The Worst Thing Trump Did

Former US Agency for International Development workers show their support to USAID workers retrieving their personal belongings from the agency’s headquarters in Washington on February 27, 2025. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

During his mad-king rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite false claims: “I ended eight unendable wars.” He insisted he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishment. This phony-baloney boast has become part of MAGA theology. Hours after Trump made that declaration, Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, exclaimed on Fox, “The wars he’s ended around the world, the lives he’s saved by doing that—I would argue this president has probably saved more lives around the world than anyone else singlehandedly in my lifetime.”

Of course, Trump was not telling the truth about his supposed peacemaking endeavors. Fact-checkers have debunked this assertion. Trump’s list of alleged successes includes conflicts that have not ended, non-shooting disputes that were not wars, and diplomatic agreements in which the Trump administration’s role was unclear or minimal. Such disingenuous bragging is par for the course for Trump. What is especially offensive is Lara Trump turning this lie into a celebration of lives Trump has supposedly saved overseas. To this nonsense, there is a simple retort: USAID.

This past week, there have been many recaps and reflections in the media about the first year of Trump’s return engagement in the White House. There is a plethora of horrendous matters to review: the corruption of the Justice Department and the criminal prosecution of political foes and critics; the cruel mass deportation crusade brutally waged by ICE; the massive tax cut for the wealthy; the out-in-the-open grift and graft of Trump and his cronies; the evisceration of policies and actions to address climate change; the war on universities; the use of troops domestically; the cratering of public health agencies and the undermining of vaccines; the unconstitutional imposition of tariffs; the targeting of law firms; the assault on Venezuela; the attempt to grab Greenland and the threat to rupture NATO; the slashing of the federal workforce; the kowtowing to Vladimir Putin; and so much more.

Perhaps the most consequential horror was the annihilation of the US Agency for International Development, which spent about $30 billion a year to help distressed people overseas elude death and the worst diseases. I’ve noticed that many first-year wrap-ups failed to highlight this catastrophe that Trump wreaked with the help of Elon Musk and his DOGE thugs. The destruction of USAID and the slashing of foreign assistance have directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Dr. Brooke Nichols, an  infectious disease mathematical modeler and health economist at Boston University, and Eric Moakley, a technology and data expert, last year devised impactcounter.com, which tracks the projected consequences of the USAID shutdown. As of Thursday, it noted that an estimated 248,238 adults and 516,268 children have died as the result of the funding cutoff. This included deaths from malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia, tropical diseases, HIV/AIDS, and malnutrition. That’s 88 deaths per hour.

Then there’s all the instances of disease that haven’t result in the immediate loss of life. In the past year, according to their calculations, there was an additional 2.4 million cases of malaria for adults and 7.1 million for children. The malnutrition cases for children that cause developmental damage but not death are not tallied. But given that 156,000 children died due to malnutrition, a good guess is that hundreds of thousands of children suffered severe hunger and experienced harm that may last a lifetime.

Other researchers have different numbers. According to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, more than 22 million people could die from preventable causes by 2030 due to the cuts in assistance from the United States and European nations. (Britain, France and Germany decreased their foreign aid budgets, but not nearly as much as Trump did.) The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that 16 million additional children under the age of five would die by 2045 if all these aid cuts become permanent.

Even if all these numbers are off—overestimated—by a factor of 10, it’s still a nightmare that resulted from Trump’s cruelty and callousness.

In the assault on USAID, no attempt was made to evaluate programs and impose efficient cuts. It was just slash and burn. And the eradication of USAID decimated the development sector. Not only did thousands of public-minded USAID employees lose their do-gooding jobs, nonprofit development groups and contractors funded by USAID were crushed and forced to fire many. Careers have been devastated; decades of experience and expertise in development work have been lost, perhaps for good. Should a future administration wish to reconstitute USAID and a robust foreign assistance program, it will be tough.

It’s not over. Trump has proposed nearly a 50 percent cut in the 2026 budget for foreign assistance. (With USAID almost all gone, the money would be distributed through other channels—which presents its own set of problems.) But the spending bill moving through Congress now is nearly $20 billion above Trump’s request—which, if approved, would still leave US assistance at a level much lower than when Trump returned to the White House. Most important, it would still leave dead all those people who have perished in the past year due to the Trump-Musk war on USAID.

