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Elon Musk’s precipitate freezing of some $58 billion in US Foreign Aid allocated for 2025 was wrong in a number of ways: morally, or as an effective economic policy or as in the ‘soft power’ interests of the USA. It is a telling sign of the times.
We are accustomed to Trump’s lack of any concept of truth but the picture painted of development aid by him and Elon Musk still comes as a shock for anyone familiar with how aid works on the ground. But this is clearly how many in the USA imagine it. Maybe the prevalence of such opinions in the UK influenced Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to transfer 0.2% from our decreased Development Aid budget to Defense, though with a two-year run-down time unlike Trump. The need for a UK defense increase itself is another knock-on consequence of the Trump Presidency. The British Government’s mantra “this is a difficult decision” avoids the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes which come with greater political costs. The world’s poor will now be paying for Putin’s and Trump’s policies. What control have we taken back after 2016 if we accept military power, money markets, the autocrats and the feudal lords in California’s and Shanghai’s silicon valleys as our rulers? There is a touching faith in the free market. Right-wing politicians advance an ideological defense of unfettered capitalism in a world in which the market is increasingly unfree, controlled by the tech giants such as Elon Musk and the global corporations. But back to massive US aid cuts to reduce national debt. Trump’s acolytes point to allegedly ‘woke’ projects funded by USAID as justification. Even giving ‘woke’ the widest possible interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure. Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances, role play preventative health care, be ‘woke’? Woman play an important role in health. If a tiny fraction of a State institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such institutions were doing well. Then there is the right-wing claim that development aid doesn’t work; it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries. But that is principally because war, systemic corruption and bad governance blight economic development. If, for example, you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth is stunted. Dealing with such problems, development aid, which encompasses a wide range of interventions, makes a major contribution. No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development in much of Africa and parts of Asia countries remain mired in poverty. But this does not justify suddenly shutting down a major, mitigating agency, as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID”. Development aid makes a difference to economies. If half your workforce is fighting off malaria, or dying from it, this harms productivity. I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections. The bonny babies in bathtubs were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling in Africa. And HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile, and Dengue viruses, one way or another, can cross borders and seas. Education and good health are essential for a skilled workforce. Alongside Governments’ foreign aid, the Church as an aid-giving body has made a massive contribution in this regard and still does. A left wing scam ? The US Government’s only compliment to virtue are certain waivers, exemptions to the spending freeze. A few bits of infrastructure will be left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid. The priorities are interesting. Most of the temporary exemptions relate to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Since 13 February the latter has received exemption for $5.3 billion spending of which $4.1 billion is going to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and Philippines’ military. Compare this to USAID exemptions of $78 million for - non-food - aid to Gaza and $156 million to the Red Cross for its work during the current ceasefire there. Before this Trump Presidency, according to available figures USAID was spending a little over $10 billion on humanitarian aid and $10 billion annually on health, out of a foreign aid budget of approximately $58 billion. To date, the Department of State’s Bureau of Global Health, Security & Diplomacy has received a temporary exemption of $500 million for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS. Launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, it is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world. PEPFAR is now operating on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out. The waiver covers - in theory - all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption already caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone the long term consequences, will cost lives. Musk, wielding a chain-saw, now a populist power symbol, is also determined to reduce USAID manpower to a skeleton staff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now acting-administrator of USAID in place of Samantha Power who handled COVID and Ukraine crises under Jo Biden. At midnight last Sunday, out of a total payroll of 10,000, Rubio fired 1,200 USAID staff and put 4,200 on ‘administrative leave’. Trump has repeatedly declared that the final staffing will be much less than 1,000 . Meanwhile the substantial buildings occupied by USAID have been handed over to Customs and Border Patrol, not to be confused with the humanitarian focus of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migrants which is likely to retain some funding for Latin American countries to spend on enforced returnees. Former USAID chief, Gayle Smith , described the freeze as the “US signaling that we don’t frankly care whether people live or die and that we are not a reliable partner”. Washington DC District Judge Amir Ali spoke of “irreparable harm”, requiring – to no great effect - a lifting of the freeze. CARITAS Internationalis, fearing millions of deaths, called Trump’s proposed cuts of 90% USAID “reckless and “ruthless”. The Jesuit Refugee Service founded in November 1980 responding to the needs of Vietnamese refugees, and now working in 57 countries, described, including displaced people, how “those waiting for our support were left stranded”. They cite particularly Chad, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, South Africa, South Sudan and Thailand. Money to pay local NGO staff suddenly cut globally means an immediate halt to work amongst the world’s poorest people. If and when our children and grandchildren consult the Oxford English Dictionary, do we want them to find ‘archaic’ in brackets next to the word ‘compassion’? Will they be living in a world in which the powerful States deny our common humanity - uniquely in the case of the USA as a consequence of MAGA mania? We may not have long to find out.
