Trump Gave 300 Babies HIV
He's also starving people, spreading malaria, and creating new allies for China
The One problem with most political reporting is the focus on the politics. When we widen the aperture, the political battles are dwarfed in importance by the stakes and the consequences.
Imagine how different our political discourse would be if the headline of this article appeared on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post. It would drive cable news coverage and social-media discourse.
Tens of millions of people would learn that Pres. Donald Trump is wholesaling the distribution of HIV to newborn infants.
Among other things it does, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — Trump’s first high-profile funding target — funds the distribution and administration of HIV medicine. These retrovirals can — just to pick a crazy example — prevent pregnant mothers from passing HIV on to their kids.
That’s not happening now. One USAID worker estimated to Wired magazine that, “At a minimum, 300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV, now do.”
We all knew Trump was a fan of the 1980s, but bringing back HIV seems excessive. But that 300 estimate is a week old, so now, who knows?
Trump did unfreeze some of the programs initially frozen, such as PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by Pres. George W. Bush (who couldn’t decide who to endorse last year). What Trump didn’t unfreeze was the communications block between USAID and other organizations. Which means even if the money is legally unfrozen, there’s no line of communication through which to resume the distribution of funds or the spending thereof.
The logistics workers to get things where they need to be are still on administrative leave.
Wired reported:
“In countries like Zambia, Nigeria, Haiti, and Mozambique, medical equipment ranging from antiretroviral drugs for treating HIV to pre-exposure prophylaxis and condoms that can prevent transmission of the disease are currently sitting in limbo…
“In Haiti, an aid worker confirmed that HIV/AIDS medication from USAID remains inaccessible. ‘We cannot touch the medication,’ they say. ‘Everything is on hold.’”
This is the handiwork of people that millions of Americans still believe to be smart.
Haiti alone has 125,000 people getting HIV treatment. At the medical facilities not shuttered due to gang violence.
But four Haitian hospitals were left unsure whether they can keep distributing medicine (or keep using funds they already have), despite the perfect — yet repeatedly amended — communications from the Trump administration.
Haiti has three months worth of HIV drugs — antiretrovirals — on hand. Well, not on hand exactly. In warehouse. Specifically, a warehouse controlled by a company funded by USAID that now cannot go inside and get the three months worth of antiretrovirals.
“If some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver [from the freeze], then I have real questions about the competence of that organization or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point, ” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
Because what kind of person would sabotage U.S. aid to make a political point.
Well, hey, here’s one incompetent organization making a political point: “[W]e urge the Department of State to resume PEPFAR programming immediately so that those on treatment can receive uninterrupted care. In fact, it’s a matter of life and death,” said the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
It’s important to note that the factional back-and-forths, the congressional/executive tensions, the on-site security standoffs, are receiving far more coverage than the consequences: People dying.
USAID gets about $40 billion in annual appropriations, less than one percent of federal spending. Trump has put an estimated 9,400 of its 10,000 staffers on leave, and internet-bellowed, “CLOSE IT DOWN.”
The cure for stupid is better voting, but there is no cure for HIV. Without USAID, 40 people are born every day who would have been free of HIV, but will now never know anything but life with HIV. And without the kind of treatment USAID provides and funds, HIV can lead to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).
With treatment, the amount of HIV in the blood can be lowered enough that people can live as long as anyone else who doesn’t drink as much as I now do. And antiretroviral drugs can lower HIV’s “viral load” so much that people with HIV won’t pass it on.
With treatment.
Without treatment, people with HIV can get AIDS. Then their life expectancy drops to three years. If they acquire a disease that’s life-threatening and opportunistic (meaning: it gets in thanks to the untreated lowered immunity), then their life expectancy drops to one year.
Without treatment.
According to the UN, 20 million of the 30 million people living with HIV rely at least in part on U.S. aid. That includes half a million kids. In theory, those people could pass HIV on to Americans, even the MAGA voters who voted for less USAID and more AIDS.
