THE SPEED OF THE CRUELTY has been stunning.
In a matter of a few weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, has decimated America’s main provider of global humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work.
USAID accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With those funds, it has been responsible for building field hospitals in war-ravaged Syria and removing land mines in Cambodia, funding vaccination programs in Nigeria and access to food, water, electricity, and basic health care for millions of people in eastern Congo. It contained a major outbreak of Ebola a decade ago and prevented massive famine in southern Africa in the 1990s. More than 3 million lives are saved every year through USAID immunization programs.
People who have worked in international development for decades will tell you that there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in.
On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been fired or put on administrative leave, the website taken down and signage removed from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, enjoining the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on leave, but the chaos has already generated a global humanitarian crisis.
Many small organizations that relied on USAID have shut down; even the largest ones have been severely weakened. One survey reports that about a quarter of nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.
The New York Times reports that funding for treatment for infants born in Uganda with HIV has been stopped, while in South Africa, researchers were forced to end an HIV-prevention trial, leaving women with experimental implants inside their bodies and without ongoing medical oversight. A cholera-treatment trial has been abandoned in Bangladesh. Patients have been told to leave refugee hospitals in Thailand. Soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan have been closed.
As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the HIV-prevention organization AVAC, told the Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works. Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”
A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”
IT WAS NOT ENOUGH for Trump and Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to unleash mass suffering and death with the stroke of a pen. They had to slander USAID and spread lies about the agency in the process.
Musk has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.” It is, according to Musk, “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”
“Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X.
For his part, Trump said USAID is a “tremendous fraud” and claimed that the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.”
In order to promote this calumny, Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have unleashed an avalanche of falsehoods and disinformation. Not that USAID should be above criticism: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has argued, it can be overreliant on contractors, endlessly bureaucratic, and prone to paying consultants with money that could be better used elsewhere. But none of that matches up with the way Musk and Trump have described it. And authoritarian leaders from around the world are now celebrating the destruction of one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.
Six years ago, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote of Trump and his movement that “the cruelty is the point.” That has never been more clear than in the president’s decision to demolish USAID. The cost savings will be minimal; the carnage will be massive. And all of the agony that will be unleashed by this decision—the cries of pain that Trump will never hear, the tears of grief Musk will never see—is not accidental. It was done with malice. This is what Trump and MAGA represent, what lies at their moral core. To be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in what they are doing.
FOR THE PAST six years, Anne Linn has worked for the President’s Malaria Initiative, another U.S. program. But she lost her job earlier this month because of Trump and Musk’s actions. Her contract with PMI was canceled.
She’s proud of her work, and proud of the fact that in the 30 countries where PMI has been operating, the malaria mortality rate has been reduced by half since President George W. Bush launched the initiative, in 2006. (Malaria still kills more than half a million people each year, about three-quarters of whom are children under 5.)
Linn is aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image in the world and helps economies prosper. But that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.
“As a Christian,” Linn wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I was compelled by the Gospel, the words of Jesus, to use my life to try to diminish suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.”
She was doing that until Trump and Musk set their sights on USAID. Now, she wrote, “children, children of God, will die unnecessarily.”
In an interview with Time, Linn put it this way: “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?”
She’s worried that their suffering will increase because bed nets used to protect people from malaria are still in the warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them have a stop-work order. She spoke of her fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?” she asked. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be okay with this.”
Linn’s question—Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?—haunts me and many others like me. No group is more responsible for the reign of Trump than white evangelicals. In 2024, for the third time, they voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump. Most white evangelicals will not, under any circumstances, break with him. They are beholden to him.
They read the same words of Jesus as Linn does, but whereas those words have led her to relieve suffering for the world’s most vulnerable, many white evangelicals have ended up in a different place. They are in lockstep with a man who is taking delight in destroying an agency whose decimation will dramatically increase suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.
It is a remarkable thing to witness. There are tens of millions of men and women who are regular churchgoers, who attend Bible studies and Sunday-school classes and listen to Christian worship music, and who would raise a ruckus if anyone in Church leadership interpreted the Bible in a way that deviated even slightly from their doctrine on any number of issues.
And yet, many of these same people insist that their faith commitments have led them to support a president for whom the cruelty is the point. As a result, there is, somewhere in Kenya right now, a mother of three asking, “If I die, who will take care of my children?” Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care. It turns out that millions and millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus don’t, either.
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