Thailand is facilitating the transfer of thousands of people rescued from scam centres on the border of Myanmar.

Around 7,000 rescued workers are waiting to be moved across the border to Thailand, says Thai PM Paetongtarn Shinawatra.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

The critics don’t always get it right. Some viewers are adamant that certain polarizing or panned shows deserve their flowers, while others think particular acclaimed series can be overindulged with praise. For those who enjoy bickering with a Rotten Tomatoes score, read on for our editors’ answers to the question: What is a TV show that the critics were wrong about?

Season 2 of Euphoria (streaming on Max)

Coming off the heels of Euphoria’s visually stunning and acclaimed first season, the ingredients were all there for a successful Season 2: the talent, the stylish costuming, Labrinth’s distinctive synth-loaded score, the sheer force of the show’s cultural influence. I cared about the characters and their arcs—a feeling only amplified by the gut-wrenching performances of Rue (played by Zendaya) and Jules (played by Hunter Schafer) in the two stand-alone episodes that aired after the first season’s finale. But as the episodes in Season 2 stacked up, I found myself wondering: Is this it?

My grievances largely stem from how the characters were treated. Some of them got plenty of spotlight (Cassie, I’d argue, got more than necessary), and some beloved characters, including Kat, were sidelined and thrown for a loop with plotlines that didn’t gel with their character development in the previous season. Fez and Lexi’s relationship was intriguing but ended up undercooked. Elliot’s easy interference between Rue and Jules bewildered me. I’ve heard the defenses from die-hard Euphoria fans—they’re teenagers; they’re supposed to be irrational and impulsive and emotional—but in the end, messy characters don’t justify sloppy storytelling.

— Stephanie Bai, associate newsletters editor

***

Season 3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls (streaming on Max)

The Sex Lives of College Girls, Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s HBO comedy about four roommates, is best described as a college show meant to appeal to Millennials. And sure, it’s far from realistic. Are anyone’s dorm rooms really that big? Has a college student ever worn as many tweed blazers as Leighton? And why does every single male student have washboard abs?

But once you give up on trying to find relatable depictions of college days, past or present, you can enjoy the genuinely sweet and funny portrayal of female friendship. Many viewers have rightly complained that Reneé Rapp’s absence from most of the recent third season left a noticeable hole, and the critical reception was lukewarm, too. But by the season finale, the chemistry between the new “fourth roommate,” Kacey (played by Gracie Lawrence), and the rest of the girls was perfect. I still think about the scene where they sit on the floor and tell the awkward tales of losing their virginity. It’s a reminder of the profound power of good jokes and good advice, especially when delivered by a friend.

— Isabel Fattal, senior newsletters editor

***

Caso Cerrado (streaming on Peacock)

Caso Cerrado has had a chokehold on four generations of my family, though by any critical standards, it’s not exactly a great show. The Spanish-language courtroom reality-TV series, based in Miami, aired for 18 years on Telemundo and was broadcast across Latin America. My devout Dominican grandmother allowed only nature documentaries and Caso Cerrado to be played on her TV; my great-grandmother perpetually had it on during her final years, like ambient noise.

Though wildly popular, Caso Cerrado often received unfavorable reviews—one Spanish newspaper called it the “most ridiculous … show on television”—and accusations that its storylines were fabricated abounded. But at its peak, more than 1 million viewers tuned in daily to watch the lawyer Ana María Polo settle family and legal disputes, wielding a mix of Judge Judy’s bluntness and Oprah’s empathetic listening. Scored by melodramatic telenovela music, the show offered vignettes of human conflict—families fighting, crying, reconciling—that were at once deliciously dramatic and thought-provoking. This mix proved hyper-bingeable for my family and many others, especially because the show provided a tidy ending for its heavy topics in a way that real life often can’t. When each episode wrapped up, Polo would smack her gavel and pronounce “Caso cerrado!” Case closed.

