Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely.
Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed to the men standing behind him—his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and said: “The people standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”
Running a nation of thirty million people. Indefinitely. Without congressional authorization. Without a declaration of war. Without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply.
When asked about the legal basis, Trump cited oil rights he claims were “stolen” from American corporations decades ago. When asked about resistance, he promised a “second wave” of military action. When asked who would govern Venezuela, he gestured at his cabinet and said they would decide.
This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to save the Union. Donald Trump announced imperial conquest to extract oil. One defended the regime. One destroys it. Trump isn’t like Lincoln. He’s the structural opposite—doing exactly what Lincoln would have fought against.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.
But watch what else he did.
He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.
Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.
The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.
And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”
That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability.
Trump’s Imperial Declaration
Trump’s announcement Saturday inverts every principle Lincoln defended.
No Congressional authorization under Article I, Section 8. No declaration of war. No emergency requiring immediate action to prevent attack on American territory or citizens. Just the President deciding to wage war, seize another nation’s government, and announce indefinite occupation.
“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms,” Trump said from his club. “The socialist regime stole it from us… Now we’re taking it back.”
This isn’t emergency power to preserve constitutional framework. This is imperial conquest announced as resource extraction. This is the President declaring he will “run” a foreign nation to compensate American corporations for assets nationalized decades ago.
The New York Timesgot it exactly right: the events “evoked memories of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. employed its military might to secure territory and resources for its own advantage.”
Trump hung a portrait in the White House featuring himself alongside William McKinley—the president who seized the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now he’s acting out McKinley’s imperial playbook, but without even the pretense of Congressional authorization that McKinley obtained.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress—not the President—the power to declare war. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a gray area. The Founders explicitly rejected giving war powers to the executive because they had just fought a revolution against monarchical power.
Lincoln understood this. Even while expanding executive authority to suppress rebellion, he sought Congressional authorization, submitted to Congressional oversight, and accepted that courts and elections could check him.
Trump’s position, articulated by his defenders, is different: Congressional authorization is irrelevant when the cause is just. Maduro is evil. Venezuela’s people are suffering. Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. Constitutional process is pedantry when outcomes are good.
This is not Lincoln’s emergency power. This is Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The strong leader acts decisively. Constitutional constraint is obstacle, not obligation. Emergency is permanent condition justifying permanent exception.
Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him.
This isn’t isolated. This is the pattern.
When election results constrain him, he claims fraud, attempts to prevent certification, and incites assault on the Capitol.
When courts rule against him, he calls the judiciary illegitimate and promises to ignore adverse rulings.
When Congress investigates, he refuses subpoenas, claims absolute immunity, and purges inspector generals.
When the Constitution limits war powers, he wages war unilaterally from his private club while his defenders mock proceduralism.
Every emergency claim serves the same purpose: eliminate the constraint. Never preserve the framework. Always escape accountability.
His defenders make it explicit. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, said of Venezuela’s interim leader: “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”
Translation: do what we want, or face second-wave military action. This isn’t partnership. This isn’t liberation. This is imperial diktat backed by armada.
Trump himself was clearer: America will extract Venezuela’s oil, and the partnership with the United States will make“the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe”—if they comply. If they resist, he warned: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”
This is conquest. Announced from Mar-a-Lago. Without Congressional authorization. In explicit pursuit of seizing another nation’s resources for American corporate benefit.
Lincoln would have recognized this instantly as what he fought against. This is executive power divorced from constitutional constraint. This is sovereignty claiming exception to law itself.
We’re not in normal politics. Normal politics is policy disagreement within shared constitutional framework. Should taxes be higher? How should we conduct foreign policy? What’s the right balance of regulation?
This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.
When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.
When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.
When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle.
Every act of “let’s debate the Venezuela policy” is collaboration with framework destruction. Not because debate is bad, but because they’re not proposing policy within the framework—they’re eliminating the framework while we debate.
You can’t defeat “constitutional constraints are optional” by following constitutional constraints politely while the other side wages war from private clubs. You can only defend the framework by using every power that framework provides.
This is the regime crisis I wrote about in the manifesto. This is what happens when democratic constraint disappears. This is what Lincoln fought to prevent.
And this is what defense of the republic requires us to stop.
We cannot treat this as normal politics.
Lincoln preserved the framework. Trump declares himself outside it.
Your grandparents knew which side they were on when the republic was threatened. They fought. They won. They built the middle class and the democratic alliance that kept the peace for seventy years.
We will do it again.
2026 begins now.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Last week, Marco Rubio and the State Department revoked visas for five Europeans—including Imran Ahmed, a legal permanent resident in the US married to a US citizen—because they don’t like their speech about disinformation. The State Department’s justification? This form of speech suppression is necessary to protect free speech.
This is merely the latest episode in what will go down as the most anti-free speech, censorial presidential administration in history. Remember when Trump’s first executive order claimed to “restore free speech and end federal censorship“? We’ve since seen the administration repeatedly attack and punish people for their speech, but the Rubio move takes the hypocrisy to a new level: using government power to punish people for their speech while claiming to fight censorship.
The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech.
If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension.
For the record: I’ve been a vocal critic of both Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate, which does ridiculously shoddy research (they once claimed photos of gum were “eating disorder content”), and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, about whom I’ve never said anything nice. But when the U.S. government bans people from the country for their speech, the quality of their work becomes irrelevant. Breton, admittedly, did try to abuse the law to censor Americans, but the EU spit him out and rejected such abuse immediately:
The most instructive case here is Breton himself. He did, in fact, try to abuse the DSA to suppress speech. In August 2024, he sent Elon Muska threatening lettersuggesting that Musk’s planned livestreamed interview with then-candidate Donald Trump could violate the DSA. It was a blatant attempt at censorship.
And here’s what happened: The EU rejected him. Completely. EU officials went on recordcondemning the letter, his fellow commissioners distanced themselves from his threats, and within weeks heresignedto avoid being fired. As EU free speech experts noted in arecent open letter: “Politically, the EU’s checks and balances worked.”
So even when Breton actually tried to censor Americans, the EU’s institutions rejected it. Meanwhile, Rubio is retaliating against Breton for that failed attempt by exiling him from the country—actual government punishment for speech.
But the truly egregious bit of the State Department’s move here was that they had Under Secretary Sarah Rogers go on X and claim that these bans were necessary to prevent “Murthy-style speech suppression,” which is an incredible admission, given that the ruling in the Murthy case showed there was no actual evidence of speech suppression.
