America The Spiteful

Chief Executive & Global Agency

THE NEW AMERICAN ADMINISTRATION SHIFTS from its initial flurry of wild actions to a steady-state that’s vicious and menacing.

Here on The Media Beat you’ll know how I keep a wary eye on how the US is reported around the rest of the world. That task comes easily during those times of the year when I’m at my home-from-home, in the Republic of Ireland, or when I’m traveling more widely. And wherever I am I maintain my deep interest in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa (as all The Media Beat followers will know) since I’ve reported on that region for a very large share of my whole career.

So right now, African countries are stunned and reeling. They’re reeling not exactly in shock since they had plenty of warning – but they are nonetheless stunned at the reality of the US withdrawal from their continent. America’s active engagement with Africa was always – well not really always, at every moment in history – but broadly it has been pretty welcome, and decidedly consequential. And now the cruel chaos, the sheer nastiness emanating from this Administration is understandably very hard to totally take in.

Let me case it in personal terms for a moment. I’m an immigrant, a grateful immigrant on the whole, having lived here for 34 years and taken US citizenship. A British friend and colleague this week complained to me by email, saying

“You have elected a King [he meant the American electorate in general, including me] — I just don’t get it, after all the anti-monarchy rhetoric of the last 250 years.”

I could understand his bafflement. And I would add that it’s an especially capricious and spiteful king that we’ve elected.

Yes, I immigrated to a Republic, gladly leaving behind a monarchy, albeit a so-called “constitutional” monarchy that’s outweighed politically by a pretty powerful, elected Parliament. What’s so distressing is that this Republic’s longstanding assistance to the poorer world, including the continent of Africa to which I have felt so connected, was affirmed by an Act of the US Congress, this country’s elected parliament, so to speak. But it’s the executive branch of government, the Administration, our elected King that is now demolishing that international involvement.

Trio at the Top: Which one will win?

The new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has put himself in personal charge of the agency providing such assistance, USAID (the Agency for International Development). And this could be presaging an intramural fight with Elon Musk who, with the overall boss’s evident encouragement, is determined to (as he graphically put it a few days ago) “feed USAID into the woodchipper.” If a fight is what it is, between Rubio and Musk … it’s another, different fight than the one I was forseeing during my January 24th podcast – over the two men’s opposing views about China.

Musk’s support from the boss has consisted of the latter condemning USAID staff as “a bunch of radical lunatics” For his own part Musk has said they are “a criminal organization” Early in the week, many of these staff being so preposterously libeled were locked out of their offices on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street, in a remarkable display of messy governmental disorder.

Within days, Musk-directed plans were laid to pull out most of USAID’s overseas workers back to Stateside. An overall total of 10,000 aid-related jobs at home and abroad were reported to be on the chopping block (alongside, of course, all the other agencies whose workforces are threatened, like the Education Department and even the CIA). The USAID website went dark for several days, not alone among hurriedly rejigged, public-facing homepages for government departments.

That first shut-out episode prompted some interesting efforts to get on top of the story by the tech journal, WIRED. It was able to tell us that Musk’s work on stripping down USAID was actually being carried out by somewhat inexperienced operatives.

“WIRED has identified six young men, all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24 — according to public databases, their online presences, and other records — who have little to no government experience.”

One of these young men, the one who sent out orders by email for USAID staff not to come to work on Monday, was a certain Gavin Kliger, who WIRED tells us was still studying at Berkeley just four years ago and on graduating didn’t move far, joining a company called Databricks, an outgrowth of that university’s Algorithms, Machines and People Laboratory. Though lacking any governmental experience, what several of these young men do have is some time (obviously not a long time) spent working for Musk-owned tech companies before being called to DC. One such Musk protégé, Edward Coristine, newly installed in the government’s Office of Personnel Management, only very recently left high school and spent three months last year at Neuralink, Musk’s company working on the interface between computers and the human brain.

Speaking of “lunatics,” at Joint Airbase Andrews, Maryland

And meanwhile, how does all this take actual effect on the ground, in those parts of the world directly concerned — places where for decades I often filmed, for instance, huge sacks of flour or rice being unloaded which were stenciled with the words “From the American People.” The BBC put it very simply in a headline, “Global aid upended in a matter of days.” Here at home the New York Times headline was pretty clear, too: “Health Programs Shutter Around the World After Trump Pauses Foreign Aid.”

In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program had to suspend the spraying of insecticide into village homes and to halt shipments of anti-mosquito bed-nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children.

In Zambia, medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women, and rehydration salts to counter life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, could not reach villages they were intended for … because the trucking companies had their USAID-provided supplies suspended.

South Africa’s newspapers, notably The Star, have been pointing out a case of the right hand seemingly not knowing what the left is doing. It reported, kind of ironically, on Secretary Rubio announcing the continuation (very welcome, if maintained) of a largely US-funded antiretroviral treatment program for millions of HIV/AIDS sufferers. While at the same time, the paper sounded an alarm over the Trump-mandated, 90-day funding freeze for all foreign assistance – which would include a halt to the program whose name now has a forlorn kind of pathos. The acronymic name is PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, so labeled because it was first introduced by another Republican president, George W Bush.

One prominent elected representative in Johannesburg, though not in government, told The Star that the American pause in funding is “a betrayal of the shared values of compassion and partnership between the nations.” Others were maybe sharper, speaking of “sheer wanton cruelty” from a man whom they know for once describing African states as “sh**-hole countries” – which an embarrassed Associated Press had to euphemize as “using language that would equate any such country to a toilet-bowl.”

It’s the overall health and well-being of ordinary human beings that are at stake in the matter of USAID. What remains so hard for any humanitarian frame of mind to fully credit … is that the withdrawal of vital life-saving measures for millions of disadvantaged people has now to be bracketed within the same petty-mindedness of a decision-maker who (just for example) makes a point of withdrawing security guards from former officials who once offended him.

What a powerful motivator — in one kind of so-called leader, at least — is plain, simple spite.