— Valerie Trapp, assistant editor

***

Battlestar Galactica (streaming on Prime Video)

The 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot has been heralded for years as a triumph of storytelling: In 2020, for example, The Guardian wrote that “everyone is aware that BSG is supposed to be some sort of 21st-century TV classic.” I expected to love it—I’m the target audience for edgy science fiction with a strong serving of political allegory, where characters have to make morally gray choices in order to serve bigger causes the best way they believe they can. But the intervening years have not been kind to this series, or to its women, whom the writing too frequently flattens into badasses who have credulity-straining romances with the men they work with. Paired with the heavy-handedness of its messaging, and the way the plot goes off the rails in later seasons … All I can say is thank goodness we’ll always have everything this show promised in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

— Emma Sarappo, senior associate editor

***

Seasons 3 and 4 of The Killing (streaming on Hulu)

When the temperature hovers stubbornly at freezing, and rain is ceaseless, what sustains me is a twisty murder mystery propelled by a pair of moody detectives with some damn good chemistry. Well-known recent prestige shows fit the bill (True Detective, Mare of Easttown), but I’ll point you instead to the overlooked third and fourth seasons of The Killing, which reboot the central murder plot so you can easily start midway through the series.

Contrary to many critics, I prefer the latter seasons, in which the haunted ex-detective Sarah Linden (played by Mireille Enos), trying to settle into a quiet life as a transit cop just outside of cold, rainy Seattle, is drawn back into a homicide investigation when her former partner gets involved with a new case that shares gory similarities with a previous case of hers. But wait—a man had already been convicted and sentenced to death row for that past crime. Now you have 16 episodes filled with doubt and personal obsessions to savor.

— Shan Wang, programming director

Here are four Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How progressives froze the American dream Growing up Murdoch David Frum: Why the COVID deniers won The Tesla revolt

The Week Ahead

Season 3 of The White Lotus, a comedy-drama series set at the White Lotus resort in Thailand (premieres tonight on Max) The Monkey, a horror movie based on Stephen King’s short story about a cursed monkey toy (in theaters Friday) Lorne, a book by Susan Morrison about the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Katie Martin

I’ve Never Seen Parents This Freaked Out About Vaccines

By Emily Oster

Today, the world of vaccine questions has totally changed—in my view, for the much worse. I’m not just referring to the spectacle of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s likely ascension to the top of the government’s health-care bureaucracy or of Republican senators questioning vaccine safety publicly. Something is also happening among parents. I’ve continued to write about parenting, and to talk with parents about vaccines. And those conversations over the past few years—and especially the past year—have completely changed.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Can anything satisfy the guests of The White Lotus? The house where 28,000 records burned The game that shows we’re thinking about history all wrong “Dear James”: Should I leave my American partner? The paradox of music discovery, the Spotify way The unfunny man who believes in humor What Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show said

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing. RFK Jr. won. Now what? Trump says the corrupt part out loud.

Photo Album

As the International Space Station passed over the United Kingdom, this photo captured the city lights below. (Don Pettit / NASA)

Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut, engineer, and photographer, recently returned to the International Space Station for his fourth mission. Take a look at his photos of city lights, auroras, airglow, and the stars of our surrounding galaxy.

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When Donald Trump looks at the globe, what does he see? We know that in the president’s eyes, other nations may be abject “shithole countries,” shiny real-estate opportunities, or potential candidates for the 51st state. There’s no question that people, goods, and ideas from other lands are less welcome in the United States than they once were. But for all his purported anti-globalism, Trump is no isolationist: Foreign states are still useful things. In his first few weeks in office, Trump has shown us how, in spite of its fixation on borders, the MAGA movement is embracing its own version of globalization.

Trump’s is not a politics of international cooperation and mutual support, as the cuts to USAID and digs against NATO make clear. Nor does he defer to corporate hegemony: He has no problem banning foreign businesses and threatening multinationals with tariffs. He seems to approach the world, rather, as a wily oligarch does—juggling offshore trusts, fictitious addresses, and numbered accounts to avoid taxes, litigation, and the rules and responsibilities that come with living in a society.

