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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about American politics, culture, and US Foreign policy. He's got a new article about the present moment in the April issue. George Packer is the author of 10 books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which won the 2013 National Book Award. His most recent book was Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, which came out in 2021. The press materials for that one, before we get into his new article, provide a prelude, I think, to where he probably thinks we are today.

They say in Last Best Hope, George Packer explores four narratives that now dominate American life. Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; smart America, the worldview of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; real America, the white Christian-- of course, it's in quotes. Real America, the white "Christian" nationalism of the heartland; and just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. That language describing the premise of George packer's book from 2021.

The balance of power among those four groups may have suddenly changed, as we all know, with this election. Maybe even their definitions changed. Jeff Bezos, I'm looking at you. Let's see what George Packer thinks. His article is called The Trump World Order. George, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

George Packer: Thank you for having me back, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with those categories from Last Best Hope? Do you think they still apply and that the white Christian nationalists and the individualists have seized much more of the power?

George Packer: I think it's still a pretty good scheme. Any scheme is simplistic and reduces things too much, but I can still see all four of them. Some are weaker, some are stronger, and some have formed strange alliances. I think the real alliance that's gone on in the last month or six weeks is between free and real America, between the America of Elon Musk, hyper-libertarian, cut government down to the bone, send the civil service packing, and free the economy up and politics up for the billionaire class, and real America, which is the base of Donald Trump's support and which I don't think voted for Elon Musk, but which got Elon Musk.

Trump so far seems to be prepared to balance the populism, the anti-elitism, the anger that he's been fueled by all along throughout his political career, and the kind of old-fashioned libertarianism that's made a roaring and quite brutal comeback with Elon Musk. I think those two are destined for a clash. I don't see how they can coexist, and they've already clashed in the form of some nasty repartee between Musk and Steve Bannon. I think that, fundamentally, they are opposed and that the little honeymoon that we're seeing right now in the White House is not going to last, but at the moment, it's quite vitriolic, aggressive, and it's doing a lot of damage.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We will see about that. Now, to your new article in The Atlantic. It starts with the dismantling of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. Of all the things going on right now, why did you start with that one?

George Packer: Well, actually, I originally was going to write about the end of the refugee program, which there's just too many things going on, Brian. As you know, it's impossible to keep up, to address them all and that's part of the strategy, I think, coming from the White House. Trump suspended the refugee admissions program at the same time that he froze foreign aid spending. Those two overlap because refugees resettling of refugees depends, in part, on foreign aid spending.

Then it became clear that USAID was-- as I put it in the piece, the Poland of this blitzkrieg. It was the soft, easy victim, the first one, the test case that would show how to do it, because there's not much of a constituency in this country for foreign aid. The American people notoriously think it's a waste of money, estimate that it's a quarter or more of the budget when in fact it's only 1%, and see it as just funding corruption overseas and going to people they don't know when it could be better spent at home. That is the general perception.

When they hear about a particular program that's feeding starving children or treating people with HIV, their views change because there is a humanitarianism in this country. USAID is an easy target, and Trump and Musk went after it almost to figure out, "How can we do this? How much resistance will there be? What's the sequence of steps to take in order to gut a federal agency?" By learning from that, they could then turn to the more heavyweight powers like the Pentagon.

Brian Lehrer: That line from your article really jumped out at me as well, and I want to communicate that to the listeners, because after you went into this detailed critique of what they're doing to USAID, in defense of USAID, in humanitarian and other terms, you pulled back. I'm just going to read that line again, even though you just cited it, because I think it's so central. You wrote, "Trump and Musk's destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg, send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers." For one thing, that's a Nazi Germany reference.

George Packer: Just because this isn't Nazism, doesn't mean we have to draw a circle around World War II and never refer to it.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It's an analogy for what you think they're really after. Take us further into that. You mentioned the Pentagon as an example, but take us deeper.

George Packer: I think this isn't just about cutting government. That may be Musk's main thrust. He really does seem to regard government as mostly just corrupt, wasteful, and getting in the way of business and entrepreneurship. For Trump and the ideologues around Trump, this is an end to 80 years of an American position in the world that made enormous mistakes and got into wars we never should have gotten into, but that nonetheless was based on a kind of enlightened self-interest, which said, by tying our own power to alliances, institutions, and even to humanitarianism, we will enhance our power. It will extend our power, our influence, and our attractiveness to the rest of the world.

If there is an ideological struggle, as there was during the Cold War and as I think there is now between democracy and authoritarianism, it's not in our interest to simply be a bully and to use all the power we have to get whatever we want in the short term. Instead, we should show some restraint and some sense of the interests of other countries. In the end, that's going to serve us better. That was the thinking of every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, even ones as opposed as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Trump has ended that.