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“Of Course It’s A Coup” is the headline of a recent blog by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History and Global Affairs at Harvard. He is always worth reading but this short piece on the Substack American online platform (https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup) is something of a blockbuster. Snyder’s proposition is quite simple. Coups used to start by the military trying to take control of key places: Parliament, presidential palace, radio and TV Stations. But now they can begin in a very different way. And a coup is underway right now in Washington DC.
Snyder’s attention-grabbing headline worked for me. Coups were one of several hazards of living in Nigeria in the 1970s. We had three in my time there. Most of the actual physical fighting tended to be around a key place like the local radio station. None were great triumphs of military strategy. One began after a polo match and a bout of all-night drinking in the club. Each coup created a tense period until it became clear that the leadership of all four of the Nigerian Army’s regional Divisions were united in opposing the coup. A split in the Army meant possible civil war. Snyder argues that in today’s coups “power is more digital than physical”. It’s an important insight. And with tech giants behaving like powerful feudal lords, you can see the consequences. But Snyder was pre-empted by the Catalan sociologist, Manuel Castells, at the turn of the millennium. Castells saw history as overlapping epochs categorized by the nature of power, how people experience the world, and how they make a living. Thus he identifies three overlapping phases of history: the agricultural, the industrial and the information economy. This last period was associated with a networked society with power arising from the control of information and data – overlapping, of course, with military power: the epoch in which we now live. Snyder paints a picture of the un-elected ‘special government employee’, Elon Musk, and his white-shirted acolytes from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) trying to get control of financial data from the US treasury and the other main departments of State. For radio station and other key sites in the Capital read the digital content of Federal Government Computers as coup targets. Whilst in foreign policy, Vice-President J.D. Vance tries to construct a white nationalist MAGA-style network in Europe, and US Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, thrusts the USA into an authoritarian alliance with Putin against China. We are well and truly into American authoritarian control of Castells’ information economy and networked society. That we are in the early stages of a slow-motion coup in the USA, the consequence of government by Trump, should wake up the Republican Party. That Trump has clear intent to disrupt and subvert democratic practice, return the world to a crude promotion of might-is-right, and reject social democrat Europe with its concern for the vulnerable, should wake up all people of good-will. Given the apparently unlimited power of AI and the future impact of the climate change this is both a moral and existential crisis. But these are early days and there are some hopeful precedents. South Korea and Brazil have faced a similar threat to their democratic societies and reacted effectively to counter it. Provided the gravity of the threat in America is recognized – this is a more damaging avarice for power than state capture for financial enrichment that occurred under President Jacob Zuma in South Africa – America will do the same. Thanks to fearful and supine Republican leadership, their further betrayal of national responsibility as a legislature, amongst the institutions balancing the power of the Executive, Congress and the Law, only the Law has risen to the challenge. A particularly egregious symptom of Republican collaboration with Trump’s authoritarian aims has been the Senate confirmation, despite the Democrats best efforts to block it, of Russell Vought as Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OBR), approved by 53-47 (voting exactly on Party lines). The OBR is important. It passes the President’s budget proposal to Congress, oversees the IT practices of Federal agencies, and generally oversees Federal spending. That means expenditure of $6.75 trillion a year will be passing through the hands of a right-wing ideologue. Vought is one of the thinkers and writers of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for authoritarian Christian nationalism in the USA. He envisaged the sacking of merit-promoted civil servants and replacing them with MAGA political appointees (US Presidents are already allowed to make 4,000 political appointments to the civil service). Project 2025’s proposals are aimed at breaking down restrictions on presidential power. If Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives have been behaving like a rabbit in a car’s headlights, then some of the country’s judges, trades unions and affected citizens could be said to be setting up temporary traffic lights and red cones to, at least, slow the traffic. Some 50 lawsuits have already been filed to stop what is an unconstitutional power grab. A district judge has put a preliminary injunction prohibiting the access of Musk’s white-shirts to information held on federal computers. Some 26 USAID employees are suing Musk and DOGE in the Baltimore Federal Court