Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022. The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.” > “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan > Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly > respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez? Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro: > Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal > of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build > against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President > Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, > may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage > at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime. But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family. While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.” Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year: > In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people > seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there > were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or > war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A > cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented > ­logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” > creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax > structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws. > > Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical > property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the > founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to > be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture > online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings > and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like > live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. > “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many > individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he > wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person > social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated > cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the > world.” > > > A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of > actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations > would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional > nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a > pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and > decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state > and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at > last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to > reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than > to reform the FDA.” Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land. Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump. At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.” Indeed, as he put it in his January article: > Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a > single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic > victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, > the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand > of President Trump!

Late last week, the X social media platform rolled out a new “location indicator” tool, plans for which had first been announced in October. Suddenly, it became much easier to get information on where in the world the site’s users are actually posting from, theoretically helping to illuminate inauthentic behavior, including attempted foreign influence. > “It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior > will not cease.” As the tool started to reveal accounts’ information, the effect was like watching the Scooby Doo kids pull one disguise after another from the villain of the week. Improbably lonely and outgoing female American GI with an AI-generated profile picture? Apparently based in Vietnam. Horrified southern conservative female voters with surprising opinions about India-Pakistan relations? Based somewhere in South Asia. Scottish independence accounts? Weirdly, many appear to be based in Iran. Hilarious and alarming though it all was, it is just the latest indication of one of the site’s oldest problems.  The tool, officially unveiled on November 22 by X’s head of product Nikita Bier, is extremely simple to use: when you click the date in a user’s profile showing when they signed up for the site, you’re taken to an “About This Account” page, which provides a country for where a user is based, and a section that reads “connected via,” which can show if the account signed on via Twitter’s website or via a mobile application downloaded from a specific country’s app store. There are undoubtedly still bugs—this is Twitter, after all—with the location indicator seemingly not accounting for users who connect using VPNs. After users complaints, late on Sunday Bier promised a speedy update to bring accuracy up to, he wrote, “nearly 99.99%.” As the New York Times noted, the tool quickly illuminated how many MAGA supporting accounts are not actually based in the US, including one user called “MAGA Nation X” with nearly 400,000 followers, whose location data showed it is based in a non-EU Eastern European country. The Times found similar accounts based in Russia, Nigeria, and India.  While the novel tool certainly created a splash—and highlighted many men interacting with obviously fake accounts pretending to be lonely, attractive, extremely chipper young women—X has struggled for years with issues of coordinated inauthentic behavior. In 2018, for instance, before Musk’s takeover of the company, then-Twitter released a report on what the company called “potential information operations” on the site, meaning “foreign interference in political conversations.” The report noted how the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm, made use of the site, and uncovered “another attempted influence campaign… potentially located within Iran.”  The 2o18 report was paired with the company’s release of a 10 million tweet dataset of posts it thought were associated with coordinated influence campaigns. “It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease,” the company wrote. “These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed—they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge.”  “One of the major problems with social media is how easy it is to create fake personas with real influence, whether it be bots (fully automated spam) or sockpuppet accounts (where someone pretends to be something they’re not),” warns Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher who co-directs the Critical Internet Studies Institute and co-authored the book Meme Wars. “Engagement hacking has long been a strategy of media manipulators, who make money off of operating a combination of tactics that leverage platform vulnerabilities.”  