“A Huge Grab of Power”: Trump Is Defying Congress on Foreign Aid

 

After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely.

But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so. So, this year, Trump officials asked Congress for permission to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and dramatically reduce federal spending on food, medicine and lifesaving work around the world. 

Congress said no. Lawmakers, who hold the government’s purse strings and have oversight of federal agencies, wanted USAID to remain, even in its diminished form. They detailed precisely how much the State Department should spend on foreign aid and for what, including $9.4 billion on global health to treat and prevent maladies like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and more than $5 billion on emergency humanitarian aid. They also insisted on regular, detailed reports about how the administration was spending the money. 

Trump signed the bill, enshrining their orders into law.

Now, eight months into the fiscal year, Trump officials are failing to follow many of those orders, ProPublica has found. Officials have delayed spending on global health, have not issued funds for some projects and have labeled money destined for humanitarian aid as “unallocated” to control how it can be spent, according to a ProPublica review of government records and interviews with legal experts, current and former government employees, and members of Congress. And when lawmakers have asked about their actions, officials often have not responded.

Nowhere has that crisis been more visible than with foreign aid. Last year, the administration took the unprecedented step of gutting USAID, terminating thousands of aid programs and letting funding expire, all without permission from Congress. Lawmakers did little to stop it.

Now, in defying Congress on foreign aid that Trump himself agreed to spend, the administration is quietly escalating the battle. “It is a huge grab of power from the president, taking powers away from Congress,” said David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University and a leading scholar on administrative and constitutional law.

USAID was created by Congress decades ago as a means of promoting American diplomacy and soft power around the world. As ProPublica previously reported, when Trump officials dismantled the agency last year, stopping payments on thousands of lifesaving programs that provided food, medicine and other supplies to impoverished nations, many people died, including children. Even with USAID in shambles, Congress has made clear that it expects the administration to continue providing foreign aid — in some cases, at nearly the level it did in previous years.

“It’s proof that there is still broad, bipartisan support for America showing up in the world, helping people and working with our allies and partners on shared challenges, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it directly benefits us,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the ranking member of the Senate committee with oversight of foreign aid funds. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee’s chair, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But the administration has taken a variety of steps to thwart Congress’ directives. The Office of Management and Budget, run by Russell Vought, was instrumental in blocking the spending of aid money last year. This year, it has labeled both humanitarian aid and global health money as “unallocated,” meaning the OMB must approve how it is spent.

Legal scholars say such moves, and the delayed spending by the State Department, likely violate the law. Foreign aid is a prime example of why Congress made it illegal for administrations and agencies to slow-walk such funds, said Bobby Kogan, an OMB adviser under former President Joe Biden currently with the Center for American Progress. “If you spend no money for a year and all the clinics close, then those people die,” he said.

The State Department has made little effort to spend some foreign aid money that Congress earmarked for specific purposes, including family planning, neglected diseases and nutrition, according to government staff and budget documents.  And programs have been given fewer dollars, even when Congress has kept funding steady. That includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the hallmark HIV program credited with saving 26 million lives around the world. 

Administration officials are also spending on foreign aid at a much slower rate than they had in recent years, according to an analysis of federal funding data shared with ProPublica by Aid on the Hill, an advocacy group created by former USAID employees, although the State Department disputes its conclusions. Another group published a similar analysis last week.

Where Trump officials have made plans to spend funds, it’s often spurred outrage. Under the new America First Global Health Strategy, Trump officials are signing bilateral deals with poor countries, asking for access to health data as a condition for receiving lifesaving medications the U.S. once donated. 

Jeremy Lewin, a 29-year-old lawyer who came into government via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with no prior humanitarian experience, is in charge of foreign aid. He has said that this new strategy will not only save countless lives but also reform the aid sector and reduce dependence on U.S. funding.

Since last July, Lewin has been “performing the duties” of undersecretary for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, a position that must be approved by Congress, though the administration has yet to nominate him or anyone else to the job.  But he rarely, if ever, meets with career staff and doesn’t share information about his plans, even with the people who are expected to carry them out, according to six current and former career officials. Lewin insists that he approve even routine payments, creating a stranglehold on funding and information. 

And all the while, Trump appointees have failed to answer basic questions from Congress about what they are doing. Letters from lawmakers have gone unanswered and required reports unfiled. 