The UN also estimates that under PEPFAR-Trump (PEPFART) and without other U.S. aid, there will be a 400% increase in AIDS deaths over the next four years. That’s an estimated 6.3 million people, even the New York Post splashed in a headline.
And Trump’s wholesale production of HIV babies is just one small piece of the larger consequences that have not (yet) been promoted from lower paragraphs to their own headlines. Here’s Politico:
“...the dismantling of USAID and the freeze on foreign aid spending may have already put lives in danger in places from Ukraine to the Thai-Myanmar border as the flow of everything from food to medical aid has slowed or stopped.”
Here’s the New York Times:
“President Trump … has thrown into turmoil programs that fight starvation and deadly diseases, run clinical trials and seek to provide shelter for millions of displaced people across the globe….
“…Trump’s executive order will cause a humanitarian catastrophe and undermine America’s influence, reliability and global standing.”
Here’s former USAD Administrator Samantha Power:
“Out of the $38 billion that U.S.A.I.D. spent in fiscal year 2023, nearly $20 billion was for health programs (such as those that combat malaria, tuberculosis, H.I.V./AIDS and infectious disease outbreaks) and humanitarian assistance to respond to emergencies and help stabilize war-torn regions.”
Here’s another New York Times:
“...money has gone toward humanitarian aid, development assistance and direct budget support in Ukraine, peace-building in Somalia, disease surveillance in Cambodia, vaccination programs in Nigeria, H.I.V. prevention in Uganda and maternal health assistance in Zambia. The agency has also helped to contain major outbreaks of Ebola.”
Here’s more Power:
“U.S.A.I.D. is no longer monitoring bird flu in 49 countries as it was three weeks ago; it has stopped working with at-risk youth in Central America to prevent gang violence that spurs migration.”
Here’s the New York Times’s graphics department illustrating where some of the money goes:
And here’s where all of the money goes, also courtesy of the Times’s graphics department (and with an obvious outlier of Ukraine):
In Kenya, at least 40,000 health-care workers will stop health-care working. Refugee camps providing for 700,000 people will stop providing.
Ethiopia already let 5,000 health-care workers go. Somewhere.
In case you heard that USAID money was buying condoms for Hamas — first of all, what MAGA Republican doesn’t support Hamas contraception? — but also, not true. Here’s what the money went for, according to the International Medical Corps:
“Instead, the group said, the money was used to operate two field hospitals, treat and diagnose malnutrition, deliver more than 5,000 babies and perform 11,000 surgeries.”
The infantile, made-up claims of USAID criminality by Elon Musk and Trump have been taken seriously in countries around the world — leaving laid-off relief workers suspected of fraud because it never occurs to people around the world that the most successful country in human history might elect a jackass as president.
Of course, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that two men who got rich exploiting people for their labor can’t conceive of humans doing good without profiting from it. In that light, it makes sense that “corruption” is the only explanation they can see for people dedicating their lives to USAID and fellow humans.
After all, without that explanation you’d have to be utterly depraved to do something like… destroying the USAID memorial to those from the agency who died in the line of duty.
Journalist Elise Labott reported on LinkedIn that it was dismantled by DOGE workers.
This same feral mistrust of altruism and compassion also blinds “business” leaders to the knock-on advantages, the selfish motives, for providing U.S. aid around the world.
In all of the countries we’re talking about, USAID assistance made it more likely that national leaders say yes when the U.S. asks for help. Which also helps counter the influence campaigns of inarguably undemocratic regimes. (The other undemocratic regimes.)
In dozens of contests around the world between democracy and oligarchy, Trump is taking the U.S. off the field. Exactly what he said he opposed in the Panama Canal.
Also selfish: A lot of that USAID money gets spent on aid…from the U.S. The government estimates that USAID bought 41% of its food relief from American farms. Which means that 41% goes right back into the U.S. economy, funding paychecks and generating tax revenue for cities, states, and the feds.
