President Trump said Saturday he was weighing the possibility of rejoining the World Health Organization, just days after signing an executive order withdrawing the United States from the international group.
“Maybe we would consider doing it again, I don’t know, they have to clean it up a bit,” the president said at a a rally at Las Vegas’ Circa Resort & Casino.
Trump threw out the idea while bemoaning how the US pays more than its fair share to the 194-nation group, contrasting the $500 million the US doles out — compared to China, who he said pays just $39 million despite its much larger 1.4 billion population.
The president has long ripped the organization for what he’s called a “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms,” and has described the U.S. financial contribution as “onerous.”
In the final year of his first administration, Trump began making steps to yank the United States from the WHO. After losing the election to Joe Biden, however, the Democratic president ultimately blocked the effort on his first day in office.
Trump also alerted the crowd that he would be working with Congress to pass a bill that not only cut their taxes, but also fulfilled his campaign promise first floated in June to prevent any taxes on workers’ tips.
“Your tips will be 100% yours, won’t that be nice?” he marveled.
He also revealed he was looking to halt the hiring over 80,000 new IRS agents, many of whom had salaries funded by $72 billion provided for the federal agency under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“They hired, or tried to hire, 88,000 workers to go after you and we’re in the process of developing a plan to either terminate all of them, or maybe we’ll move them to the border,” he said.
The president, dropping by Las Vegas at the tail end of his frenetic inauguration week, gushed to his supporters that they helped him become the first Republican presidential candidate to win in Nevada in decades, besting Vice President Kamala Harris by 46,000 votes.
“I just came here because I wanted to thank the people of Nevada for giving us such a big win,” he said.
Trump also shared a slew of executive actions he signed off on to undo the work of the Biden administration while making good on campaign promises, including closing the border and restoring law and order.
“This week alone I took nearly 350 executive actions to reverse the horrible failures and betrayals that were inherited from a group of people that didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” Trump said.
“Our message couldn’t be more clear: America’s decline is over.”
With Post wires.