for dismantling USAID without formal Senate confirmation. There is a case pending on the constitutionality of removing the right to citizenship of the children of immigrants born in the USA. Lawsuits and temporary injunctions , though, cannot halt the damage as cases bounce up the appeal process to the Supreme Court. Some have simply been ignored. The Republicans, the MAGA supporters, and the many others who voted Trump and his cronies into office have been forced-fed disinformation and lies. They may continue to see the application of the Rule of Law as politicization of the legal system by the Democrats. But that will be increasingly implausible. Americans still have a choice. Wave goodbye to the US constitution, the rule of law, nationally and internationally, or block this slow-motion coup. “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after”, Jonathan Swift wrote some three hundred years ago. That has even more salience today. But even in the Internet age, in a country with a deep belief in democracy, surely people will register the true impact of this coup before it is too late and will act accordingly. Or not. In both new or Nigerian-style coups, the risk of civil strife is ever present. In Timothy Snyder’s warning to his fellow citizens: “Miss the Obvious, Lose your Republic”. See TheArticle 19/02.2025 The crisis in America is many-sided. One aspect is to be found within the Christian Churches. At a prayer breakfast last Thursday, President Trump announced a Task Force on “anti-Christian bias” within the Federal Government, a new Commission on religious liberty and a ‘Religious Office’ in the White House. He had changed his mind about religion, he explained; God had saved him from an assassin’s bullet.
Faith seems to be rising in prominence in divided USA. But faith in what? Faith in Trump Towers growing out of the rubble of a US-controlled Gaza strip? Shortly before Trump’s announcements and with Elon Musk’s possible vast cuts to US overseas aid threatening, Catholic Vice-President J.D. Vance and Rory Stewart were debating the question “Who is my neighbour?” in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Defending the US Government’s current treatment of undocumented immigrants and the demolition of USAID, Vance cited St. Augustine of Hippo’s ‘ordo amoris’: family first, then the folks next door, and then outwards, nation and globally. But according to the eminent historian of the early Church, Peter Brown, the main criterion for selecting bishops in the late Roman Empire was that they should be ‘lovers of the poor’. You wonder what Augustine would have replied to Vance. Not only does the US Government encourage citizens to believe that there is no crisis in the USA - just necessary disruption for the greater good – but also that their actions are entirely compatible with faith and religion. Mr. Google describes gas-lighting as “a psychological manipulation technique in which a person tries to convince someone that their reality is untrue”. You can smell the gas like an old London fog. Last Thursday the Jesuit London Centre and Catholics for Labour organized a webinar for Rev. Jim Wallis who in the late 1970s in Washington DC founded the Sojourner communities, and the Sojourner magazine. Wallis’ vision reflects in many ways, the priorities of Latin America’s Basic Christian Communities and of Liberation Theology within the movement of the American Evangelical churches, seeking to apply the values and moral precepts of the Gospels to contemporary circumstances. By 2013 Wallis had been arrested 22 times for civil disobedience. A friend of Senator Obama, he became President Obama’s spiritual adviser in 2019. In 2021, he was appointed to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at the Jesuit Georgetown University, Washington DC. A nice denial of the opposition often perceived between two tired terms used for dismissing people: academic and activist. The long-term political significance of Jim Wallis’ work mainly derives from the cultural and political importance in the USA of the evangelical community to which he belongs. There are probably about 40 million evangelicals - figures are confusing – making up about 12% of the US population, concentrated in the ‘Bible-belt’ of south-eastern States running west to Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma. In America, differences in voting are associated with age, education, gender and ethnicity – overlapping - and in the 2024 Presidential elections, the 14 States with 30% or more of the population identifying as evangelical had thumping Republican majorities. Some 85% of White evangelicals - compared to 59% of White Catholics - voted for Trump and, ethnically, Whites still remain the majority of evangelicals. In 2007, Jim Wallis was talking to receptive audiences about an evangelical movement taking a Gospel perspective on social justice, moving away from Right-Wing Republicanism. In the last decade or so this trend reversed. The title of Jim Wallis’ The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith & Refounding Democracy”, MacMillan 2024, sums up his webinar talk last week or, at least, its background. He didn’t say that America had spawned a new Christian heresy though this book’s title could summarize the South African Council of Churches’ denunciations of apartheid religious ideology in the 1980s. Wallis takes a strong-line on the Good Samaritan parable, emphasizing how it was a Samaritan, belonging to a rival Temple cult, despised and