Has Donald Trump really been US President for less than a month? It feels so much longer.
How many of his imperial edicts will affect us, it is hard to say, although his targets and beneficiaries are becoming clear.
As I write, every federal agency in the United States is pulling banned words from online documents in a frantic effort to comply with Trump’s executive order to purge ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) from the American mind. The National Science Foundation is no longer allowed to say ‘female’. The National Security Agency has erased ‘equity’ and ‘injustice’.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is attempting to close federal agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a group which fights fraud and predatory loans. It maintains a significant amount of sensitive information about individuals, banks and big tech platforms. Its budget is $823 million. Since 2011, it has returned $20.7 billion to consumers who have been scammed.
Never let anyone tell you that Musk is simply ‘cost-cutting’.
Amid a flurry of attacks on the United States’ federal governance, courts and the media, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have also taken the time to punish those who tend to the most vulnerable people on earth.
In an act of fathomless cruelty, they have crippled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk has bragged about feeding it “into the woodchipper”. The agency, he says, is staffed by people who have donated to the Democratic Party. It is “incredibly politically partisan” and supports “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American”.
Thanks to Musk, food for children with acute malnutrition is sitting locked away in warehouses.
Former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk told The Guardian that Musk’s strangulation of the agency is an “extinction-level event” for the international humanitarian sector. “It threatens the collapse not just of what USAID does, but of this huge ecosystem of relief and development organisations that are doing good around the world every day.”
Konyndyk is now the President of Refugees International, a group which doesn’t accept government or UN funding.
“[Closing USAID] is going to kill a lot of people,” he said. “Just from the HIV programs alone, that’s potentially a death toll in the millions. It’s just happening because of a bullshit disinformation campaign by Elon Musk.”
Another affected agency is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). It was set up by a Republican president, George W. Bush, and has saved an estimated 25 million lives by distributing HIV drugs in 54 countries. Until Trump’s order freezing foreign aid, it helped 550,000 children under 15 who depend on daily doses of antiretroviral pills (ART), which suppress the virus.
If a patient stops taking ART, the progressive failure of their immune system will kill them. Before they die, they risk developing and spreading drug-resistant HIV.
I keep checking the website of an LGBTQ+ clinic in South Africa which distributes HIV medicine through PEPFAR. “Engage Men’s Health regret to announce that, due to an immediate ‘stop-work order’ issued by our funder, we cannot provide any services until further notice.” The page recommends phone numbers to call for mental health support and suicide counselling.
Pulling funding from HIV programs will result in the spread of drug-resistant HIV in Africa, and in the world’s most aid-reliant region – the Pacific. While Trump’s ‘Gilded Age’-era tariffs and mad ambitions for Gaza are getting all the attention in New Zealand, the risk of bird flu, malaria, dengue fever, tuberculosis and HIV quietly spreading in our backyard has increased.
Many Pacific nations depend on outside help to deal with the effects of climate change, which they did little to cause. The US counters Chinese influence in the Pacific with aid like this, often called ‘soft diplomacy’.
What is this ‘soft power’? Wikipedia describes it as “the ability to co-opt rather than coerce… shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values and foreign policies to enact change.”
The problem with soft power in international relations is that it tends to benefit the national brand rather than the personal one. Its era appears to be over, at least for now. The Trumpian era of zero-sum politics has begun. For Trump and Musk to win, someone has to lose.
The great journalist Kai Kupferschmidt doesn’t mince words. “[Musk], ensconced in his cocoon of privilege, is taking away livelihoods and access to life saving medications from some of the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth.”
And so the world watches as the richest man on earth celebrates taking food from starving children.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