As I wrote in the piece, this is bizarre revisionist history of a ruling that just came out last year:
Rogers is referring tothe Murthy v. Missouricase mentioned above, where two states and a collection of angry social media influencers sued the Biden administration, claiming social media platforms censored content at the government’s direction. The Supreme Courtrejected those claims6-3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion finding the plaintiffs had no standing because there was no evidence the government suppressed anyone’s speech. The platforms, Barrett noted, were simply enforcing their own rules.
Even worse, in a damning footnote, Justice Barrett highlighted that the lower court’s finding that there was censorship was based on a “clearly erroneous” reading of the evidence.
So the State Department is citing a case that disproved government censorship as evidence of government censorship. That’s not even creative lying — it’s just citing your own loss as precedent.
As I wrote in that piece, this goes beyond routine lying. The State Department is weaponizing a Supreme Court case that explicitly rejected claims of government censorship to justify actual, unambiguous government effort at punishing people for their speech. They’re inverting the legal record—taking a ruling that said “no, the government didn’t suppress speech” and using it as precedent to suppress speech.
The State Department is literally using the judiciary’s rejection of censorship claims as permission to punish people for their speech. When an administration twists a loss into a win by doing exactly what the court said they didn’t do, we’re not just dealing with censorial hypocrites. We’re watching them test how far they can push before anyone stops them.
For what it’s worth Ahmed quickly went to court seeking a temporary restraining order on this decision, which he feared would be used to eject him from the country where he lives with his family. On Christmas day, the judge issued the TRO, with orders for a telephone conference later today to discuss further issues in the case.
Again, there are few things that Ahmed and I agree on (he’s spent months insisting that Section 230 needs to be repealed, based on his direct misrepresentation of 230). I think he’s wrong on a wide variety of issues, and that his advocacy is dangerous for speech and the open internet. But I’ll stand up and defend his right to say such things any day, without the US government punishing him for it.
Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert. After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S. and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains, “is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old.
Under the fluorescent lights in the malnutrition ward, nurses try to get an IV into him. But Santo is so swollen with edema — a result of severe protein deficiency — they can only find a vein on his head. Drained of color, his skin peels off in patches like burns. They drip milk into his mouth because feeding too quickly can be fatal. “Their bodies have adapted to starvation,” a nurse explains.
At night, Rose and Santo lie on a small vinyl hospital bed surrounded by a mosquito net. The swelling abates after a few days, but the little boy shrinks to 14 pounds and disappears into a loose, unstrapped onesie meant for a 9-month-old. The nurses tell Rose that God has performed a miracle, but Santo is still a long way from recovery. This is not his first time in the malnutrition ward this year.
Days pass. On July 16, the hospital discharges James, her 5 year old with dark marble eyes. He has somehow overcome a bout of malaria, which can be nine times more likely to kill a severely malnourished child like him. Without other options, Rose decides to send him home to her eldest, 7-year-old Lino, who is still staying with neighbors and relatives, even though she knows they have little food to spare. She has to stay behind at the hospital just a little bit longer, she tells James. Santo needs her.
July turns to August, and Rose becomes a fixture in the clinic. Five-foot-nothing and soft-spoken, she often enters and leaves rooms without notice. Every day, she sees other panicked mothers come to the clinic with sick children, a dozen a day on average. Some leave alone, after their children die.
Rose does laundry, bathes Santo and tidies up around their bed to stay busy. She wonders who, if anyone, is looking after James and Lino and what, if anything, they are eating. She starts asking staff any chance she gets if today is the day they will discharge Santo.
Some of the other mothers are so desperate to check on their children they sneak out at night and walk hours back home. Others abscond altogether. At least one baby died this year after her mother took her from the clinic before she was ready.
Rose considers leaving, too. “I don’t want my kids to suffer alone,” she says as her fingers work over black and white beads of a necklace she’s making for Santo, a traditional charm popular in South Sudan. Rose separated from her husband, who she says abused her, and now raises her boys alone. She inflates her cheeks and presses her face nose-to-nose with Santo. She’s the only one who can make him laugh.
Rose fled her home for Kakuma as a teenager in 2018, after South Sudan’s civil war found her village and left few survivors. She’s now about 23 — she doesn’t know her exact birthday — but still feels like an orphan in need of help.
On Monday, Aug. 4, a young, gentle nurse named Mark Kipsang walks through the pediatric malnutrition ward with a clipboard. Medical staff had promised Rose before the weekend that she and Santo would be discharged soon.
When Kipsang reaches their bed, Rose sits the boy upright and encourages him to greet their visitor. Kipsang offers a hand for a high five, but Santo doesn’t budge. His little feet dangle from the bed, still swollen with edema. Kipsang is worried Santo’s condition will worsen at home and that he’d quickly end up back at the hospital. This year, Kipsang’s ward has seen about six relapses every week on average.
“Has he had diarrhea?” he asks, inspecting the loose skin on Santo’s backside.
“No,” Rose lies.
“Can he walk?”
Rose nods and places Santo on the cold concrete, his shirt slipping from his shoulders. When he stands motionless, Rose holds his hands above his head and wills him forward, his feet barely shuffling. Santo starts to wail, and Rose sighs and lifts him back into her lap.
Santo is not ready to leave. Just then, Kipsang looks at Rose sitting cross-legged and notices what she has kept to herself all this time. Rose is pregnant.
Kipsang sends her straight to the hospital prenatal offices. She pads across the courtyard clutching a worn purple book that shows her first and only checkup was months ago. Rose speaks three languages but cannot read or write. Staff take her blood and conduct other tests and then explain the results as they jot them down in the book. She is extremely anemic, which means she is at risk for fainting, strokes or a preterm birth.
A third of the women in the hospital’s maternity ward have life-threatening complications that could be treated simply with food. They suffer from anemia like Rose, as well as dangerously high blood pressure. Their babies are born early, weighing too little and with underdeveloped lungs.
Jane Atim, a solicitous nutrition counselor, tells Rose that in order to avoid a dangerous birth, she needs to address her iron deficiency. Rose nods but otherwise sits still on a plastic chair, her fingers laced together. Atim flips through a ledger of two dozen other pregnant women she had seen in recent weeks, all with the same problem. There’s a diagram of a balanced diet on her desk. “How many times a day do you eat?” Atim asks.
Three, Rose lies again. She wants to end the conversation and figures there’s not much point in being honest or complaining. Instead, she lists peas, greens and lentils as her typical daily fare.
Atim knows it isn’t true, but she doesn’t think it does much good to despair alongside the starving mothers. So she tells Rose what she tells everyone: “The best thing for you to do is eat.”
