Trump’s ‘Own Goals’ Are Enabling China Worldwide

An ‘own goal,’ for those unfamiliar with the term, is a goal that results when a player inadvertently knocks the ball into the goal they are defending.

If you consider the duty of an American president to be ‘the defense of our constitution and democratic history,’ Elon Musk’s attack on USAID is an own goal, enabled by Trump and scoring a point for China.

Let me explain.

USAID is an agency of American government, and the creation and funding of agencies is a function of the United States Congress. That ability is founded in law, and supported by the Constitution of our country, under separation of powers, Article I, Section. 1: All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

(ProPublica) “While USAID was first created by President John F. Kennedy in a 1961 executive order, Congress passed a law in 1998 to make it an “independent establishment” like others in the cabinet. Multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, built USAID into an institution that has helped save millions of lives around the world, promoted U.S. interests in remote corners of the globe and employed thousands of Americans.”

Now Trump and Musk have nearly destroyed it in three weeks.

“It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution. “It’s very scary and tragic.”

Along with scary and tragic, it’s an own-goal of immense proportion.

And, I would argue, China is the winner under this circumstance in a worldwide competition for influence. Should they so choose, China now has the opportunity to step in and offer immediate support to those abandoned by an American agency that no longer disburses tens of billions of dollars across the globe, fighting famine and disease and bringing clean water to millions.

Among USAID’s no longer achievable achievements:

· More than three million lives saved each year through USAID immunization efforts. Vaccines are the most ‘transformational breakthroughs’ that they have at their disposal.

· Life expectancy that’s risen in the developing world by about 33 percent. Smallpox has been eliminated worldwide, and the number of people who are ‘chronically undernourished’ has been reduced by 50 percent.

· Infant and child death rates in the developing world reduced by 50 percent. In 2012, USAID nutrition programs reached more than 12 million children under five worldwide. In ‘priority health countries,’ over four million children now live past their fifth birthday than would have if they were born in 1990.

· USAID has helped increase literacy rates. Eighty-four percent of illiterate adults live in just 35 countries and primary school enrollment has tripled in the last 25 years, due to USAID’s support in education.

· Forty-five years ago there were only 58 democratic nations. Due to the direct democracy and governance assistance provided by USAID, 36 more countries have been added to that list. As of 1995, 115 nations worldwide are now completely democratic.

· An extra billion people have food to eat. Due to donations and investments made by the United States, extra food has become available to those who would not have had it without USAID. That food now languishes in locked warehouses. Own goal!

· HIV/AIDS prevention programs have been implemented in 32 countries. Over 850 thousand people have been reached directly by USAID’s HIV prevention education in the 32 countries it has reached.

· USAID has released a Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy…When girls are educated, their families are healthier, they have fewer children, they wed later, and they have more opportunities to generate income.

· Safe water and sanitation was brought to more than 50 million people and counting. Most recently, according to the Wall Street Journal, on September 5, 2013, USAID and the Coca-Cola Company “announced support for new programs under their Water and Development Alliance that will provide more than 190,000 people with improved clean water and/or improved sanitation services by the end of 2015.”

Around the world, millions of people who depend on the USAID for all of the above benefits are suddenly on their own.

Is this worldwide competition for both soft-power and the needs of billions of suffering world-citizens, a source we want to make available to China? One would hardly think so, but it’s an own-goal of tantalizing proportion on offer for delivery into the net of world opinion.

Even without that, world opinion is running quite strongly against American interests these days.

That’s hardly a time for Trump and Elon Musk to offer a self-inflicted own-goal onto an international stage. The world is fascinated as an American presidency is being blatantly managed by an unelected multi-billionaire.

We are used to American politics being affected by wealth, but hardly overwhelmed by the richest man on the planet.