There’s no good way to say it: Donald Trump has absolutely gone off the deep end. And unfortunately, he’s taken all of his supporters and much of the federal government with him.

From pardoning violent criminals who staged an insurrection against the United States to trying to overturn a Constitutional amendment with an executive order, Trump has been turning the country on its ear to pursue things that benefit no one but himself and his friends.

Certainly not Americans.

The problem is, with legacy media caving to him left and right and massive corporations trying to curry favor with him so they can avoid his economy-devastating tariffs, there’s little pushback. He’s been able to advance a false narrative almost unchecked.

The most recent example — although we’re less than three weeks into his administration — is his move to dismantle USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.

The USA, having been one of the richest nations in the world since very early in its existence, finally decided in 1961 to spread that wealth around to developing nations. And while not ALL of the motive may have been philanthropic in nature, since America wanted to reduce the global influence of Russia by basically being “nicer” than them, it’s still better to do good than to withhold.

But Elon Musk hates USAID. He’s been fomenting opposition to it for some time on social media. Far more skilled researchers than me have already done the legwork on tracking both Musk’s motivations and the sources of the conspiracy theories he promotes, but here’s a quote from the link I just put at the beginning of this sentence:

…on Sunday came a flurry of posts wherein the world’s richest person, the Trump-appointed head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted.

You’re welcome to read more about the social media-led effort to demonize USAID at the link above, but suffice it to say, Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about any of that. He is in no way smart enough to parse what Elon has told him. But he knows one thing: He likes pissing off anyone who didn’t vote for him.

So early this morning, Trump was back on Truth Social again:

Notwithstanding the fact that “radical” is a meaningless word when Trump says it, he really is just laying it out for everyone to see there. He wants to dismantle a 65-year-old humanitarian program because it does things that liberals favor. Elon Musk was able to convince him that it was justified using confusing retweets of right-wing accounts on X — which he owns, and was therefore able to amplify those accounts to seem more legitimate.

This is becoming a pattern.

Trump came out against high-speed rail in California, not because it’s a bad idea, but because he hates “liberal” California, and Elon was able to muddle his brain with more confusing social media. The real impetus for Musk? California turned down his “hyperloop” plan and went with high-speed rail instead, since, uh, the technology for the Hyperloop was never developed. By Musk. Who proposed it.

This could go on for four years at this rate, but at least we now know what Trump’s real motive is: Owning the libs.

The worst part of all of it is the fact that it never enters Trump’s mind how much this will harm Americans. Not only will American farmers and businesses be purposely hurt by the dismantling of USAID, but our global reputation will take a hit that can’t be measured.

When natural disasters happen around the world, USAID is often the first governmental agency in the world to respond:

How can Republicans argue against the kind of international goodwill that an agency like that sows globally? The best they can come up with is some variation of “We should be helping America before anyone else.”

But even THAT argument is lost, when you consider humanitarian assistance as an investment in our global stock-in-trade. As a result of help like this that we send out, even if you want to consider it transactional like Donald Trump might — something that benefits the United States in return — we get land rights, first dibs on mineral and oil discoveries, any number of things that we otherwise would never see.

If you personally were in need, who would you remember in times when you were able to offer something in return?