POLITICO: Democrats Are Falling For Trump and Musk’s Foreign Aid Trap
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, February 6, 2025 02:07
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/04/democrats-foreign-ai
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After three months of soul-searching about how to revive their party, some Democrats this week believe they have finally found a rallying point following Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy piece by piece at Trump’s behest, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, lit a fire under many Democratic lawmakers — several of whom rallied Monday outside USAID headquarters.
But relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation — and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back.
When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence.
“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.
Trump’s orbit, meanwhile, couldn’t be happier seeing Democratic lawmakers lined up on a downtown Washington sidewalk Monday — in their view, wasting political capital defending an agency that they believe the public doesn’t give a rip about. Musk himself spent the following 24 hours posting videos of Democrats protesting the move.
“The federal bureaucracy is very unpopular. … It’s a pretty widely held, majority position — if you poll it, people think the government is wasting money. And, very simply, that’s the battle that we’re fighting,” one senior Trump administration official told me Tuesday. “The Democrats are now taking the opposite position: ‘Everything’s perfect.’ ‘Nothing to look at here.’ ‘No money is wasted.’ ‘All your tax dollars are being spent well.’”
“Not a very politically tenable position,” the person added.
The political considerations in vocally defending foreign aid are of course entirely separate from the humanitarian and national security concerns at play.
Dismantling USAID is already having tragic consequences for health and development programs worldwide, Axelrod pointed out, and America’s withdrawal from the world will give its adversaries new opportunities to win influence abroad.
Republicans had long been proponents of exerting “soft power” — winning global hearts and minds by feeding the hungry, fostering emerging economies and getting vaccines to the most vulnerable populations. China, notably, stands ready to fill the void.
That’s to say nothing of the argument that Democrats’ fight needs to be everywhere all at once given the scale of the threat. That’s what Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz passionately argued to me soon after this column first published.
“People empowered by the president are violating federal law in multiple ways, taking over federal payments, illegally shutting down whole departments, freezing Head Start and Medicaid, and the best these podcasters can muster is that we should wait for a more popular program to defend? Spare me,” said Schatz, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing USAID.
“The emergency is now. We need to act like it,” he added. “This isn’t about any particular program or the theater criticism that substitutes for strategy. This is about making sure these billionaires are not able to loot the federal government and strip it for parts.”
But most Americans have no idea what USAID is, let alone what it does. In fact, much of the country wrongly believes that foreign aid constitutes as much as 25 percent of the federal budget, according to the BrooNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Any attempt to paint USAID ops as humanitarian foreign aid is disinfo.
USAID was just a fig leaf for regime- change operations, including payments to individuals, regime-change NGOs with names like "Students for democracy" or some such bullshit, and pro-globalist organizations supported by Soros and Bill Gates.
It's like Musk said, there wasn't a worm in the apple, it was just a ball of worms.
NGOs living high on American $$ ... like all the NGOs in Afghanistan that never made it past embassy row ... Leaders like Armenian PM Pashinyan who was expecting a nice flow of $$$ to him and his party ... boy, I'll bet their butts are puckering.
GOOD.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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I'd be lying Sigs, if I didn't admit that I actually do have some concerns about what's in store. Just because of the speed of all of this. And I'm pretty torn, because I love watching it happen, and I know that there is a very finite amount of time that this is going to be allowed to go on. Once one major thing breaks or some event that could feesably be blamed on Trump and Team in such a way that nobody could claim that it was media disinformation to lay it at his feet, the jig is up.
I just really hope that I'm not giving them more credit than they deserve when it comes to being smart about the choices they're making and the gutting they're doing.
This is an administration built on populism. A lot of that population is on one form of assistance or another in our country. If they take that away from people either on purpose or on accident while they're doing this other stuff, public opinion is going to sway hard and fast the other way. That's what they're all hoping will happen here. It's really the only thing any of them have left to hang on to.
In the meantime though...
Did you ever think you would see anything like this in your life?
Wasn't on my Bingo card.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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