COMMENTARY President Trump's foreign aid freeze is a doubly self-defeating mistake: it emboldens Latin American dictators he claims to scare and raises the despair of migrants he wants to keep out.
In an otherwise dismal week for America’s global image, Republican Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar has plastered this amusing all-caps message across her web page:
“EVERY TIME TRUMP PICKS UP THE PHONE, DICTATORS SHAKE IN THEIR BOOTS”
It’s amusing because, frankly, that was graphically not the case with left-wing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Photos from last Friday inside the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas show Maduro beaming as he greeted Trump envoy Richard Grenell.
Maduro did afterward release six U.S. prisoners held in Venezuela and agreed to receive the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants Trump wants to deport. The White House insists there was no quid pro quo negotiation involved.
But a despot doesn't grin like the Cheshire cat unless he's getting something out of the deal, too — in this case, probably back-channel assurance from Trump that he won’t re-tighten the U.S. oil sanctions screws on Maduro’s regime.
READ MORE: J6 meets J10: Maybe Venezuelans should expect a Trump-Maduro deal
And that's fine. I favor U.S. engagement with U.S. foes — even a wretched autocrat like Maduro, who brutally stole Venezuela's presidential election last summer — if it gives the U.S. a foot in the door to push change. I supported former President Obama’s opening with Cuba; I was OK with Trump bromancing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first presidency.
But this time around, Trump may have shot himself in the America First foot — which is why the tyrants, far from shaking in their boots, are more likely shaking from laughter.
In his oh-so-disruptive excitement to show the world that America could care squat about the world, Trump and his de facto co-president, Elon Musk, have frozen what they call wasteful and wokeful — even "criminal" — foreign assistance to developing regions like Latin America. So they're moving, possibly illegally, to stamp out the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
In his excitement to show the world America cares squat about the world's developing regions, Trump may have shot himself in the America First foot.
What USAID does, Trump insists, doesn’t serve U.S. interests.
Wrong. USAID is hardly perfect. But it's necessary.
Let’s start with the tyrants.
Historic landslide
In a smart report this week, my colleague Joshua Goodman at the Associated Press points out USAID channels most of the $690 million Congress has allocated for pro-democracy efforts in democracy-trashing nations like Venezuela.
In fact, it helped prepare the thousands of Venezuelan opposition poll watchers who outsmarted the regime and retrieved some 90% of the voter tally sheets from the July 28 election, which convincingly prove Maduro lost by a historic landslide.
Similar operations have abounded amid other Latin American dictatorships like Cuba’s and Nicaragua’s. In Nicaragua, Goodman reports, a TV network owned by dictator Daniel Ortega’s family crowed in celebration last week: Trump , it said, is “turning off the [aid] faucet” for that thug regime’s foes and dissidents.
The foreign aid freeze is doubly self-defeating because as long as regimes like Venezuela’s remain in power, they’re more likely to send desperate migrants heading for the U.S.
A decade ago in Honduras I observed a USAID project that steered members of the vicious and omnipotent maras, or street gangs, toward alternatives like entrepreneurship. Along with U.S.-backed police reform, it helped reduce Honduras’ homicide rate — the world’s worst at the time — which gave Hondurans more reason to stay at home.
Trump’s first administration tried to dump that and similar programs in Central America, disparaging them as chump-worthy American giveaways run, as Trump says, by “radical leftist lunatics.”
Which explains a dumbfounding U.S. foreign assistance freeze announced this week. This one involves not USAID but rather Washington’s funding of a multinational mission to help Haiti’s overwhelmed police confront the violent and powerful gangs that now control the capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the rest of the country.
For a U.S. president who’s made his contempt for Haitian migrants crystal clear — most crystal-clearly in his monstrous lie during last year’s campaign that they were eating people’s pets in Ohio — it makes no sense that he would spur more of them to flee here by effectively empowering the gangs that murder, kidnap, rob and rape countless people back in Haiti.
Gang lord Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier is Haiti’s tacit dictator now — and I can assure you that after Trump picked up the phone to freeze the Haitian police assistance, Barbecue wasn’t shaking in his boots.
But like the rest of us, he might be shaking his head.