shunned by the Judeans, who rescued the man by the roadside and paid generously for his treatment (two denarii was about two weeks’ wages). Jesus’s own actions demonstrated what this teaching might mean in practice. Wallis' message: all Christians were accountable and should heed the message of the parable’s teaching in Luke 10:25-37. This emphasis on Jesus’ teaching and relationships with strangers, and even enemies, challenges the US White, Protestant evangelical community today and indeed, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference which supports Trump. In contrast, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition has been moderately critical of Trump’s policies on Aid and immigration. But how can so many who place the Bible at the heart of their faith support such government cruelty to immigrants? How can they not be writing to their congressman or woman in droves to stop Musk’s attack on USAID with its consequences for the world’s poor? Wallis reaches beyond the Christian Churches to others who are already resisting. Encouragingly, he sees disparate forces, legal, secular, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, plus NGOs and community groups coming together to oppose this assault on shared moral values. Drawing on his experience of the Black Churches and on Catholic Social Teaching, he speaks with hope rather than optimism calling not simply for resistance but for a deeper resilience. Even on-line Wallis radiates a comforting serenity. When you are listening to him, suddenly the way transactional language is replacing moral and legal terms within discussions of political choices comes into sharp focus. The American Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) used the classical Greek concept of a Kairos moment for a time of great danger but great opportunity, demanding conversion and transformation. It is hazardous to make comparisons but The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa, signed by over 150 Church leaders in 1985, responding to the brutality of the apartheid regime’s State of Emergency, comes to mind. This today is a time of great danger for Christian leadership, both in the USA and globally, but also great opportunity to speak out strongly and to act with the authority of the Gospels. On 22 January, the Archbishop President of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, Timothy Broglio, described some of Trump’s executive orders as ‘deeply troubling’ causing harm to “the most vulnerable”. There is now much more to be said. No ethical system can justify the freeze on some $43 billion USAID annually, including over £17 billion for health and humanitarian aid purposes , 2/3rds of this for sub-Saharan Africa. Where are the values expressed in the outcry against and cruelty towards migrants to come from? The Catholic hierarchy need the unity and courage clearly to speak truth to power. It is a heavy responsibility for Christian leaders to shoulder. But as politicians struggle how to react to Trump’s new disorder who else but the US Churches are in a position to defend and advocate the values of truth, compassion, justice, human dignity and equality now threatened by the current crisis in the West? Meanwhile, if you, like me, are in search of Pope Francis’ “tangible signs of hope”, or even trying to be such a sign, try tucking in to Rev. Jim Wallis’ talks and books. Answers abound. But, after barely two weeks of President Trump’s executive orders, the nagging question still persists. Why and how did he win for a second time ? This isn’t idle speculation if he is to be resisted.
The most frequent explanation of Trumps’ victory is economic: the consequences of spectacular inequality, not least three super-billionaires earning as much as fifty percent of the American population combined, and Trump’s claims that he would deal with the high cost of living. After many years of stagnant salaries, inflation experienced by millions of workers led to their rejection of an urban elite and identification with those who challenged the injustice of it all. Trump’s own resentment is real coming from his past as a vulgar upstart shunned by sophisticated New York. Populist resentment stems from feeling humiliated ‘losers’ - a favorite Trump word – living lives blighted by inflation in a world of winners celebrating their wealth. As the Irish author and journalist, Fintan O’Toole, argues, promote a shared resentment, add showmanship and self-parodying humour and you have the key ingredients of Trump’s appeal. Trump’s campaign benefited from the massive multiplier effect of social media unavailable to a former entertainer, Ronald Reagan, his more amiable, avuncular Presidential prototype. In 1980, Reagan’s campaign slogan was ‘Let’s Make America Great’, he believed in conspiracies (communist not deep-state), and somehow turned ignorance into a virtue and source of authority. President Reagan, the charmer, won the Republican heart. President Trump, the con-man, stole the Republican soul. A feature of Trump’s rallies and public performances that doesn’t get much mention is his description of America’s glorious past destroyed by a criminal elite - a portrayal which summons like a genie out of a bottle a sense of victimhood. Voicing “we the people” while speaking of the richest most powerful country in the world, one that has maintained its macroeconomic success during hard times globally, he presents himself as at one with the victims he has come to save. An extraordinary elision. Trump