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.