President Donald Trump claimed that “nobody knows” how many people make up the American population.
Speaking at the Circa Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon, Trump boasted about the flurry of executive orders he signed and Biden-era policies he reversed during his first week back in the White House. One of those was withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
“We paid $500 million a year and China paid $39 million a year despite a much larger population,” he told the crowd, he erupted in cheers after Trump reminisced on the WHO withdrawal.
Those amounts didn’t correlate to the countries’ populations, he argued.
“They paid $39 million, they have 1.4 billion people. We’re paying $500 million, we have — nobody knows what the hell we have,” Trump said.
America has 331 million people, according to census data - and Trump is president to everyone.
The 47th president then pivoted to discussing migration at the southern border: “We have so many people pouring in. We have no idea.”
“We’re going down a little bit now,” he said. “We’re going to throw some bad ones out.”
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump signed the executive order initiating the U.S. withdrawal from the global health body.
“World Health ripped us off,” Trump said as he signed.
WHO members are required to give one year’s notice and fulfill existing funding obligations before leaving, meaning Monday’s order starts the one-year clock.
The order states: “The WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.”
Health experts have warned about the consequences of pulling out of the WHO, with some saying the order made Americans “less safe.”