To understand the administration’s compliance with congressional mandates and federal law, ProPublica reviewed administration documents, including agreements, memos, and internal communications, and spoke with dozens of current and former government officials, congressional staff, and international experts in global health and humanitarian aid. Many people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. 

In response to a list of detailed questions about the concerns, a State Department spokesperson who declined to be named said they would continue to follow the president’s direction on foreign aid spending. “We are not withholding any funds appropriated to, or available to, State,” they said. “If additional funds are made available to State, we will work to obligate them consistent with legal requirements and Administration priorities.”

They said officials have regularly briefed Congress and that Lewin had recently spent four hours discussing foreign assistance. They also said they have “reduced by 80% the number of outstanding reports and letters” since Trump retook office.  “We are working with Congress to spend appropriated balances and find the right future-appropriated level for global health,” the spokesperson said. 

In response to a series of detailed questions about this story, OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, “This is patently false,” adding that “USAID was a weaponized government agency.” She did not respond to a follow-up question asking what was false.

Spending Less — or Not at All 

After nearly all of USAID’s employees were fired and the majority of its programs closed down last summer, the agency’s remnants were transferred to the State Department. Despite repeated promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving aid would continue, the State Department began winding down many of the remaining programs earlier this year.

And staff have been working with a severely constricted budget; officials gave them just half of the available money for PEPFAR, said Dr. Mike Reid, who was the program’s chief scientific officer until he left earlier this year over concerns about how the program is being run. Of the $9.4 billion for global health spending for the State Department that Trump signed into law earlier this year, Congress earmarked about $4.6 billion for PEPFAR. But staff say it’s unclear how much of that they will be allowed to spend.

Congress also explicitly directed the State Department to spend pots of money on family planning ($524 million), nutrition ($165 million) and neglected tropical diseases ($109 million), according to the bill. According to a review of government records and two people with knowledge of the department’s activities, State Department officials have made little or no effort to spend from those pots…

For the entire article: Trump Is Defying Congress on Foreign Aid — ProPublica

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

"Should Presidents Be Cashing In?"

 

Donald Trump's brokerage accounts executed 3,642 stock and bond transactions during the first quarter of the year, averaging about 63 trades per trading day. The surge in trading, which totaled between $210 million and $695 million, has triggered intense debate over the ethics of a sitting president trading individual corporate stocks. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Details: 3,600 Trades in Three Months []

The sheer volume of transactions is entirely unprecedented for a modern U.S. president. While previous presidents primarily utilized diversified index funds or broad blind trusts, Trump's active portfolio exhibited a high-intensity trading strategy focused on individual companies. [1, 2]

Key Holdings: The portfolio heavily emphasized major tech, defense, and pharmaceutical companies, including large transactions in Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Response: The Trump Organization maintains that these brokerage accounts are fully discretionary and managed by independent third-party advisors. They assert that neither the President nor his family had any role in selecting investments, had advance notice of the trades, or influenced the timing. [1]

Why the Controversy?

Ethics watchdogs, lawmakers, and financial experts point out several compounding factors that make the trading spree highly controversial: [1]

Timing and Policy: Critics highlight that some substantial trades coincided closely with executive actions or public statements that directly impacted those companies. For example, reports showed transactions in Nvidia occurring shortly before the administration eased chip export controls benefiting the company. [1, 2]

Conflict of Interest: Unlike federal employees, the president is technically exempt from conflict-of-interest statutes. However, critics argue that holding massive individual stakes in companies while having the power to sway their bottom-line breaches public trust. [1]

Insider Trading Concerns: Skeptics suggest the trading style and its timing present the appearance of gaining from material, nonpublic information. []

Should Presidents Be Cashing In?

The debate has polarized politicians and the public: [1, 2, 3]

The Critics' Stance: Ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers argue that an active trading portfolio is inherently dangerous for a president. Because a president's daily actions directly affect international markets, industry regulations, and government contracts, critics argue active individual trading invites severe conflicts of

  interest. [1, 2, 4]

  The Defense & Alternative Views: Defenders of the President—along with some independent financial experts—suggest that the sheer, rapid-fire volume of trading could be a strategy for long-term tax loss harvesting rather than illicit market manipulation. Others argue that as long as financial advisors are independently directing the discretionary accounts, it falls safely within the boundaries of the law. [1, 2]

  Legislative Action: The scale of the transactions has sparked broader legislative efforts. Momentum has grown behind bipartisan proposals—such as the Honest Act—designed to restrict not just members of Congress, but also the President and Vice President, from purchasing or selling individual stocks while in office. [1, 2]

AI Overview

 

"It has been twenty-four years: How painful it is to write these words. It never gets easier, and it never will – as I always knew and as I now see for certain"

 

Some people call sorrow that lasts more than one year “complicated grief” or “pathological grief.” I call it the price I pay for loving an extraordinary person extraordinarily much. The intensity of sorrow correlates to the intensity of attachment, and most parents who lose children never get over it. We have to live out every bitter moment that should have been sweet.