I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist reporting on the shadowy offshore world and its protagonists: the people who built it, the countries complicit in the system, the firms and oligarchs that profit from it, and the groups and individuals who get caught in the cracks. I recognize in Trump’s recent incursions a line of reasoning that I’ve encountered time and time again: that if you’re incredibly rich, cruel, or clever, the world can be your loophole.

Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction. Call it “national globalism”: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.

The new administration’s international agenda so far has—not coincidentally—disproportionately focused on vulnerable territories that share a defining feature: They might offer the U.S. ways around rules, treaties, costs, regulations, or even the Constitution itself. Greenland. Gaza. El Salvador. The Panama Canal.

The most glaring example is Guantánamo Bay, which received its first planeload of undocumented migrants from the U.S. early this month. As of Friday, at least 126 migrants were detained at the naval station; Trump says it will accommodate 30,000. It’s not hard to guess what Trump hopes to achieve there, because the station has served a similar purpose before.

Most people associate Guantánamo with the War on Terror. But the U.S. has occupied the naval base for more than a century—renting it from the Cuban government consensually from 1903 to 1959, then somewhat less so once the Cuban Revolution scorched diplomatic relations.

[Read: The never-ending Guantanamo trials]

Gitmo’s physical location in the Caribbean is strategically useful, of course. But its unique legal geography is an added perk: Being neither entirely “domestic” (the U.S. does not own it) nor “foreign” (Cuba does not control it), Guantánamo is a liminal space. It is out of sight, out of mind, and a perfect place to try to evade accountability.

In the ’90s, tens of thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers escaping political violence found themselves rerouted to Guantánamo. Many became trapped in what lawyers described as a “legal black hole,” detained in squalid camps, and denied the usual legal process to claim asylum. One lawyer representing a group of 158 Haitian detainees, many of them HIV positive, who were prevented from leaving the camp for 20 months, compared the conditions to Dante’s ninth circle of hell. The Clinton administration agreed to follow a judge’s order to free them in 1993—but only on the condition that the court would strike the case from precedent. The migrant detentions went on.

The U.S. government will not identify the migrants it’s now imprisoning at Gitmo. The ACLU and others have sued to get them access to lawyers, alleging that the detainees are already “incommunicado.” It’s unclear what will happen to these people—not least because they have already been on U.S. soil—but the camp’s location, culture of secrecy, and dark history will make accountability much harder to come by.

Gitmo isn’t America’s only plan for offshoring migrants. Panama has accepted more than 100 deportees originally from China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said. Bukele’s administration has become synonymous with a brutal crackdown on crime. It’s conducted mass trials and been accused by Amnesty International of torturing prisoners in its overcrowded prisons. Now, in return for assistance developing its nuclear-energy program, El Salvador’s government has offered to put up America’s unwanted migrants—and potentially, U.S. citizens with convictions, too—in its jails, under its laws.

Last month, Trump said he wanted the U.S. to take control of the Panama Canal. Of course he did. Though the canal belongs to Panama, the U.S. built and governed it for much of the 20th century, and it now serves as the world’s second-largest free-trade zone, governed by an autonomous (albeit Panamanian) government agency. Trump also ordered Panama to sever ties with China, which controls ports adjacent to the canal via a Hong Kong company, and insisted that Panama stop charging U.S. vessels to use the thoroughfare. This is national globalism: free passage for me but not for thee (and definitely not for Xi).

It is unclear how seriously the Panamanians are taking this request, but even if they complied, it wouldn’t amount to much: There are only 185 U.S.-flagged cargo ships in the world. That’s because, under international law, shipowners can have their pick of flags, and given the choice, most opt for cheaper, less-regulated ones, like that of the Marshall Islands (which claims more than 4,000 vessels), Liberia (more than 5,000), or Panama itself (more than 8,000). Flags of convenience are a prototypical example of national globalism: the bald use of another country’s sovereignty to advance one’s own commercial interests. The practice of “flagging out” was, in fact, pioneered by American businesses in the 1920s and ’30s as a way to evade Prohibition, and later New Deal–era worker protections.