Trump has said quite clearly and plainly that that's a sucker's game. What's in it for us? We're not going to do that anymore. Our allies in Europe are on their own. He seems to despise them, not in spite of being democracies, but because they're democracies. The leaders and regimes that he respects are the authoritarian ones, and he has now essentially put us on Russia's side of the Russia-Ukraine war, which is maybe the most single remarkable thing he's done since he came back into the presidency.

All of that, to me, is based on an idea that if you have the power, you should just use it at everyone else's expense for your own gain in the short run, whether it's getting minerals, getting Greenland, forcing Colombia to take a flight of deportees, whatever it is, you just use your power. What he's showing is we actually have had unused power. We have restrained certain things that we're no longer restraining. We are immensely powerful. He will have successes like the ones I just cited-- Greenland's not quite there yet, because we have that power. Previous presidents have seen the wisdom of not using it to its fullest extent. That's gone. Now, we're back to the struggle between great powers, for scrambles, for loot and for territory. It's sort of a 19th century world that we're living in right now.

Brian Lehrer: Along those lines, stark as that already is, you turn the America first rhetoric on its head. You're write that it's actually more imperialistic than isolationist. Yet isolationist is what we've heard for years from Trump and that camp, Steve Bannon maybe, and others. We have to stop spending all this money on foreign aid and forever wars, so we have it to spend on the American people. Make that case that actually now that they're in power, they're pivoting toward imperialism rather than isolationism.

George Packer: Right, you put it perfectly. Again, I don't think that's what most of Trump's voters voted for. They voted for isolationism. I interviewed them, I heard them say, "We're just too overextended. We've cared too much about other people, whether it's Ukrainians or anyone else. We should care about people in this country." That's a cliche you hear everywhere in this country. What Trump has shown is that isolationism is really not an option for this country. We're too big, too powerful, too, I would say, messianic, to simply pull inward like that. It will never be the 1920s again in our time.

Instead, what Trump is doing, because he believes in power and he's aggressive and he wants to be a king, is he's acting like an old-fashioned king or emperor who says, "I want that piece of territory and if I have the ability, I'm going to get it." If it's in our interest, if Greenland is somehow strategically necessary for our global position, for access, whatever, to the arctic-- I honestly don't quite understand Greenland, then we're going to put pressure on Denmark, poor little benign, NATO-loving Denmark, to give it to us. If we want Ukraine's minerals, we're going to squeeze the life out of Vladimir Zelensky until he has to say uncle, because we want those minerals.

If we are going to make common cause with Vladimir Putin because Ukraine doesn't serve any purpose of ours, but Putin could be in our interest, then we're going to do that, too. All of this has nothing to do with isolationism. It is a raw throwback to an earlier form of imperialism from the 19th century that was, in some ways, checked in the Post World War II era by the policy and the vision that I described earlier.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking with Atlantic staff writer George Packer. His latest article for the April issue is called The Trump World Order, and we can take some questions, comments or stories at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 call or text. On USAID George, listener writes, "Some people I know on the left claim that USAID is mostly a CIA front. Would Mr. Packer care to comment?"

George Packer: During the Cold War, USAID was quite obviously an arm of US Foreign policy, and in South Vietnam, for example, it was used as part of the broader counterinsurgency effort against the Vietcong, so there's a history there. Even today, if you think that supporting independent media in Hungary or providing training for independent political parties in Bulgaria is part of a CIA effort, then guilty is charged. That's part of what USAID used to do. They saw democracy as being part of their mission. That's been completely obliterated by Trump.

I think the listener is forgetting how much of USAID's work, as the writer and surgeon Atul Gawande, who was its last head of the Bureau of Global Health, told me, was to increase the human lifespan. That's what USAID has done in places like Africa, and that is going to stop. In fact, as he said, it's going to kill people. If you have a humanitarian vision, you don't like the CIA, and you don't think that American hard power has served the interests of people in other countries, you should want USAID to exist. You should want it to continue, but Trump doesn't care about any of that.

He doesn't care about AIDS in Central Africa. He doesn't care about even about checking Chinese power in Asia, which is another thing USAID did by providing development money that China otherwise would have filled with its Belt and Road Initiative. These are things that both serve our national interests and serve humanitarian interests. That's not a naive position. It's a factual description of much of the work, not all of it, but much of the work that USAID used to do.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it's one of the reasons we invited you on for this article because I think even with all that it's been in the headlines recently, most Americans don't have a sense of what USAID does on the ground and who it helps, whether we look at it from a US soft power, so we have influence against China kind of perspective, or just from a humanitarian perspective. Further to that point, I read an excerpt from the USAID section of your article on Monday's show to New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, who used to work for USAID. I'm going to read this again for our listeners.

