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Something Serious is Happening in Trumpland, Because Donnie is Having a Full-Blown Meltdown on Truth Social

Deconstructing a right-wing media narrative.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen the term USAID in the last couple of days. It’s the United States Agency for International Development, and it was created by an executive order by President Kennedy in 1961, after the congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act.

Because its mission is humanitarian aid, Donald Trump is desperate to shut it down. That does not align with his administration’s priorities. But that’s a minor reason for his desire to eliminate the agency.

Primarily, his concern is with justifying the actions of DOGE, the fake “department” he created to put his biggest financial benefactor, Elon Musk, in charge of. Officially, DOGE is tasked with cutting government waste. But Trump can’t just say “We’re wasting money on humanitarian aid,” because he’d sound like a monster.

Trump will never cut military spending, because no US politician, Republican or Democrat, other than a very small minority of left-leaning lawmakers, would ever touch that. He can’t just slash Social Security and Medicare or he risks the ire of the voting base that keeps Republicans in power: Old people.

So he has to go after soft targets, like the relatively small USAID, and he has to make it seem like they’re wasting massive amounts of money, or Musk’s efforts at DOGE just look like him cutting off polio vaccines and pandemic prevention and the hundreds of other essential tasks that USAID fulfills in order to cut taxes for his billionaire friends.

Make no mistake, that IS what he’s doing. But he can’t have it LOOK like that’s what he’s doing. So early this morning, and I mean early, Trump was wide awake on Truth Social:

Wow, BIG if true, as they say. Fortunately, not true. And not just not true, but he already knew it wasn’t true before he posted it. This is just like the Haitians eating dogs nonsense from last year.

What happened is, right-wing former Fox News producer Kyle Becker tweeted this:

Looks pretty serious, right? Money intended for humanitarian aid, given to a news agency that’s known for printing, um, the truth about Donald Trump? Unthinkable! But kind of thinkable, honestly, because why would a news outlet get eight million bucks from the government at all, right?

Then Kyle followed it up with this:

Kyle would like for you to associate this tweet with the first tweet. They will, very shortly, turn out to be completely unrelated, but it’s important for Kyle’s narrative for you to now believe that Politico hadn’t paid its employees, and USAID stepped in with their eight million dollars and got those guys paid.

…as you can see in that follow-up tweet. So far, the story is “Politico hadn’t paid their employees (for THIS pay period), USAID gives Politico eight million bucks (presumably all at once, I guess), employees get paid. Also, Politico is biased because, reasons.”

BUT WAIT! This tweet, an hour after the first one had already gone viral, suggests that perhaps some of that money had come from agencies other than USAID, and that it was for, um, subscriptions to its professional newswire.

So maybe this isn’t the hair-on-fire story that Kyle initially made it out to be. In fact, nine hours after the initial viral tweet that every right-winger from Dana Loesch to Benny Johnson ran with, Kyle posted this:

Let’s do one more recap real quick.

  • Kyle says USAID literally paid Politico employees
  • Kyle says, well, okay, lots of people paid Politico
  • Kyle says, okay, well it wasn’t actually for payroll, it was for a service that Politico sells
  • Kyle says, okay, well, actually only a tiny baby fraction of that first number actually came from USAID

I was going to make you scroll back up, but here’s the screencap of Trump’s post again, just so I can keep your attention:

That’s from this morning at 3:47 AM. That’s twelve full hours after Kyle admitted all of that was horsepucky. Only now it’s got superlative Trumpisms all over it: “STOLLEN” and “MUCH OF IT” and “FAKE NEWS” and “PAYOFF” and don’t forget it was to benefit the “DEMOCRATS” and now we’re back to a full $8,000,000 and maybe the New York Times and who knows who else and this scandal is the “BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

Donald Trump is desperate to justify shutting down USAID, which is why his people concocted the bogus story about $50 million in condoms going to Gaza before, and why he’s lying about this now.

His lies are falling apart in front of his eyes.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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