Earlier this month, two former USAID directors, J. Brian Atwood, a Democrat, and Andrew Natsios, a Republican, co-wrote a piece for the Hill that noted that USAID programs have often benefited Americans:

USAID funded important seed research that protected our food from crop diseases. Twenty years ago, a fungus called wheat rust threatened nearly 90 percent of wheat cultivars worldwide and caused a worldwide nutritional crisis. USAID resources funded the development of rust resistant wheat seed with other donors…

The innovation in seed technology saved the global wheat crop… USAID-funded seed research benefits also accrued to American farmers.

But that ongoing work is now gone with the dissolution of USAID. And they pointed out:

USAID protected Americans’ physical health as well. Starting in the Reagan administration, for 40 years, USAID developed and managed the Demographic and Health Surveys Program: a health statistics reporting system in 90 developing countries. It tracked death rates, birth rates, disease incidence and novel disease outbreaks. 

This was our early warning system for novel diseases; its destruction could lead to a new pandemic. We cannot stop a new disease at our borders—by that time it’s too late. The dismantling of USAID shut down the systems’ management and funding.

Obliterating USAID did more than condemn millions overseas to otherwise avoidable death, disease, and hunger—and the suffering of losing loved ones. It screwed us at home. So Lara Trump should put a sock in it. Dear Leader hasn’t saved lives in all those conflicts. But he has been the Angel of Death for many around the world. Of all the damage he has done, this is likely the worst, and much of it cannot be remedied.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Please pity our poor and poorly paid judges who were compelled by a deep sense of responsibility to Our Land readers to watch Donald Trump’s rant-a-thon in Davos. He attacked the United States’ closest allies, insulting European leaders by name (when he could remember the names), while heaping praise on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He confused Iceland with Greenland. He distorted basic history. He lied about…so much, including basic economic stats. In the Our Land command center, heads were exploding. How to choose what to nominate?

For two days, the judges went without sleep and with minimal food. (We only had little yogurts and unsalted peanuts in the mini-fridge.) The last judge standing won, and his nomination was this line from Trump: “Without us, right now you’d all be speaking German.”

This was far from the most offensive remark Trump uttered. But it was one of his most ignorant comments. He was speaking in Switzerland, a nation that has three official languages: Italian, French, and German—and more than 60 percent of the population are native German speakers.

Remember when George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 spoke out against Islamophobia and took important steps to counter Muslim hatred? That’s sure not the current stance of the Republican Party. In the Trump era, conservatives can let their racist flag fly as high as they want. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) did so proudly this week with his retweet of an anti-Islam post on X.

Doing this with a public social media post indicates Tuberville believes such overt racism is acceptable. In his MAGA world, it is.

You might expect the speaker of the House to have a fundamental understanding of the US Constitution. Well, not Mike Johnson. Asked about Trump’s wielding of tariffs, he said, “I have no intention of getting in the way of President Trump and his administration…He has used the tariff power that he has under Article II very effectively. He has not exceeded his authority. There is no reason, in my view, for the Article I branch to intervene.”

Article II does not grant the president any authority to levy tariffs. The Constitution hands this power, in Article I, to Congress. Trump points to a 1977 law that he claims allows him to implement tariffs during a “national emergency.” The law, though, doesn’t say that, and this issue is now before the Supreme Court. But even if he’s right, he only has that power because Congress gave it to him to use in certain situations. Johnson ought to know these basics. But when you’re a disciple within a cult, the Constitution doesn’t matter.

When Trump selected Scott Bessent to be Treasury secretary, Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief. In an administration of far-right MAGA extremists, he was going to be the proverbial adult in the room. But Bessent has been nothing but another Trump toady, who would take gold if the Olympics had a contest for smugness. There is no Trump idiocy that he won’t defend when called to mount up.

This past week, when Trump was threatening to slap oppressive tariffs on European countries if Denmark did not surrender Greenland, a constitutional question was raised. How could Trump do this? What was the national emergency? On Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker posed that query to Bessent. He replied, “The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. It is a strategic decision by the president. This is a geopolitical decision, and he’s able to use the economic might of the US to avoid a hot war.”

None of this makes sense. A national emergency entails an immediate threat or imminent danger. Failing to steal Greenland from an ally is not an emergency—especially since the United States already has a military base there and is free to establish others. As I write, it seems Trump has agreed to some not-yet-defined deal that would not give him all of Greenland—indicating that there really was no national emergency that had to be addressed by full annexation.

Because the judges applied the mercy rule to Bessent’s boss, the Treasury secretary wins this week’s prize. So there’s no need for him to threaten to invade a US ally.

