Trump to World: Drop Dead
TUCSON — Nightmare plots don't get crazier: Mars-Obsessed Muskrat Attacks With a Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight! Pour a cup of tariff-free Colombian coffee, get a world map and imagine a revived American dream that extends beyond borders.
A groundswell of outrage building fast across the country offers hope. Whether that can rescue an imperiled United States and a planet on the boil depends on how many Americans see global reality as it is.
One syntax-challenged Elon Musk X-tweet rises above so much other insanity: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead." The agency, he contends, is evil and criminal.
Seeing that, I thought of the colorful painting on my office wall in France. Mobutu Sese Seko and two other presidents wave to a cheering crowd from a Lincoln convertible in 1967 to herald a short-lived "democracy": the United States of Central Africa.
A Kinshasa street artist painted it on a cut-open, stretched flour sack marked "U.S. Agency for International Development" with its logo of clasped hands.
The CIA helped murder leftist Patrice Lumumba, one more case of foreign policy losing hearts and minds across the world. But the agency John F. Kennedy created to relieve poverty, protect health and build infrastructure made Americans the good guys.
During Mobutu's 32 years as Washington's son of a bitch and chaos that followed, at least 10 million Congolese — perhaps double that; no one was counting — have been killed in war and rebellion or died of malnutrition and preventable diseases.
The New York Times just displayed photos from the lake country near Goma. It was what I saw in 1967 and in 1994 when Rwandan refugees fled genocide. USAID workers helped victims of new mass killings, rape and starvation.
USAID likely does more than anything else to curb migration, terrorism, runaway pathogens and Chinese hegemony. Its $38 billion budget in 2024 was well below 1 percent of federal spending. Americans spent nearly four times as much on pets.
Over the decades, the agency has saved millions of lives abroad while protecting Americans at home. Today, the dreaded Ebola virus is spreading in Uganda. USAID was working to ensure no one carried it on international flights. No longer.
Musk ordered all 1,500 USAID people abroad to drop everything and come home. After taking its website wth vital research and data amassed over decades, he announced he was slashing its 4,000-member staff to 290.
More on this below. But, for now, a question: How that does not count as a crime against humanity?
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"Hope Dies Last," the title of Alan Weisman's new book, is a grim alarm. Yet its subtitle is "Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future." Hope is still alive and kicking hard.
After watching things fall apart for so long in so many places, I am no deluded optimist. But growing throngs of people besieging senators' and congressmen's offices make clear that America is not Animal Farm.
Lawmakers grovel at Trump's feet to keep their place at the public trough. If enough constituents they are sworn to serve raise unremitting hell, the sort of plutocrats Orwell depicted as pigs who walk upright are bound to be figurative pork roast.
Beyond the risk of nuclear war, Earth is headed toward climatic endgame. That might be mitigated, if not avoided. Yet the country best placed to lead the way is hurtling in the opposite direction.
When I wrote in 2016 that Trump planned a creeping coup, it seemed like hair-on-fire Chicken Little delirium. I'm hardly prescient, but I've covered enough brazen putsches to know the early signs. Today, look around and decide for yourself.
If you're reading this from across America's insulating oceans, the nightmare beggars belief.
A malignantly narcissist president — greedy and ignorant beyond words yet gifted with cult-leader charisma — is intent on empire. His latest idea is to colonize Gaza with U.S. troops, evict people with ancient roots, and erect a gaudy Trump-style Club Med.
Musk wants the universe. He came from South Africa via Canada. As the Washington Post reported, he is liable to deportation for violating his student visa terms. Yet as an unelected Rasputin, he treats the Constitution like toilet paper and citizens like serfs.
German-born Peter Thiel was also raised in white-ruled South Africa. He has a New Zealand passport as a backup Plan B. In the après-Trump, JD Vance, his puppet reverse Robin Hood, can fleece the poor in a nation run by plutocrats and Christian zealots.
People with short memories forgot how Joe Biden blunted the Covid calamity Trump caused and contained global conflict Trump's folly left behind. Fixated on egg and gas prices, voters ignored what the Economist called Biden's envy-of-the-world economy.
The landslide Republicans claim was razor-thin, helped by an outdated Electoral College system, gerrymandering and voter suppression. Democrats are investigating Trump's broad hint that Musk used his computer savvy to affect the vote count.
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Musk apparently targeted USAID because he thought Americans were too absorbed with themselves to notice. That is the danger of an uber-rich mercurial scofflaw without human empathy who shoots from the hip.
In fact, the agency spends $2 billion a year on excess grain from American farmers, which U.S.-registered ships take to foreign ports. Tons of it are destined to rot on African docks as Sudanese, Somalis and others starve.
As protests defended the agency across the nation, Trump thumbed on his phone: “CLOSE IT DOWN!” Giving no evidence, he accused it of rampant corruption, fraud and demanding kickbacks when it granted aid.
He said USAID was run by "radical Left lunatics." That hardly describes Samantha Power, whose intimate grasp of global complexity takes some explaining.
