Saturday, May 09, 2026
What Happened When Trump Abandoned the World’s Poorest Children
What Happened When Trump Abandoned the World’s Poorest Children
“The Trump administration’s 71% cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025 is estimated to cost millions of lives, particularly children, worldwide. The administration’s actions, including withholding aid for vaccines and exacerbating global poverty through the war with Iran, are having devastating consequences. Despite claims of prioritizing trade over aid, the administration’s policies are harming the world’s poorest children.
A year after some of the world’s richest men cut aid for the world’s poorest children, they’re trying to roll out a new public relations narrative:
Aid continues! We’re saving lives from AIDS! Anyway, aid never really worked, so we’re focused on trade! Building opportunities for American companies while saving babies!
As Jeremy Lewin, the acting under secretary of state for foreign assistance, put it: “Contrary to false media narratives, the data shows that President Trump’s foreign assistance review maintained and improved frontline lifesaving programs, while reducing NGO bloat and costs.”
“False media narratives” may refer to my reporting from a series of African countries on children dying as a result of the Trump cuts.
Let’s first concede a few points. American humanitarian aid was never great at nurturing economic growth, but it did save one life every 10 seconds until last year. It’s also true that public pressure led the administration and Congress to retain some lifesaving programs, particularly for H.I.V./AIDS, and to its credit the administration has expanded use of a drug called lenacapavir to fight AIDS. Finally, the Trump administration is right that trade is crucial, which is why President Bill Clinton started a fine trade program with Africa; unfortunately, it expires this year, and its long-term future under Trump is in doubt.
None of this changes the fact that this glossy new Trump narrative is absurd. Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.
Are these figures correct? Exaggerated? I can’t be sure, and neither can Trump or anyone else, partly because the administration has cut data collection that might help us assess mortality accurately.
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Meanwhile, Trump and his aides continue to take steps that will add to the toll.
The administration is now withholding aid for vaccines for poor countries in ways that may cost the lives of vast numbers of children. Trump slashed funding for an international vaccine alliance called Gavi, and now the administration is also refusing to release $600 million for Gavi that Congress has already appropriated and that must be spent by September.
Gavi is one of the most cost-effective aid programs in history. One study found that each dollar spent on vaccines in poor countries brings a return of $54 in reduced health costs and other benefits. I was once hospitalized with a serious case of malaria that I caught in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I think it’s a miracle that a few doses of a $3 malaria vaccine can now save a Congolese child’s life — and a scandal that administration officials are willing to let such children die because of ideological hostility toward vaccines.
Gavi also pays for HPV vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, which kills more than 900 women every day worldwide. Cervical cancer is an excruciating, humiliating way to die — it is sometimes diagnosed partly by the odor of rotting flesh — yet a $4 vaccine can prevent it. Gavi’s vaccinations have already averted almost one million of these horrific deaths from cervical cancer.
Trump’s cuts have created a budget crisis for Gavi and other aid agencies. It has been magnified because European countries followed America’s lead with cuts to their own aid budgets. Gavi estimates that 600,000 lives will be unnecessarily lost by 2030 as a result. Think of your mother, wife, daughter; multiply by 600,000, and you glimpse the cost of Trump’s destruction of just the Gavi element of American aid.
The Trump administration is also, unintentionally, exacerbating global poverty with its catastrophic war with Iran, and not just because the war has displaced more than 2.2 million women and girls in Iran and Lebanon. Because of the war, diesel prices have risen 160 percent in Myanmar and 87 percent in Nigeria, while 40 percent of gas stations have closed in Laos, according to the United Nations. Rising fuel prices are increasing costs of transportation and thus food.
The upshot is that if the Gulf crisis doesn’t end by next month, an additional 45 million people worldwide are likely to suffer severe hunger in the latter part of this year, according to Cindy McCain of the U.N World Food Program.
An even bigger impact may come, after a delay, from shortages of fertilizer, often made with oil and gas byproducts from the Persian Gulf. Perhaps one-third of the world’s fertilizer production will be disrupted if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and shortages will most likely mean lower crop yields, higher food prices and more starvation. José Andrés of World Central Kitchen has warned that fertilizer shortages could lead to a multiyear famine beginning as early as the end of this year.
Think of it this way: Artificial fertilizers keep roughly half of humans alive. Without them, the earth would be able to produce enough food to support only about 4 billion people.
