There is no way to overstate what is happening in America. A sinister alliance between a demagogue, the world’s richest man, and right-wing activists is rapidly remaking the federal government by destroying everything it can. Entire agencies are being eliminated. Tens of thousands of civil service employees have been fired, and that’s only a fraction of the initial 220,000 workers in Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s crosshairs. Nowhere in the government is safe, it seems, and each day brings a new wave of shocking cuts.
This blitzkrieg is reason enough for every American to be alarmed about the direction of their country. And yet, it is hardly the whole story of the damage being wrought by the Trump administration. The overriding focus on the transformation of the federal government is understandable, but it often overlooks the human cost of these moves. One cannot put a figure on this unfolding tragedy. Lives are being destroyed—indeed, lost—already. And it makes clear that this administration is guided by cruelty above all else: To inflict pain and suffering on as many people as possible, as soon as possible.
On February 18, two young girls who were effectively imprisoned in a hotel in Panama held a sign on a window reading, “Please help us.” They were among hundreds of Asian migrants who were deported to the Central American country after being told they were flying to Texas. Shortly thereafter, a group of 97 migrants being held in the Panama hotel were moved to a camp in the jungle where conditions are even worse. “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” one 27-year-old migrant from Iran told The New York Times. “They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.”
Other migrants have been sent to Guantánamo Bay, which is being fashioned into a concentration camp. Some have already attempted suicide, while others have threatened it, according to three former detainees at the prison. The Trump administration has insisted that many deportees are violent criminals but has provided little, and in many cases no, evidence that this is true. Indeed, investigations into some migrants sent to Guantánamo have found no criminal records whatsoever. The young girls begging for help in Panama certainly aren’t gang members. Instead, they are part of a sadistic public relations effort: The Trump administration is holding refugees, migrants, and others in inhumane, and possibly deadly, conditions in an effort to warn others from trying to come to a nation founded by immigrants.
On a moral level, the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development is an abandonment: The United States had promised to help people suffering from disease and, in some cases, conditions that were caused by Americans. And now the agency’s elimination is certain to cause devastation around the world.
In Vietnam, medical care has abruptly ceased for those suffering from the effects of Agent Orange—the horrific chemical used by soldiers during the Vietnam War—as has support for children born with serious birth defects, likely due to their parents’ exposure to the chemical. “It makes no sense,” Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem, who was born with a malformed spine, told The New York Times. “Agent Orange came from the U.S.—it was used here, and that makes us victims,” she said. “A little support for people like us means a lot, but at the same time, it’s the U.S.’s responsibility.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands in Africa have seen USAID-funded treatment for HIV and AIDS dry up, which experts warn could lead to millions of deaths in the next four years.
Noah Gottschalk, senior director for international advocacy at HIAS, a Jewish group that helps refugees around the world, told ABC that the closure of USAID has resulted in “chaos.” “We’ve had to stop programs, for example, with survivors of violence against women in Latin America, in countries like Colombia, in countries like Ecuador, women who fled abusive partners, and the support that we provide them is often the difference between them being forced to maybe return to those abusive former partners, or becoming vulnerable to human trafficking,” Gottschalk said.
It’s not just foreigners. Americans are also needlessly suffering thanks to the actions of the Trump administration—and it’s not only the thousands of federal workers who were thrown onto the unemployment rolls just as the economy appears to be stalling. More than two dozen people—USAID staffers or their spouses—in the midst of high-risk pregnancies were left in limbo after the agency was shuttered, which stalled planned medical evacuations. Congressional Republicans are poised to slash Medicaid, which provides medical care for 40 percent of children in America, so they can extend huge tax cuts for corporations and the uber rich. The staff of the Social Security Administration may be cut in half, imperiling payments millions of seniors rely on. Even if, miraculously, these payments aren’t interrupted, they may be slashed anyway—there’s simply no other way to pay for the tax and discretionary spending cuts promised by the Trump administration.
That’s not all! In Texas, one child is dead as the largest measles outbreak in over a decade rages—an outbreak that was dismissed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer running the Department of Health and Human Services, who told President Trump such an outbreak was “not unusual.” (It very much is.) Kennedy has seemingly stalled development of next year’s flu vaccine, is currently considering halting the development of another vaccine aimed at stopping bird flu (which has caused eggs to hit record prices), and abruptly canceled the development of a Covid vaccine pill shortly after being confirmed.
Everywhere you look, you see death and devastation, nearly all of it preventable. Seven years ago, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer identified the operating principle of the Trump administration. “The cruelty is the point,” he wrote in October 2018. “This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.” This perfectly explained Trump’s political project then; it is truer now than ever.
But the motivation for it has somehow become even more sinister. Trump promised his supporters that he would be their “retribution,” and he is fulfilling that pledge by inflicting massive, unnecessary pain on the groups he and his supporters vilify as enemies of the people: immigrants, federal workers, trans people, even sick and starving people from “shithole countries.” And yet, it’s also clear that the scope of his cruelty is much broader, for even Trump voters are not immune to the wholesale, indiscriminate destruction wrought by this administration. Some have lost their jobs. Some are at the risk of deportation. Some may find themselves at the mercy of a rapacious credit card company that no longer has to worry about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or perhaps they’ll become deadly ill from a preventable disease because Kennedy convinced them not to get vaccinated.
The misery that Trump is inflicting abroad is just the beginning. Soon, it will be inescapable in America as well, and not even a red MAGA hat can protect you.
