‘He Should Be Fired Immediately!!!’ Trump Rips Washington Post Columnist Following Morning Joe Segment on USAID
President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Friday and called for the firing of Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, following Robinson’s appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post is INCOMPETENT! So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN. He should be fired immediately!!!” wrote Trump, who regularly attacks the free press.
Trump, who is known to regularly watch cable news and hired almost twenty Fox News personalities for his administration, made the post after Robinson took part in a discussion about USAID with the agency’s former administrator Andrew Natsios.
Ironically, it was Natsios, a Republican who served in the Bush administration, who really lit into Trump and Elon Musk’s gutting of USAID during the segment.
“I don’t think people realize worth the money goes. The money goes to dozens and dozens of evangelical Roman Catholic, International Orthodox Christian Charities. The the NGO of my church, the Orthodox Church, gets millions of dollars of aid funding,” said Natsios in a lengthy takedown of Musk and Trump who have made wild claims of waste at the agency. He continued:
So World Relief is the NGO of the National Association of Evangelicals. They got $123 million a few years ago from from aid to do work in the Congo, in Haiti, and refugees and displaced camps. And I might add. These are highly skilled technical people in these NGOs, Christian NGOs, Roman Catholic, and evangelical NGOs, and all of that’s being shut down.
The camps are being collapsed in many areas, and people who’ve had their houses burned down, their children raped, who are traumatized. We’re getting food aid from us. The whole operation is going to be shut down. Now, Marco Rubio, who I’ve always had great respect for, is being blamed for this. This is being orchestrated by Musk, not Marco Rubio and by the director of OMB.
They don’t care what happens to the people of the world because they don’t vote in the United States. They don’t care that hundreds of millions of people are going to have to be on the edge of starvation if these programs aren’t restored immediately.
Host Joe Scarborough then brought Robinson into the discussion, adding, “Well, you know, Gene Robinson, we talked about this yesterday and had people on the show talking about the fact that, you know, Elon Musk is saying they’re Marxists, they’re evil, they’re this, they’re that. It’s just lies. You know, this is there are I’m sure there’s some programs that may be run, that may be the idea of people who are center-left. The programs that have caught the most attention right now have been programs that have been inspired by religious faith. And I speak primarily of what George W Bush did with PEPFAR.”
“Yeah. Joe. And I think we have to there’s so much to be angry about, but this is something we need to be angry about because– just take PEPFAR, PEPFAR is one of the best things for the United States has ever done. Really,” Robinson replied, adding:
And I am, everybody knows, I’m no great fan of President George W Bush’s record except for this. This is an extraordinary, extraordinary program that has saved tens of millions of lives. And the idea that you would you would demonize this and and, you know, it looks to me as if as if Musk has chosen AID as kind of a demonstration project, just to see how we can destroy an agency and demoralize the rest of the federal workforce.
My question for Andrew is let’s assume that that you are right, that Marco Rubio just inherently is not insane, that he understands the good that that AID was doing and that within the State Department he wants to try to recreate some of this maybe quietly. But but he he knows that we need to have it.
But how long would it take? How difficult would it be, even if he wanted to to sort of put it back together now that it’s been utterly smashed? Isn’t that a long-term project?
“It is. You destroy an institution. You don’t rebuild it overnight. And I might add, the State Department is– I mean, I have great respect for the State Department. They’re the best diplomats in the world. I was a diplomat for a while, was President Bush’s envoy to Sudan. But they are not operational. They cannot deploy disaster assistance response teams which AID sends all over the world,” Natsios replied, adding:
They hire generalists and the Foreign Service AID hires specialists. You have to have an advanced degree to work in the Foreign Service and AID you can’t get hired, which means PhDs, medical doctors, agricultural economists, agricultural scientists. We have logisticians. How do you think food aid gets moved? It doesn’t just appear it magically.
You have to have people, experts in logistics, 294 people to spend to to spend $38 billion. What are they idiots? And they’re not going to the hiring systems in the State Department. I have to say, a very slow AID has slowed down in recent years, but when I was there, we could hire someone in a couple of months. And I do think that changes need to be made. But the problem is not in AID.
The problem is and the federal system is is ground to a halt. And this is going to have horrendous consequences around the world. I don’t think they have any idea the consequences of what they’re doing. They’re just they have a wrecking ball. They go into an agency, destroy it, and they’re on to somewhere else.
They’re going after the FBI now? Yeah, CIA, the same thing. We are in a conflict around the world with China and Russia. Some people, the president said we’re bordering on World War III. We’re destroying all our foreign– the apparatus of our international affairs apparatus in the US government just before we are in a conflict. It’s madness to do this. So we think we’re going to rebuild this overnight. They’re crazy.
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.
