fill some of the gaps and play a larger role in the organization.
So, the world isn’t praising Trump. They’re laughing at him while at the same time fearing how bad things could get if he wins a second term. Our reputation around the globe is toast and even our allies can’t trust us. At some point, the entire world is going to turn against us. And Trump is to blame.
Featured image via screenshot
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