The next morning, three days shy of one month in the hospital, Rose comes apart. “I am leaving today,” she shouts to a group of hospital workers who had gathered around her. The other mothers turn on their beds to watch. Her face is wet with tears. She tells them she doesn’t know who’s taking care of her other kids.
Her doctor relents and signs the discharge papers. “This is not ideal,” he says. He’s worried Santo might have contracted tuberculosis as well. But he says it’s better to discharge Santo than let Rose leave against medical advice and risk her ignoring their recommendations for treatment at home.
Later, Rose collects all of their belongings into the plastic wash basin she’s been using for laundry: two dresses, blankets, soap in an empty powdered milk tin, the iron tablets the prenatal ward had given her and papers describing Santo’s treatment plan. She doesn’t know what the files say, but she organizes them into neat piles anyway. The hospital had prescribed Santo 11 ready-to-use therapeutic food bars, and Rose keeps the packaging of one he just finished. She saves the empty wrappers to prove Santo has eaten them. Some mothers resort to selling theirs.
Rose ties Santo to her back with a blanket printed with monkeys, balances the basin atop her head and cups her lower belly with her free hand. “God help you,” another mother says.
As Rose reaches her sister’s house, Lino and James bound around the corner, through an open gate and beneath a clothesline made of concertina wire. Flanked by a posse of other children all coated in a film of dust, the boys beeline for Santo. They coo over their little brother before liberating a nutritional supplement wrapper from his hands to lick it clean. Rose inspects Lino’s dirty fingernails and picks up James, his brittle arms reaching around her neck; his body feels like an empty bookbag. He has a bad cough.
They look rough, Rose thinks, but they are alive.
It takes more than an hour to walk back to their house. James lost his shoes at some point after leaving the hospital. He struggles to stand, much less walk under the blinding East African sun. “He became so thin this year,” says Rose, whose own sandals have broken. “He’s usually fat.”
Strapped to her back, Santo falls asleep. Rose agonizes over being a mother unable to feed her children, with a pain so deep that she feels something like remorse for having had them at all. “There’s no happiness in it,” she says later.
They walk past the occasional house stripped to a husk. Those families, Rose explains, sold their clothes, chairs and even roofs to afford a ride over the border to South Sudan — a place they had not long ago fled for their lives.
Kakuma once felt like her only possibility for a future. She hoped to go into business for herself, selling food of all things. She’d raise money in case she and the boys were ever granted asylum in the U.S., where her sons could receive a good education.
But she’s abandoned that plan. Now she instead imagines joining those returning to South Sudan instead. “This sickness that came upon her baby has broken her,” Rose’s sister Sunday says, using a camp colloquialism for malnutrition.
“The only time she scared me,” Sunday adds, “was when she told me she wanted to take her kids back to South Sudan.”
On the morning of Aug. 11, Rose disappears into a crowd of hundreds of refugees under a pavilion about the size of a basketball court. Children lie across concrete benches while their mothers crane their necks toward the front, struggling to hear over the din. There, a small team of Kenya Red Cross workers holding clipboards call names on a bullhorn. One at a time, the mothers come forward to lift their kids onto a scale.
This outdoor clinic is functionally a pediatric malnutrition referral center. Community health workers fan across Kakuma to measure the circumference of children’s arms. Any kids in the area with arms thinner than 13.5 centimeters below the shoulder are sent here. They’ve made almost 12,000 malnutrition referrals this year.
Rose sits with James and Santo on either side of her, both half asleep despite the noise. Behind a folding table at the front of the crowd is a harried young Red Cross nutritionist. He said on a previous visit that the turnout shows how far malnutrition has spread. “It’s worse than last year,” he added, “because the food has been cut.”
Rose plops Santo on the scale: about 15 pounds. James is 21. Both weigh more than they did last check up, but still far less than what healthy children would at their ages. Each of their arms measures less than 12 centimeters, meaning the aid workers should prescribe them both therapeutic food.
The nutritionist tells Rose to follow him. He unlocks a heavy steel door that opens into a vault typically filled with nutritional supplements. Now, save for a couple boxes torn open on pallets, the room is empty. “We don’t have Plumpy’Nut anymore,” he says. (U.S. funding cuts disrupted the global supply chain that moves therapeutic ready-to-use food all over the world, The New York Times reported, stranding it in warehouses and at shipping companies.) He hands Rose a few bars of what remains for Santo and a different, less dense, supplement for James. They head back home.
Rose gives birth to her first girl two months later, on Oct. 5. It’s a Sunday, which is what Rose names the baby.
Her family still struggles to get food, even though WFP has started giving out more rations after a recent grant from the U.S. She rests under a tree with the children outside their dark, squat home, watching them sit listless in the heat.
All three of her boys have backslid. Lino and James are even thinner. The color has again drained from Santo’s skin and the edema returned to his legs, arms and face. He has lost 1 pound since the August weigh-in with the Red Cross.
Still wearing the black-and-white necklace his mom made him, Santo can hardly open his eyes or sit upright. It’s clear he needs to go back to urgent care. But she’s afraid to risk bringing her newborn to the hospital, where she might catch an infection.
They’ll all stay at home for now. This time, Rose has to choose baby Sunday.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.The original has additional imagery which is worth checking out as well.
On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed.
By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.
In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.
Days later, on a remote patch of land in South Sudan, a 38-year-old man named Tor Top gathered with his neighbors outside the local health clinic. Surrounded by floodwaters, their hamlet of thatch and mud homes had been battling a massive outbreak of cholera, a deadly disease spread by poor sanitation. Around the country, it had infected 36,000 people in three months, killing more than 600, many of them babies. Top’s family lived in the epicenter.
The clinic, one of 12 in the area run by the Christian, Maryland-based humanitarian organization World Relief and funded by USAID, provided a key weapon in the fight: IV bags to stave off dehydration and death. The bags cost just 62 cents each, and in three months, the clinics had helped save more than 500 people.
Now, Top, who lived with his wife, children and mother in a one-room house less than 50 feet from the clinic, listened as World Relief staff shared grim news: The Trump administration had stopped USAID’s funding to World Relief. Their clinic, their lifeline, was closing.
Top’s usual gentle demeanor broke down. Why would the U.S. just cut off their medical care in the middle of a deadly outbreak?
By now the broad story of USAID’s ruin has been widely told: The decree handed down by Trump; Elon Musk, who led the new Department of Government Efficiency; and Russell Vought, who holds the purse strings for the administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, to scuttle the agency and undo decades of humanitarian work in the name of austerity. Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by promising to keep or restore critical lifesaving programs.
