The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”

“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”

After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f--- they’re doing.”

At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”

The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”

In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.

Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.

The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”

Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.

Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”

A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”

It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.

Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”

Trump’s posts sound panicked, and even aside from the strikes against Iran, there is reason for his loyalists to be concerned about political events. On Saturday, masked agents from Customs and Border Patrol were caught on video chasing Narciso Barranco, a 48-year-old undocumented landscaper who has lived in the U.S. for decades, down a street with guns drawn, pinning him to the ground, and hitting him as they handcuffed him. Barranco’s oldest son, Alejandro, served in the Marines for four years and is a veteran. Barranco’s two younger sons are active-duty Marines. There has been a popular outcry over Barranco's arrest.

Barranco’s son Alejandro told Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley, and Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News that his father is being held with at least 70 other people with one toilet and no privacy and that he has received very little water and even less food.

ICE's detentions continue to create a backlash. Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported that the number of migrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000, leading to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Federal law permits members of Congress to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities to inspect them, but officers at the Department of Homeland Security last week said members of Congress needed to give at least 72 hours notice before an inspection.

ICE claims the power to “deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit” by lawmakers or by members of their staff if “facility management or other ICE officials deem it appropriate to do so.”

Inspections will be hard to conduct at the newly approved detention facility deep in the Florida Everglades designed to house up to 5,000 migrants. Members of the state legislature say they were not consulted about the plan. Florida says the new facility will cost about $450 million a year to operate. The federal government will reimburse that money through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

News broke today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the individual responsible for the administration’s draconian immigration policies, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, the data and intelligence software company owned by Peter Thiel. Palantir has a number of valuable contracts with ICE to track undocumented immigrants.

Ken Dilanian of NBC News reported today that concern about retaliation from Iranian sleeper cells has made the FBI return agents who had been pulled from their normal duties to focus on immigration issues back to their usual focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity.

One source told Dilanian, “Guess they are realizing this whole national security thing is important, after all.”

Or are they his personal lacqueys ?

At The Hague, a city in the Netherlands, today for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Trump showed that he cannot let go of the intelligence assessment that his military strikes against Iran had set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions only by a few months. He appears determined to convince Americans that he has solved the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions overnight.

"It's gone for years, years,” he said. And then, turning to the news outlets that reported the early conclusions of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, that the hits delayed production of a nuclear weapon by only a few months, he said: “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They're bad people. They're sick. And what they've done is they've tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less." Trump insisted that the U.S. hits caused “total obliteration.” He claimed he did not want the recognition of the effectiveness of the hits for himself, but rather for “the military.”

Trump equated the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation into who had leaked the DIA report, complaining that “CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad, when this was an overwhelming success.” Later in the morning, Trump’s social media account posted that CNN should fire Natasha Bertrand, one of the CNN journalists who broke the story that the attacks had done less damage than Trump claimed.

Marc Caputo of Axios reported this afternoon that the Trump administration will limit the classified information it shares with Congress after the leak of the DIA assessment, even though there is currently no evidence tying that leak to Congress. A senior White House official said: “We are declaring a war on leakers.”

Stephan Neukam and Andrew Solender of Axios reported that congressional Democrats, already angry that the administration delayed briefing Congress about the strikes on Iran past the legal deadline for such a briefing, see the announcement that the White House will limit the information it provides to Congress as an attempt to hide reality in order to bolster Trump’s narrative. “A senior House Democrat told the Axios reporters: “[T]his from a group of people who used Signal about actual war plans?”

On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “The administration has no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security. Senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad.”

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The law requires the congressional intelligence committees to be kept fully and currently informed, and I expect the Intelligence Community to comply with the law.”

Tomorrow the White House will brief senators on the strikes. Notably, it is not sending Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that the Intelligence Community did not think Iran was developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, it is sending Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. Ratcliffe, not Gabbard, will represent the Intelligence Community.

Today, Ratcliffe appeared to walk back Trump’s claims that the strikes had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, saying instead they had “severely damaged” the program.

On his social media platform tonight, Trump continued his attacks on CNN and announced that tomorrow morning, Hegseth and “Military Representatives” will hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.” He claimed those “Patriots” were “very upset!” when they “started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!... The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”

There is no evidence that anyone sees the correction of Trump’s extreme claims as an attack on the pilots who flew the mission, or that the pilots see that correction in that way.

Laura Rozen of Diplomatic notes that the strikes might have convinced Iran to abandon negotiations and commit to building a nuclear weapon. Rozen quotes former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora, who wrote: “This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington. There will not be a third time.” Mora continued: “If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”

Tonight, on his social media site, Trump’s account called for Israel to abandon its trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, calling it a “ridiculous Witch Hunt.” Trump claimed that Netanyahu was a partner in “something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the world, and it was going to happen, SOON!” Trump called for the trial to be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.” He continued: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu.”

Summary

Background
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. The aim of this study is to comprehensively evaluate the effect of all USAID funding on adult and child mortality over the past two decades and forecast the future effect of its defunding.

Methods
In this retrospective impact evaluation integrated with forecasting analysis, we used panel data from 133 countries and territories— including all low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs)—with USAID support ranging from none to very high. First, we used fixed-effects multivariable Poisson models with robust SEs adjusted for demographic, socioeconomic, and health-care factors to estimate the impact of USAID funding on all-age and all-cause mortality from 2001 to 2021. Second, we evaluated its effects by age-specific, sex-specific, and cause-specific groups. Third, we did several sensitivity and triangulation analyses. Lastly, we integrated the retrospective evaluation with validated dynamic microsimulation models to estimate effects up to 2030.

Findings
Higher levels of USAID funding—primarily directed toward LMICs, particularly African countries—were associated with a 15% reduction in age-standardised all-cause mortality (risk ratio [RR] 0·85, 95% CI 0·78–0·93) and a 32% reduction in under-five mortality (RR 0·68, 0·57–0·80). This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths). Significant decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.

Interpretation
USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.

"This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e're debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don't need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We're obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we'll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don't throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don't close so many rural hospitals. It's gonna be a long day and a long night.”

“This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

“When I worked here in the 70's,” King said, “I had insurance as a…junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years…and the doctors found a little mole on my back. And they took it out. And I didn't think much of it. And I went in a week later and the doctor said, ‘You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You're going to have to have serious surgery.’… And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma, he didn’t have insurance, he didn’t get that checkup, and he died. That’s wrong. It’s immoral.”

Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”

In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans’ determination to destroy the modern government.

Grover Norquist, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation’s social safety net while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years.

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out.

“This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”