Trump’s proposal to take over Greenland reflects a similarly cavalier approach to sovereignty, but with murkier aims. Is it a real-estate play? A bid for rare-earth minerals? A tacit acknowledgment that climate change will alter shipping routes forevermore? Or is it all about some libidinal masculine desire for a new frontier?

That Trump will actually buy or invade the Danish territory is quite unlikely. But that he chose it as his target at all is instructive. Greenland is a sparsely populated former colony that enjoys a high degree of self-rule while depending on Denmark for its security. Greenland, like Gitmo and the Panama Canal, can be seen in the national-globalist imagination as betwixt and between—a natural place to exploit.

Then there’s Gaza. After close to a brutal year and a half of violence there, Trump entered the chat. First, he declared that the U.S. would simply take Gaza over and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” that could be filled with expats and multinational businesses. To do that, he said, Gazans would have to vacate (many would call a population transfer of this magnitude, with these intentions, ethnic cleansing). It’s highly unlikely that any of this will happen, but again, it makes sense that he seized upon a territory that world leaders have gone out of their way to classify as liminal, indeterminate, or somehow sub- or extra-national, against the wishes of the Palestinians who live there.  

Trump is certainly not the first national globalist, nor is America the first state to embrace practices such as sending migrants to third countries.

Italy recently established a camp in Albania, for instance, and Israel has deported hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Uganda. Since 2001, Australia has, on and off, diverted asylum seekers to squalid detention centers in the nearby nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The camps were directly inspired by Guantánamo. Australia offered the host states a cynical win-win: The poorer countries would get money to operate prisons, and Australia could make an example of a few thousand people, some of whom lived in the camps for years. Offshoring migrants also allowed Australia to claim it was not responsible for them under international law: After all, they were not on Australian land. Today, the majority have been resettled—but not in Australia.

In an analogous scandal that began in 2008 but is still ongoing, some 40,000 stateless people in the United Arab Emirates have semi-forcibly been given passports from Comoros, a nation they have never known, just so they can remain classified as “foreign” nationals without citizenship rights in the UAE.

National globalism is wily that way. It uses foreignness and territorial indeterminacy to its advantage. And no nation has mastered it better than the country Trump sees as America’s most threatening competitor—China.

The use of specialized carve-outs has helped China attract industry: through semiautonomous territories such as Hong Kong, which offers common-law courts and low taxes, and enclaves such as Shenzhen, which since the ’70s has been more open than the rest of China to foreign businesses and migrants. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which finances foreign ports, infrastructure, and real-estate developments in other countries to advance its own economic interest, can be seen as a much more ambitious version of what Trump might hope to achieve in Greenland and Panama. (Ironically, the overseas Chinese projects were themselves conceived to counter U.S. influence in the region.) On the borders of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, Chinese companies have invested in the creation of quasi-extraterritorial cities where they can invest currency and where gambling, scams, and other kinds of illicit activity are common.

Some of China’s partners, like Kazakhstan, are willing, if not equal, participants; others, like Laos, are poor and small and don’t have much choice. There are more than 50 Chinese special economic zones in Africa. What’s always clear is who’s calling the shots.

The philosophy of national globalism—a combination of nationalism, mercantilist economics, and neocolonial exploitation—is what unites the flags of convenience and the billionaires hoarding their art collections in top-secret Swiss warehouses. The defining feature of the national-globalist worldview is this: Land and law are not, and should not, be inextricably linked. If your own law doesn’t work for you, you can find a better one in another country or jurisdiction: moving your assets offshore, renouncing your citizenship and buying a new passport, or, if you’re a government, moving entire populations to a place where you are not technically responsible. These maneuvers purport to follow the letter of the law, but they don’t embody its spirit; the Australian refugee-law scholar Daniel Ghezelbash calls it hyperlegalism.

