THE WORST

 

Now that the first year of Donald Trump's term is coming to a close, instead of trying to cover the dizzying amount of terrible things that he has done, from Tariffs to ICE raids, I've decided to focus on the one thing that he did that may stand as the largest art of cruelty ever committed by any president.  Or, at the very  least, the worst thing that any modern president has ever done.

This requires a little history: the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, was a program first created by the Kennedy administration back in 1961.  It's goal was a humanitarian one: to provide food, medicine, educational assistance and  other forms of aid to places in the world in desperate need.  It's goals were not entirely altruistic as it was seen as part of the cold war, with the assumption that countries getting aid from the US would be less likely to fall under Communist influence.

Over the years the agency has endured under presidents from both parties.  In fact, it was Republican, President George W Bush who worked with USAID and other  agencies to create the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR,  a program that is believed to have saved millions of lives all around the world.

While it delivered aid  around the world, the USAID agency only cost the tax payers a pittance; the amount of our federal budget going to the program rarely reached more than one percent in any year since it began.  But, sadly, the American public have never understood just how little we were spending on aid to foreign countries.  According to Our World in Data, a Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll done earlier this year found that most Americans thought that aid to foreign countries made up around a quarter of our budget, with only 30% correctly saying that was less than 5%.  

Given the public's ignorance on this issue, it's no surprise that USAID became a prime target when Trump allowed ketamine addled narcissist Elon Musk and his band of inexperienced tech bros known as DOGE to start cutting at what was seen as unnecessary government waste earlier this year. While DOGE was wildly incompetent and released a list of its so called accomplishments that was riddled with errors and exaggerations, it was, tragically, able to successfully gut the USAID program.  In a moment that was truly staggering in its callous casualness, Musk sent out a tweet saying that he had thrown USAID into the "wood chipper".  He would then go on to constantly lie about the devastating effects of those cuts, even though every  analysis said that they were absolutely that.   

How devastating?  Well, with 83% of its budget now slashed, a study from the medical journal, the Lancet released last June said that the death toll by 2030 could be as high as fourteen million.  Think of that.  All just to save less than one percent of our national budget.  Or to put it in raw numbers, the country spent around thirty five billion dollars on USAID in 2024 before Trump came to office,   Last year the Trump administration gave over thirty billion to farmers affected by his tariffs and twenty billion to bail out the right wing Argentinian  government.  In other words, DOGE and Trump cut USAID because it was an easy target that wouldn't effect most Americans, not because it wasted money.

Looking back over the various presidents that have ruled in my lifetime, I am hard pressed to find anything so stunningly destructive to the world than what Musk and Trump have done by cutting USAID.  Together the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man have ended programs that will result in the death of millions of the world's most vulnerable people and shrugged it off as if it was nothing.  If there were any justice in the world, Musk and Trump would remembered as the men responsible for negligent genocide.

WAR CRIMES

 

Recently the Trump administration has continued to bomb boats from Venezuela that it claims were carrying drugs on them.  The explanation given  is that  the drug dealers were enemies in our war on drugs. After the first bombing back in September happened, Geoffrey Corn, a retired uniformed lawyer who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said “I think it’s a terrible precedent.  We’ve crossed a line here.”  Sadly, the Trump administration continued the bombing, even as some Republicans in congress balked at the news that the first bombing attack  hit the boat twice, killing two survivors who were hanging onto the wreckage when  the second bombing hit, in open violation of the rules of engagement.

While Trump has been claiming that all of the attacks are legitimate and  even claimed  that “Every boat that we knock out ,we save 25,000 American lives.”  the notion that these attacks are justified as part of our  nations's war on drugs is absurd; for one thing, even if the boats were bound for America, they would have carried cocaine and not the far more dangerous fentanyl, which comes across the Mexican border and not from Venezuela, so the notion that the bombings saved so many American lives is preposterous.  Another point could be made that ferrying illegal drugs is not a capitol offense worthy of the death penalty, and that having the US harbor patrol stop and search the boats would not only have prevented the loss of lives, it would have allowed the drug dealers to be interrogated, which could lead to more arrests.  And to make matters really quite insane, last month Trump pardoned  Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US and was about to serve a forty five year sentence.  So much for cracking down on illegal drug deals!

It's clear that what Trump wants is not to blow up a few boats, but to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. To that end he has already mobilized the US Navy around that country and recently had a Venezuelan  oil tanker seized.

Now, it must be said that Maduro is a corrupt leader who has jailed opponents, wrecked Venezuela's  economy and caused millions to flee the country since he took power in 2013.  And, yes, it appears that he has cut deals with illegal drug traders, although he denies this.  So a case could be made that removing him may be the right thing to do, although it really appears that Trump is more interested in getting access to Venezuelan oil reserves than in taking out a dictator.  Either way,  Trump and his administration seem to have come to  the conclusion that Marduro must go.  However, as we found out in the Iraq war of 2004, it's much easier to remove a corrupt leader than it is  to replace one while also trying to  stabilize a country militarily.  It is therefore understandable for the American public to expect the Trump administration to explain to us just why we need to possibly risk American lives to force Madero out.  Even though I always opposed the Iraq war, at least George W Bush's administration attempted to make as strong a case as possible for the invasion.  The Trump administration is just gearing up for some kind of attack with little to no communication with the public.  This is especially galling given that recent polls show a whopping 70% of the American public oppose such an invasion.  

One of the many troubling things about the second Trump term is his administration's attitude that they know what's best without even bothering to inform the publics about it's motivations.  For example,  when Trump was questioned about pardoning that drug lord, he vaguely shrugged it off by saying he heard that  Hernández had been framed by Biden, as if that was a legitimate answer.  Of course, Trump is really more the cult leader of the Republican party than he is a president, and like any cult leader, he hates to be questioned about his decisions.  And so the country may soon be in another war based on an oil grab carried out by a president who couldn't care less about the consequences.  We continue to live in unprecedented and horrifying time in this country.