Since 2018, X and other social media companies have drastically rolled back content moderation, creating a perfect environment for this already-existing problem to thrive. Under Musk, the company stopped trying to police Covid misinformation, dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, and, along with Meta and Amazon, laid waste to teams who monitored and helped take down disinformation and hate speech. X also dismantled the company’s blue badge verification system and replaced it with a version where anyone who pays to post can get a blue checkmark, making it significantly less useful as an identifier of authenticity. X’s remaining Civic Integrity policy puts much more onus on its users, inviting them to put Community Notes on inaccurate posts about elections, ballot measures, and the like. While the revelations on X have been politically embarrassing for many accounts and the follower networks around them, Donovan says they could be a financial problem for the site. “Every social media company has known for a long-time that allowing for greater transparency on location of accounts will shift how users interact with the account and perceive the motives of the account holder,” she says. When Facebook took steps to reveal similar data in 2020, Donovan says “advertisers began to realize that they were paying premium prices for low quality engagement.” The companies “have long sought to hide flaws in their design to avoid provoking advertisers.” In that way, X’s new location tool, Donovan says, is “devastating.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Despite historic environmental rollbacks under a president who pulled the United States from a key international climate treaty—and recently called global warming “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”—US civil society groups say they are gearing up to push for bold international climate action at a major UN conference next month. “This is a really important moment to illustrate that Trump does not represent the entirety, or even anywhere near a majority, of us,” said Collin Rees, US program manager at the environmental nonprofit Oil Change International, who will attend the annual UN climate conference, known as Cop30. The negotiations will take place in the Brazilian city of Belém near the Amazon delta. It is expected to convene delegations from nearly every government in the world to discuss the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Trump, who began the process of pulling the US from the Paris accord on his first day in office, is not expected to send a delegation to the negotiations. But hundreds of US activist organizations are planning to attend, despite widespread logistical challenges and high accommodation costs in a region with limited tourist infrastructure. “Yes, the federal administration has changed radically…but the actual US climate movement is still here,” said John Noel, senior strategist at Greenpeace International who formerly worked on the US team. The conference will take place amid growing awareness that the vast majority of the world’s population—as much as 89 percent, according to a recent study—want more to be done about the climate crisis but mistakenly assume their peers do not. In the US, the world’s largest historical emitter, three-quarters of those surveyed said their government should do more. But Donald Trump has pushed the country in the opposite direction. The Trump administration’s anti-climate stance puts it out of step with many governments around the world who have realized that environmental action can deliver economic benefits. More than 100 countries, for instance, have been able to cut back on fossil fuel imports thanks to renewable energy growth, which has in turn enabled them to save $1.3 trillion since 2010, according to the International Energy Agency. The expansion of wind, solar, and other carbon-free power sources has also created millions of jobs. And many global south countries are upping their sales of electric vehicles, which lower fuel and maintenance costs. “There are different trends showing that the rest of the world is still working towards getting their economy more resilient for a more prosperous future, and that prosperous future cannot happen without taking into account the climate,” said Yamide Dagnet, the Washington DC-based senior vice-president of international work at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Unlike the US, other countries are also showing an increasing interest in international climate negotiations. Colombia last month offered to host the first-ever International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in April 2026, after countries pushing for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty called for such a meeting. At Cop30, climate activists will work to support governments that have undertaken such action and push more officials to follow suit. And they will aim to highlight local- and state-level climate action taking place in the US, such as the successful fight for laws requiring polluters to pay climate damages in Vermont and New York last year. “We want to put a spotlight on those ‘polluter pay’ mechanisms, and highlight that they are winnable and that other states are considering them,” said Noel. “And Cop presents a good opportunity to market those solutions.” The Trump administration is urging the courts to strike those policies down, and though it will not officially participate in November’s UN negotiations, climate groups say the administration may also try to pressure countries not to take ambitious international climate action. It’s something officials did as recently as last week: The US derailed the enactment of a global carbon fee on shipping at an international maritime meeting as Trump called the scheme a “Global Green New Scam” on social media. Washington also threatened to impose sanctions and visa restrictions on nations that supported the deal. “If there’s a real inflection point and the US sees fossil fuel interests as somehow being constrained, it’s not hard to imagine that there’ll be some type of statements from the administration trying to color the negotiations from afar,” said Noel of Greenpeace. The US worked to block strong international climate policy long before Trump entered office. It refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and more recently has underfunded international climate finance, opposed language to phase out fossil fuels, and worked to obstruct requirements to phase out fossil fuels. Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has placed dozens of fossil fuel allies in his cabinet. He has also waged broad attacks on climate and energy policies, as well as renewable energy expansion, despite data showing most Americans support the energy transition and the growth of carbon-free power. And the president has taken steps to dismantle climate research by an array of US agencies, something recent polls show is highly unpopular, even with Republicans. Trump officials have also shown animosity for multilateralism. During the negotiations, activists will be on high alert for a potential announcement that the president intends to remove the country from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty serving as the structure for intergovernmental climate policies. But in Belém, said Noel, US-based campaigners plan to “reassure our global comrades and colleagues that there’s still a robust movement in the states to maintain pressure around various forms of climate action.” That will entail putting pressure on global leaders to commit to ambitious emissions reduction and climate adaptation schemes with vigorous and realistic plans to achieve them. “We’ve got to show the rest of the world that the administration’s assault on the climate is unpopular,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, who will attend Cop30. “The United States…has always been a bad faith actor when it comes to climate action, and the biggest blocker of meaningful progress,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, a research director at Corporate Accountability. “It has walked away from doing its fair share time and time again; the only difference now is that its bad intentions are on public display for all to see more clearly.” Jackson said she expected that even without an official delegation, the US will still have its “tentacles all over the UN climate talks,” working on the sidelines with other participants such as the EU and Canada to “orchestrate their great escape from climate action. And it still controls the purse strings.” US campaigners can provide an important counterweight to that kind of pressure, activists say, from both the halls of the official Cop30 negotiations and from the demonstrations expected nearby in Belém. The protests are expected to be the largest seen at any Cop conference in years. “Those actions can help put pressure on negotiators,” said Rees. “And they can also help build people’s movements, build power and confidence to go back to national capitals and provincial capitals or state level capitals and continue that advocacy from the bottom up.” Su, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said Cop30 provided a “powerful” opportunity to show the world that climate action is not only necessary, but also popular. Though activists are under no illusions that the negotiations will be the “pinnacle of democracy,” she said they would be an important time to exercise the right to free assembly—something guaranteed in Brazil and the US alike. As experts—and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—warn that the US and other countries are creeping toward authoritarianism, Cop will allow activists to push for “people power,” Su said. “During this dark turn,” Su said, “this type of physical collective showing humanity couldn’t be more important.”

Do Donald Trump and his family “actually give a fuck” about appearing to profit from his presidency? Evidence is mounting that they don’t. Mother Jones reported yesterday on various ways that corporations, foreign governments, and random rich people with agendas are giving money and other benefits to the first family—and noted that the president and his kin have largely dispensed with even their first-term pretense of adherence to ethical norms. This view was seemingly bolstered by Arthur Schwartz, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr., who, while explaining his unwillingness to address my questions about conflicts resulting from Trump Jr.’s business ventures, texted: “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a fuck.” The president indeed did not appear overly troubled by extensive bipartisan criticism when he accepted, on Wednesday, a plane from Qatar (a country where his business just cut a deal to develop a golf resort) to use as Air Force One. And he ignored critics accusing him of corruption again on Thursday, when he hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf course rewarding 220 of the largest purchasers of his $TRUMP meme cryptocurrency, including dinner guests who said they hoped to use the access to influence him. > “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a > fuck.” “They really don’t seem to be making much of an effort to show they care about appearance of conflicts of interest or corruption,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a recent interview. As brazen as Trump’s recent actions may appear, he nevertheless has continued to argue they are not corrupt. Trump this week threatened to sue ABC News again for reporting, he said, “that Qatar is giving ME a FREE Boeing 747 Airplane”—Trump insists the plane is going to the Department of Defense, rather than to him personally, despite having repeatedly said he plans to eventually transfer it to his presidential library. White House spokespersons, too, continue to profess indignation about media reports suggesting that there is anything untoward about the president taking gifts or money from people attempting to influence him. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday. “This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.” The White House has claimed Trump’s businesses don’t create conflicts of interest because “the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.” But these arguments are belied by Trump’s failure to limit the appearance or reality that he is using his power to reward people who help enrich him. Trump continues to benefit from the family companies now run by his sons, and ethics experts note that because Trump has not set up a blind trust, the president can keep track of who is paying or investing in those firms in hopes of influencing him. The Trump Organization and White House have declined to renew modest ethics restrictions they imposed during Trump’s first term. In 2017, the Trump Organization, run by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., said it would not ink foreign deals during the Trump presidency. This time, the company is reaching foreign deals. And while they claim to be avoiding agreements with foreign governments, the Trumps are making development deals that rely on approval by foreign governments. The Trump family also appears to be benefiting from a plan by a state-backed United Arab Emirates firm to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin in a multibillion-dollar deal. Donald Trump Jr., speaking Wednesday in at an economic conference in, of all places, Qatar, elaborated on this decision. “In the first term, we actually said we’re not going to do any foreign deals,” he said. “The reality is, it didn’t stop the media from constantly saying you’re profiteering anyway. We’re like, we stopped entirely, even the deals that were totally legit, it didn’t stop the insanity. So this time around, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play by the rules,’ but we’re not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn’t matter—they’re going to hit you no matter what.” This comment raises questions about what Trump Jr. thinks padded rooms are used for, and what not “totally legit” deals he may have in mind. But it also suggests that he understands the purpose of ethical norms to be avoidance of criticism. Critics of the first family’s mix of business and politics, by contrast, are concerned about actual corruption occurring. The president and his family hear those concerns. But they don’t seem to give a fuck.