Imagine having a head of state who is cogent, speaks in full sentences and paragraphs, and comes across as both thoughtful and forceful. Such a day seems far away for the United States. But if you want to viscerally experience this, watch the Davos speech of Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister. He sharply excoriated Trump’s assault on an international order of rules, laws, alliances, and commonality, and he challenged the fundamental premise of America First: “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. And there’s another truth: If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.”

Carney called on other nations to resist subordination to the “great powers” who “have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms.” He added, “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

Oh, Canada!

Here’s a transcript.

Our Land subscriber Denise Smith sent in a unique response to the item reporting on the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit I filed with the Bureau of Prisons to obtain information on the transfer of convicted sex crime offender Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy prison camp facility for white-collar criminals and nonviolent offenders:

I am writing in response to your post inquiring about why Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred from a federal penitentiary to a cozy minimum-security center in Texas. I drove up to the Bryan, Texas, facility to see for myself just before Christmas. I was shocked to find that the facility is nestled in a quiet residential neighborhood just two blocks from a public playground. Standing at the driveway of the facility, you can hear children playing in the distance. 

The question stands as to why Trump had Maxwell, a notorious child abuser, moved to a quiet community and given preferential treatment. The transfer occurred shortly after House Speaker Mike Johnson put the House on early recess in August and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal attorney, rushed to meet with Maxwell in Florida. After a brief two-day softball-question deposition, Maxwell goes on record to state that Trump never did anything wrong in her presence. 

As for the transfer, no one has taken accountability and explained who initiated it and why. Please continue to investigate it.

Thanks for the field report, Denise. That is the big question. I am not hopeful we'll get a full explanation. But it's worth a try. 

Richard Gilbert had a question:

The president is a twice-convicted felon. ICE is his tool for inciting chaos. His cabinet is uniquely inept and operates in an extrajudicial way. There has to be a legal remedy for getting rid of him. What action is available to us? Not impeachment; if January 6 was not enough nothing is. We need to do something now.

I wish I had a better answer than this: The founders believed that if a rogue agent ever came to be president, impeachment would be the failsafe. That's the remedy they established for a threat they did foresee. What they did not envision was that a political party would support such a person as if it were a cult. They counted on the decency and good sense of legislators who they assumed would place public interest and honest government over partisan interests. They messed up.

Cliff Viada expressed a similar sentiment.

Just want to say that you are one of the very few reputable sources that tells the plain simple truth about Trump. Even the pussy-footing New York Times has finally come around to calling him a crook. But you were always on it.

After reading Jill Lepore's depressing history of the United States, I am stumped about what the Democrats should do to deal with ever-growing authoritarianism. If you have thoughts about that (or know of others who do), I'd love to hear them.

Thanks, Cliff. I wish there were a simple solution. The basics are...pretty basic. Fight Trump’s authoritarianism in the courts (win a few, lose a lot), organize popular protests (not enough people are yet engaged on this front), support all the various advocacy nonprofits trying to help people being harmed (much more assistance is needed), and work like hell in every election, local and national, to support candidates who back democracy and the rule of law. I've said it before—this threat to democracy requires an everything everywhere all at once strategy.  

Lynda Dobens wrote in about possible action Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison could take to bring a prosecution in the Renee Good case:

Could Ellison bring a Bivens action? I know this could be a stretch but if ever there were the parameters and reason to do so now is the time to at least try.

Others have thought about this. As Cornell Law School describes it, “A Bivens action is a lawsuit seeking damages against federal officers for violating constitutional rights under federal authority. It originates from Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), where the Supreme held that a violation of one’s Fourth Amendment rights by federal officers can give rise to a federal cause of action for damages for unlawful searches and seizures.” But in the past 40 years, the Supreme Court has severely limited Bivens lawsuits. As USA Today reported a few days ago, “The end result is a more challenging legal landscape for individuals who say a federal agent abused them. ‘It's likely impossible to bring a lawsuit against individual immigration officers for violating constitutional rights,’ said Emma Winger, a deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit promoting immigrant rights.”

It seems rather unlikely that this Supreme Court would be more sympathetic to a Bivens action. Given the corrupt Justice Department’s total obedience to Trump, obtaining justice in this case will be quite difficult. 

John Kyper found a mistake:

There was a factual error in this morning's dispatch: Sen. Elissa Slotkin is from Michigan, not California.

Damnit. Heads will roll in the Our Land Quality Control Office. But…it was my fault.

“Nice ’doo, Moxie. You sure look like a poodle.”
“What does that mean? Like a stereotype?”
“Well, you know. Just the way many people think of—”
“Being a poodle is much more than looks. It’s what’s on the inside.”
“Okay. Envie de faire une promenade?”
“Mais, oui.”