Trump’s freeze means U.S. food we already paid for is now going to waste — hundreds of tons of American-grown wheat is sitting in Houston alone — and planned purchasing from American farmers is stopping. We’re talking about $340 million in U.S. rice, wheat, and soybeans.
US Dept. of Agriculture grants to buy 235,000 metric tons of wheat have also been put on pause until American farmers learn their lesson. U.S. rice farmers export $126 million of, no surprise here, rice. And they expect that to be affected, too.
The single biggest U.S. recipient of USAID funding is Catholic Relief Services (CRS), based in Baltimore and founded by the U.S. bishops’ conference in order to aid Europe’s World War II survivors. On Wednesday we learned they’re expecting to lose half of their $1.5 billion budget.
CRS says it serves 200 million people in 121 countries, mostly with disaster relief. It had already started laying people off by the time Trump on Thursday promised to end anti-Christian persecution.
Justifying the spending freezes, the Trump White House said, uh, yeah, but, um, USAID was also providing gender-affirming care in Guatemala and diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia. So if condemning Guatemalans to gender dysphoria and rendering Serbian workplaces undiverse means killing babies, that’s a price Trump’s willing to pay.
Don’t get me wrong, U.S. engagement in other countries is incredibly fraught. Lee Fang has a good writeup (well, the part before the paywall is good) on how problematic some USAID funding has been. And, of course, it would’ve been nice to have a surgical approach to extract federal support for corporate colonization around the world.
But Trump didn’t have to throw the starving baby out with the polluted bathwater.1
And helping the world helps the U.S. even if you’re utterly bereft of morality. Instability is already on the rise thanks to climate change and oligarchs. Worsening it with famine and disease will not make things better in the U.S.
U.S. exporters can sell more to stable countries. Diseases don’t know borders. Medical research benefits future people. Here’s more from the Times:
“Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. The freeze left people with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut them off from the researchers monitoring them and spread fear.
“In South Africa, for example, the freeze shut down a U.S.A.I.D.-funded study of silicone rings inserted in women to prevent pregnancy and H.I.V. infection.”
Insecticide spraying to kill mosquitoes is on pause and millions of bed-nets (to prevent mosquitoes from spreading malaria) are not being distributed thanks to Trump’s freeze. That’s more people on the planet from whom mosquitoes can get malaria to inject into you or someone you care about.
Not scary enough? Trump’s order may suspend funding for a prison camp in Syria that currently holds tens of thousands of Islamic State members whose militant form of Islam is also contagious.
Family Ties
I’ve done a lot of reporting over the years about the Fellowship Foundation, the group behind the two (2) National Prayer Breakfasts that Trump addressed Thursday (yes, I have reporting coming on that).
One thing I’ve tried and probably failed to make clear is my belief that the vast majority of The Fellowship’s people, like most people, have good intentions. Albeit typically acted on in theocratic ways.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) is a longtime Fellowship insider. He came to USAID’s, um, aid, on behalf of U.S. farmers. Two billion dollars of USAID funding is paid out every year to U.S. farmers. For food.
With the subtext that Moran and Rubio are connected via The Fellowship, Moran posted: “I urge @SecRubio to distribute the $340 million in American-grown food currently stalled in U.S. ports to reach those in need. Time is running out before this life-saving aid perishes.”
There’s also longtime Fellowship leader David Beasley, the former governor of South Carolina. He fought hunger so hard he won the Nobel fucking Peace Prize leading the UN’s World Food Programme. Fellow Fellowship insider former Rep. Tony Hall (D-OH) spent decades fighting famine, including a stint as U.S. ambassador for food and agriculture.
Hall is so naive, he co-wrote a book called “Changing the Face of Hunger: One Man's Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and People of Faith Are Joining Forces to Help the Hungry, the Poor, and the Oppressed.”
In the run-up to the election, Beasley on Twitter posted about how Democrats and Republicans can work together on foreign aid. And how mixing religion and politics will feed the hungry.
