Earlier this week, I invoked Trump’s now iconic opera piece,
Nessun Dorma (“None Shall Sleep”). The dramatic tune played at many Trump rallies was popularized by the final triumphant scene in the movie
The Sum of All Fears. Without dialog, in a series of simultaneous, coordinated covert assassinations all over the world, agents of the US and Russia executed evil plotters who tried to start a nuclear war. If that scene is a metaphor for what’s happening inside the US government, a similar climactic denouement played out yesterday. The Washington Post ran the story headlined, “
USAID announces sweeping moves to sideline remaining staff.”
If one were masochistically inclined, one could argue with Democrats for
days over President Trump’s legal authority to “shut down” the U.S. Agency for International Disasters and Dirty Tricks, or USAID. But no one can argue that an Agency without employees has, for all effects and purposes, ceased to exist in a very practical and direct sort of way.
To that end, in what WaPo described as “sweeping new steps,” and a “stunning broadside,” yesterday USAID’s new managers sidelined all remaining non-exempt staff and, perhaps more tellingly, ordered all overseas staff to return to the U.S.A. within 30 days if not sooner.
It was a take-no-prisoners, human resources
bloodletting, and it salted the civil service earth. In other words, as one of WaPo’s leakers explained, “the announcements mean that most of the staff was fired, furloughed or put on leave.”
Lest anyone feel tempted to sympathize with this particular group of unmanageable federal employees, consider the facts.
Based just on the part we do know, it is fair to assume USAID funds Mexican drug cartels, paid for the stolen 2020 U.S. election, funded the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014 (which in turn provoked the Proxy War), engineered the barbarian invasion of most Western countries including our own, and caused, negligently or intentionally, the covid pandemic and its resulting millions of deaths.
USAID probably also ensured the homogenous and catastrophic worldwide response to the virus that it helped create and unleash.
Historian Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), shattered the comforting illusion that only fanatics commit great crimes. Watching Adolf Eichmann’s trial, she saw not a monster, but a dull bureaucrat—obedient, career-driven, and chillingly thoughtless. His evil wasn’t ideological rage but blind conformity, a cog in a system that made atrocities routine. Arendt’s horror was realizing that authoritarian regimes don’t just rely on radicals; they thrive on ordinary people mindlessly enforcing evil, making malevolence disturbingly mundane.
We never thought it could happen here. But like a deadly, mutant fungus, the poison grew quietly, unrecognized, right below the public’s noses in the State Department’s sub-basement. USAID’s “independent” bureaucrats shoving billions to criminals all over the world were, indeed, banal, bureaucratic, but no less blameless Adolph Eichmanns.
And within a handful of days,
Trump just burned it all to the ground.
According to WaPo, roughly 7,000 of USAID’s 10,000 employees were staffed overseas, meddling in other countries’ business. Last week, their money hoses were cut off. Now, they’ve been ordered to get back home. Who knows how many hapless countries suffered under the Deep State’s dirty tricks and destabilizations.
Last week they were temporarily liberated by the 90-day funding freeze. But now they have a new generation of hope that our chaos agents are departing for good. I hope all the folks who live in those destabilized places of suffering know that the American people are
appalled and
horrified, and we were co-victims of the same uncontrollable Frankenstein’s monster that our neocons covertly built.
Along those lines, consider how encouraging is this next clip. Some Africans are speaking out, and saying
they don’t want the USAID. They support President Trump.
CLIP: Africa doesn’t want USAID, because the money always goes to warlords and dictators, not poor folks (0:24).
USAID massacre continues as Trump fires the entire agency, and world rejoices; DOGE opens new front in the Swamp Wars; Bondi confirmed as US Attorney General; Vance goes to Palestine; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
not choppy....
