President Trump praises a “strong, sharp and powerfully focused” Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. “President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” Trump said.

This offended some Americans. At a time when many Chinese are criticizing Xi for initially covering up the outbreak, should America’s president really side with a dictator who punished doctors rather than listening to them?

That critique seems right to me. But a focus on China’s failures or on Trump’s praise risks distracting from our own failures in health care — and this is where Trump’s actions have been more destructive than his words. He has proposed enormous budget cuts for Medicaid, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; if carried out, these would leave the U.S. more vulnerable to a pandemic.

But whatever happens with the coronavirus, America’s health system is a mess. That is a consequence of failures that go way back, and Trump is now compounding them. In particular, his lawsuit to destroy Obamacare without offering anything to take its place is the height of irresponsibility; it’s not policy but vandalism.