Even as the Trump administration has created this crisis, it has unraveled some of the global health systems that would normally save lives of starving children. And Trump administration proclamations of “trade over aid” sound empowering until you realize that what they mean in practice is that America is talking about withholding lifesaving medicines from villagers in Zambia unless the Zambian government sells more minerals to American companies.
A new book, “Into the Wood Chipper,” recounts the reckless way in which DOGE officials dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. Written by Nicholas Enrich, a former top health official at the agency, it chronicles the “callousness, dishonesty and ineptitude” of Trump aides who destroyed programs that they didn’t understand.
“I had no idea you did all this,” Enrich quotes one of the newly arrived officials saying. “As a Republican, when I think of what U.S.A.I.D. does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.” (In fact, no American aid dollars went to abortions.)
Please excuse my intemperate tone. But in my travels over the last year, I’ve seen children dying because of our aid cuts. This doesn’t feel like policymaking so much as vandalism, accompanied by wasted food, ruined contraceptivesand an estimated $6.4 billion spent closing down the United States Agency for International Development (that sum alone could have saved more than one million children’s lives).
Actually, for all my harsh words, Trump is talking about providing emergency financial support for one nation. That’s the United Arab Emirates, which is pinched by the Iran war and may get a lifeline from Washington to support its currency.
So we’re ready to support a country that is roughly as rich as Britain and Franceand is fueling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, in Sudan, by arming a militia committing mass murder and mass rape? Could one factor be that high-level Emiratis have approved investments of half a billion dollars in a Trump family crypto company?
Forget the efforts to dress this show up. The truth is ugly: The world’s richest men are crushing the world’s poorest children.
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Spirit Airlines and the Death of Leisure for the Non-Leisure Class
Spirit Airlines and the Death of Leisure for the Non-Leisure Class
“Spirit Airlines, a low-cost carrier known for its affordable fares and no-frills service, ceased operations, leaving 17,000 employees jobless and customers awaiting refunds. The airline, which operated on an à-la-carte model, offered a stripped-down flying experience, charging extra for luggage, snacks, and legroom. Despite its flaws, Spirit provided a sense of freedom and accessibility to air travel for many, contributing to its cultural significance.
The low-cost carrier was a mess. But it was also an icon of budget travel, facilitating a kind of modest freedom for the masses.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The New Yorker
After Spirit Airlines ceased operations, in the middle of the night on May 2nd, a series of canary-yellow airplanes sat on the tarmac at Newark Airport, arranged neatly like children’s toys at day’s end. Travellers flying in or out of the hub ogled the spectacle, a display of sudden corporate collapse. Now that the airline is officially dead, following one failed government bailout and a couple of failed mergers, seventeen thousand workers are in need of employment, and thousands of customers await refunds. Meanwhile, Spirit’s jets are being ferried, one by one, to the desert—a storage field at Goodyear Airport, in Arizona, where they await their fate. What was leased will be repossessed to recover debt in bankruptcy court. What was old will be scrapped and sold for parts. What is functional will be recouped by competitors that will benefit from the death of this icon of budget air travel, which facilitated a kind of low-grade freedom for the masses.
Spirit dying, or getting itself killed, is another episode in the protracted crisis of aviation this season. The feeling is one of precarity; the act of flying, which had retained that glint of preciously guarded leisure activity, is now a microcosm of the tumult of the Trump Administration. Should we tabulate the events? The Administration’s cowboy capture of the Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd, prompted an airspace closure in the Caribbean, stranding many populations, none as humbled as the American tourists, gone to the islands for rest and relaxation over the winter holiday. Airports themselves, liminal spaces that, normally, are pleasantly severed from the lurches of the world, spun out, too. After ICE and C.B.P. agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, House Democrats forced a partial government shutdown, halting the flow of funds to the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Transportation Security Administration. Agents, forced to work without pay, called in sick; security lines metastasized, sometimes snaking out to the curb. In a bid to restore order, Donald Trump planted ICEagents, some of whom were in plainclothes, at major airports; in San Francisco, two agents in athletic zip-ups forced a mother to the ground, arresting her while passengers heckled the officers and her young daughter wailed. More recently, the war in Iran, and the resulting exorbitant increases in fuel costs, threaten to make flying prohibitively expensive for many, and have made it much harder to reach certain destinations.