People often remark on how short life feels, and at 57, I get why they say that. The days fly by, the years evaporate. But imagine having to leave the party at just eight years old. And the worst thing is, she understood all she would be missing. She wanted to finish learning cursive at St. Irene’s School; she wanted to play in the kiddie pool with her friends on a sunny June day; she wanted to be Tinkerbell for Halloween; she wanted to adopt a baby so she could watch it grow. 

She got none of those things, none of the quotidian joys, none of the lifetime landmarks. She told me not to bury her dolls with her – because she did not want that for her children. Can you imagine truly understand you would be rotting in the grave within days at such a young age? She should have been raising children of her own by now.

I am not sure my children will ever have children of their own. They have seen what losing Katherine has done to us, and unfortunately, they know all too well – from me – the perils that await parents and children now.

When I had Katherine, it was not until she was born that I understood what I had done to myself – that I loved her so much that it would destroy me if anything bad ever happened to her. Her first day on Earth, I thought “oh no – what have I done?” – as I fell in love at first sight. Her last day I thought would kill me. I often wish it had.

But mostly, I went into parenthood with serene sanguinity. I thought that the days when so many children died in childhood were behind us – with vaccines and antibiotics conquering communicable disease, with car seats shielding their travel and “back to sleep” guarding their nights. I knew a few children were diagnosed with leukemia, but I thought that was mostly a problem in heavily industrialized areas, and I focused on the fact that many cases of leukemia are now cured. I thought that with effort and intention, I could protect her.

Little did I think that we were poisoning our children from before conception and every day after with every breath they inhale, every sip they take, every bite they eat. Little did I think that even the tender and intimate act of breastfeeding was conveying my lifetime exposure, my body burden of toxic chemicals, right into her rapidly developing self.

Our families, our town, our country, and we ourselves in our ordinary daily habits – things everyone did then, like heating food in plastic, putting a flea collar on the dog, replacing carpet – all participated in her poisoning. We have built our world to poison children. Even those taking drastic steps to avoid it – like eliminating pesticides, eating organic, filtering air and water, and limiting plastics and personal care products – are not free from toxic trespass.

And the petrochemical industry chiefly responsible for poisoning people and planet are marketing their toxic products – especially plastics – harder than ever. They have ruthlessly purchased our politicians – anyone who has ever spoken the words “drill, baby, drill” for starters – and are trying to hold back the necessary transition to renewable energies and cleaner materials. 

They have cruelly sabotaged the Paris Climate Agreement and pitilessly thwarted the UN’s Global Plastics Treaty. The Trump Administration, in thrall to these behemoths, has utterly gutted all the salutary steps towards addressing climate change and toxic contamination that the Biden Administration had taken.

I once thought of politics as something I wasn’t that interested in. I thought my one duty was to show up at election time. Little did I think that decisions made in the halls of power — or more commonly, in the board rooms of corporations – would kill my child, would ruin our lives, would imperil the very planet on which we all dwell.

I am glad I didn’t know how it would turn out. Yet I would give anything to know then what I know now if knowing could have prevented her death. I want every person this side of loss to understand that their everyday decisions and the decisions of those they vote into office are life and death for those they love the most. I hope Poisoning Our Children will play some small part in preventing for others the desolation we ourselves endure.

-Jean-Marie Kauth

"I want to tell you a bit about what it’s like to grow up in a country at war"

 

I was 14 when Russia first invaded Ukraine and took Crimea. I was 22 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Now I’m 26. That's 12 years of war — about half my life. And I've been thinking lately about how that has shaped me — how it’s given me habits that I don't even notice anymore, until I say them out loud and realize they sound… a bit strange. I remember being in school, drawing pictures to send to soldiers on the front line. We had first aid lessons. We practiced what to do if a missile strike started while we were in class. That was just school. After that came university. Normal college life, mostly — except it wasn't, quite. Our university set up a spot where students could come and weave camouflage nets for the front-line positions. People just showed up after classes and helped. Then February 2022 happened, with the full-scale Russian invasion and Kyiv under attack. I remember those first weeks in Kyiv — just feeling stuck. I stayed in the city with my cat for two weeks. Public transport wasn’t working. Taxis were almost impossible to catch. Leaving didn’t really feel like an option.

