From Global Leadership To Flood-Stricken Texas, The Cost Of Trump’s Ignorance Is Being Paid In Lives

Drowning in the Wreckage— When Tyranny Meets Stupidity

Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962 and she couldn’t have been referring to Señor TACO, then just 16, when she is reputed to have said “Some people are going to leave a mark on this world, while others will leave a stain.” Unless she was clairvoyant.

Larry Diamond mades no bones about who he was referring to yesterday in his discussion about who is gutting everything Roosevelt’s husband accomplished and, in fact, everything that has been accomplished that has made our country great. Señor T’s most lasting and catastrophic legacy is sure to be the collapse of American global leadership— something that sustained peace, prosperity,and the spread of democracy for generations. Since World War II, the U.S. has led in science, diplomacy, alliances, development aid and soft power. Trump is gutting every one of these assets in the name of “America First”— a slogan that, in practice, means American retreat.

He defunded USAID, is dismantling diplomatic networks and is undermining the international institutions that checked authoritarian aggression. As China expands its global influence and Russia redraws borders by force, Trump is shrinking the very tools that once made the U.S. a superpower.

Most dangerously, he’s waging war on science— slashing research budgets, attacking elite universities, and threatening international student visas. These aren’t just culture war stunts. They destroy America’s innovation engine, weaken its economy and hand long-term strategic advantages to China, which invests heavily in science and higher education.

As Fareed Zakaria warns, Trump is “wrecking American competitiveness.” His budget will slash the National Science Foundation by 56%, decimate STEM research, and gut university endowments. This isn’t populism— it’s national sabotage. China already leads in dozens of advanced technologies. The U.S. lead in life sciences, our last frontier, is now at risk too.

The U.S. has always had a unique advantage: the ability to attract the best minds from around the world. But Trump’s xenophobia turns talent away. His attacks on science, diplomacy, and multilateralism amount to what Rush Doshi calls “the suicide of a superpower.” And if this trajectory continues, we may soon find ourselves not just diminished— but defeated.

This week, we don’t have to look towards China nor anywhere else beyond Texas’ Hill Country to see the human cost of Trump’s war on American competence and particularly on Science and expertise. Just  few days ago, deadly flash floods dumped more than a foot of rain in a matter of hours. So far over 70 bodies have been recovered— including at least 21 children— and hundreds still missing when the Guadalupe River surged nearly 29 feel in under and hour! But this wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was a Trump/DOGE-made failure. Senor TACO’s clueless and systematic gutting of NOAA, NWS, and FEMA— through staffing cuts, budget freezes, and an ideological retreat from federal disaster relief— left Texas far more vulnerable heading into the flood. All that death and destruction underscore a grim reality that this idiot doesn’t understand: weakened federal readiness endangers Americans’ lives when disaster strikes. Does he think the Texas and Louisiana Gulf coast and Florida aren’t going to have a hurricane season this year?

Under Trump, the National Weather Service lost critical staff and funding. NOAA's forecasting and climate research budgets were slashed. FEMA was hollowed out, its resources politicized and diminished. Agencies that were once world leaders in climate modeling, early-warning systems, and disaster readiness were told to do more with less— or simply not do it at all. Trump didn’t just neglect these institutions; he seems to have deliberately dismantled them as a mad dash to transfer wealth the the rich in the form of lower taxes. Ahead of these floods, the Weather Service office near San Antonio, which oversees warnings issued in Kerr County, had one key vacancy: A warning coordination meteorologist, who is responsible for working with emergency managers and the public to ensure people know what to do when a disaster strikes. The person who served in that role for decades was among hundreds of Weather Service employees who accepted early retirement offers and left the agency at the end of April, local media reported. Schumer has written a letter to Commerce Department Acting Inspector General Roderick Anderson asking him to “investigate whether the staffing shortfalls at [National Weather Service] offices in Texas— and across the country— played a role in exacerbating the impact of this deadly flooding event.”

While China builds the world’s most advanced disaster resilience systems, Trump is turning the war on “woke” universities into a war on the very science that protects lives. In Texas, the consequences are no longer theoretical. They are submerged homes, drowned children, and mourning families. If America falls as a global power, it won’t be because another country defeated us. It will be because we let a bitter, ignorant man turn his personal vendettas into national policy. Trump isn’t just waging war on American greatness. He’s leaving us to drown in the wreckage.

