Trump-Musk Scandal at USAID Takes Unnerving Turn With Vile
Leaked Memo
Can Trump and his top advisers really just act with total
impunity? Or is there, just maybe, a price to be paid for starving poor people
and un-indicting a corrupt mayor?
Feb 15, 2025
by
Greg Sargent
Shockingly, it turns out that empowering the richest human
being on the planet to maliciously and gratuitously heap additional misery on
that planet’s most poor, hungry, and desperate people might—just might—pose a
niggling political problem to President Donald Trump.
There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some
seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is
to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others
seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push
things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually
matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the
U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The
Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees
not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that
are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already
producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met
with “dismissal.”
The memo claims to be correcting a “false
narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that
Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving
humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze
in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued
uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients
against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”
This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at
worst. As The New York Times reports, some senior USAID officials recently
received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of
this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according
to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to
Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.
This assistance—which includes aid for lifesaving food,
shelter, and medicine—has gotten bogged down as USAID employees and groups that
partner with the agency to distribute these things have struggled to access
government funding streams halted by Trump. (A judge has ordered the funds to continue.) In one
case, Musk claimed that the administration had restarted some
disease-prevention funding, but it remains frozen, the Times reported.
The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from
discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given
how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to
tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior
USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to
“get in line with the propaganda narrative.”
Yet the memo also shows that USAID leaks are infuriating
Trump officials precisely because they are exposing the horrifying consequences
of the Trump-Musk efforts to cripple this agency.
In this context, let’s also recall that the USAID inspector
general recently released a report finding that due
to the Trump-Musk pause of funding, nearly $500 million in food assistance was
at risk of spoiling. That revealed an extraordinarily cruel and wanton attitude
toward the global poor, and barely 24 hours after the USAID inspector general
revealed all this, Trump fired him.
It’s hard to adequately capture the absurdity and
malevolence on display here. The whole function of I.G.s is to independently
document waste, inefficiency, and corruption inside government. That’s what the
USAID I.G. did in documenting the mismanagement that put huge stores of
taxpayer-purchased food at risk of going to waste. This is exactly what
I.G.s are supposed to do. But apparently because it made Trump and Musk
look bad, the I.G. got the ax.
Here you see Trumpworld believing both that they are
politically vulnerable to revelations about the misery they’re inflicting on
some of the world’s poorest people—they were clearly stung by the I.G.’s
findings—and also that they can unabashedly fire the watchdogs who reveal it.
They conspicuously did this right after the revelations hit, suggesting they
lean toward feeling they can act with total impunity.
Underscoring the point, Vice President JD Vance has tried to justify Trump’s “America first”
agenda as in keeping with Christian teachings about the proper hierarchy of
obligations, with those outside our country being of lower priority. Vance
apparently feels some pressure to morally justify Trump’s
agenda. Yet that claim is so preposterous that it was denounced by Pope Francis, and it absurdly flies in the face of
what we’re seeing with USAID and other “America first” policies, which shows
Trump-Musk-Vance systematically abandoning our obligations to the global poor
with an indifference bordering on venality. Vance, intoxicated with hubris,
seemingly thinks he can get away with saying anything.
This split is evident elsewhere. White House press
secretary Karoline Leavitt recently dismissed the idea that Trump-Musk
abuses of power constitute a constitutional crisis as a “dishonest narrative,”
apparently revealing sensitivity about such perceptions. But on Friday, Trump
border czar Tom Homan swaggered on to national television and “joked” that New
York Mayor Eric Adams may face prosecution if he doesn’t meet Trump’s demand
for cooperation with his immigration agenda:
Thinly veiled Homan warning to Adams: “If he doesn’t come
through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the
agreement we came to” pic.twitter.com/Pq0msJXZGb
— Emily Ngo (@emilyngo) February 14, 2025
This comes after Trump’s Justice Department ordered career prosecutors to drop an
ongoing, carefully assembled prosecution of Adams, explicitly because Trump
wants that full cooperation on immigration. This clear quid pro quo is triggering resignations at the department,
with some prosecutors speaking out powerfully in protest. For Homan to make a
big joke out of this on Fox News while blow-dried TV sycophants giggle in the
background is the act of someone who doesn’t believe he’ll ever be held
accountable for anything.
Meanwhile, on still another front, Leavitt—who recently
seemed eager to tamp down perceptions that we’re enduring a constitutional
crisis—unfurled her own big middle finger at constitutional governance this
week. After the White House barred the Associated Press from the media
briefing room, Leavitt blithely confirmed that this is retaliation for the AP’s
refusal to describe the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” per Trump’s
diktat:
COLLINS: Which White House official made the decision to
bar the AP reporter?
LEAVITT: It is a privilege to cover this WH
C: Isn't this retaliatory?
LEAVITT: It is a fact that the body of water off the coast
of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America pic.twitter.com/5gxGborPgs
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2025
Musk, Homan, Leavitt, and others inside Trumpworld are
profoundly infected with arrogance—they appear unshakably certain that they’ll
never pay a price for any of this, no matter how cruel their policies or how
flagrant their abuses of power. Yet here and there, you can see glimmers of
awareness peeking out of Trumpworld that their grip on power is impermanent and
provisional. And, yes, as far-fetched as this might appear at this unsettling
moment, they also seem dimly aware that this hold on power will ultimately be
dependent on what American voters decide.