But that promise was not kept. Instead, a cast of Trump’s lesser-known political appointees and DOGE operatives cut programs in ways that guaranteed widespread harm and death in some of the world’s most desperate situations, according to an examination by ProPublica based on previously unreported episodes inside the government as well on-the-ground reporting in South Sudan. In some cases, they abandoned vital operations by clicking through a spreadsheet or ignoring requests in their inboxes.
The abrupt moves left aid workers and communities with no time to find other sources of funding, food or medicine. Borrowing from a phrase used to describe the U.S.’ overwhelming military campaign during the Iraq War, political appointee Tim Meisburger told senior USAID staff that the strategy was “shock and awe.” (Meisburger declined to comment.)
Tibor Nagy, a veteran diplomat who was Trump’s acting undersecretary of state for management until April, has long been a critic of the vast networks of nonprofit organizations funded by American taxpayers. But he told ProPublica the administration never cared to differentiate between the “fluff” and vital humanitarian programs. “It was the most harebrained operation I’d seen in my 38 years with the U.S. government,” Nagy said, referring to the methods used this year. “Who knows how much damage was done.”
In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all. Lewin blocked funding requests for programs like tuberculosis treatment in Tajikistan and emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, records show.
This meant that dozens of supposedly “active” operations were dormant throughout most of the year. Rubio’s advisers let other critical programs, which typically run on one-year grants, expire without renewing them.
Few places were hit harder than South Sudan, the youngest and poorest country in the world, as well as one of the most dependent on American aid.
After Trump’s inauguration, career USAID and State Department staff spent months warning top officials that the funding cuts would exacerbate a historic cholera epidemic ripping through the country. They needed less than $20 million to fund lifesaving health programs, including cholera response efforts, for three months at the beginning of the year — an eighth of what Trump recently approved to buy private jets for one cabinet secretary and just 3% of USAID’s budget in South Sudan last year. But Rubio, Marocco and Lewin failed to heed their own agencies’ assessments, according to internal records and interviews.
As a result, people in South Sudan died.
By denying and delaying those funds for months, Trump’s appointees incapacitated the fragile nation’s emergency response systems at the very moment when doctors and aid workers were scrambling to contain cholera’s spread. “We had to start rationing lifesaving interventions,” said Lanre Williams-Ayedun, the senior vice president of international programs for World Relief. “To have something like this happen in a place like this, where there aren’t mechanisms for backup, just means people are going to die.”
Villages and towns that had been reining in the outbreak suddenly lost essential services. Cholera came roaring back. “The trend was going down,” said a former U.S. official. “When we stopped the funding, it just surged.”
This summer, ProPublica journalists hiked and boated across Rubkona County, the epicenter of South Sudan’s outbreak and home to the country’s largest refugee camp, to interview families that the U.S. cut off from help. We collected medical files, diaries, meeting notes and photographs documenting cholera’s devastation after essential services stopped.
ProPublica also interviewed more than 100 government and aid officials and reviewed enormous caches of previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents from inside the Trump administration. Many were granted anonymity due to fears of reprisal.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official said fast, drastic changes to foreign aid were necessary to reform a “calcified system.” The world, especially U.S. interests, will be better for it in the long run, the official said, despite “some disruptions in the short term.”
The official also said that Rubio was the final decision-maker for all aid programs. They also contended that they had a limited budget to work with, “which required some tradeoffs on what programs to continue,” saying OMB has ultimate control over new humanitarian funds.
The official maintained that nobody died as a result of the funding cuts. “That’s a disgusting framing,” the official said. “There are people who are dying in horrible situations all around the world, all of the time.”
“Who is responsible for the suffering of the people of South Sudan?” the official added. “The South Sudanese [government leaders] who take their oil revenues and buy private jets and fancy watches and don’t see to their own people? Or the United States? Are we responsible for every poor person all around the world?”
Officially, the death count in South Sudan is nearly 1,600, making it the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history. But that toll is a dramatic undercount. ProPublica found newly dug, unmarked graves alongside roads and in backyards. In one town, community leaders showed reporters an informal cemetery with at least three dozen people who they said did not make it to medical facilities in time.
Tor Top’s mother, Nyarietna, was one of the uncounted. In March, the clinic doors had been padlocked for two weeks when she developed vomiting and diarrhea. Top bundled her into a rented canoe and began paddling toward the nearest hospital, eight hours away. Less than halfway into the journey, long after they had stopped reassuring one another that she would be OK, Nyarietna died.
Top turned the canoe around and made his way back home, where he buried his mom in their backyard. Now he alone tends the small garden where she grew corn and okra for their family. “If there was medicine here,” he said later, “maybe her life would have been saved.”
Aid to South Sudan
For years, Sudan’s Arab-led central government waged a campaign of brutal violence against its Christian minority in the south. Their persecution became a cause celebre of the American Evangelical movement, which convinced President George W. Bush’s administration to help broker a peace agreement that led to independence 15 years ago. Since then, the U.S. has given the fledgling nation nearly $10 billion in aid, according to federal data. That money subsidized virtually every corner of the health care system, among other institutions.
Still, South Sudan remains undeveloped. Political instability, corruption and dysfunction are rampant. The transitional government hasn’t paid public employees’ salaries for most of the last two years. U.S. officials had long been on alert to South Sudanese aid workers siphoning resources. Deadly political violence — left over from the civil war and threatening a new one — besets much of the country.
Well before Trump took office this year, the international community had broadly agreed that it was necessary to end the nation’s dependence on foreign aid, and U.S. officials were working on strategies to force its leaders to take responsibility for its citizens.
Some of the most vulnerable among them live in Rubkona County, an oil and cattle hub larger than Rhode Island near Sudan’s border. There, a refugee camp formed in 2014 during the nation’s civil war when thousands of people fled behind a United Nations peacekeeping mission to escape a massacre in the nearby town of Bentiu. As South Sudan’s political turmoil continued to spiral, tens of thousands more fled to the camp. In 2020, Rubkona was hit by a series of catastrophic floods that submerged the majority of the county. Generations of people are now essentially trapped there with nowhere else to go.
Previously, USAID gave the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration $36 million for work in South Sudan, which included keeping the Bentiu camp habitable and making critical repairs to the dikes that surround the camp and hold back the rising floodwaters. The group maintained the drainage system and paid people to pick up garbage and clean the latrines — essentially performing sanitation services for 110,000 people.
Despite those efforts, cholera began spreading late last year as new refugees poured in from neighboring Sudan. Rubkona County quickly became the outbreak’s epicenter. In a matter of days, hundreds of infections turned to thousands and the death toll mounted. U.S.-funded organizations raced to set up treatment units in the camp and surrounding communities.