George Packer wrote, "A grant for hundreds of ethnic minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew," meaning the Trump-Musk wrecking crew, "because it went under the name Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship Program, as if the money were going to a woke bureaucracy not to Rohingya refugees from the military's regime's genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology diversity, inclusion. The orthodoxy of the new one has ended the student's education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them."

Then you went on, "One of Trump's executive orders is called Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism. Meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department." I read that to Senator Kim and he said what you're seeing here is absolutely damaging. Basically, just saying Control+F will find any reference to the word diversity and we'll cut those programs. We're just cutting wide brush. Again, I hope people see this. This is not about effectiveness or efficiency. It's about loyalty.

Do you want to talk about any of that? You can react to Senator Kim reacting to you or just talk about the head-exploding reality of what they're doing to people whose human rights we say we support.

George Packer: Do they care? This is something I wonder. Are there people in the White House who are learning the extent of the destruction when you freeze all these programs, when you fire thousands of people, when you kill 10,000 grants and loans? Are there people who are saying, "Let's look a little harder into this and make sure that children aren't going to die of hunger or that women aren't going to die of AIDS, or that American farmers aren't going to go bankrupt because they're producing a crop that USAID is paying them to produce in order to send it for high nutrition to refugee camps? I haven't even begun to express the cascading consequences.

Has anyone thought about them and in some small way tried to stop it? Marco Rubio is a career long supporter of USAID. Throughout his time in the Senate, he wanted more USAID. He's now the head of the State Department and the acting head of USAID. He's presiding over its destruction. He issued at the beginning a humanitarian waiver. In other words, if there are programs that are life-saving programs, then we're not going to kill them. Well, guess what? They've killed every means of executing those programs, of carrying them out, so they're not happening and in spite of that.

It's been weeks now, people have been pointing it out and still nothing is moving, those programs are frozen, and the retroviral drugs are not going out to people. Does Marco Rubio know? Does he care? Is he enacting Trump's agenda? Has he become a convert to Trump's agenda, which just the day before yesterday he was against in terms of foreign aid? I don't know, but it's staggering to think of what the consequences are in thousands and thousands of places for thousands and thousands of people.

Leaving out simply the brutal and contemptuous treatment of a civil service that works hard and doesn't get a lot of money, and that's now being treated as if they're disloyal, lazy, incompetent, and are all being sent out onto the street. How demoralizing is that for the entire federal workforce to be waiting for that email to come that says your computer has been frozen and you are now on administrative leave or out of a job. I know I sound a bit incoherent right now, Brian, because I do think we're going to be years reckoning with the toll that has been exacted in the last few weeks.

Brian Lehrer: Jeffrey in Hackensack has a story to tell us, I think. Jeffrey, you're on WNYC with George Packer from The Atlantic. Hi?

Jeffrey: Hi. You can hear me, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jeffrey: Oh, wonderful. Shout out, first-time caller, long-time listener. Brian, you are fantastic.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Jeffrey: George, you're also one of the greats.

George Packer: Thanks.

Jeffrey: I had an interesting opportunity where I was working in Cambodia doing human rights work. I worked for one of the largest Original post-war NGOs there, and so I got pretty involved in the foreign aid regime of donors and international community. That involved close work in many occasions with USAID and got a pretty good insight into USAID, and I actually interviewed for a job there.

My take is, in a word, I think there was just a ton of waste. I think there was a degree of-- I'm not sure incompetence is right. That might be too strong, but I just saw too much like fluff and I was just like not sure that these programs are really being implemented and administered well, even when they were fantastic programs in principle, and I agreed with in principle. Which was, for example, a lot of the human rights organizations I dealt with. I thought, in principle, they were fantastic, but they just were not managed well. A lot of that had to do at the local level coming up after devastating conflict, and needing the foreign aid and technical advice, some of which I provided and a lot of people like me provided.

I thought that it was a little bit too much about the big villa with the high walls and the drivers and all that, and not enough about just really getting involved intimately on the local level and just being a well-run, efficient organization. I got a sense of too much clubbiness. I had a couple of very weird experiences when I was scheduled to interview with them. Where it was obvious I was--

Brian Lehrer: Jeffrey, let me follow up a question.

Jeffrey: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: I want to do this and then get to a few other people before we run out of time. Is there a difference to you between these inefficiencies and sometimes being ineffective that you're describing that you saw in Cambodia and what Musk says about USAID, which is that it's evil and a criminal organization?

