In the comments section of his New York Times column titled “ Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True,” Nick Kristof wrote: “I think that President Trump and Elon Musk thought the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would be an easy target and could be a practice run for raiding something harder, like Medicaid. In reporting this story, I tried to put human faces on the aid cuts and appeal to readers' consciences, but I wonder whether it's more effective to appeal to the public's sense of self interest? Which arguments do you think are most effective in reaching people and changing minds?”
As a citizen advocate who has spent more than 40 years working to improve USAID, waves of grief keep coming over me due to the reckless and shameful dismemberment of the agency. Attempts by Musk and Trump to shut down USAID amount to vandalizing America’s soul.
Here's why I say that demolishing USAID is like vandalizing America’s soul, why it is wrong to decimate an agency that Elon Musk calls “evil” and “a criminal organization” that “needs to die” and that President Trump said is run by “lunatic radicals”. Listen to the late-U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) who, in 1982, spoke to our deepest aspirations as individuals and as a nation. In an Oregonian op-ed Hatfield wrote, “We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to eliminate hunger. Yet, we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few hundred feet of their target. This is not innovation; it is a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.”
USAID is not a perfect organization, but it is one key tool the U.S. has for correcting that distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Here’s an example of USAID’s importance. In the mid-1980s, globally, 3.5 million children were dying each year from six vaccine-preventable diseases (listen up RFK Jr.!): diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, polio, and tuberculosis. At the time, a dose of vaccine to prevent the greatest killer, measles, cost a mere six cents. By 2017, globally, an estimated 700,000 children died each year from these vaccine-preventable diseases—a reduction in child deaths of 80 percent.
USAID matters not only for what it does but for how it impacts other donor countries. In a New York Times interview in 2013, former UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Kul Chandra Gautam said that it was the U.S. leadership on child survival “….that led many other countries to come on board.” Will our abandonment of the world’s poorest children and their families lead other nations to follow our lead and result in an alarming rise in global child deaths?
Hearing about millions of lives saved can make our eyes glaze over and miss the impact on individuals. UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 1986 Report concluded with the words of Maria Auxilia Paja, a mother from a rural area in South America. A trained health worker arrived in her village but only after two of Paja’s children had already died, one from a respiratory infection and the other from measles. Paja said:
“For the baby boy, I tried to get help, but as I was carrying him for help, he just died in my arms. My daughter was older. I had got used to playing with her, being with her. It’s difficult. . . . It’s sad to remember those times with my children. She was alright when she went to bed. By midnight she was sick. She died just as day broke. I am not alone. It’s happened to a lot of women.”
“Maria Auxilia Paja is indeed not alone,” the report concluded. “In the last 12 months, approximately 15 million mothers like her have been forced to watch their children die.”
Because of the work of USAID and others, 10 million of those 15 million child deaths are now prevented each year, a two-thirds reduction in global child deaths. But with five million children still dying each year from mostly preventable causes, now is not the time to retreat from the parts of the aid budget that work.
We should locate wasteful spending in all areas of government but you don’t do that by firing USAID’s Inspector General and putting Elon Musk’s army of 20-somethings in charge. The Congress should do its job; protect effective aid and remove any abuse. When the Senate approved a continuing resolution in early March to extend federal funding for the remainder of the fiscal year, they voted down, by a vote of 73-27, an amendment introduced by Sen. Rand Paul that would cut foreign assistance funding by $16 billion. Twenty-seven Republicans voted against Sen. Paul’s amendment to cut foreign aid. Maybe some in Congress are finding their conscience (and some backbone).
Andrew Natsios, a lifelong Republican who ran USAID under President George W. Bush, said that what Musk and Rubio are doing “is criminal”. I agree with Natsios and I think Hatfield would too. I look at what Musk, Trump and Rubio are doing and see a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of “ Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy ” (Rivertowns Books, 2025 paperback) and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.