When I finally did leave, it was on an evacuation train to Lviv. There were kids sleeping on the floor. People crying. At some point, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere because of a missile threat. Later that year, Russia started attacking energy infrastructure. There was no electricity, and no phone signal to contact my family for almost two days after the first big attack. Slowly, life changes. And you change and adapt with it. Now I have habits that feel completely normal to me — until I describe them to someone outside Ukraine and watch their face. I always keep a power bank charged. I check the electricity outages schedule before getting into an elevator. I wash my hair in the evenings — even when I'm exhausted — because I don't know if there'll be water in the morning. Before going to sleep, I check if there's a risk of a big overnight attack. I keep a tourniquet next to my bed, because most attacks happen at night and you don't always have time to reach a shelter. That is just how life works now. At some point, I stopped adapting and started asking what I could do to help. That's how I ended up at the Kyiv Independent. And honestly, it’s the place where I feel the most… grounded, I think. Because of the nature of work. And because of the people. Yes, because of our team, but also because of our community. I remember hearing about one of our members riding his motorbike all the way from Western Europe to Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine to donate the motorbike to the military. I kept thinking about that for days. About what it means to care that much about something happening far away from your own life. Because when you see that people care this much, it does something to you. It makes you want to keep going. It makes all of this feel a bit less heavy. And if you're reading this, you're already part of that in some way — because the secret to our independent reporting is our community. People who choose to care — who show up, who pay attention, who decide that Ukraine's story deserves to be told freely and fearlessly. Right now, we're on a quest to find 4,000 new members. Not just as a number — but as proof that independent journalism from Ukraine can thrive, when readers choose to back it. So, I'm inviting you to join our community today and help us get closer to that goal.

Thank you for reading my story. Yana Zhuryk is the membership growth manager at the Kyiv Independent

"My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask"

 

My father died in stages, the way most people do, and the four of us boys — me and my three brothers, our wives beside us — didn’t know what we were watching. 

He’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak or meaningfully move for the week or so before he died; we didn’t know what he was feeling. We didn’t know what to say, or whether to say anything at all, whether to hold his hand or give him space, whether the grimace on his face was pain or something we were misreading entirely.       

We didn’t know why he’d suddenly seemed so alert for a day, and we didn’t know what it meant when that passed. We were well-educated, reasonably worldly adults with decades of life experience between us, and we stood around that bed like children who’d wandered into a room where the grownups were speaking a language none of us had ever been taught.              

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Not with guilt, exactly, though some of that is in there too. Mostly I’ve thought about it as a kind of cultural failure; a thing our society stopped teaching somewhere along the way and never bothered to replace.   

For most of human history, people died at home, surrounded by family and neighbors who’d seen it before, who knew the signs, who understood the arc of it. Death was something a community witnessed together and held together.

Then we moved it into hospitals, handed it over to professionals, and quietly lost the knowledge that ordinary people once carried as a matter of course. Now we’re shocked, disoriented, and grief-stricken in ways that might be at least partly unnecessary, if only someone had thought to tell us what was coming and what it meant.

That’s why a piece published this month in the Washington Post was so meaningful to me. Written by Ashley Abramson, it’s about death doulas, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago and is now growing fast enough that the International End-of-Life Doula Association has trained nearly 6,500 doulas worldwide.

A death doula is a non-medical companion who provides emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people who are dying, and to the families around them. As Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Northern Virginia, puts it, a death doula is “a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments.”

They can read aloud, play music, advocate with medical providers, help navigate paperwork and final arrangements, and simply stay present in ways that hospice nurses — stretched thin and focused on clinical care — often can’t. People don’t always realize that hospice care isn’t 24/7, Patterson notes; it certainly wasn’t in our case (Dad died at home). A death doula can be there as much as the family needs.

But what I found most valuable in Abramson’s piece wasn’t the description of the role itself. It was the specific things that death doulas, from their long experience at bedsides, have learned about the dying process that most families simply don’t know going in. This is the kind of knowledge that can transform a terrifying experience into something that still holds space for love and even peace.

