Sometimes it’s like banging your head against a wall. David in Pittsburgh called my SiriusXM program last week to defend Donald Trump gutting the United States Agency for International Development.
MAGA morons and Fox fantasists have convinced themselves that there’s a massive amount of waste—using few dubious claims and some known outright lies—about agency that was less than 1% of the budget.
Even Marco Rubio—before he was Trump’s lapdog secretary of state—defended USAID on the Senate floor over and over, and urged the Biden administration to expand the program to blunt China’s influence. Now he’s part o the mob that’s gutting the agency and literally taking the sign off the building—even as a judge blocked Trump from placing 2200 people on leave.
The facts are clear. The programs have done an enormous amount of humanitarian good. But the tiny investment for the U.S. also helps the keep governments stable, and stops them from collapsing and turning to our adversies.
As I said to David, “if you want to be the big guy on the block,” you have to look out for your neighbors.
He couldn’t quite grasp how this worked, and said that there was waste—which, even if it is true, you could cut, without killing the entire agency.
Listen in to get a sense of how the MAGA mind works—or doesn’t. And let me know your thoughts!