The consumer finds herself a dupe. Planning air travel, she does not have an idea of what to expect. Spirit flaunted a low-cost model, with some domestic flights costing less than a cab to the airport. The experience was purely, aggressively functional. From Point A to Point B. Although Spirit had a few American competitors in the budget space, such as Frontier and Southwest, it was the one among them that had a cultural lore. If Pan American Airways represented, at its height, victory and suavity, the country achieving a kind of European state of grace, then Spirit was the exact opposite—synonymous with the rowdy and the rude at the heart of the American character. After the closure was announced, every single late-night-show host paid their respects to an accidental muse of Americana. “This is the worst news for my writers since they fixed LaGuardia,” Seth Meyers complained. “If the Mets start winning, we might have to put them on a psychiatric hold.”
In 1978, Congress deregulated the airline industry. Spirit introduced itself to the market, five years later, as Charter One. The service, according to its website, began in Detroit, shuttling passengers to vacation hot spots, like Vegas and the Bahamas. The rebranding as Spirit came in 1992; the business model in 2007. Spirit operated by the à-la-carte model, condensing the up-front cost to the seat and the seat only, along with one personal item. Each additional piece of luggage incurred a separate cost, as did snacks, as did legroom. In later years, following economic losses after COVID, the airline introduced more upgrades—“Go Big,” for an extremely attenuated version of business-class seating, with free drinks, or “Go Comfy,” with one non-alcoholic drink. Of course, the point of flying Spirit was to spend as little money as possible. It is not valorizing the company to point out that it identified a need: for air travel to be stripped of its economic identity as a splurge so that as many people as possible could access it. To be clear, Spirit was a mess. The customer service sucked. The predatory add-ons were annoying. Leg space was nonexistent. I know all of this because I flew Spirit frequently.
“Less Money. More Go” was one of many cheeky official mottos. “We’re Dollar General,” Ben Baldanza, the former C.E.O. said. Did the connotations of travelling with Spirit carry a sense of embarrassment? Maybe, for some. Airport-lounge culture, currently, is out of control; the clamor to “get in” to Delta One Lounge or HelloSky is surely a marker of the exclusionary, bourgeois desires that somehow still attend an experience that is, at base, a mode of transportation. No one who flew Spirit was doing caviar bumps in a lounge.
Still, the stereotype of the Spirit customer was not of a traveller cowed by a need to be thrifty. Viral videos of onboard brawls contributed to the airline’s notoriety. There were racial and class elements, of course, to the reviling of Spirit, which was often referred to—both lovingly and hatefully—as “the ghetto airline.” It catered to passengers who were deemed to lack the etiquette required to fly: the girls’-trip groups, the large families, the spring breakers. In the air, innocuous human behavior carries a sense of threat. A snobbery persists: that flying is a privilege, not a right. In recent years, Spirit tried to shed its reputation. The company hired a marketing agency to make Spirit “More Fly.” Then came an updated policy giving the airline the right to refuse service to customers who were “inadequately clothed” or who had offensive tattoos.
I had a flight to catch on May 3rd, the morning after Spirit’s operations ended. Whenever I am preparing to fly, a line from Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights” creeps into my mind: “When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.” The erasure of the self is a gratification we all deserve. For better and often for worse, Spirit facilitated that. A passenger on one of the last Spirit flights recorded a video of a pilot as he tearfully bid adieu over the cabin speakers: “Met a lot of friends along the way. Had some great conversations with some of you over the fourteen years. Had some not so great conversations occasionally. A lot of crazy stuff has happened.” ♦
Friday, May 08, 2026
Trump Is ‘Bored’ With the War He Started - The Atlantic
Trump Is ‘Bored’ With the War He Started
"He wants out, but Iran could likely keep going for months.
President Trump really, really wants the war with Iran to end. He has declared victory many times, including about three weeks ago, when Iran briefly reopened the Strait of Hormuz. He has repeatedly extended his cease-fire deadlines instead of following through on his (sometimes-apocalyptic) threats to resume hostilities. This week, his administration abruptly abandoned an effort to escort ships through the strait in part because of a fear that it could provoke violent, escalating confrontations.
Trump is tired of the war, which has proved far more difficult and lasted far longer than he had expected. His party is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers. He doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.
But Iran, it seems, does not want the war to come to a close. Or at least not with any sort of outcome that could be acceptable to American negotiators. Trump is now in a bind. The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Dealcan’t even get Iran to the negotiating table. Today, Washington is still waiting for Iran to respond to the latest offering, a one-page memorandum of understanding that is far more of an extension of the cease-fire than a treaty to end the conflict."
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