The first thing the doulas want you to know is that dying can be peaceful. Diane Button, a death doula in Northern California and the author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, puts it simply: “Just like the body knows how to be born, it knows how to die.”

For people who’ve been living for months or years in bodies racked by illness, the transition can actually come as a relief. Jill Schock, founder of Death Doula LA, told the Post that many people are relaxed at the end, because dying feels better than continuing to live in a body that’s been suffering. That’s not what most of us picture when we imagine death, but it’s what people who sit with the dying actually see. And Button adds that the most common regrets she witnesses aren’t about things left undone — vacations not taken, money not earned — but about things left unsaid. If you can get to a place of peace with your relationships before that time comes, the dying itself tends to go more gently.

The second thing the doulas want you to understand is that the dying person can still participate in shaping that experience. Even in a hospital room, you can fill the space with what matters: favorite music, beloved objects, the people and even the pets you love.

Erica Reid Gerdes, founder of Waxwing Journeys in Chicago, describes a client whose husband found real comfort in being able to play music from his wife’s favorite musical and read her favorite books to her in those final days. She was unresponsive by then, but as Reid Gerdes says, “We knew she could still hear.” That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Third: death doesn’t need to be painful. Many of us carry images of painful deaths we witnessed in earlier generations, but modern hospice care is specifically designed to manage symptoms including pain.

Part of a doula’s job is to make sure the dying person has adequate medication and isn’t suffering unnecessarily. And medication does something else, too — it can calm what’s called terminal agitation, something my family saw with Dad and had absolutely no framework for understanding. When someone is actively dying, the shutting down of organs can affect brain function in ways that cause the person to pick at their clothing, claw at their bedsheets, or seem frightened and restless.

Seeing that in someone you love is alarming, even traumatic, if nobody has told you it’s a known and manageable part of the process. It has a name. It can be treated. You’re not watching your father suffer some unique and inexplicable torment: you’re watching something that happens, that doulas and hospice nurses have seen many times, and that medication can ease.    

Fourth, and this one is critically important: it’s normal, even expected, for a dying person to stop eating and drinking near the end. The body simply needs less energy. Swallowing becomes too taxing. The Post article makes the point explicitly — you don’t need to urge someone who’s actively dying to eat or drink. It doesn’t deprive them the way it would deprive a healthy person. Families often feel guilty about this, or frightened by it, and push food and water when the body is trying to do what it knows to do. A doula can gently explain that letting go of that particular effort is itself an act of love.

And fifth — this is the one I keep returning to when I think about those last days with my father — there’s a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, or an end-of-life rally. In the days just before death, many dying people experience a sudden surge of energy and clarity. After days of not talking much or eating, they perk up. They seem like themselves again. Families often mistake this for improvement, for a turn in the right direction, and the hope it kindles makes what follows all the more devastating. What doulas know, from having witnessed it over and over, is that this rally is often the body’s final gathering before it lets go. It isn’t a sign of recovery. It can be a gift — a last real conversation, a last moment of connection — if you know how to receive it as such rather than as cause for false hope.

I wish someone had told us all of this before we walked into that room. I wish someone had sat us down and said: here’s what’s happening, here’s what to watch for, here’s what it means, here’s how you can be present for him rather than just frightened beside him.

That’s what a death doula does. That’s the knowledge that used to live inside communities and families and has largely been lost, and that a growing number of remarkable people are now working to restore.

INELDA and the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance both maintain directories where you can find certified doulas in your area. Death doulas are generally not covered by insurance, which is a policy failure worth fighting about separately, but the field is having conversations about Medicare reimbursement and pro bono work for those who can’t pay. If the financial barrier is real for you, ask; many doulas offer sliding scales or even volunteer their time.     

But even if you’re nowhere near this moment in your own life, I’d urge you to read Abramson’s piece in the Post, and to have the conversation with the people you love before it becomes urgent. Talk about what you’d want. Ask what they’d want. Write it down. The conversation itself is an act of love, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be honest about the one thing none of us can avoid.

My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask. That’s a quiet regret I carry. You don’t have to carry the same one.