It’s unclear how much of these ideas Trump will carry out abroad. But he isn’t confining himself to other countries. He’s ready to bring national globalism home.

In 2023, Trump pledged to build “freedom cities” on federal land that would “reopen the frontier” and, presumably, free businesses from the usual rules and regulations. “Freedom Cities could address two major challenges confronting the United States: a sclerotic bureaucracy and a stagnant society,” wrote Mark Lutter and Nick Allen, experts who promote special economic zones like China’s.

The irony, of course, is that carving out land for deregulated islands of industry is how other countries sought to attract American industry in the first place. It worked because it lowered costs and unleashed a regulatory race to the bottom. What Trump would actually be doing is bringing the long hours, low wages, and poor conditions of offshore jobs back home to America.

By picking and choosing which rules to play by—foreign, domestic, or something conveniently in between—national globalism undermines democratic rule, replacing the idea of “one land, one law, one people” with something fractured and piecemeal.

Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order exemplifies this. The Fourteenth Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” That’s universality based on territory: Being born here is enough.

Does birthright occasionally grant citizenship to people born here by chance? Absolutely. Is it a perfectly fair system? No. But what is citizenship if not chance?

The Trump administration has made the specious claim that children born to people without the right documentation are somehow not under its jurisdiction, and could therefore see their citizenship claims denied, or perhaps even have their citizenship revoked. If nothing else, it is a transparent effort to establish two classes of people. And for national globalists, only one of them matters.

What do the wealthy actually want? Some billionaires have been startlingly transparent about their intent to shape the systems that govern American life. Some celebrities just need uncomplicated adoration from the masses. In recent years, several prestige shows have examined the psychology of a different, less visible category of the ultrarich. They walk down the street without bodyguards; they splurge on fancy tasting menus; they attend parties full of people with the same social breeding and balance sheets.

But when they interact with those outside their world, their hidden desires and values are inevitably revealed. On The Undoing, the murder of a working-class mother whose child attends a fancy Upper East Side private school exposes the double life of a respected local physician. On Big Little Lies, a close-knit group of rich California moms—and their breezy social norms—is subjected to the judgment of an outsider. And The White Lotus, another HBO series, has poked and prodded at the wealthy guests of luxury resorts scattered around the world, showing how the casual exploitation of others is central to their vision of leisure. Rich and poor characters alike behave badly on the show—but only the former expect to get away with their sins, and usually do.

Season 3 of Mike White’s anthology series, which premieres on Sunday, follows a motley crew of vacationers at a Southeast Asian outpost of the titular hotel. As in previous seasons, guests of the White Lotus land themselves in all manner of compromising situations when they allow their base impulses—the need for sex, or chemical indulgence—to overtake them. But the shift to Thailand also introduces a new avenue for the show’s character studies. While in Asia, some of the guests end up contemplating the role of spirituality and organized religion in their life—and bristling at Buddhist teachings that seemingly run counter to their most ego-driven convictions. The selfish tourists are trapped, as one newly sober expat describes it, on a “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering,” and those unwilling to wrestle with their discomfort may never jump off.

The most obvious conflict of principles emerges among the Ratliff family, who come to the resort because Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook), the college-aged daughter, wants to interview a local monk. The Ratliffs don’t spend much time together on a regular basis, it seems, and their vacation becomes an exercise in attempting to reconcile each family member’s competing priorities. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is cautiously permissive about his bookish daughter’s interest in Buddhism; mother Victoria (Parker Posey), seems bewildered; her brash older brother mocks it outright. “Buddhism is for people that wanna suppress in life,” Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) says to his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), on the Ratliffs’ first night in Thailand. “They’re afraid—don’t get attached; don’t have desires; don’t even try. Just sit there in a lotus position with a thumb up your ass.”