The situation was dire, and people had few viable options to leave Bentiu, U.S. Ambassador Michael Adler reported back to Washington after USAID staff visited the camp to assess the outbreak in early December. The U.S.-funded cholera clinics and other programs were necessary given the “explosivity” of the illness’ spread, he wrote.
It was the kind of routine crisis response that USAID was renowned for handling. The last cholera outbreak in Rubkona, in 2022, lasted seven months, and government statistics say that just one person died while about 420 were sickened. An aggressive sanitation campaign, largely funded by the U.S., was crucial to containing the disease.
Now faced with a new outbreak, the embassy’s staff rushed to get the aid organizations in Rubkona more money, according to the organizations and former officials. By early January, humanitarians were preparing to expand operations. World Relief planned to expand its mobile clinics, Williams-Ayedun said. USAID told Solidarités International, which repaired water pipes, provided sanitation services and distributed soap, to aggressively spend the money it had to combat cholera, with the understanding that the agency would immediately review a proposal for more funds, according to two former officials. An additional $30 million for the U.N.’s migration office — which planned to use the money to continue maintaining the refugee camps — was already committed.
Then Trump took office, signing an executive order on day one to freeze all foreign aid pending a review of whether it aligned with the administration’s stated values.
It wasn’t true. Behind the scenes, Marocco and his lieutenants repeatedly obstructed USAID’s Africa, humanitarian aid and global health bureaus from restarting programs critical for responding to disease outbreaks, according to interviews and memos obtained by ProPublica. The money aid organizations in South Sudan were expecting by February didn’t come. Meanwhile, the appointees suspended nearly all of USAID’s staff, and those remaining said their bosses blocked payments even for approved programs.
Marocco was meant to be “the destroyer, and then someone else would come in to rebuild,” one former official said a senior political appointee had told her. “I guess the one thing happened, but not the other.” (Marocco did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The cuts were so frenetic that, for a brief time, the U.S. government stopped paying for the fuel that ran the electricity for the American embassy in Juba, including the security compound, just as violence was surging throughout South Sudan, according to former senior officials.
In response to questions about the episode in Juba, the senior State Department official denied it was a mistake or that Rubio’s review wasn’t careful. “Going back and looking at things again doesn’t mean that you’ve made a mistake,” the senior official said.
At one point in February, Marocco tried ordering the immediate return of foreign service officers stationed abroad. Several senior USAID officials protested, citing safety and logistical concerns for staff in war zones. During one meeting that month, Lewin responded, “You don’t want to get to know the lobsters. Just throw them in the pot,” according to an attendee and meeting notes.
Lewin joined the government via Musk’s DOGE and later took over for Marocco. He seldom came to the USAID office or met with his own staff experts, officials said. Publicly, he called the agency an “unaccountable independent institution” where secrets leak so quickly “we have to hand-walk memos around like we’re in the ’40s.”
In the weeks that followed, DOGE and Trump appointees forbade those who remained at USAID from communicating with aid groups and discouraged discussion internally, telling staff abroad not to approach ambassadors to advocate for programs, emails show.
Senior staffers said they were prohibited from meeting with congressional delegations to share basic information, which was critical to Congress’ oversight capabilities. The government’s health experts feared that taking any action to save lives could be a fireable offense.
Still, some spoke out.
“The consequences on lives lost and funding squandered will grow exponentially and irreversibly in many cases,” Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator at USAID, warned in a Feb. 8 email to agency leaders, including Joel Borkert, the chief of staff, and Meisburger, who led the humanitarian affairs bureau. They did not respond to his plea, and Enrich was later put on administrative leave.
Crucially, even when USAID’s new bosses did approve organizations to resume lifesaving work, they at times denied requests for the money that would allow them to do so, internal records show. Other proposals to fund existing grants or reverse terminations languished in limbo.
The official responding on behalf of the State Department said Trump’s OMB ultimately has more control over approving new grants and extensions, but that it was never the administration’s intention to keep all of the lifesaving programs forever.
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false, and the State Department did not address when Lewin sought funds from OMB for South Sudan’s cholera response.
In early February, embassy staff in South Sudan provided Adler, the ambassador, with a list of the most critical operations there, warning that funds had not been released and lifesaving programs would cease when their money ran out.
A career foreign service officer appointed to his post by the Biden administration, Adler had long been critical of the government of South Sudan for ongoing violence and deserting its own people, according to embassy cables and interviews with people familiar with his thinking.
Still, early on he appeared to recognize that without U.S. intervention, the most vulnerable people in the country did not stand a chance against cholera. In a Feb. 14 memo addressed to the leadership of the State Department’s Africa bureau, Adler asked the administration to release money to keep people alive.
“Lifesaving medicine and medical care, as well as emergency water and sanitation services, play a critical role in controlling disease outbreaks,” the embassy wrote, “notably a severe cholera outbreak in South Sudan’s border regions hosting the greatest number of refugees.”
Adler declined to meet with ProPublica in South Sudan and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Death by Spreadsheet
As humanitarian groups racked up unpaid bills, they began to file lawsuits challenging the foreign aid freeze. A federal judge ordered the administration to reimburse the organizations. But on Feb. 26, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the lower court’s order.
In a meeting with senior agency staff the next day, Lewin, who at that time was not yet in charge of USAID programs, indicated that he interpreted the recent legal decisions as a potential license to dispense with one of the key review processes for unfreezing operations, according to two attendees and meeting notes. One of those attendees took Lewin’s remarks to mean that “he had no intention to review contracts or implement lifesaving programs.”
In response, the senior State Department official told ProPublica, “No one meant that or said that.”
The next night, a Friday, staff at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, the division of USAID that dealt with emergencies and ran nearly all of the programs in South Sudan, were working late, scrambling to keep emergency programs operational. Suddenly, they noticed Borkert making changes to a key spreadsheet.
To create the spreadsheet, DOGE had sidestepped career staff, pulling information from databases made for project management. It was so rudimentary that it was often impossible to tell what a program did from descriptions as vague as “extension No. 4” or “allocation of funds,” according to people who saw the spreadsheet.
Rubio and his aides had already terminated hundreds of programs in preceding days. Staff were bracing for another round of cuts, but many of the line items remaining in the file were for programs that provided food, clean water or essential medicines.
Veteran USAID officials watched as Borkert scrolled down the spreadsheet, turning rows red, yellow or green every few seconds, never asking a single question. Realizing the red programs were slated to be cut, they frantically started editing descriptions so that Borkert would at least know what those programs did. Within minutes, he’d flagged dozens of them for termination. (Borkert declined to comment.)