---

If this piece meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it: a sibling, a grown child, a friend whose parent is aging. And if you’ve had experience with a death doula, or wish you had, I’d love to hear your story in the comments. -Thom Hartmann

    

Trump Put His Own Interests Above All in the Iran Deal

 

Surely something about this preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran must have felt familiar to America’s real-estate mogul president. After all, it reads like a real-estate bankruptcy filing — an act of financial capitulation. It is a measure of how much Iran had Trump over a barrel, and how thoroughly it cleaned his clock, that Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told Iranian state TV after the details were announced: “The agreement is a record of U.S. failure. People will see it and judge.”

You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see what happened here. You need to be a domestic policy expert. Trump sold out America’s ally in the war, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states for the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan. Trump knew that the food inflation and high gasoline prices triggered by this war were a prescription for a Republican wipeout in the midterms. He had to stop the war now to get prices down by November, because if the Democrats take the House and Senate, Trump will be looking at endless investigations into how he has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family — and possibly even impeachment.

So, Trump did what he always does: He abandoned all principle and all allies and put his personal interests above all other considerations. He even prepared the terrain to set up his vice president, JD Vance, for a fall. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.” People laughed — but nervously, because everyone knew it was a joke, but also not a joke. It was Trump’s inner voice speaking.

This was not a war I advocated, but once it started I was sure hoping Iran would lose. As such, I am shocked by the outcome so far — by the sheer cynicism with which Trump and Vance have gone from damning Iran, and telling its people to rise up because “help is on its way,” to praising its leaders, and how this deal has left Iran stronger and all its neighbors more vulnerable to Tehran’s whims.

I would have much more sympathy for Trump’s stress-filled handling of the wicked problem that is Iran if he had just once shown the same to President Obama or acknowledged that he couldn’t deliver now for the Iranian people as he promised. Instead, he just pretends that everything he did was perfect.

Let us count the ways it is not perfect. The deal not only puts off the question of the disposal of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium to future negotiations — negotiations in which the Trump administration has already given up its military leverage — but also, most amazingly, it clearly leaves open the possibility that Iran will be able to charge a toll in the future to any ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Just read the cease-fire agreement: Upon the signing of this memorandum of understanding, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only …”

After billions of dollars of bombs dropped on Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner won from Tehran 60 days of toll-free passage through Hormuz. After that, oil tanker captains, bring your credit cards. Thank goodness we had these crack real-estate negotiators on the case, not wimpy diplomats.

The cease-fire deal not only is silent on any commitments by Iran to curb its development of long-range missiles and its support for proxies undermining the governments of Lebanon and Iraq, but it also makes the 60-day negotiation on Iran’s nuclear future contingent on Israel’s halting its military operations in Lebanon against Iran’s mercenary army there, Hezbollah. If Barack Obama had ever agreed to such a thing, Fox News would have interrupted its regular broadcasting to denounce it.

All of this is the result of the fact that Trump and Netanyahu never took seriously the idea that Iran would do the obvious: close the Strait of Hormuz in response to their attack. So in their attempt to stop Iran from developing a weapon of mass destruction that it was unlikely to ever use — since Israel would immediately use one on Iran — Trump and Netanyahu inspired Iran to develop a weapon of mass disruption, a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which it can use anytime it feels too much pressure from the United States or Israel.

The message to America’s Gulf Arab allies — the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait in particular — is that we are cutting and running, so you’d better make the best deals you can with Tehran to keep it at bay. This is the biggest geopolitical power shift in the Gulf since the start of the Iran-Iraq war. There is a new sheriff in town. Dial 1-800-Ayatollah.

In case they did not read that between the lines, Trump spelled it out in a news conference justifying why he did not try to curb Iran’s missile development: “What am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he asked. “Doesn’t work that way, you know, it doesn’t work that way, and missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”

If you are reading those words in Tel Aviv or Riyadh, a shiver just ran down your spine, along with the dawning awareness that the president of the United States no longer is playing with a full deck and you are home alone.

For all of these reasons, it is simply impossible to listen to Trump and Vance without being reminded of Nick Carraway’s famous observation about Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Indeed, shortly before Ghalibaf and his Iranian colleagues were boasting that they had imposed a “failure” on the United States, Trump was declaring the Iranian leaders to be “very rational people.” “They were nice to deal with, they were strong people, smart people,” he added. “They are not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.” He called them “smarter” than past regime leaders.

Compare this also with how Trump and Vance talked to and about President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — the leader of a heroic democracy that has been resisting a Russian invasion for four years: “You don’t have the cards,” Trump told him, urging Zelensky to cut a filthy deal with Vladimir Putin.