[Read: On failing the family vacation]

To Saxon, the point of life is getting what you want—a worldview without room for avarice isn’t one he respects. That’s a fairly standard outlook for a White Lotus character, and Saxon’s experience seems to graph neatly onto the show’s established patterns: Each season features a rich, conventionally attractive white man who expects the world (or the closest available woman) to bend to his whims. What makes The White Lotus often satisfying to watch is how the show challenges these characters, however briefly, to confront the assumptions they’ve built their life on. It’s not just that they’re attached to their material objects or social status; many of them have never even thought about what their comfort demands of other people. For some characters, imagining a different way of living means being forced to see how insecure they are about their looks or how flimsy their friendships have become; for others, it’s much more existential. These journeys are more complex than a simple tale of rich people getting their comeuppance in the tropics.

Some of what gives The White Lotus its charge is the show’s insistence on pushing its characters into thorny erotic terrain. Season 3 slowly upends Saxon’s understanding of himself, as the easily attained passions he’s always taken for granted—professional success, attention from women—cede ground to unspeakable, unacknowledged yearnings. The White Lotus has often portrayed sex as an exchange of power, and Saxon’s storyline shows the haunting aftereffect of unnamed desires. Later in the series, a different character regales a former friend with memories from an era in his life when he discovered an appetite for role-play. Considered alongside Saxon’s journey, these scenes underscore how inextricable sex is from the characters’ sense of self—and how their identity is attached to invisible hierarchies. Without others affirming their superiority, be it in the bedroom or in the boardroom, they wind up adrift.

Part of why the White Lotus characters are pushed toward cataclysmic (if also fleeting) personal revelations is how the series traps them in contained, unfamiliar settings. Every season of The White Lotus opens with the killing of a character whose identity is only later revealed. The hotel guests are sometimes too self-absorbed to notice, but this season amps up the terrors lurking around every corner in the week leading to the mysterious death. The music is eerier, and the environment seems more foreboding. Even the animals pose a threat—a number of the season’s most suspenseful moments involve patrons either running away from, or getting overly friendly with, the local wildlife. And yet, most of the peril that the rich guests have encountered thus far is of their own making.

There’s only so much catharsis that a show about the ultrarich can offer. The White Lotus may be a show about wealthy people behaving reprehensibly, but it still exults in depicting their luxurious lifestyles, at a time when average Americans have been warned to prepare for economic hardship ahead. When one character says that having access to a yacht is worth the risk of being killed, her blithe assessment doesn’t land as a shocking provocation; the camera seems to be in love with the boat too. The characters are not wholly irredeemable, and some do arrive through meditation and self-reflection at meaningful answers about their compulsions, even as others remain unwilling to consider such questions about their motivations (and how their actions affect other people). But no matter how many internal crises they face, they usually end up sailing off into the sunset.

Slime-covered capybaras in Argentina, a chaotic fireworks festival in Taiwan, the day of the patron saint of beekeepers in Bulgaria, a lava flow atop Mount Etna in Italy, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York City, a Buddhist prayer ceremony in Thailand, and much more

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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.

Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:

American tariffs hurt Americans.
President Donald Trump has always insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners, that they put free money into the U.S. Treasury. Trump’s week-long tariff war confirmed that nobody else in the U.S. government or in American business believes him. The National Association of Home Builders published a letter to the president predicting that his tariffs would raise the cost of housing construction. Automobile stocks slumped because investors expected Trump’s tariffs to add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new vehicle. The senior Republican in the Senate publicly pleaded for potash to be exempted from tariffs so as not to increase fertilizer prices for his farm constituents, belying Trump’s claim that the higher prices would be paid by the exporters.

Tariffs beget retaliatory tariffs.
When Trump paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those countries halted their retaliatory actions. But China is proceeding with a range of tariffs against U.S. exports, reserving more retaliation for later. Americans are already paying for previous rounds of Trump trade actions against China. In the first Trump presidency, China cut its purchases of U.S. soybeans by 75 percent over a single year in 2018. Brazil in 2018 overtook the United States as the world’s largest soybean producer. During the campaign of 2024, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lamented that the United States had become a net importer of food. He omitted to mention that a reason for this status was precisely the harm done to U.S. farm exports by Trump’s first-term tariffs.