Jeffrey: In terms of like my, my place, I couldn't see any of that darker-- I didn't have enough of a behind-the-scenes involvement. All mine was front-facing with their officials and the people that were involved in implementing or overseeing the grants up to the local level. I'm not going to say it was evil or things like that. I would never. I actually don't like what's going on because I think it should be more surgical, more process, and very much in line with rule of law, due process of law.

Brian Lehrer: There's a lot there that should be addressed is your point.

Jeffrey: I think so. I just got too much of a sense of clubbiness and insiderness and patronage related, depending on who was in power and the shifting currents of all that.

Brian Lehrer: Jeffrey, thank you for Your call. We really appreciate it. George, what are you thinking?

George Packer: Yes, he's absolutely right. I covered the wars in Iraq and to some extent in Afghanistan, and I saw it everywhere, especially when there was just tons of funding coming in, way more than local economies or bureaucracies could handle. It inevitably led to waste and corruption and to a walling off of the Americans from the locals. I always thought the best programs put money in the hands of local people and don't enrich Beltway contractors who then, as the caller said, wall themselves off and drive fancy cars and have almost a servant class. I saw all of that, it's true. What he said at the end about a surgical review is exactly right.

Atul Gawande said to me, "This is like stopping an airplane mid flight and firing the crew in order to do a review of the airline industry." In other words, you're bound to kill people this way, and it doesn't even do the review. The review is not the point. The point is destruction. The point is to end USAID because it's part of a foreign policy that Trump thinks of as not just wasteful, but absurd, that has nothing to do with our national interests. That's where I fundamentally disagree. Go through it program by program, get rid of waste. I think that's happened in the past as well. What they've done shows no interest in simply getting rid of waste. It shows an interest in getting rid of aid. That, I think, is a catastrophic mistake.

Brian Lehrer: One more call, Lauren in the Bronx, who, let me say, is gonna reflect a question that a number of our listeners are asking. Lauren, you can speak for the group.

Lauren: Yes, thank you. My question is, what can I do about all this? I think people mistake posting comments on Bluesky as accomplishing something which doesn't. I think the Million Woman March on Washington DC when Trump was first inaugurated accomplished nothing. Not going to go out there with my musket and March to Washington DC, but I really want to do something. I think the only thing I can think of to do is to pressure the DNC to remove Chuck Schumer. He should not be the minority leader. That's politics over country, too. I personally do, other than sit here and be-- yes.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren, thank you. George, I don't know how much media you've been doing or consuming, but we get this every day. We get it every segment that we're talking about the new Trump administration. We talked about it some earlier in the show. Our listeners, a bunch of them, heads exploding because they say Democratic politicians are either ineffectual or just don't have the levers of power right now. Do you want to add any game plan to your critique of what's going on? For people really concerned about all this, demanding different responses by elected officials, and also just asking, like Lauren did, what can I do?

George Packer: The first thing you can do, if you care about the other end of foreign aid, is find the international organizations, either UN or charitable, that you think work well and that have lost all their US funding and send them a check, or go online and give them some money because they are desperately in need of it now. It turns out US money was keeping so many humanitarian programs afloat.

Hold your elected officials accountable, especially if they're Republicans, but also if they're Democrats, and force them to speak about this, to answer, as The Atlantic just did. Do you agree that Ukraine started the war and that Zelenskyy is a dictator? The Atlantic asked that of every Republican in Congress and got about 20 replies. Ordinary citizens can do the same thing. Force them to defend what Trump is doing or if they are against it, to make a public statement and to take action that is actually consequential, and it isn't just, as you say, a little note on Bluesky or Twitter.

Other than that, it's tough. It's tough because all the power right now seems to be in the hands of a Republican administration and a completely broken Republican legislature. There's a few federal courts that are now hearing cases about refugees, about aid, about some of these other issues, and they're stopping it, but it's all going to go up to the Supreme Court. Just yesterday, John Roberts upheld for now the halt to foreign aid, and I think the whole Supreme Court is going to hear it in greater detail later on.

I don't count on the courts to do the work that a Democratic citizenry has to do. That's all that I can say about it. Act like a Democratic citizen. Simply don't be passive. Don't curl up. Don't think, "I'm just going to go to sleep until it's over. I'm going to cultivate my garden." The best thing to do when you find that your freedoms and your values are being destroyed is to take some action. It's going to be up to your listeners to figure out what that means.

Brian Lehrer: George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, and now the author of an article for the April issue of The Atlantic, The Trump World Order. George, thank you.

George Packer: Thanks for having me.

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