USAID

Nothing is more dangerous than success. In America, anyone can survive failure – you get up, dust yourself off and try again. But few politicians, or political parties, survive success because success kills urgency. And without urgency, voters don’t vote. President Donald Trump has been dangerously successful. With a seeming snap of his fingers, he has restored our nation’s borders. He has dismantled elite wokeness – rescuing our God-given pronouns and kicking men out of women’s sports. He has neutered Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons, ended taxpayer-funded pro-Hamas campus activism and quashed Bidenflation. To the astonishment of our foreign policy establishment, he has strengthened Europe’s support of NATO to match our 5-percent-of-GDP goal.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk settled their week-long feud this morning — through their shared love of eliminating government waste. How cute! The spat began during last week’s cabinet meeting when Musk and Rubio clashed over their different approaches to cutting the US Agency for International Development. The New York Times reported that Musk called out Rubio for firing “nobody,” arguing that he was unwilling to dismiss large groups of employees. Rubio responded by saying that more than 1,500 State Department officials had retired early or accepted redundancy offers under his leadership, the Times reported.

National Harbor, Maryland Former British prime minister Liz Truss began her speech at CPAC today by declaring that America has just entered its golden age with the election of President Trump. Britain, however, is in its dark age, she said: “Let’s be honest, Britain isn't working.” Truss’s concerns for the current state of the UK and Europe mirrored those expressed in Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich last week. She touched on attacks on free speech in the UK, the rise of Pakistani grooming gangs and the inability of the British government to do anything about the rise in illegal immigration.

Marko Elez. If that name means anything, you might spend a little too much time on the internet. Elez is a whizz kid at DoGE, the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently taking a flamethrower/bazooka/heavy weapon of your choice to whole departments of the federal government. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from politicians, journalists and common-garden liberals everywhere. On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal article uncovered some embarrassing tweets Elez had made on an anonymous account, and he was forced to resign his post. What Elez said was no doubt offensive to some — “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” “normalize Indian hate” — but isn’t that always the way?

Washington, DC has been struck with DoGE (Department of Government Efficiency) fever — just as everyone started getting over the bugs they all caught at from Trump’s inauguration. Elon Musk and his gang of twenty-something whiz kids are making their mark across the federal government, starting with USAID, which Musk has repeatedly criticized in strident terms as being the core of the corruption he’s seeking to root out.

Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union's attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump's executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development. This American Brezhnev policy has had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland effect: democratically elected leaders such as Ukraine’s ill-fated Viktor Yanukovych could be violently overthrown in the name of democracy.

Elon Musk claims that President Trump and DoGE are shutting down USAID.He made his claim on X Spaces last night following the administrative leave of two senior security officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after they denied the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) the ability to receive sensitive data from the agency, the Guardian reports.DoGE was created on Trump’s first day to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Headed by Musk, the department has already taken action to bring to light extensive federal spending and has been granted access to the US Treasury’s federal payment system.Musk said that USAID is beyond repair.