The Dictatorship
Trump’s USAID cuts are having a devastating impact on the ‘rape capital of the world’
She was 17.
After armed men attacked her village in eastern Congo and raped her, she fled into the night — bloodied and alone. By morning, in late January, she reached a clinic on the outskirts of Goma.
The nurse knew exactly what she needed: a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) kit — a small box of medication that can prevent HIV, sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy if given within 72 hours.
“She arrived within the window,” said a local social worker in Goma, who followed the case closely and spoke to me by phone. I’ll call her Grace. “But the kit wasn’t there.”
We can blame Washington, where Elon Musk-appointed disruptors locked out USAID staff and began dismantling the 61-year-old agency.
“We’re sorry,” the nurse told her. “We have nothing.”
Three months later, after a desperate, unsafe attempt to end her pregnancy, Grace died. We shouldn’t consider her direct cause of death the assault, but rather her despair that there was no care for her after her assault.
We can blame Washington, where Elon Musk-appointed disruptors locked out U.S. Agency for International Development staff and began dismantling the 61-year-old agency that once dominated PEP kit supply in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dr. Esther Kitambala of Heal Africa — a Goma-based hospital on the front lines of the crisis — told me over the phone that more than 80% of those kits previously came from USAID.
At the beginning of this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio put the finishing touches on the process Musk began in January when he declared USAID “beyond repair” and “a criminal organization.”
On June 30, NBC News reported on an analysis of USAID cuts published in the medical journal The Lancet that found:
From 2001 through 2021, USAID-funded programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths across 133 countries, including more than 25 million deaths from HIV/AIDS, around 11 million from diarrheal diseases, 8 million from malaria and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis.
Ending USAID could lead to the deaths of 14 million people over the next five yearsthe analysis predicts.
The day after that news story, Rubio, in a press release headlined “Make Foreign Aid Great Again,” said, “As of July 1st, USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance,” in part because “the countries that benefit the most from our generosity usually fail to reciprocate. For example, in 2023, sub-Saharan African nations voted with the United States only 29 percent of the time on essential resolutions at the UN.”
Humanitarian aid shouldn’t be pay to play.
At Heal Africaone of Goma’s few hospitals offering full support to rape survivors, the shelves once stocked with PEP kits now sit bare. Women and girls are turned away.
Her voice trembled as she described the anguish of turning away survivors in urgent need.
Kitambala, who leads reproductive health at Heal Africa, said the phrase she dreads most is now routine: “I’m sorry. We don’t have a PEP kit.” Her voice trembled over the phone as she described the anguish of turning away survivors in urgent need.
She spoke of a 3-year-old girl who’d been subjected to brutal sexual violence and a young woman, raped and pregnant, who went to her village clinic only to be turned away.
“When we receive rape victims like her, we call everywhere,” Kitambala said. “Every clinic I know. But the answer is always the same: ‘We ran out of PEP kits months ago.’”
I knew exactly what those kits meant. As a journalist, I reported from war zones like Goma. More recently, I led global media and public relations for Corus International, a humanitarian organization active in Goma and across 30 countries with fragile health systems.
A practitioner in Goma who asked to remain anonymous told me, “Survivors come clinging to hope that they’ll at least be protected from HIV. But when we turn them away … we send them back into the dark with nothing.”
“But their stories don’t end there,” that doctor said. “I see the face of that 12-year-old rape victim I had to turn away today. I think about the trauma she’s already endured — and the unimaginable challenges still ahead for her.”
Empowered by U.S. funding, facilities such as Heal Africa provided critical, compassionate care for survivors of sexual violence. The program’s success was striking — United Nations data indicates annual HIV/AIDS deaths in the DRC have fallen from 200,000 to roughly 14,000.
Then came Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Marco Rubio.
In multiple capacities across my professional career, I’ve walked through overcrowded camps filled with people carrying the weight of unspeakable loss. But what’s unfolding in Goma is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
This is how America’s exit played out in a place long labeled the ‘rape capital of the world.’
Over 500,000 people are crammed into makeshift shelters. Children are dying of preventable disease. Health workers are exhausted and being forced to explain that even the most basic supplies, supplies once funded by about 1% of the U.S. budgetare no longer coming.
As USAID collapsed, Rwanda-backed M23 rebels surged into eastern DRC. The fallout was immediate. UNICEF reported a fivefold spike in rape cases in one week alone — children made up 30% of victims.
