The Trump administration's massacres have used up the days of the week; we'll need to start adding 1s and 2s, then on to double and most likely triple digits.
The latest victims of Trump and his thrill-killers are workers at, and for, the U.S. Agency for International Development. They addressed — emphasis on past tense — urgent needs in over 100 countries, primarily humanitarian improvements in health, economic development, poverty and disaster relief.
The number of workers ranged from 10,000 to 14,000, if one includes foreign nationals and contractors. Today there are roughly 290 of them — and I do mean roughly. Also canceled are about 800 of the agency's awards and contracts.
The massacre's chief coconspirator — once known to Trump as 'Lil Marco, now littler than ever — "claims that @USAID lifesaving assistance for health and humanitarian needs will
continue," wrote Atul Gawande, assistant administrator of the bureau of global health in the Biden administration, on social media.
"But," he continued, "his team just communicated that the entire agency will be imminently reduced from 14,000 to just 294 people." And Gawande communicated that Trump-Rubio's plan will leave all of "12 people focused on Africa, eight focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, 21 on the Middle East and eight on Asia," per The NY Times.
Maybe not even that "many." Although the Times reported that the cuts "were communicated to agency leaders in a call on Thursday," today, Trump bellowed on Truth Social, "CLOSE IT DOWN!"
Also in caps, of course, which I won't further inflict on you, he wrote "USAID is driving the radical left crazy, and there is nothing they can do about it because the way in which the money has been spent, so much of it fraudulently, is totally unexplainable. The corruption is at levels rarely seen before."
Trump should have written that the fraud is unexplained, since he explained nothing about it. Then again, he never does when hurling baseless accusations. As for government corruption at "levels rarely seen before." That, perhaps, was a joke. Elon Musk has called the agency a "criminal organization."
In this killing machine of an autocracy, such kidding appears to be contagious. In a Fox News interview this week, Rubio said his appropriation of U.S.A.I.D. was "not about getting rid of foreign aid." Next came the "But now we have rank insubordination." The agency's employees had been "completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control."
Insert your unbelieving chuckles here — twice. He knew as a fact the sociopathic autocrat is getting rid of foreign aid." So also here, picture Marco quickly grabbing a glass of water to quench his lying mouth. Plus his contention that Trump's shambolic regime is capable of bringing anything under control is surely the knee-slapper of the week.
If the world had doubts about the dictator's mental stability after he threatened America's two largest trading partners with ungrounded punitive tariffs, it has them no longer. In less than three weeks Trump has decimated the United States' dependability on matters from economic stability to just plain human decency.
He may be able to keep his indecent voters in the dark for a while, though. "On Monday, the [State Department] issued a stop-work order to companies employing about 60 contractors in Washington who work on democracy and human rights issues." The firms also "focus[ed] on authoritarian states."
Leaving a foreign aid vacuum into which China is happy to step, further diminishing US influence abroad and enhancing China's.
I'm still scared of what Elon and the Hitler Youth boys are doing at Treasury.
Of course, the chaser to this particular shot is that much, if not most, of that USAID spending was going to…Americans! Like the $2 billion it spent in 2020 buying excess American grain and produce from farmers who probably voted for Trump. Doh!