I’m sitting in a safe place in Northwest Baltimore with no bombs falling outside my window, so I won’t pretend to know if President Donald Trump has committed America to triumph or tragedy in Iran.
But I’m close enough to the Johns Hopkins University, only a few miles across town, to sense the damage from this president who sees numbers on a page and fails to translate them to human beings clinging to life.
As The Sun reported over the weekend, Hopkins has lost more than $800 million in federal grant money. That makes the school a small part of this president’s slashing and burning of U.S.-supported projects around the world.
The Hopkins money, for example, involves clinical trials in Bangladesh aimed at managing life-threatening diarrheal diseases in children.
But as Dr. Judd L. Walson, chair of Hopkins’ Department of International Health, told The Sun’s Brooke Conrad, Trump administration cuts will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths globally and could lead to millions of deaths in the next several years.
As the New York Times reported Monday, June 23, White House-directed cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have decimated programs around the world to combat malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, disaster readiness, maternal and child health, emergency food delivery, and on and on.
What kind of people in power make such murderous decisions? And what kind of people, millions who once saw America as benevolent saviors of the planet’s downtrodden, allow it to happen?
As this is written, we’re a little distracted by Iran and the most dangerous nuclear possibilities since the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.
But with the Trump administration, there are always distractions. It’s their game plan. Trump tosses out one preposterous line after another.
You don’t like his plans to take over the Panama Canal? So he sidetracks debate by tossing out a takeover of Greenland. You think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to America’s children? What about Pete Hegseth, formerly one of the Fox frauds, running the Defense Department as the bombs fall in the Middle East?
And speaking of bombing, has anybody heard anything lately from Ukraine? No? Well, we’ve been a little distracted by that other bombing, haven’t we?
The cuts at Johns Hopkins, big as they are, are only a tiny piece of the Trumpian damage. They’re so small, you can’t hear anybody talking about them. Or maybe it’s just the sound of bombs falling, which takes our minds off everything else.
Until the next crisis, and the next.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University)
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