The cameras caught what the White House hoped you’d never see.
Two former presidents, a rock star, and thousands of stunned public servants standing at the grave of America’s global conscience.
Bush and Obama are furious. Trump and Musk are triumphant. USAID is gone.
Lives, alliances, and America’s moral authority hang by a thr… Continues…
The quiet alliance between George W. Bush and Barack Obama over USAID is less about nostalgia and more about a brutal reckoning
with what America chooses to be. Bush, who once launched the massive
AIDS relief efforts in Africa, now watches a program credited with saving 25 million lives dismantled in the name of “efficiency.”
Obama calls it a calamity, warning that future
leaders will realize too late what has been lost.
On the other side, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio celebrate the end of what they describe as a bloated
“global NGO industrial complex.” To them, USAID was a haven for radicals and waste,
not a lifeline for fragile democracies and dying patients.
As its responsibilities are folded into the State Department,
the question is no longer jus
t how America spends its money abroad
, but whether it still believes
that compassion is part of its national interest at all.