may be ignorant but he is far from politically stupid and he shows remarkable – frightening - skills of persuasion. In his second Inauguration speech on January 20th. we got a gala performance. Some of that Inauguration speech was old Hollywood. We had the American spirit forged by the demands of the ‘Frontier’, the scenic backdrop to the ‘American dream’, the values and freedom of the big spaces, the wagons rolling West across the prairies. Older readers will remember Saturday morning pictures, the circled wagons surrounded by fierce Red Indian horsemen shot down by brave cowboys. I did vaguely notice that, close-up, the ‘Injuns’ looked rather like the cowboys with heavy makeup and bows and arrows. At the time, all good clean fun. It never occurred to me that I was watching a fictionalized version of the slaughter and expropriation of America’s indigenous population. Trump’s uplifting, manipulative nostalgia did not include the words cotton or slaves, words which might have tempered enthusiasm for one of the origins of America’s economic success. But mention of plantation slavery, lynching, disenfranchisement and discrimination would have been a sign of belonging to the urban elite, unpatriotically ‘woke’ when the glorious past for MAGA was bespoke. Since it was Martin Luther King Day, a black pastor from Detroit, Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, did speak of King’s famous dream during the Inauguration Benediction, but only some 10 black people, including Barack Obama, were visible in the Capitol Rotunda, capacity 600 - though camera angles were very controlled. Forgive the pop psychology but perhaps a sense of victimhood and fear arises from vestigial folk memories, the fear of slave rebellion and guilt at the dispossession of the First Nation. Custer’s last stand, the Great Sioux Wars, happened only 150 years ago. It was just 60 years ago black voting rights were fully honoured by legislation. The Statue of Liberty’s inscription (opened 1886) “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses…” once welcomed immigrants. When I was myself an immigrant living in New York in the late 1960s, you learned how to be American by watching TV. You were taught how to aspire to the American dream. Now the US government and many of its citizens are set on cruelty to immigrants who evaded border controls, and even to their children born there whose citizenship is protected by the Constitution. The ‘shining light on the hill’ that is America casts a long, dark shadow. Deep political divisions existed in America in the 1960s too. At a peace rally against the Vietnam War, held near Columbia University, a young Harlem resident politely asked us why we were there. I told him that as Catholics we had conscientious objections to the war. “Jews N*****s and Catholics must stick together bro”, he whispered in my ear and moved off. It was a conversation you would probably not have today. The FBI took some nice family photos. Yes, the USA was deeply divided about the Vietnam war but these were divisions akin to those over Gaza, not about the meaning and survival of democracy which not only Jo Biden thinks is now at stake. Cultural heterogeneity resulting from immigration may lie behind American anxiety but more likely deliberate disinformation - “them taking our jobs” - is to blame. In the first three years of Biden’s administration 14.3 million jobs were created, a 10.3% increase on the COVID years. But inflation is directly felt. The family next door getting a job – which might not exist but for Biden - isn’t. Old and newly fashioned voter suppression played a significant part in Trump’s victory. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a respected non-profit law and public policy institute reports that, between 2021-2024, “ States enacted a total of 79 restrictive laws” suppressing voting. According to the investigative journalist, Greg Palast, an expert on controlling corporate power, before August 2024, self-styled ‘vigilante voter hunters’ accused 316,886 people voter fraud (200,000 in the swing State of Georgia alone). An audit conducted by the State of Washington (Pacific North-West) found ballots mailed in by black voters were four times more likely than white to be rejected, and a US Civil Rights Commission study undertaken in Florida found that 14.3% of black voters appearing in person had their ballots rejected. That’s one in seven, though some would have voted for Trump. Palast reckons that without such voter suppression Kamala Harris would have won in the key marginal States of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What he calls “America’s nasty little secret” is that such election rigging has become routine. In a first past the post system the consequences can be enormous. China’s Premier, Zhou EnLai’s, “it was too early to say”, in reply to a question from Henry Kissinger about the French Revolution, is a myth: his interpreter said Zhou misunderstood and thought the question was about the student upheavals of 1968. But were Zhou alive today, he might wisely want to reserve judgement on the reasons for Trump’s second victory. Less wisely, I would highlight the years of mainly Republican-instigated vote rigging, President Biden’s damaging of Democrat chances by his delay in resigning, and the extraordinary bouquet of policies Trump offered to resentful voters who identified with, and trusted, a dangerous charlatan. See TheArticle 03/02/2025 |
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