Beasley hasn’t posted since the election.
As of this week, the World Food Programme that Beasley used to run (now run by Cindy McCain, widow of Trumpsbane) said that all this USAID bullshit (not their phrasing) had upended distribution of 507,000 metric tons of U.S. food. Planned purchases — from American farmers — of an additional 180,000 metric tons of food was canceled. By the most overtly religious administration of modern times.
(Flashback: Here’s a 2020 article about how great Beasley is at getting funding out of Trump by not telling the White House that climate change is making famine worse.)
Beasley and Hall are not alone putting their faith in the make-no-enemies, prayer-will-unite-us approach that’s currently starving and killing the people they spent much of their adult lives trying to save.
An untold (because it’s secret) number of Fellowship leaders and associates have what’s often called “a heart for Africa.” A lot find it more fun to play golf with powerful people, but some really are fighting famine and, as far as I can tell, virtually all of them have famine-fighting in their DNA.
Franklin Graham, for instance — the secret backer behind The Fellowship’s National Prayer Breakfast — drizzles Jesus all over his disaster relief. But he does the disaster relief, too. (Graham claims he’s exempt from the Trump freeze, but it’s far from clear how true that is in practice.)
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) more than anyone is responsible for keeping The Fellowship viable in Washington by ensuring they always had a Democratic name on their events, bolstering their false claim of bi- or non-partisanship. On Feb. 5, Coons was at a USAID rally, reaping what he’d sown.
In fact, the World Food Programme and other famine-fighting leaders are often Republicans not because Republicans care more, but because America’s Republican lawmakers would block funds for famine-fighting with Democrats in charge. The GOP wanted its famine funding rich in proselytizing, but free of family planning and contraception.
But they did want it.
It’s true that some in the Fellowship are so committed to serving power that they routinely mingle with bloody-handed dictators. Rubio, for instance, is a longtime Fellowship insider who was happy to torpedo a UN anti-corruption task force in service of a Guatemalan evangelical president based on evidence that was so clearly bullshit that even Rapture-believing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called it out.
But Rubio has also been on board with The Fellowship’s mission of helping people not die.
Which didn’t stop him from throwing in whole-heartedly with a Trump agenda that means starvation and sickness for people around the world. After becoming secretary of State, Rubio said, “Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”
Which is different from what Rubio reportedly said at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast: “Everything we do can be worship … The most important goal is approval from God.”
Unless it doesn’t make America more prosperous.
Rubio aside, there’s a vast Christian subculture in this country that’s not only committed to foreign aid, but that’s been invested in it forever. Yes, this impulse could easily be channeled into toxic, much-more-proselytizing “private” charity — in keeping with the privatization aims of Project 2025/DOGE/etc., — but Democrats also have an opportunity here to make common cause for the value of American tax dollars fighting famine and preventing the spread of disease.
That won’t happen, though, unless people know about it. And that means educating people about the real consequences of the chaos and disruption many of them are undoubtedly celebrating. It means letting people know not just that Musk is being mean to government officials, but that every day forty babies are being born with human immunodeficiency virus.
And when people respond with, “Well, they should’ve gotten their shit together or other countries could help more,” you can respond, other countries do help more, but also, tell them they’re right and it shouldn’t fall so much on us, and Trump should make that happen without giving babies HIV in the process.
It’s “move fast and break things,” not “move fast and kill babies.”
The Good News
Non-governmental organizations are taking action. So are judges. One judge delayed the suspension for thousands of USAID workers.
The really good news is that Trump always hires shitty lawyers. And his crack legal team at the Justice Department is incapable of disguising the fact that his claims are baseless. Here are words that actually came from the inside of a Trump lawyer:
“The president has decided there is corruption and fraud at USAID.”
Well, there is now.
THE COVERAGE As a former “real” journalist who highlights deficiencies of “real” journalism, I want to reiterate my recent point that editorial siloing and staffing shape how news is reported.
