5mo ago

Why is Trump getting rid of NED and USAID

Both are useful in achieveing American political aims abroad, so getting rid of them seems like a bad choice from the perspective of the US government

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The liberal explanation is that Trump is a big dumb dumb and doesn't understand the role of those orgs in US hegemony.
The fact that relatively few institutional voices from the US state apparatus are stepping out to denounce this move, collectively running out waving their arms for the bull to stop running around the china shop, if it was really done out of sheer ignorance, shows that there is likely more of an internal power struggle at play rather than some "comrade Trump" working against US empire.
There's still no real indication whether Trump will actually follow through on any of this. Regardless, however, one thing that should be noted is the reality is that those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to. Those like Anderson Cooper and the like. If you get a liberal arts major in the wasteland of the American job market nowadays, you're likely in for a struggle as a normal individual. If you get a liberal arts major as a failson/faildaughter of some US institutional elite, you get a job at USAID/NED and the Radio Free Whatevers. These "non-partisan" NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute and they had all largely swung in the Democratic camp over the years as they had alienated Republicans with objectives like rainbow imperialism.
There was this big news story a while back about the "Chaguan" column for the Economist (a cushy one-man job journalist position in Beijing that also funded travelling around China writing anti-China propaganda hitpieces by doing cherry-picked interviews) being shut down. Amidst all the Economist's whining about the "hostile journalism environment," it inadvertantly revealed that this "journalist" was the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie.. These are the kind of places that the failsons of Western institutional elite drift into and Trump's actions against them is essentially a form of blackmail to cow them and attempt to make them fall in line. The important thing to note is that new institutions more closely aligned with the MAGA Republican flavor of US imperialism will inevitably be created, whether wholesale or more closely under the government's leash within the State Department, and the intent of these purges is enforce a reset so that anyone who wants to regain their old spots would need to pay fealty to the new order of the day.
- those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to.
  These “non-partisan” NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute
  This is like saying U.S. domestic media jobs are just golden parachute make-work for elite failsons. Some jobs in that industry fit the bill, but the industry serves a real purpose outside of that and a ton of its workers don't fit into the "elite failson golden parachute" box.
  What's happening is (1) true believers in "cut everything but the military" are in power, (2) they're trying more blanket cuts than we've seen before because they're seeing what they can get away with and they don't know enough to do it more selectively, and (3) they don't care if it causes problems because it won't cause any meaningful problems for them.
  
  I don't see the difference and splitting the hair seems irrelevant. The US military isn't just an imperialist fascist force, it's also a jobs program for millions of Americans. It's dialectical to acknowledge all relevant facets and the existence of those orgs as a institutional golden parachute is one of them. I don't care if someone weighs it as "just that" or "primary" or "secondary" or "whatever" it's simply a crucial element that should be highlighted.
  Yes, the Reddit Democrat "analysis" or the Hasanabi interpretation of this as just "evil dumb racists" doing "evil dumb racist" things isn't necessarily wrong. There's no value in framing this under that sole paradigm, however.

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