Diamond warned that we may never recover from Trump’s war on science and his campaign to make America weak again. “The scope and depth of the devastation Trump is wreaking on American leadership in science and technology is so massive and sweeping that it is hard to understand without resorting to the idea that Trump is literally mad. In truth, Trump is an angry populist whose resentment for established institutions and elites is so profound that he is willing to cut off America’s nose (and ears and eyes) to spite what he views as its arrogant, ‘woke’ face.”

During his first terrible 150 days we see where this is headed: “his punishment of elite liberal universities under the guise of fighting antisemitism; his massive punitive cuts to the research funds of major universities and to the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health; and his vow to deny student visas not only to all of Harvard’s international students but possibly to most or all students from countries he doesn’t like or considers a threat, most of all China. As the U.S. has lost its lead in so many areas of manufacturing, its economic vitality and global influence have been sustained by its continued leadership in services, including research, design, and higher education. The annual global ranking by Times Higher Education shows seven U.S. universities among the top 10 (the other three are British) and 13 among the top 20. Why would any effort to ‘Make America Great Again’ attack one of the most striking dimensions of actual, existing American greatness? Yet Trump is eagerly doing so… And of course it’s not just Harvard. Trump has also imposed cuts in research funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars on Johns Hopkins University, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

“There is more punishment to come, including a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation’s current budget, in addition to a 73% reduction to its staff and fellowships, in Trump’s ‘One, Big, Beautiful’ budget bill, and steep punitive tax increases on university endowments… [B]asic research is fundamental to the technological breakthroughs that have established U.S. corporate leadership in such fields as biomedicine, computing, smartphones, and, indeed, ‘the internet itself.’ Universities do the bulk of the ‘fundamental exploratory science too risky for private industry,’ because the payoffs are too far in the future. Their research investments, his work finds, deliver five times as many patents as the same amount invested by private industry. And the gains to economic growth multiply where universities and innovative industries are in close proximity and interaction—like at Harvard and Stanford. As former MIT President Rafael Reif observes in an important essay in Foreign Affairs, basic scientific research and applied technological innovation proceed in a virtuous cycle that yields enormous ‘spillover effects for the U.S. economy.’ Take away these investments and you squander the seed corn of American global economic leadership, at a time when China is hot on our heels in virtually every field where it is not (as in batteries, electric vehicles, and hypersonics) already ahead.”

While others are investing daringly into the technologies of the future, we are pulling back from scientific investments. On April 1 (this is not a joke) HHS Secretary Kennedy fired all the top veterinarians at the FDA overseeing the response to the devastating wave of bird flu spreading across the globe— at a moment when many scientists worry about the possibility of its mutating to enable human-to-human transmission. I’ve wondered recently how the global balance of power would shift— practically and symbolically— if the world should face a new pandemic virus for which China has developed an effective vaccine and the U.S., having yielded to voodoo theories of vaccine danger, had been rendered a helpless supplicant, begging for China’s beneficent mercy. That could come as well if the U.S. finds itself in anything approaching a military conflict and China— which is now bidding “to establish itself as the preeminent developer, manufacturer, and distributor of drugs worldwide”— simply halts exports to the U.S. of pharmaceuticals it substantially controls in world trade, such as antibiotics, some cancer drugs, and over-the-counter pain relievers. China would have powerful leverage if it were ready to cause Americans tangible pain and palpable fear, not just the pain to manufacturers of squeezing the supply of rare earth minerals in a trade dispute.

All of this points in an accelerating and alarming direction. We are on the cusp of a massive shift in the global balance of power that would deliver to the U.S. a defeat far more existential than anything it suffered in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. China surpassing the U.S. as the world’s dominant power— or even prevailing militarily in the event of a conflict over Taiwan— would not be another setback in a regional conflict. It would not be a Sputnik moment from which we could recover by gearing ourselves for a new national sprint. It would be the end, not the recovery, of American greatness—what the China expert Rush Doshi calls  the “suicide of a superpower”— with horrific consequences for the freedom, prosperity and health of Americans (and our allies).

As Donald Trump retreats from American engagement abroad and rational policy at home, that is the trajectory we are on. And we may be running out of time.