“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.


The political one first.  I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.



Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine.  The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.

The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites.  Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.

So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine.  But Russians liked it, so that was okay.

Then the USSR collapsed.  And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do.   By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export.  And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.

This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia.  Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb.  Which absolutely included Moldova.

So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine.  And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved.  Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will.  

This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.

Enter USAID.  Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry. 

They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods.  They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses.  They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment.  They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.

(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project.  It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)

The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages.  That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU.  I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine!  But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard.  There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”.  For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards.  That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified.  Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging. 

The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff.  Like, the “TAVA” number?  There’s a minimum font size for that.  If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you.  The glass of the bottle?   Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with.  The adhesive behind the label?  It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it).  There are dozens of things like that.

And then of course they had to do marketing.  Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines!  Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products.  This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat.  This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.

This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.

And in the end it was a huge damn success.  With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured.  Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan.  And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%.  Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.  



(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table.  Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines.  I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)

Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago.  It fell completely flat.  Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance.  In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.

So that’s the political story.  Russia had Moldova on a choke chain.  Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose.  Soft power in action.  It worked.

Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course. 

Okay, that’s the political story.  Here’s the personal one.

Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history.  They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war.  So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.

While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill.  Very ill.  Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection.  At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over. 

Wham, emergency room.  They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics.  But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country.  We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.

If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something.  No.  We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off.  Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows.  A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope.   

We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies.  Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication. 

In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?  

But there we were.  So into the hospital he went.  Here’s a photo:

— Take a moment and zoom in there.  Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed?  It says “USAID:  From The American People”.

Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID.  I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete.  But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old.  Except for those USAID beds.  Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile.  The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.

And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it.  And so did some other stuff.  There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from.  USAID sticker.  Couple of child-sized wheelchairs.  USAID stickers.  Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.

As I said, it was crowded in there.  Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents.  So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does.  A couple of people had a little English.  And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…

…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box.  “USAID!”  “USAID!”  People were pointing at the stickers, smiling.  “USAID!”   “America, very good!”  “Thank you!”  “USA!  USA!”  “Thank you!”

This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable.  When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down.  For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!”  “Very good!”  “Thank you!”

I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor.  But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.

Anyway, USAID stories.  I could go on at considerable length.  This is my career, after all!  I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.

But this is long enough already.  More some other time, perhaps.

Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.

The most surprising thing about Donald Trump is that there are still people here, in the year 2025, who retain the capacity to be surprised by Donald Trump. The man has no depths to plumb, contains no multitudes; to scratch his surface is to know the man entirely. We know that what he wants most in life is for the voices on his television to be praising him. We know that the biggest reason he ran for a second term is to avoid jail and that, now that he’s back, his main goal is to make off with as much money as he can. We know what kind of president he will be (bad) and how he’ll leave the country (worse). Trump is often described as a “pugilist” in the press. I’m not sure people know what that word means, because he’d be awful at pugilism. All of Trump’s punches are telegraphed.

Nevertheless, D.C. Democrats seem to be some of the last people to learn that there is nothing left to learn about Trump. Trump’s first week back seems to have caught them off guard, so much so that they’ve largely spent the last few days tiptoeing around as multiple crises unfolded. They’ve been careful, circumspect, cautious—and they’ve gotten absolutely banjaxed as a result. It wasn’t until Trump tried to turn off the entire federal government that they recovered a bit of fighting spirit, vowing to escalate the conflict with the GOP into a “street fight.”  

It’s great that they got there in the end; I look forward to this street fight, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Still, one of the Democrats’ big problems is the sheer number of times you can use the word “belatedly” to describe their reactions. It might have been better if Democrats had actually used the time between Trump getting reelected and Trump getting inaugurated to prepare to confront the things that Trump spent over a year saying he was going to do.

On Tuesday morning, The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reported on BlueSky that Democrats were planning to do a press conference on Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers—which occurred a full week prior—even as the effects of the Trump administration’s funding freeze were making headlines. The Democrats’ approach raises serious questions about their pathological inability to participate in the modern news cycle. Moreover, the pardoning of the January 6ers became a fait accompli the moment Trump won the election. The time to start raising a hue and cry over those pardons was thus November. 

Stein noted this lag: “Two parties running at different speeds.… Unclear if there is a presser today to go after the OMB’s power play to take over all federal grant money.” Democrats actually did manage to work the breaking news story into their brief in a rare display of nimbleness. But despite the hasty agenda change, Democrats seemed as if they’d not been following the political news for a staggeringly long amount of time. “Last night,” Chuck Schumer said of Trump’s attacks on the civil service, “President Trump plunged the country into chaos without a shred of warning.”