It’s why most of the USAID headlines are about the political battles. In a better, grown-up media environment, the headlines would be different — and they’d move public opinion.
What people don’t care about: Political battles.
What people care about: Babies born with HIV because a DOGEr recruited last month said don’t talk to the people in other countries who could unlock the retrivals warehouse two blocks away.
Given these media inadequacies, I want to shout out two outlets, Jalopnik and Salon — both aggregating Wired’s reporting — that got this right:
Democratic Politics
I’m reluctant to address this due to fear that I will lose my fucking mind and start getting personal and ugly. So pray for me, because here I go.
Politico just ran a piece about Democratic consultants warning against fighting for foreign aid.
David Axelrod: “Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight … When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
Rahm Emanuel: “[W]hile I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on.”
James Carville: “It’s a question of what you emphasize and how you emphasize it … In the big conversation, where do you want to put your chips?”
Let’s set aside my heart-of-the-sun, thermonuclear rage that real people will non-metaphorically die on Emanuel’s hill because they can’t even eat Carville’s chips. This is still just the worst kind of loser politics.
All three of these political masterminds start their arguments by surrendering, by accepting the battlefield as Republicans have defined it. The entire point of being a political consultant is supposed to be that you are so good you get to be the one defining the battlefield.
All three of these self-beclowning clowns know that when people learn more, their views change. Axelrod and Emanual should know better than anyone that Obamacare wasn’t as popular as the Affordable Care Act because legions of dipsticks didn’t know they were the same thing.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) is the top Democratic on the subcommittee with USAID oversight. He responded to those consultant quotes as follows: “[T]he best these podcasters can muster is that we should wait for a more popular program to defend? Spare me.”
Even better, let’s get some political consultants who also understand that those podcasters are factually wrong about where Americans are on this issue (unless we only care the politics of the Great Mythical Gettable Republican).
A 2019 Pew poll showed that an overwhelming number of Americans, 68%, support foreign aid. More than a third of Americans wanted us to spend more, outnumbering the less than one third who wanted it decreased:
Pundits and consultants think foreign aid is unpopular because they live in a world where what it buys is buried in the seventh paragraph.
The more people know about foreign aid — the good kind, anyway, not the kind that clears corporate landing-zone and suppresses democracy — the more they understand its moral worth and how it helps us.
Politics on behalf of evil requires lying. Politics on behalf of good requires educating. If we had better politicians, and if we had more headlines focused on consequences, the American people would be stampeding to save USAID at a thousand miles an hour, or 40 babies a day.
DVD Extras
DELETED SCENES Here’s how the whispering devil on my shoulder wanted me to start this piece:
One might reasonably expect that if a buddy of Jeffrey Epstein gave someone the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus which leads to Auto-Immune Disease Syndrome (AIDS), that he would do so the old-fashioned way and rape them.
Of course, that’s incredibly inefficient, even for a career rapist. And if you made your career by playing a businessman on TV, the expectations are a little higher.
Eventually, I had so much data and quotes and maps and shit that the article seemed too important to start off that way, even if the deleted beginning does at least convey some idea of the boiling rage that drove me to spend my weekend pulling it together in an effort to push back on all the wrongheaded coverage and commentary.
Jonathan Larsen is a longtime TV news producer and journalist who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and The Young Turks.
Here at TFN we reuse old jokes because we recycle.
I don’t really know how you walk this tightroap between humour, outrage, and accuracy. But somehow you do day I and day out. And it is a boon to me and so many others. Your passion and dedication to reporting craft burns through.
Thanks so much for all your writing. It’s been a solace to me to feel how enraged you are. The calm of those around me, the lack of screaming, is painful. Your wit, intellect and rage are sustaining. These are the people that claim to be pro-life. All they want to do is save the babies…. No it’s not. And I do feel sorry for anyone who voted for this thinking that’s what they would get. Nope.