Back in early July, the United Nations Population Fund shared a document with Reuters revealing that only seven out of 34 health zones in North Kivu currently have even a minimal supply of post-rape kits. Fewer than 1 in 4 survivors are receiving the care they need, and shockingly, just 13% of those seeking help are receiving HIV-prevention medication within the critical 72-hour window.
This is how America’s exit played out in a place long labeled the “rape capital of the world,” where — even in relative calm — up to 80% of women and girls as young as 8 have endured sexual violence, according to front-line clinicians.
It didn’t have to happen this way. A working system existed that meant the difference between life and death. And Congress should either restore USAID or establish a replacement that reflects the generosity of the American people and not the inhumane agenda of one man and his administration.
Rubio says aid from the U.S. will now serve “American interests,” but what American interests are served by withholding a box of pills and letting a 17-year-old girl die alone in a displacement camp?
I’ve seen American power up close — not in tanks or embassies, but in quiet acts of courage:
A winter blanket handed to a shivering child in Ukraine. A solar panel powering a maternity ward in South Sudan. And in Goma, a PEP kit handed to a terrified teenager who still had a chance.
That girl is gone now. As is the system that could have saved her.
Muhammad Tahir
Muhammad Tahir is a nonresident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He previously held key roles at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Washington, D.C., and Eastern Europe and served as bureau chief for IHA, the Turkish media, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Most recently, he led media strategy at the nonprofit Corus International. His work has been published by BLN, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and The New Atlanticist, among others.
The Dictatorship
Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.22.26: Why Trump backed both Republicans in a key S.C. race
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* In South Carolina’s gubernatorial raceDonald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pam Evette last month. Last week, however, ahead of this week’s primary runoff election in the race, the president published an online item telling voters that “you can’t go wrong” with either Evette or state Attorney General Alan Wilson.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Trump has done this before. Around this time two years ago, for example, he endorsed both Republicans running in a congressional primary in Arizona. And two years before that, he endorsed two leading contenders in a Senate primary in Missouri.
Only the president can say for sure why he ended up endorsing Evette and Wilson in the South Carolina race, though it’s worth emphasizing for context that GOP primary voters have already ignored his direction into two gubernatorial primaries this month, and it stands to reason that he hoped to avoid a third.
* We’re one day away from a variety of notable racesincluding but not limited to South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. There are also some congressional primaries in a handful of statesincluding Maryland, New York and Utah.
* In took a while, but the ballots have been tallied under Maine’s ranked-choice systemand we now know that Democrat Hannah Pingree, the former state House speaker, will face off against Republican Bobby Charles, who worked at the State Department during the Bush-Cheney era.
* As for Maine’s closely watched congressional racestate Auditor Matt Dunlap won the Democratic nomination in the battleground 2nd District, defeating state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who enjoyed the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dunlap will run in the fall against a familiar figure: former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who had moved to Florida a few years ago, but who returned to run for Congress.
* In California’s congressional special electiontwo Democratic candidates — state Sen. Aisha Wahab and Melissa Hernandez, a Bay Area Rapid Transit director — have advanced to an Aug. 18 special general election. The winner will fill the vacancy left by disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April.
* In a new commercial shared first with MS NOWDemocrat James Talarico has launched his campaign’s first multimillion-dollar ad buy in Texas’ gubernatorial race. In the 30-second spot, Talarico focuses on affordability and the cost of living. The state lawmaker will face scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the fall.
* And in New Jersey, Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.who has been missing from Capitol Hill since early March, will reportedly return to work on June 30according to a statement from his spokesperson. Neither Kean nor his office have offered any public information about why he has been away.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
The Dictatorship
Trump tries dual endorsement in South Carolina as his pick for governor flounders in polls
After President Donald Trump’s pick for governor in Iowa lost in the Republican primary earlier this month, the president argued that he “would have endorsed the other person” if he had “the proper information.”
Trump is taking no chances in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Over the weekend he rescinded his exclusive endorsement of Pamela Evette, the lieutenant governor, announcing instead that he would support both Evette and her runoff opponent, Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general.
The move put Evette’s political future in jeopardy: Even before Trump’s dual endorsement, she trailed in limited public polling and was seen by political observers in South Carolina as a weak candidate with little to show besides the president’s coveted endorsement.
“Her chief distinction from Alan Wilson was that Trump endorsed her,” said Dr. Dubose Kapeluck, a professor of political science at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.
Trump’s dual endorsement “was a kiss of death,” he told MS NOW.
Evette, who moved to South Carolina from Ohio to found a successful payroll and HR company in 2000, has been lieutenant governor since 2019, serving under Gov. Henry McMaster, who is term-limited.
