Vice signalling
By 
It would be difficult to come up with a quote that better encapsulates the Republican Party in 2025 than this one:
Trump remains undeterred, his advisers say, by hand-wringing in Washington and critical news coverage of the initiatives, including the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a top target of an Elon Musk-led cost cutting commission, the U.S. DOGE Service. A White House official dismissed concerns about the cuts as a “media narrative.”
“We knew they were going to do this,” said the White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions. “They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.”
I can’t believe that the libs are focusing on one* (*note: number may be a gross underestimate) starving kid to distract from other DOGE initiatives like “make sure more people get sick” and “make sure fewer people have potable drinking water” and “more planes falling out the sky.”
Like some friends of the blog I still haven’t fully internalized the fact that a publication run by a bunch of ex-Weekly Standard people is doing tougher and more consistent criticism of Trump from the left than a lot of liberal outlets and Democratic politicians but here we are:
JOHN IS OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER the dark days when AIDS ravaged his country and his family. Living in Malawi, he has seen up close the difference made by the lifesaving work of PEPFAR, which is administered in large part through the U.S. Agency for International Development. For him, the American government has been a steady, sustaining presence for many years through a multiplicity of programs under the umbrella of USAID. He had believed it was a relationship of mutual benefit to Malawi and America.
Now, in the wake of the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, he wonders what will happen to his country. He worries the deadly past might revisit. “We are so scared we might see people dying like that again,” he told me on the phone this week.
John’s work brings him into contact with many USAID employees and projects in Malawi.1 In particular, he knows that USAID brings badly needed development and services to rural areas, which in Malawi, as in many other African countries, are chronically underserved by their governments. Wealth, power, and influence tend to be concentrated in cities.
Specifically, he describes to me the importance of USAID educational programming for rural children. The agency has built rural schools with science labs and libraries, both rare in those settings. John thinks support for rural girls’ education is especially vital in a country where many families don’t prioritize educating their daughters. He says USAID programming has ensured girls don’t miss school during their periods because they lack feminine products, a common problem for girls in Africa.
“USAID had focused on the girl child,” John says. “They focused on so many problems facing girls in the rural areas.”
I’m you’re not absolutely furious about the Trump administration illegally impounding funds to do stuff like killing and impoverishing innocent children I really don’t know what else to say to you at this point.