A senior staff member in the group raced upstairs and begged Borkert to reinstate them, according to two officials familiar with the episode. He relented on several. But the next day, Marocco and Lewin told the group they’d kept far too many programs, emails show. Lewin ordered 151 additional awards terminated, writing that he would “have strong objections to these awards being turned on.” Marocco followed up by email at 11:30 p.m. saying the reactivations were “far too broad,” indicating several more line numbers and writing “sound like terminations,” next to them, ultimately canceling even more programs.
On March 10, Rubio announced on X that the review was over. In response to lawsuits, Trump officials told the courts that the review was a careful examination of USAID’s operations.
More than 5,000 programs had been canceled, and fewer than 1,000 remained — a figure that many officials told ProPublica was arbitrary but binding. In reality, the administration still wasn’t releasing money and many of the surviving programs had no funds, according to interviews with humanitarian groups and government officials, as well as memos and spreadsheets documenting those decisions.
When asked about the current status of the 1,000, the senior State Department official criticized USAID’s former vetting procedures and said the administration is in the process of creating new programs.
Soon after the review ended, the cholera response in South Sudan came crashing down.
“God Is With Us”
Rebecca Nyariaka and Koang Kai were shrouded in grief throughout the upheaval in Washington. Their only child, 4-year-old son Geer, had been one of the first victims when cholera inundated the Bentiu camp in December.
The couple met in secondary school at a refugee camp in Kenya and got married after they’d both returned to their homeland in 2013. After violence broke out, they fled to Bentiu, finding occasional jobs working with health clinics.
Now, in early March, they prodded one another to stay hopeful: 28-year-old Nyariaka was once again pregnant.
In the refugee camp, the couple could see the signs of the funding cuts everywhere. Uncollected garbage barricaded the drainage ditches that encased their neighborhood. Human waste spilled out of the overflowing communal latrines near Nyariaka’s house and into the fetid water filling the culverts. Toilets crawling with rats, maggots and flies became so noxious that neighbors began defecating on the surrounding dirt roads. The stench was overwhelming. “Those who washed the latrines have gone,” Kai said. “And we are left here all alone.”
The U.N.’s new sanitation contract had been committed before Trump took office, but it hadn’t received any money since last year. On March 12, USAID staff in the region sent Washington field notes about the conditions in the camp, where health services faced “closure or severe cutbacks” because of the funding shortfall. Officials at the organization pleaded behind the scenes as well. They repeatedly called and met with embassy leaders to request help, to no avail. “What we have now is survival of the fittest,” one U.N. official told ProPublica.
WhenNyariaka gave birth to a healthy baby boy, cholera was rampant throughout the camp. Neighbors were dying around them, and Kai was worried for his wife and new baby. “When cholera enters your home, you know the chances of survival are very low. Very few people survive it,” he said later.
Nyariaka named the baby Kuothethin, “God is with us.” In her first days back from the hospital, her body still healing, the new mom used the bathroom frequently, teetering back and forth to the overflowing latrines close to her house. She soon developed violent vomiting and diarrhea, the hallmark symptoms of cholera.
Kai, tall and muscular, picked her up in his arms and raced to the camp hospital, but it was too late. Nyariaka died just after they arrived.
She had been nowhere except her house and the latrines since coming home from the hospital, Kai said. He’s certain the toilets are to blame for her death. Depressed and unable to care for their newborn, he sent the baby across the floodwaters to live with his mother-in-law on another side of the state.
Kai and Nyariaka had been best friends for years before they started dating, their lives intertwined for nearly two decades. “Her whole way of life was good. She loved our children and cared for them,” Kai said. “I am heartbroken.”
As the disease ripped through the camp, more services shut down, including transportation for the dead. Kai’s neighbor, John Gai, lost his father to cholera. Gai had to take him to the cemetery himself in a wheelbarrow, his father’s head bobbing at his knees. “Nobody should have to carry a dead body among the living,” Gai said.
“Gross Neglect”
On March 28, Rubio notified Congress that he was officially shuttering most USAID operations and transferring programs that survived his review, including several in South Sudan, to the State Department.
Staffers spent the next weeks repeatedly appealing to Lewin — who by then had replaced Marocco as Rubio’s top foreign aid official — for authority to perform the mundane tasks needed to keep the programs operating. In late April, the agency’s humanitarian bureau submitted a blanket request to fund grants that Lewin had already approved. Lewin refused, records show, and the humanitarian bureau had to submit country-specific proposals for consideration. That process dragged on for months.
In June, just before USAID was shut down for good, Lewin finally approved some of the funding the staff had advocated for. But by then it was too late. The officials had run out of time to transfer money already appropriated by Congress to remaining programs.
On June 26, R. Clark Pearson, a supervisory contracting officer at USAID, sent a scathing email to USAID offices around the world in response to an email from the top procurement officer for the agency listing the hundreds of programs that were meant to be active. He said there was no one who could manage the awards, which he called “gross neglect on an astonishing level.”
“In a time of unimaginable hubris, gross incompetence and failures of leadership across the Agency, this has to be one of the most delusional emails I have seen to date,” Pearson wrote. “Lives depend on these awards and for the [U.S. government] to simply not manage them because of an arbitrary deadline is inexcusable.”
That same day, a senior humanitarian adviser informed Adler that payment extensions for several programs, with the exception of food aid, weren’t processed because the “approval was received late.”
In September, the Supreme Court issued another emergency ruling that let the administration withhold nearly $4 billion that Congress earmarked for foreign aid.
Later that month, OMB released some new foreign aid funds. That’s when World Relief finally began to receive funding, allowing the clinic in Tor Top’s community to reopen, even though the administration claimed the program had been “active” for almost seven months.
The U.N.’s migration program has not received a new South Sudan grant. The organization will run out of money for dike maintenance in Bentiu by February, after months of some of the most severe flooding in years.
A spokesperson for the U.N.’s migration program said the organization was still in discussion with the State Department and “continues to engage with donors about the critical humanitarian needs in South Sudan.”
The Uncounted
During the first months of the cholera outbreak, a mobile health team run by the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works in crisis zones around the world, visited Nyajime Duop’s remote village on the edges of Rubkona County twice weekly. The team brought soap and transported sick people to IRC’s nearby clinic for care.
At 27, Duop’s youthful face belied a life marked by war and poverty. She had arrived just a few months earlier, fleeing violence in Khartoum, Sudan, with an infant and toddler in tow, when Trump officials terminated IRC’s $5.5 million grant.
The IRC suspended its operations in the village in the spring. When Duop’s 1-year-old baby, Nyagoa, fell ill with cholera in July, on a day IRC would have visited, there was no one to help her. By the morning, Nyagoa was unconscious. She died that day, the Fourth of July.
