Isolated
The other G7 countries don’t want Trump at their lunch table right now.
Donald Trump found himself isolated among western leaders at a virtual G7 summit, as they expressed strong support for the World Health Organization after the US’s suspension of its funding.
Health officials around the world have condemned the US president’s decision to stop his country’s funding for the UN agency, amid a crisis that has left more than 2 million people infected and almost 140,000 dead.
Yes but the infections and deaths don’t matter, all that matters is Trump.
Immediately after the hour-long conference call, a spokesman for Angela Merkel said that the German chancellor had argued that “the pandemic can only be overcome with a strong and co-ordinated international response”. The spokesman said Merkel “expressed support for the WHO as well as a number of other partners”.
The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “There is a need for international coordination and the WHO is an important part of that collaboration and coordination. We recognise that there have been questions asked, but at the same time it is really important we stay coordinated as we move through this.”
The Gates Foundation also announced an extra $150m (£120m) donation, in a move the WHO welcomed.
The Gates Foundation was already donating as much as the US, so now it’s donating significantly more than the US did until Trump yanked it back.
In a statement after the summit, the EU council president, Charles Michel, called on world leaders to contribute to an international online pledging conference on 4 May to “enhance general preparedness and ensure adequate funding to develop and deploy a vaccine against coronavirus”.
…
The EU statement also sent a shot across Trump’s bows by stressing “multilateralism should be at the core of the action”. The EU also stressed that its pledging conference should be devoted to building African resilience, a theme that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, stressed at the G7 conference.
Never mind shooting across his bows, just fucking sink him.
It is fortunate that the Founding Fathers could see so clearly the dangers of absolute monarchy, and thought up the ‘balance of powers’.
Trump is a modern Captain Queeg, but less the charm. However, there does not appear to be any unrest or murmurings among his crew, let alone signs of mutiny. The captain of the SS Republican Party is on course for a reef, and nobody aboard appears at all concerned. Pretty amazing stuff.
Omar,
Perhaps it’s that the crew don’t think they’ll drown when they hit the reef because…. well, they won’t. It’s the engineers working in the bowels of the ship and the catering staff serving martinis as the waves crash over the deck who’ll be at the back of the queue for lifeboats.
One of the major imbalances between the haves and havents is that the haves always get another chance to have no matter how badly they screw up. The havents – even supposing they get a first chance – don’t get a second even if they’re not the ones screwing up.
latsot:
Granted. But that still leaves open the question as to why the catering staff don’t storm the bridge and brain the captain with anything handy: whisky bottles, decanters, trays of oysters; anything.
Perhaps loyalty feeds on itself; like changing horses in midstream To paraphrase MacBeth: “I am in shit waded in so deep, that to return were as tedious as go o’er.”
It’s a mystery.
Omar,
Even if the mutineers were praised for saving the ship, nobody would hire them afterwards. But the captain and crew would fail upwards into new jobs with higher compensation and a lucrative white-washing book deal about the tragedy, ghost-written by someone on a zero-hours contract.
Maybe.
But isn’t the captain supposed to go down with his ship?
;-)
Things that are filled with hot air float.