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THE SPEED OF THE CRUELTY has been stunning.

In a matter of a few weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, has decimated America’s main provider of global humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work.

USAID accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With those funds, it has been responsible for building field hospitals in war-ravaged Syria and removing land mines in Cambodia, funding vaccination programs in Nigeria and access to food, water, electricity, and basic health care for millions of people in eastern Congo. It contained a major outbreak of Ebola a decade ago and prevented massive famine in southern Africa in the 1990s. More than 3 million lives are saved every year through USAID immunization programs.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

People who have worked in international development for decades will tell you that there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in.

On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been fired or put on administrative leave, the website taken down and signage removed from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, enjoining the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on leave, but the chaos has already generated a global humanitarian crisis.

Many small organizations that relied on USAID have shut down; even the largest ones have been severely weakened. One survey reports that about a quarter of nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

The New York Times reports that funding for treatment for infants born in Uganda with HIV has been stopped, while in South Africa, researchers were forced to end an HIV-prevention trial, leaving women with experimental implants inside their bodies and without ongoing medical oversight. A cholera-treatment trial has been abandoned in Bangladesh. Patients have been told to leave refugee hospitals in Thailand. Soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan have been closed.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the HIV-prevention organization AVAC, told the Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works. Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH for Trump and Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to unleash mass suffering and death with the stroke of a pen. They had to slander USAID and spread lies about the agency in the process.

Musk has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.” It is, according to Musk, “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X.

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

For his part, Trump said USAID is a “tremendous fraud” and claimed that the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.”

In order to promote this calumny, Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have unleashed an avalanche of falsehoods and disinformation. Not that USAID should be above criticism: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has argued, it can be overreliant on contractors, endlessly bureaucratic, and prone to paying consultants with money that could be better used elsewhere. But none of that matches up with the way Musk and Trump have described it. And authoritarian leaders from around the world are now celebrating the destruction of one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

Six years ago, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote of Trump and his movement that “the cruelty is the point.” That has never been more clear than in the president’s decision to demolish USAID. The cost savings will be minimal; the carnage will be massive. And all of the agony that will be unleashed by this decision—the cries of pain that Trump will never hear, the tears of grief Musk will never see—is not accidental. It was done with malice. This is what Trump and MAGA represent, what lies at their moral core. To be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in what they are doing.

FOR THE PAST six years, Anne Linn has worked for the President’s Malaria Initiative, another U.S. program. But she lost her job earlier this month because of Trump and Musk’s actions. Her contract with PMI was canceled.

She’s proud of her work, and proud of the fact that in the 30 countries where PMI has been operating, the malaria mortality rate has been reduced by half since President George W. Bush launched the initiative, in 2006. (Malaria still kills more than half a million people each year, about three-quarters of whom are children under 5.)

Linn is aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image in the world and helps economies prosper. But that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.

“As a Christian,” Linn wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I was compelled by the Gospel, the words of Jesus, to use my life to try to diminish suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.”

She was doing that until Trump and Musk set their sights on USAID. Now, she wrote, “children, children of God, will die unnecessarily.”

In an interview with Time, Linn put it this way: “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?”

She’s worried that their suffering will increase because bed nets used to protect people from malaria are still in the warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them have a stop-work order. She spoke of her fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?” she asked. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be okay with this.”

Linn’s question—Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?—haunts me and many others like me. No group is more responsible for the reign of Trump than white evangelicals. In 2024, for the third time, they voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump. Most white evangelicals will not, under any circumstances, break with him. They are beholden to him.

[Read: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

They read the same words of Jesus as Linn does, but whereas those words have led her to relieve suffering for the world’s most vulnerable, many white evangelicals have ended up in a different place. They are in lockstep with a man who is taking delight in destroying an agency whose decimation will dramatically increase suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.

It is a remarkable thing to witness. There are tens of millions of men and women who are regular churchgoers, who attend Bible studies and Sunday-school classes and listen to Christian worship music, and who would raise a ruckus if anyone in Church leadership interpreted the Bible in a way that deviated even slightly from their doctrine on any number of issues.

And yet, many of these same people insist that their faith commitments have led them to support a president for whom the cruelty is the point. As a result, there is, somewhere in Kenya right now, a mother of three asking, “If I die, who will take care of my children?” Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care. It turns out that millions and millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus don’t, either.

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President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to put America First, just proposed the wildest and most improbable intervention by the United States in overseas affairs since the invasion of and occupation of Iraq, more than 20 years ago.

At a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump promised that the U.S. would become the occupier of Gaza.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we’ll do a job with it too. We’ll own it,” Trump said. “I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East.” Trump suggested that U.S. troops would be used, if needed, to implement his vision for Gaza.