Cholera has spread to nearly every corner of South Sudan, infected at least 100,000 people and killed 1,600, though cases began abating this fall. The true death toll is impossible to know, in part because clinics that would have cared for people and counted the dead were shuttered. The Trump administration also cut funding to the World Health Organization, which helped the South Sudanese government gather accurate data on the outbreak.
In a pasture a short walk from IRC’s clinic, ProPublica found at least three dozen mounds covered in sticks — the makeshift graves, village leaders said, of those who died of cholera before reaching the clinic. The clinic’s security guard told reporters he saw one man collapse and die just yards from the front gate.
“There are many more cases,” said Kray Ndong, then acting minister of health for the area, “many more deaths.”
The Trump administration recently announced a new era of foreign aid, where the U.S. will prioritize “trade over aid.” South Sudan, with a gross domestic product one-tenth the size of Vermont’s, has little to offer.
“The administration says they are committed to humanitarian needs,” one aid official in South Sudan said. “But we don’t know what that means, only that it will be transactional.”
The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.
This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.
The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.
To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.
A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.
Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.
The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.
The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.
Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.
[…]
“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.
If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.
To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”
That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).
Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.
You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they’re doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust & safety, fact checking, content moderation, or mis- or disinformation research. The government is now punishing people for speech—specifically, punishing them for the false belief that their work constitutes censorship.
The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants – and family members who would be traveling with them – to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” under a specific article of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the cable said.
It’s like JD Vance’s “the rules were you weren’t going to fact check me” taken to a new level.
This policy censors non-censors for not doing the thing that the White House and MAGA folks are actively doing every day. MAGA knows content moderation is necessary—they’re super eager to have it applied when it’s speech they don’t like. As we’ve recently discussed, they’ve suddenly been demanding social media companies stop foreign influence campaigns and remove anything mean about Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the White House itself is engaged in a twisted version of what it claims is fact checking and demanding that media orgs hire MAGA-friendly censors.
The hypocrisy is the point. But it’s also blatantly unconstitutional. As Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to this news:
People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren’t engaged in ‘censorship’— they’re engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional.
Incoherent and unconstitutional is being too kind.
The real work that trust & safety professionals do makes this policy even more perverse. As trust & safety expert (and occasional Ctrl-Alt-Speech guest host) Alice Hunsberger told (the recently defunded) NPR:
“Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it,” she said. “Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it’s so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer.”
So the administration is now barring entry to people whose work includes stopping child sexual abuse material and protecting Americans from foreign bad actors—all while claiming to oppose censorship and demanding platforms remove content about Charlie Kirk. The only way this makes sense is if you understand what the actual principle at work is: we get to control all speech, and anyone who might interfere with that control must be punished.
There are no fundamental values at work here beyond “we have power, and we’re going to abuse it to silence anyone who stands in our way.”
Elon Musk is now calling for the dissolution of the European Union because it fined him $140 million for violating a law he once said was “exactly aligned” with his vision for (what was then called) Twitter.
And he’s doing it by lying about what the fine is actually for.
The EU hit X with a $140 million fine last week for violating the Digital Services Act (DSA). But (despite what you may have heard) this isn’t some censorship overreach by Brussels bureaucrats. The violations—which have been known for over a year—have nothing to do with content moderation. Zero. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying.
The fine is for three specific transparency failures: misleading users when Elon changed verification from actual verification to “pay $8 for a checkmark,” maintaining a broken ad repository, and refusing to share required data with researchers.
The European Union has announced a fine of $140 million against Elon Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for several failures to comply with rules governing large digital platforms. A European Commission spokesperson said the fine against X’s holding company was due to theplatform’s misleading use of a blue check markto identify verified users, a poorly functioning advertising repository, and a failure to provide effective data access for researchers.
Again, let’s repeat: it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with the way X handles content moderation or what speech it allows on its platform. As Daphne Keller explains:
Don’t let anyone — not even the United StatesSecretary of State— tell you that the European Commission’s€120 million enforcementagainst Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Service Act (DSA) is about censorship or about what speech users can post on the platform. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this fine is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law. Many of these requirements resemble existing US laws or proposals that have garnered bipartisan support.
There are three charges against X, which all stem from amulti-year investigationthat was launched in 2023. One is about verification — X’s blue checkmarks on user accounts — and two are about transparency. These charges have nothing to do with what content is on X, or what user speech the platform should or should not allow. There is plenty of EU political disapproval about those things, for sure. But the EU didn’t choose to pick a fight about them. Instead, it went after X for violating much more basic, straightforward provisions of the DSA. Those violations were flagrant enough that it would be weird if the EU hadn’t issued a fine.
Both Daphne and I have criticized attempts by EU officials to abuse the DSA in pursuit of censorship. I directly called it out when former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton clearly went way over the line last year, a move that quickly led to Breton losing his job. I’ve been highly critical of the DSA for years, so if this were actually an abuse of the law for censorship, I’d be first in line to call it out and side with Elon (I’ve done it in other circumstances as well).
But this is not that. This has nothing to do with “content moderation” or “censorship” in any way.
And yet, Elon Musk is running around pretending it is a free speech issue, and his once-again friends in the Trump administration are bolstering that false claim.
As Daphne pointed out, the EU could investigate certain aspects of X’s content moderation, and that could lead to serious questions about censorship and free speech. But they have not done so.
Honestly, this move is little different than the Trump FTC taking action against a Chinese company for violating COPPA. Which it has done. Did we see Chinese politicians lose their minds over that? Did we see the CEO of that company, Apitor Technology, call for dissolving the United States like Elon Musk is now calling for dissolving the EU? No. No, we did not.
But because the Elon Musks/JD Vances/Marco Rubios of the world can only think in terms of memes and culture wars, they know that if they just insist that this is about censorship, that the media will cover it that way, and the ignorant rabble on X will buy their version of the story.
All this is even more incredible because Elon Musk told the EU that he was entirely on board with the DSA while he was in the process of buying Twitter. Yes, the law he’s now claiming is censorship tyranny requiring the dissolution of an entire governmental body is the very same law he declared was “exactly aligned” with his vision for the platform.
At the time, we called out how the EU was clearly playing Musk, who seemed to have no clue what he was actually endorsing. It was obvious he hadn’t read or understood the DSA. But there he was, recording a video claiming perfect alignment with a regulatory framework he’s now treating as an existential threat to free speech.
So it’s pretty rich for him to whine about it now.