[Read: The tariffs were never real]

There’s not much point in negotiating trade treaties with the United States.
Trump renegotiated NAFTA during his first term, replacing it with his USMCA deal. Now, in his second term, he has reneged on that. Trump’s version of NAFTA offered a range of legal ways to terminate the agreement; he did not use any of them. He did not even pretend that Canada or Mexico had somehow defaulted on their end of the bargain. He simply ignored the deal and proceeded with his tariffs under a series of contradictory excuses.

Days earlier, Trump had issued a flurry of threats against Colombia, which also has a trade agreement with the United States. Again, Trump ignored all the legalities of the treaty; again, he used trade as a weapon to resolve nontrade disagreements.

Mexico and Canada have oriented their economies to the U.S. under first NAFTA and then USMCA. That probably will not alter even after Trump’s episode of blackmail. But other countries, farther away, may wonder whether there’s any point in signing deals with such a bad-faith partner as the United States has become.

“Friend-shoring” is a fiction.
As relations have worsened between the United States and China, many in the U.S. government have looked to friend-shoring as a way to keep most of the benefits of free trade. The idea is to redirect U.S. purchasing power away from hostile China and toward more trustworthy partners. The assumption behind the term is that those partners will gladly trust the United States.

Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies in Congress have threatened unilateral military action against Mexico; Trump himself indulges in speculation about the forced annexation of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and about absorbing Canada as a 51st state.

Maybe that’s all just a lot of ugly talk. But the president has made clear that so-called friendship with the United States does not ensure anything for America’s partners: not trade access, not the security of treaties, not even their territorial integrity and national independence.

Friend-shoring imagined extending trade with American allies. Trump-shoring means that today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy, without cause or even warning.

Instability is the future.
Trump has now allowed North American trade a 30-day reprieve. His supporters want to claim that he won big concessions worth all the tumult he caused. Such claims are transparently untrue. Canada had made its big proposals for more cooperation on border issues back in December. In any case, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has observed, illegal drugs are much more likely to flow north into Canada than south from Canada. Mexico’s offer to (once again) shift National Guard units to the border from other duties inside the country is generally recognized as symbolic. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page correctly identified the embarrassing truth in a headline on Monday: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.”

Trump is a uniquely emotionally needy president, prone to impulsive vindictiveness.

In 2019, Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney forbade Homeland Secretary Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss threats to the integrity of the 2020 election. Such discussions upset Trump, The New York Times reported, by reminding him of questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election. In mid-November 2020, Trump refused to hear or think more about the coronavirus pandemic even as fatalities spiked to their peak. An aide explained to The Washington Post that Trump was “just done with COVID … It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” For two weeks after the election of 2020, he forbade his administration to cooperate with the transition process and denied Joe Biden’s team access to information and the funds required by law.

[Read: A handbook for dealing with Trump threats]

As Trump confronts derision about his splendid little trade war of February 2025, will he lash out again? And how is any business of any size supposed to plan for the future when the president creates economic crises to act out his ravenous ego needs?

“America First” makes it safer not to be America’s ally.
In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion, only slightly less. Yet it was Canada, not Vietnam or Thailand, that Trump threatened with tariffs.

One difference: Canada is as a rule closely aligned with the United States. By geography, by history, by ideology, Canada has few geopolitical options. Vietnam and Thailand, however, have worked hard to balance their relationships with the two greatest powers, and hostile U.S. action against either could swing that country toward China, away from the United States.

A lesson of Trump’s trade war that all the world will hear: Countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump. Countries such as Vietnam and Thailand that carefully navigate between the two great economic powers without making undue commitments maximize their security and their dignity.

To reward non-aligned countries and punish U.S.-aligned ones might seem a reckless, even a perverse, choice by a U.S. president. But that’s the president Americans have, and the choice he has made for them.

This story incorporates reporting fromCNN, MSN and The Associated Press on MSN.com.

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