Dems Shouldn’t Run Away From the USAID Fight—They Should Win It
A party that lets the opposition dictate the terms of all the debates will inevitably lose them.
ON MONDAY, THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT for the District of Columbia published an affidavit from “Terry Doe,” the pseudonym of a USAID employee challenging the Elon Musk-Donald Trump shutdown of America’s foreign assistance programs.
We don’t know where Terry Doe is stationed—maybe in Ukraine helping to keep that country’s energy grid up, or in Central America fighting gangs, or in the Horn of Africa supplying hospitals serving war victims. It doesn’t matter.
What’s important is that this man, who had previously served twice in active war zones, chose a life helping America in tough places overseas. And that when doctors told his 31-week pregnant wife that life-threatening complications with her pregnancy required her to come home, USAID refused to pay for a MEDEVAC because of the Trump administration’s funding freeze. He was able to successfully appeal to a U.S. Senator for help. But it was too late. On February 8, his wife started hemorrhaging and had to be hospitalized in place. As of the filing of the affidavit, she remains on bedrest until her due date in April, with doctors advising her that it is now too dangerous to get on a plane.
I read this story and felt utter fury at the scumbags working for Marco Rubio at the State Department (or maybe he works for them) who are making these decisions. If you’re going to unlawfully kill a U.S. government agency that is funded and mandated by Congress, fine. We can have that fight and eventually kick your asses in court; but don’t abandon the Americans that agency sent overseas—men and women for whom you are still responsible—without the means to protect themselves or get emergency care. It would be no different if a president ended a U.S. military mission in a foreign country and then told soldiers recently wounded in that mission that we were leaving them behind.
But the story also brought to mind conversations I’ve had with several Democrats in the last couple of weeks that pissed me off almost as much. Often, those Democrats would casually say something like: “It’s a shame what they’re doing to the State Department and USAID. But foreign aid isn’t really popular, so we shouldn’t focus on that right now.”
On one level, I get it. If I were in Congress right now, I’d spend time in my district talking about mass firings of air traffic controllers, cuts to cancer research, farmers getting stiffed, and Elon Musk seeing our personal tax information. Those are the outrages that will hurt Americans immediately and directly.
But it would be an insult to the people I represented to say they don’t also care what happens beyond America’s borders.
Even in the most Republican communities I represented while in Congress, I saw more Ukraine than MAGA flags flying after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and while many of those folks would be happy to see the war end, none would tolerate forcing Ukraine to surrender. I’ll also never forget how many constituents reached out to me during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some had served or knew someone who served in a military or civilian capacity there; some had family ties to the region; most just cared about American security and honor. And I’ll never forgive the political consultants who misinterpreted superficial polling data to advise us that voters didn’t care how we left Afghanistan so long as we left. Joe Biden paid dearly for that mistake.
Let’s name some of the consultants making similar arguments now. There’s David Axelrod, who says his “heart is with the people” protesting USAID cuts but that his head says to leave the issue alone. There’s Rahm Emmanuel, who has spent decades pretending to be tough by saying the word “fuck” in every sentence while urging Democrats to fight only for causes that are already popular and to surrender on everything else.
Republicans, of course, do the exact opposite. They work hard to shape the public opinion that Democratic operatives then say their party must accept as immutable and passively follow. Who in America ever heard of “critical race theory,” for example, before Republican operatives defined it as a threat and started winning elections on it?
As for the notion that Americans don’t care about foreign policy, here, too, Republicans have shown that it’s better to set the terms of the debate than be reactive. After all, for years the GOP painted itself effectively as strong on the world stage and Democrats as weak. Now that Republicans have pulled a 180 and started licking foreign dictators’ boots while abandoning every effective tool of American influence in the world, are Democrats truly incapable of capitalizing?
The “safe” advice many Democrats are getting now is to wait till Musk and Trump go after something unimpeachably popular and to scream loudly about that. The risk of that approach from a policy standpoint is that in the end, the administration will give ground on the headline-grabbing cuts to cancer grants, Meals on Wheels, and nuclear weapons safety, leaving every less visible but no less critical part of America’s public sector in shambles. The exceptions would legitimize the rule that Trump can ignore Congress’s power of the purse.
But there’s an even bigger danger. If Democrats keep ceding ground in the public debate, what will be left? After all, the FBI was unimpeachably popular—especially with conservatives—till Republicans started smearing it as part of some communist deep state. If they can do that, will any part of the U.S. government be truly “safe” to defend when this is over?
The Democrats’ task in this fight is to stop a group of radical fanatics from dismantling the government of the United States and selling it for scrap. Not parts of the government, but all of it. Stories about average Americans being hurt by the freeze on popular domestic programs are powerful—of course we should lead with those. But stories about betraying American values and the Americans who sacrifice for our country overseas can be powerful, too.
Don’t forget that one reason we have USAID and the Peace Corps and American aid workers saving lives in foreign lands is that John F. Kennedy and other presidents, Democratic and Republican, inspired Americans to believe we had an interest in doing good in and for the world. If you’re an elected official now and can’t explain to voters why helping Ukraine hold Putin at bay makes us safer, or that we’re better off stopping diseases in other countries before they kill us here, or that it’s wrong to let Americans serving us abroad bleed because Elon Musk took away their money for MEDEVACs, you should have your politician’s license revoked and get a new line of work.
I’ll close by noting that some Democratic political consultants still understand this. In my first race for Congress, my media adviser, a great Jersey guy named Brad Lawrence, saw my State Department human rights background as a plus, and he slapped this slogan on all my literature: “He stood up to dictators; he’ll stand up for you.” He understood that voters care more about what happens at home than abroad, but that our leaders’ approach to the wider world can reveal their decency and their strength. This would be a good time for all Democrats to remember that.
Tom Malinowski served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Obama administration and was a member of the House of Representatives from 2019-2023.
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