Posted on 07/05/2025 8:24:46 AM PDT by Signalman
Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are once again joining forces to denounce President Donald Trump, this time for slashing international services they claim are critical to U.S. interests.
Bush appears in a new video alongside Obama and U2 frontman Bono, a notorious Trump critic, praising the departing staffers of USAID, the international diplomacy arm that Trump gutted earlier this year. Bush was an advocate for funding the program to combat AIDS and HIV in parts of Africa.
“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy,” Obama said in a video shown to departing USAID employees on Monday. “Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world.”
Calling the decision by Trump “a colossal mistake,” he added that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed.”
Their warm words come as little comfort to employees of the United States Agency for International Development who now find themselves without government jobs for the first time in years. Trump, in partnership with Elon Musk and his U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, effectively dismantled the sprawling global agency but for a small skeleton staff while operations wound down.
The video message was not broadcast to the public, according to the AP, which obtained snippets of the trio’s comments.
Musk once referred to USAID as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” It was an early target of the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize a federal government the president said was ripe with waste, fraud, and abuse of tax dollars.
USAID was officially absorbed by the State Department on Tuesday, per the NY Post.
Bush, who has largely refrained from criticizing Trump since he first took office in 2016, spent his video remarks lamenting the loss of staffers he credited with contributing to global stability by reducing the spread of AIDS and HIV through a program that is credited with saving 25 million lives over the last 20 years.
“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work — and that is your good heart,’’ Bush told USAID staffers, according to the Associated Press. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”
Bono regaled the sullen group with a poem written about his worry that millions will die as a result of USAID’s shuttering.
“They called you crooks. When you were the best of us,” Bono said.
Other Trump foes marked the official end of USAID with public messages, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“In all my years of service, I found that foreign service officers and development professionals were among the most dedicated public servants I encountered,” Clinton posted to X Tuesday. “Their work saves lives and makes the world safer. Today, and every day, I stand with them.”
Bush and Obama haven’t said much publicly about President Trump, and both appeared chummy with 47 at his inauguration in January. Bono, meanwhile, has ripped the Republican going back to his first election in 2016, calling Trump “potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio contrasted the trio’s message of doom and gloom with optimism for an efficient government free of far-left political ideology.
“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio wrote in his statement. “Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown.”
“This era of government-sanctioned inefficiency has officially come to an end,” he continued. “Under the Trump Administration, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that prioritizes our national interests. As of July 1st, USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance.
“Foreign assistance programs that align with administration policies—and which advance American interests—will be administered by the State Department, where they will be delivered with more accountability, strategy, and efficiency.”
Trump spent the first months of his administration working hand in glove with Musk and praising the work of DOGE to uncover more than $22 billion in “waste,” including at USAID.
“Forty-five million dollars for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma,” Trump said while citing various examples of purported waste. “Forty million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is.”
They relied on USAID to pay off their political allies. Cut off the cash flow and folks squeal like a stuck pig.
W is the reason I’m no longer a Republican.
W is the reason I’m no longer a Republican.
W is the reason I’m no longer a Republican.
Bush is a disgrace there was very little reason to criticize the first Trump term but this second term is impeccable and it’s disgusting to see Bush turn against patriotic conservative americans.
It also shows how tone deaf and elitist he is to be worrying about something called usaid that Americans frankly had never heard of and don’t care about.
George......🖕
iirc, Prescott Bush, their father, financed the rise of hitlers germany after the Wiemar depression
Alot of the negative comments about W that were posted here on FR in the late 1990s and 2000s unfortunately turned out to be correct.
I thought W was “bro’s” with Bill Clinton
Now he’s “bro’s” with Obama too?
Go away, Bush. You are the most disappointing President of my lifetime.
Jealousy and envy are so ugly and unbecoming.
These jerks are upset having to watch REAL leadership and being reduced to “I coulda been a contenda!”
Agreed. Now, why is Bush committed to USAID? Uninformed? Complicit?
Bush hates America.
W showed up at the inauguration ALONE and looking like he was chewing on a cat turd. He should stay silent.
Heckel and Jeckel...
Two dildos looking for publicity...
His initial judgment was correct.
So why is he speaking out against Trump regarding USAID?
More likely due to conflict of interest.
Relatives getting funding from USAID because they work for a "charity"?
Complicit. But George Bush may be entirely “honest” here, taking not a penny for himself. It likely all went to his cronies insiders in the globalist cabal which tried to subvert national sovereignty and therefore the power of elected governments to respond to the desires of their lawful citizens.
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