That is how they talk about the leader of a people defending the frontier of freedom from its worst enemy. For Iranian leaders — part of a regime that just gunned down thousands of their own people who were seeking freedom — Trump says they are “nice.”

Trump and Vance “have no coherent view of U.S. interests, and they have absolutely no core commitment to democratic values of any kind,” Gautam Mukunda, the author of “Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World,” told me. That’s the point. Trump loves to wrap himself in the American flag, but he is the least American president, in terms of his core values, in modern times.

You have to ask how Trump and Netanyahu could have miscalculated so badly as to think they could topple a regime that had been in power since 1979 by bombing it from the air. The same answer applies to both: It’s because they have surrounded themselves with sycophants and purged their parties of anyone who might challenge them.

“There are two ways to make sure your executive is a good leader — either by selecting people of good character or putting limits on what they can do — and America and Israel today have failed at both,” Mukunda said. “This war is the most perfect example of what happens when you disdain all forms of expertise, knowledge and principles, in favor of gut instincts.” Experts had predicted everything that went wrong in the war.

But therein may lie a possible silver lining for both America and Israel: The failed Trump-Netanyahu endeavor to destroy Iran’s Islam-fascist autocracy might end up saving American and Israeli democracy. Both countries are facing fateful elections — America’s midterms in November and Israel’s national election in the fall. Trump and Bibi, both sinking in the polls, were hoping that a quick win in Iran would propel each of them or their parties to victory.

The whole world is worse off with a stronger Iran, but it will be triply worse off if Trump and Bibi win their elections. Because five more years of Netanyahu as prime minister would be the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy. And two more years of Trump controlling the White House, the Senate, the House and effectively the Supreme Court would pose the same danger to American democracy.

Is there any way Trump can salvage a good outcome in Iran? Yes, but it has nothing to do with the fate of its nuclear weapons. In the wake of this war, if there is a diminished threat from Israel and America, that might unlock politics in Iran as well. It might just create the space for an Iranian majority to ask: “What does this regime have to show for 47 years in power besides a multibillion-dollar waste of money to get a nuclear bomb and funding militias around the region with cash we Iranians desperately need for our own development and turning our country into a water-starved environmental disaster?”

Who knows what politics, what pressures for regime reform or regime change, would be unleashed in Tehran if Iranian leaders can no longer distract their people with war?

NY Times: Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

 

 

 

The Joke Is On Us

 

The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hyper-masculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism. It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”

There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.

Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.

“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear. “From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognize the limits of that empire.”

Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last. There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.

The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in her book “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” lays out the familiar pattern: “It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritization of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. 

“What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.”

“As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “...soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”

Comedians such as Kimmel function like the cabaret star, Fritz Grünbaum, who during Nazism, once quipped when the power went out during a performance: “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.” Grünbaum would eventually find himself in the Dachau concentration camp — along with other actors, performers and satirists — where he died of tuberculosis.

The Nazis moved swiftly to close the cabarets — along with all institutions that defied Nazi control — and replaced them with mindless variety shows. They hated mockery as much as Trump, who after Stephen Colbert’s final show, gloated that Colbert was “finished” and called him a “total jerk.” Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, slamming down the lid and dancing. Trump wrote that Colbert’s exit was the “beginning of the end” for other late-night hosts.

Jokes about dictators in totalitarian regimes are a criminal offense. Satire is permissible in fascist states only when employed to mock political opponents and demonized minorities. It is not permissible when directed at centers of power. As Gramsci pointed out, the consolidation of power by fascists requires them to win the “cultural battle,” by dominating the public discourse, policing language — including satire — and redefining social, cultural and political norms.

Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve. But because it refuses to confront the roots of our political, social and cultural degeneration — which preceded the Trump presidency — it solidifies the fascist project it seeks to destroy. It reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science. 

It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history. It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.

This elitist satire simplifies the complex social, economic and political forces we must dismantle. It ignores or pays deference to the subterranean forces that created Trump. Gramsci’s “passionate sarcasm” is too revolutionary and too truthful to be broadcast on media conglomerates such as CBS.

“Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in “Humor and Faith.” “Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life. There is no laughter in the holy of holies,” Niebuhr continued. “There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”

When satire is the end point, it is deleterious. It masks what is coming. It must be, as Niebuhr pointed out, the entry point. It must push us, as Gramsci understood, into hard analysis and the organization of mass movements that alone can save us from tyranny. It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.

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                                                       Antonio Gramsci