Of course, Musk isn’t just misrepresenting the fine. He’s responding with a series of escalating tantrums designed to feed his false censorship narrative. First, he called for abolishing the entire EU:
Then came the petty retaliation. First, he canceled the EU Commission’s X advertising account. X claimed it was because they “exploited” X’s ad platform by posting a link that appeared to be a video, but replies to that tweet suggested many, many people said that claimed “exploit” was not an exploit at all, but a tool that many others had used.
As the coiner of “The Streisand Effect,” I’d just like to point out that this is not what the Streisand Effect means at all.
Each move—calling to dissolve the EU, canceling ads, threatening individuals—is transparently designed to manufacture a free speech crisis where none exists. It’s performance art for an audience that won’t bother checking whether the fine is actually about censorship (it isn’t).
And he’ll likely keep escalating with the help of the Trump administration.
The DSA certainly has some issues, but this fine is not one of them. But that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk and his crew of political supporters from pretending that this is some huge attack on American free speech. It’s not. No more than the FTC’s fine against Apitor was an attack on China-based speech.
But, of course, most of the media will continue to pretend this is about free speech. They will frame it that way and for years into the future we’ll hear false stories—that the media and tons of other people will simply accept as true—that the EU fined X and Elon $140 million for not censoring people.
This is the template now. Violate fairly modest regulations, claim it’s censorship, get your political allies to amplify the lie, use it to de-legitimize any attempt at platform accountability for actively misleading users. It’s not about free speech. It never was. It’s about securing freedom from accountability while wielding the power of both private platforms and state resources to crush anyone who tries to impose it.
So yeah, anytime you hear someone claim the EU fined Musk for not censoring people, call it out. Because the truth matters, even when powerful people would prefer you didn’t notice they’re lying.
You’re just a commodity in Trump’s marketplace of horrific ideas.
Sure, criminal informants are seldom the trustworthiest of people, what with their stay-out-of-jail free cards being reliant on their steady production of evidence against other people. But the government does make promises to criminal informants that it’s expected to keep, not only to fulfill its legal obligations but to prevent informants from being, you know, beaten, tortured, and killed by those they associate with and rat on.
But when it’s time to eject as many people with brown skin as possible, all bets are off. If you’re a government informant, maybe it’s time to renege on your own obligations before the government gets you killed. When the Trump government sought to deport hundreds of [checks notes] Venezuelans to El Salvador’s torture prison, “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele had a favor to ask of his own: the return of nine MS-13 gang members.
Here’s the latest bit of callous evil perpetrated by some of the most banally malignant people to ever hold office, as reported by the Washington Post:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
Quite the quid pro quo, stripping people of the protection and safety they’d been guaranteed for the sole purpose of getting the green light for mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants. Well, the sole purpose on the Trump side of the equation. On the other side, there was a benefit beyond a little more burnishing of Bukele’s “tough on crime” reputation.
It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.
Basically, the State Department and the Trump administration offered up these gang members as literal human sacrifices in order to pursue its mass deportation program. Nothing greases the wheels like blood, I guess, and this administration’s collective hands have been covered with the substance since Trump’s inauguration.
And, as is always the case when authoritarians engage in human trafficking to further their bigoted ideals, the government spokespeople are there to remind everyone that the ends justify the means:
“The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman. “Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador. And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts.”
Neat. I supposed just summarily executing anyone suspected of drug trafficking would probably put a dent in drug trafficking but that’s the sort of thing we just don’t…. hang on a second. I’m sorry. I’m now being told this is exactly the sort of thing we do, for the first time in our government’s history. My mistake.
At least 32 people have been killed in U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. The Trump administration has said the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, arguing that the narcotics they smuggle kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, constituting an “armed attack.”
“When they’re loaded up with drugs, they’re fair game, and every one of those ships were,” President Trump told reporters last week.
Yep. And we’ll never know whether or not these claims have any basis in fact because all of the evidence has been drone-striked to the bottom of the ocean. Instead, we’re just expected to accept the new normal that moves extrajudicial drone strikes from areas of international conflict and into any body of water that might contain boats with Latin/South American citizens in them.
Of course, shitting on informants probably doesn’t even raise red flags in the DEA, ATF, CIA, FBI, or any other agency that used to be primarily concerned with actual criminal cases. Most of those resources are now being spent on pursuing people only suspected of civil violations of immigration law. If you’re from anywhere south of our border, you’re nothing more than meat puppets for a tyrant and his enablers.
The Party of Free Speech Snowflakes is at it again. Despite Charlie Kirk not actually being a member of the administration or, indeed, a political leader of any sort, the Trump Administration continues to act as though one of its own has been assassinated, rather than just another podcaster who happened to be more popular (for all the wrong reasons) than most.
The State Department has made a big deal in recent months about refusing/stripping visas over what’s normally considered to be protected speech in the United States. That’s because it’s headed by DEI hire Marco Rubio, who is prized not only for his ability to follow orders but his willingness to sit and not speak unless spoken to during diplomatic summit meetings.
Rubio — and his deputy Christopher Landau — are the gatekeepers of the Nazi Bar that is America. And if you can’t be bothered to cry your eyes out for a guy who’d never shed a tear for you, you’re not allowed to hang out in a country where you’ll probably just end up arrested during another untargeted ICE sweep.
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the state department said in a statement posted on X. “The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
The state department then listed six “examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the US” in a thread on the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the Trump donor who called himself “a free speech absolutist” before buying the site formerly known as Twitter.
If you can stomach it, the X thread contains a list of supposed offenders of this brand new rule about temporarily residing in the United States. As is to be expected, those singled out for their refusal to treat Kirk’s death with the respect it doesn’t deserve are from countries this bigoted administration considers to be unworthy of rights or basic human respect, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay. Somehow, a couple of social media posts from people in Germany and South Africa make it into the mix.
This is the end result of a witch hunt deliberately started by the deputy secretary of the State Department:
Last month, a deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, urged social media users to send him posts critical of Kirk, saying he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action”.
And there it is: the party that thinks free speech should only protect their hatefulness towards others, but should never be extended to speech it doesn’t like. While Charlie Kirk may have occasionally provided advisor-esque input to the Trump administration, he was never a politician nor a member of Trump’s cabinet. To elevate him posthumously into Someone Who Cannot Be Criticized is fucking disgusting. He was just another white dude with a bunch of biases who was blessed enough to make a bunch of money by taking advantage of the Trump administration’s embrace of white Christian nationalism ideals.
A person’s temporary residency in another country should never be based on whether or not they agree with the current government’s ideals nor the internet randos the government has decided are more equal than the rest of us. America was built on dissent. Now, it’s being destroyed by someone who seems to think he’s the second coming of King George.