Power is an Irish American, born in London and schooled in America. After a history degree at Yale, she spent three years reporting on war in Bosnia, then got a Harvard law degree. Her book on genocide, the first of many, won a Pulitzer.
Walter Isaacson caught the essence of "Chasing the Flame," her biography of a beloved United Nations peacemaker: "The best way to understand today's messy world is to read about the inspiring life and diplomatic genius of Sergio Vieira de Mello."
Vieira de Mello, a polyglot Brazilian, kept his U.N. mission out of the Green Zone in Baghdad to make clear its humanitarian work had nothing to do with the military. A terrorist truck bomb killed him in 2003.
Barack Obama put Power on the National Security Council, then at the U.N. as ambassador. Biden named her administrator of USAID so her diplomatic skills and prodigious knowledge could fine-tune targeted aid.
In the past, USAID was often lumbered with bureaucracy, at times focused on grand projects to please dictators to win U.N. votes against the Soviet Union in nonaligned countries. Seldom partisan, it was the opposite of corrupt.
Dictators and their inner circles often siphoned off aid from donor countries. As a safeguard, strict accounting was too cumbersome to fund small NGO projects. USAID focused more on obvious tangible results rather than long-term social development.
In Kinshasa, I saw a dead-obvious need for schools. Belgians had educated kids up to high-school level. After independence in 1960, schools barely functioned. By 1967, the Congo had only a handful of university graduates.
I asked the local USAID chief about funding schools. "Too long-term," he replied. That began to change with Andrew Natsios under George W. Bush, especially after 9/11.
Natsios, a staunch conservative, told an MSNBC interviewer he was livid over Trump's "radical left" remarks and heartsick at callous treatment of people who work hard in harrowing conditions. Over the years, 99 USAID workers have been killed on the job.
They are often in remote places, learning local languages from friends at all levels of society. I've often found them to be far better sources than embassy-bound State Department diplomats.
Natsios said USAID was first to respond when a 2004 tsunami struck Aceh in Indonesia, killing 170,000 people. Afterward, he said, a poll by five major newspapers in the world's largest Muslim country saw U.S. popularity spike from 37 percent to 57 percent.
U.S. intelligence learned that Osama bin Laden was furious, he added. Al Qaeda's approval rating dropped by the same 20-point spread.
Natsios and Power stressed jubilance among authoritarians intent on undermining democracy. China, in particular. Xi Jinping has been gaining influence across the global south with soft-loan aid that gives him political clout and access to strategic resources.
Power made the overall point in a talk with Stephen Colbert: "We are the ground game for American policy, and we are the face of American values."
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Those values have taken a sharp right turn inward in America. Many of the world's other 95 percent scorn what they see as bullying bluster with disregard for their own intractable crises. Trashing USAID does much to increase that.
This morning, I passed a gaggle of protesters outside a family planning center. One woman kneeled in prayer, motionless as a mime. Others carried signs excoriating abortion. One simply read, "LOVE."
Views on abortion are personal; "pro-life" advocates have a right to express their view. But the world notices when demonstrators sing, "Jesus loves the little babies," yet focus only on those in their own line of sight. Why not save millions who are already born?
Rural farmers in Georgia are proud of the magical peanut paste they supply to USAID. Power says they can bring a starving kid back to life. Feeding clinics were just another casualty, along with experts helping governments renegotiate loans from China.
Farther on, two men held signs reading, "Billionaires don't own us yet." I stopped at a third man, with a big cardboard square: "SAVE USAID."
He was a public health epidemiologist who joined the Peace Corps in Afghanistan during the 1960s and did a stint in Malawi in 2012. He praised Bush's PEPFAR initiative against HIV and other diseases, which saved 26 million African lives.
But he was dismayed at Bush's refusal to fund birth control on a continent suffering because of so many new mouths that families could not feed. Some thrive and do well. Others turn to crime or terrorism. And many besiege European or U.S. borders.
We talked about how USAID under Power had helped to reduce birth rates, provide medical care and schooling. Finally, I asked his name. "I'd rather not say," he told me, clearly embarrassed. "I don't want to face any harassment."
Those encounters typify the American nightmare.
Trump's hardcore following includes Evangelicals who excuse his own blatant sins for what they see as a greater good. His fascistic Christian soldiers use death threats some are ready to carry out to enforce his whims.
For Trump, green means money. USAID's environmental work counters his "drill, baby, drill" obsession. Its quiet diplomacy thwarts his tariff-threatening, missile-rattling quest for transactional "deals."
Before Rachel Maddow interviewed Power, she displayed a New York Times headline: "Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency." As they talked, footage showed huge demonstrations on both coasts and in the farming heartland.
Maddow asked if those crowds matter. "I think they matter massively," Power said.
Reaction is building. Bill Gates met with Power to offer support. Like others who battle HIV-AIDS, he fears that when treatments that contain the virus and prevent contagion are stopped, drug-resistant variants could start a new global epidemic.
The precipitous USAID shutdown now faces court challenges, like so many other decrees, dismissals and disruptions. Trump's creeping coup is nearing its most critical stage. Citizens who move beyond hope to urgent, persistent action can stop it.