After a month of fits and starts, a final hammer came down on the U.S. Agency for International Development on Wednesday night when the State Department, which had previously said it was going to review all foreign aid, announced that review was over and it had decided to terminate nearly 10,000 government contracts worth about $60 billion in humanitarian work abroad.
But as of Thursday, all of Alight’s U.S. contracts have been canceled going forward, even contracts related to those programs that had received waivers to continue in the last few weeks.
I couldn’t make it past 4 1/2 minutes before being overwhelmed with rage and disgust. This is the way kings, khans, and young children behave. That these two people, Trump and Vance to be clear, lead and represent a democratic country is beyond belief.
There’s so much stupid about this deal that nobody was talking about. Like, how many of the exploitable minerals are in the eastern part of the country. If you watched something called “the News”, you’d remember that that area is currently heavily occupied by Russian troops.
Then there’s the obvious questions like, “so much is destroyed in the way of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure…who’s going to rebuild it?”, “who’s going to build the facilities to exploit mine these minerals”, “who’s going to pay for all of this?”, “who’s going to buy all of this?”, “what’s in it for Ukraine?”, and so on.
It was always a half-baked Trump fever dream that probably sounded good in his head but was filled with holes. Regardless, it seemed like Zelenskyy was willing to entertain this insanity in exchange for some sort of security agreement with the US. Even with Trump seemingly having Zelenskyy over a barrel, he still managed to fuck it up and it was all his doing.
Zelenskyy has been dressing in nothing fancier than he asks his soldiers to wear as a show of support and solidarity in every meeting since the start of this war.
It wasn’t a “shouting match” by the way, as corporate media keep calling it with their usual bothsiderism. Zelenskyy was calm and collected throughout, while Tramp and his baby sidekick did all the angry-man shouting. Which is another way they’re the ones who emerged with dogshit on their faces.
I’ve just watched the Trump/Zelensky thing. It is clear to me that this was a pre-arranged ‘mugging’ of Zelensky by Trump and Vance. Anything short of kow-towing, signing any and all papers put in front of him, and general arse-licking, was always going to see Vance pull that pin and toss that grenade.
They now think they’ve shown the US people and ‘the base’ that Zelensky is a disrespectful ingrate and their doing a deal with Putin should be looked at with even more approval.
What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.