Trump’s actions were of course preceded by copious warnings, most notably in the form of Trump repeatedly saying that he planned to tear down the civil service and replace it with loyalists willing to use the federal government as his own instrument of plunder and revenge. In addition to these warnings, many stories generated well ahead of time elucidated Trump’s purge plans—a tightly reported piece from Jonathan Swan in Axios and two well-trafficked features from The New York Times and Vanity Fair among the biggest stories detailing Trump’s shock-and-awe schemes for the civil service. 

Readers of this very newsletter know that I wrote about Trump’s plot back in September 2022, using my patented journalism technique of listening to what Republicans say they are going to do and then writing it down and publishing it to the internet. All of these stories, based on nothing more than the public statements and documented plans of Donald Trump and his cronies, are what we in the biz would call a “warning.” 

There’s a long list of bad habits that Democrats need to break at this point, but we’ll add this to the list: Be ready to respond to the things that Republicans plan to do when they’ve given you several months of head start. If there is a takeaway for Democrats after Trump’s first 10 days in office, it’s that procrastination and lollygagging really kills. Fortunately, there’s still an easy way for them to get two steps ahead of the curve.

For instance, it’s never been a mystery that Project 2025 has essentially been the punch list for Trump’s second term—the White House is already very dutifully ticking items off. Any uncertainty about this ended this week when it was discovered that metadata in the Trump administration’s OPM memos indicated that they shared authors with the Project 2025 manifesto. Once that was publicly disclosed, the administration rather clumsily attempted to scrub that metadata from those memos. 

Based upon all of this, it seems pretty clear that this administration is just going to keep making its way through Project 2025’s pages. Democrats could probably finagle a copy of that document, given that it is publicly available, and maybe even start messaging against it.

Another thing I recommend Democrats get ahead of is the Trump administration’s plans to enact a national abortion ban. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Republicans can be pretty cagey and evasive when confronted on this matter. Here’s a fun fact: Several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices even told Democrats during their confirmation hearing that Roe was “settled law” before they actually went and unsettled it. Chances are good, folks, that Republicans are actually doing this thing colloquially known as “lying.”

Yes, I know that Trump has repeatedly said that he would not sign a national abortion ban that comes across his desk into law. In the first place, yes, he absolutely would (see above: “lying”), but more importantly, he does not need a bill to arrive on his desk to enact a ban. As we have rather relentlessly reported here at The New Republic, Trump’s Department of Justice will enforce a law that’s already on the books known as the Comstock Act to ban abortion, something that Vice President JD Vance asked Merrick Garland’s DOJ to do when he was still an Ohio senator. 

There is no reason Democrats can’t simply count the contents of Project 2025 and a national abortion ban as done deals, things the GOP is going to roll out sooner or later, and start publicly sparring about them, along with the GOP’s other antisocial and unpopular plans. Republicans will complain, and there’s definitely a strain of pundits who will disapprove, but remember: Those people suck, and being on their bad side is evidence of good politics. Besides, with no legislative majority and thus no prospect of enacting legislation, Democrats may as well spend their time fighting the GOP, complaining about their ideas, and working the refs. 

Democrats have some reason to feel a little gun-shy about ramping up these kinds of attacks. The media, too often, reported on Trump’s denials of Project 2025 and his assertions about signing a national abortion ban way too credulously. But that’s a reason to start naming and shaming the media personages who got it so badly wrong. More to the point, Democrats need to spur, if not entirely resuscitate, a popular opposition to Trump and start planning an electoral referendum of what will be another round of failure and misrule. That begins with something that resembles energy and action, no matter how constrained you may be in parliamentary terms.

You look stupid when you’re a week late to a news story, and pathetic when saying you weren’t warned about the stuff that Trump publicly and repeatedly said he’s going to do. This administration wants to burn it all down, and measured responses won’t work as a counter; you can’t wait for your lawyers to go over the text of Trump’s executive orders and for your pollsters to focus-group the optimal response. Besides, you shouldn’t need to when you can just say, “Trump is fucking up the country and plundering the federal government.” Hopefully this week will prove to be a teachable moment heralding a quick course correction, because there’s one thing that Democrats can never say about Trump’s plans: that they weren’t told.

A company spokesperson said Amazon will outsource deliveries to smaller contractors. The spokesperson insisted that the decision was tied to cost savings — not the recent unionization of about 200 employees at the Laval, Que. warehouse. 

Let’s not bicker and argue about who murdered who.

From my perspective on a university campus where I’ve had occasion to see it in action lately, the ADL has turned into a straight-up reactionary organization, that is is eager to treat a completely unambiguous Nazi salute by the president of the United States’s current BFF as an “awkward gesture.”

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