MAGA Speared Its White Whale, Leaving the World’s Poor to Drown | Opinion

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Congratulations, Republicans. You caught your white whale.

For the past two decades, you longed to cut off the hand that America extends to the most impoverished, oppressed, desperate, and ill of the world, pursuing deep cuts or outright death to foreign aid with the glassy-eyed zeal of soldiers in a holy war—and occasionally the ghoulish glee of sadists. And now you’ve done it.

Never mind the irony of hearing the words of Jesus on Sunday—”Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40)—bleating “America First” on Monday, and voting overwhelmingly for the ultimate avatar of publicans and sinners on Tuesday.

Never mind that for decades, muscular international aid was a bedrock Republican idea. President Ronald Reagan wanted to spend double what we do today, explaining “You know the excuses: We can’t afford foreign aid anymore, or we’re wasting money pouring it into these poor countries, or we can’t buy friends… Well, all these excuses are just that, excuses—and they’re dead wrong.”

Never mind that President George W. Bush—yes, fellow Democrats, that George W. Bush—deserves a Nobel Prize for hisPresident’s Emergency Plan for AIDS (PEPFAR) program, which has saved 17 million lives and enabled 2.4 million babies to be born HIV-free, mostly in Africa.

Evidently, what Reagan, Bush, and Jesus didn’t realize is that USAID—the agency responsible for most foreign assistance—is actually, as our de facto President Elon Musk said, “evil.”

Their trail of wickedness includes soup kitchens in Sudan, hospitals serving refugees in Thailand, and NGOs delivering firewood to freezing people trapped in the Ukrainian war zone. The 816,000 people who relied on their one and only meal a day that America provided in Khartoum must appreciate being delivered from the clutches of USAID. The 40 newborns who are now contracting HIV every single day in Uganda since the US has stopped funding antiretroviral drugs will have a lifetime to thank you. Though it may be a shorter lifetime.

It’s a good thing you struck at the heart of all that wasteful spending you claimed was happening. You spent political careers stoking myths about foreign aid. And boy you knocked that rhetoric out of the park. The public now believes that we spend a quarter of the federal budget on helping people abroad. It’s actually less than 1 percent. You said our money was going to corrupt foreign governments. Actually, only one-fifth of all aid goes to governments at all, and there are stringent controls on which ones. You said the money is ineffective. U.S. aid has actually played a major role in lifting more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, cutting maternal, infant, and child mortality rates in half, and raising life expectancy globally by seven years.

So, you really put a squeeze on the 20 percent of the one percent of federal dollars that was creating all of that life and health around the world.

Oh, and goodwill. Let’s not forget the goodwill we were sowing. That’s not a thing we would want getting out of hand in a world where we are competing against China for strategic alliances and American advantage… especially in Africa, where we are losing.

Or democracy. The $690 million that Congress provided to counter authoritarians, and which you’ve also now crushed—you must be proud to have shut that down, and that according to the Associated Press “strongmen throughout the world are already celebrating and Iranian government insiders are joking the U.S. is treating its allies like “disposable tissues.”

And we can all celebrate the massive blow you’ve struck against wokeness. Your press aides definitely put together a scary hit list with a lot of “gay stuff” on it that USAID was supposedly doing for you to share with Fox News. And their best efforts to tally all the questionable funding they could find certainly amounted to 0.1 percent of the USAID budget. So, you can tack that right onto the savings. With that, you’ve won the World War on Wokeness. And all it cost was thousands of lives.

You can feel confident that the foreign aid shutdown was a totally well-considered, carefully constructed, stable genius plan implemented by people who know what they’re doing, because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to scramble after the fact—as do all leaders who are part of a thoughtful initiative—to issue an “Emergency Waiver” to exempt lifesaving aid from the freeze, one that still left the American aid system in Africa “paralyzed” and global HIV-fighting permanently devastated.

Above all, we must remember to learn no lessons about investing in the global security efforts that protect America. In the 1990s, we stopped engaging in Afghanistan, leading to the rise of the Taliban and their allies al-Qaeda, and everything that followed from it. Today, we are fighting their ideological descendants in East Africa. We’re helping to protect Taiwan from China, prevent the total collapse of Haiti, and fighting the drug trade in South America; the list goes on. Republicans should take satisfaction that we’ve strangled those efforts. Surely there will be no consequences that will come back at us. Because we’re not going to get entangled abroad at all. Except if it’s a real estate opportunity in Gaza.

Of course, one might also pause to consider that after Captain Ahab caught his white whale, he was strangled on the harpoon rope, and his entire ship was dragged down into the depths with him.

But that would take too much effort of thought. Better to save that to focus on burying your shame.

Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.