In office, she has pursued meaningful but little-celebrated policies, like a key tort reform bill, according to Gil Gatch, a Republican member of the South Carolina state House and an Evette supporter.
But voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Evette besides the fact that Trump endorsed her, which he did just days before the June 9 primary. Visitors to her campaign website are greeted with a full-screen message labeling Evette as “Trump-endorsed.” The first line in her X bio states the same. Pro-Evette television ads are quick to tout the endorsement.
An accomplishment like tort reform, while noted on Evette’s website, “maybe could have been something that was highlighted more heavily,” Gatch told MS NOW.
The political makeup of South Carolina nearly guarantees the next governor will be whoever emerges on Tuesday between Evette and Wilson. They survived a crowded primary field on June 9, and nearly every challenger who fell short of the runoff publicly endorsed the attorney general.
“She’s just not a good candidate,” Josh Kimbrell, a state senator who failed to make the runoff and has since said he’d back Wilson, said of Evette.
“She kind of assumed this was a coronation, and that was never going to go over that well,” he added.
Even some pro-Trump voters were confused by the president’s initial endorsement of Evette, whom he called “a good friend, fighter, and WINNER” in a social media post in May.
“I have no clue why Trump would endorse Pamela Evette,” Leland Lemmons, a 30-year-old Trump supporter told MS NOW as he exited a polling site in the Greenville suburb of Easley on June 9.
“She’s served, you know, a decent time. I just haven’t seen much fruition of what she’s done in office,” he added.
In a post on Truth Social Friday announcing his dual endorsement, Trump wrote, “I can’t hurt one of them by only Endorsing the other, so, therefore, I am going to Endorse, for Governor of South Carolina, both Pam Evette and Alan Wilson!”
In a subsequent statement on X, Evette said, “I was proud to come in first as [Trump’s] endorsed candidate for Governor on June 9th. Looking forward to doing it again on June 23rd.”
After The Washington Post foreshadowed the dual endorsement last Tuesday, allies of Evette were quick to denounce the possibility.
“I would guess that’s fake news,” Suzanne Pucci, a member of Evette’s finance committee, told MS NOW of the chance Trump would also endorse Wilson. “She’s probably not real worried about it.”
Another close ally and supporter told MS NOW at the time the report was “a total, fabricated lie.”
“[Trump] is invested in Pamela Evette because she invested in him. He’s a loyal guy. That kind of stuff is important to him,” added the supporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“With or without Trump, I think she is going to win,” they said.
On Thursday, a senior campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, brushed off the idea of a dual endorsement, telling MS NOW in a statement, “Pamela Evette has earned the complete and total endorsement of President Trump. She is the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race and we look forward to delivering a big win for the president on Tuesday.”
Roughly 24 hours later, Trump retracted the exclusive endorsement.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.
As last week’s G7 summit in France got underway, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether his purported deal with Iran was final. “No, it’s not final,” the president replied. Later that day — during a visit to Versaillesof all places — he signed the framework anyway.
But moments after signing his name to the memorandum of understanding, Trump offered an unsubtle hint about what he was thinking at the time. Amid applause from those around him, the American president pointed down and then up while saying“Oil down, stocks up.”
In other words, Trump’s focus had nothing to do with natural security and everything to do with the economy. What’s more, the four-word phrase was part of a larger and underappreciated pattern. The Washington Post reported:
In the more than 100 days since President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran, he has offered a shifting list of reasons for why he started the conflict. But in explaining his push for peace, he named a priority much closer to home: protecting the stock market.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains, France, after the Group of Seven summit.
As the summit wrapped up, the Republican similarly said“I’ve studied presidents, some good, some bad, some great. Not too many are great and some really bad. … And the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that and who knows what would have happened.”
He pushed the same point in an interview with Axios, which was released over the weekend.
“If I went further, the stock market would be much lower,” the president said. “Now think of this: I have one primary wish as president, in terms of people: I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
The comments came days after Trump similarly argued“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people.”
Whether the president fully appreciates the implications of his own rhetoric, this string of comments doesn’t just shed light on his motivations for accepting a defeat, it also suggests he saw his failed policy in Iran as pushing the global economy toward a dangerous cliff.
In other words, based on Trump’s own comments, the war he started was poised to create an “economic catastrophe,” which he was desperate to avoid — and which led him to accept a framework that empowered Iran to get what it wanted in exchange for effectively no concessions at all.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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