He presented this idea, one never before suggested by a U.S. president or Middle East peace negotiator, as a way to end generations of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and, also, as a bonus, an opportunity to create sweet real-estate development opportunities. The idea was breathtaking in its audacity, and it would be fair to say that its implementation would run into myriad obstacles at home and abroad, except that the overwhelming likelihood is that the U.S. would never come near implementing this notion.

Trump’s proposal to displace 2.2 million Palestinian residents from their homes, which he expanded on today, has already angered  the Arab world. A direct American intervention in Gaza would radically expand the U.S.  footprint in the Middle East, giving it possession of a territory devastated by 15 months of fighting between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces, ignited by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. And it could further destabilize a region never known for its stability.

Trump, as is his practice,offered few details as he outlined the expansive idea at a White House press conference, standing next to a smiling Netanyahu.

The president—who has long been vociferously opposed to U.S. military intervention abroad—did not rule out sending the American military to secure Gaza while it was being rebuilt. Asked if U.S. troops would be deployed, Trump said that “we’ll do what’s necessary. … We’ll take it over and develop it.”

The plan would permanently remove Gaza’s residents from Palestinian territory and settle them outside of their land. Trump did not specify where homes for the new refugees might be found, though he again repeated his desire for Egypt and Jordan to take in Gaza’s residents. Both of those nations have firmly declined, their leaders quietly panicking, according to regional diplomats, at the thought of Trump forcing them to take radicalized Palestinians as refugees.

The displacement would presumably be met with outrage across the region. Palestinians, like Israelis, want to stay on their land. Neighboring Arab nations—even those with close U.S. ties—would not want to abet an Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from the strip. The Saudi foreign ministry released a statement offering its “unequivocal rejection” of any attempt “to displace the Palestinian people from their land.”

A ceasefire took hold in Gaza just before Trump took office, bringing a tentative halt to a conflict that has reportedly killed more than 20,000 Palestinian civilians and as many as 20,000 Hamas militants, leveled much of the strip, and created a devastating humanitarian crisis. Trump’s plan would pull the United States even more deeply into the conflict by taking over the territory, which has been fought over since Egypt occupied it in 1948.

The region has already been reshaped by Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks that killed nearly 1,200 people and saw another 250 taken hostage. Israel has pummeled Hamas, destroying its leadership, and also delivered devastating blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Combined with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the events of the past year have left Iran more isolated than it has been in decades, and Trump today ordered the return of the “maximum pressure” campaign to sanction Tehran.

Trump’s Gaza plan, were it to be carried out, would appear to be a remarkable win for the far-right members in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, who have longed for permanent Israeli expansion into both Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu—a longtime Trump ally, and the first foreign leader to visit the White House in the president’s second term—suggested he was open to the idea, noting that Trump “sees a different future for that piece of land.” He added: “It’s worth paying attention to this. We’re talking about it. It’s something that could change history.”

One White House official told me that Trump’s comments were not a spur-of-the-moment suggestion but reflective of a newfound, post-election confidence that he could put together the ultimate deal and change decades of history.

“Look, the Gaza thing has not worked. It’s never worked,” Trump told reporters. “I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable.” Trump has been buoyed by two first-term Middle East initiatives that Washington experts said would have devastating consequences for U.S. national security, but did not: The decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the capital, Jerusalem, and the order to assassinate the Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani.

Trump—who also has been publicly and privately musing about winning a Nobel Peace Prize—has been known to first take an outlandish position and then move to a more moderate stance. Sometimes there is a method to his madness, and sometimes there is simply madness in his madness. World leaders, from Denmark to Panama to the Middle East, have spent the past two weeks trying to discern the difference.  

“It occurs to me that Trump may have floated this idea to raise the stakes after Arab countries refused his request to take in Palestinians,” Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote on X. “Now, he’s cranking up the pressure: If you won’t take them, we’ll remove them ourselves and take control of Gaza. Classic Trump: Go to the extreme, making what once seemed outrageous suddenly look like the reasonable middle ground.”

Whatever motivated Trump’s comments, his proposal remains a repudiation of the principle of national self-determination, which has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for more than a century, albeit one that has been imperfectly honored.

Any direct U.S. intervention in Gaza would fly in the face of Trump’s long-standing desire to disengage from foreign entanglements; he began negotiations to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, wants to slash aid to Ukraine and has threatened to abandon military positions in Korea, Europe, and Syria. And it may face pushback from at home from some usually reliable allies.

“I think that would be an interesting proposal,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill after Trump spoke. “We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that. I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. It might be problematic.”

The plan also, ultimately, was at least a little bit about real estate. Trump remains a developer at heart, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner said last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable” and that Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip. The president today suggested that the appeal of Gaza’s beachfront property would be a draw for the strip’s future inhabitants, whether or not they be Palestinian, when asked whom he imagined living in the rebuilt region.

“I envision world people living there,” Trump declared. “The Riviera of the Middle East.”

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