President Donald Trump insists that accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s ruling family would not amount to huge bribe. That’s because this opulent new Air Force One would go to his “library”—not to him personally—when he leaves office. That, at least, is what the president claimed amid concern that he might make personal use of a library-owned aircraft. Disputing that, he has suggested the plane would instead serve as a museum piece, like the decommissioned former Air Force One displayed at President Ronald Reagan’s library facility. It’s not yet clear whether this curious claim—that a so-called “flying palace” that US taxpayers may pay more than $1 billion to upgrade will be parked at a to-be-determined site in Florida after just a few years of use—will really come to pass. Facing rare bipartisan criticism over his plan to accept what experts call an unconstitutional emolument, Trump left Qatar Thursday without a public announcement finalizing a deal for the plane. But Trump’s explanation is part of a trend. The president, or unnamed aides, are regularly attempting to wave off ethical concerns by saying that various huge donations will eventually go to the “library.” Trump’s inaugural committee hasn’t said how much remains from the record-shattering $250 million raised via fealty displays from corporate chieftains. But the balance will go to the library, a “person close the inauguration” told the Wall Street Journal. Proceeds from the million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million-one-on-one meetings with the president—organized by the pro-Trump MAGA Inc PAC—are “all going to the library,” a “person familiar with the dinners” told Wired. Then there are Meta (owner of Facebook) and Disney (owner of ABC News), which settled dubious lawsuits Trump had filed against them by pledging $15 million and $22 million, respectively, to Trump’s presidential library foundation.   There is ample reason to be wary about how the money could ultimately be used. For one, these are pledges to give money to a organization that is only partly established. Disney, in its a settlement actually said it would transfer settlement funds “to a presidential foundation and museum” before one existed. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library was incorporated in Florida a few weeks later, apparently as a way to accept the settlement. (Meta’s January settlement, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “looks like a bribe,” is also reportedly bound for that foundation.) Modern presidential libraries are run by nonprofit foundations. They often take the form of hagiographic museums, which include a repository of presidential papers administered by the National Archives. Trump’s library foundation has not indicated if it has yet sought IRS recognition as a nonprofit, and it hasn’t publicly announced a board of directors. Trump’s record with non-profit organizations leads to additional reasons for concern. In 2019, a New York judge ordered his nonprofit Trump Foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then to dissolve entirely—after finding Trump misused the foundation to further his political and business interests. In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a suit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused nonprofit funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” Trump-owned companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.” Trump, of course, was indicted in 2023 for hiding highly classified government documents he had removed from the White House. Trump reportedly insisted the federal records, which belonged to the National Archives, were “mine.” Whether the 747 and the millions in donations and settlement money truly end up benefiting the future library—which would be run in part by the very same National Archives—remains to seen. “If past is precedent, I don’t know that we should take them at the word until we see how the money is spent,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Mother Jones. Regardless, the library itself is hardly an ethical panacea. Gifts to presidential libraries “fall between the cracks of campaign finance regulations and rules governing ethics in office,” Jacob Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, wrote in a recent op-ed arguing that presidential fundraising for libraries while in office creates a “loophole you could fly a plane through.” Levy noted that the foundations are bound only by loose rules applied to US nonprofits. Critics have labeled presidential libraries, generally, “a scam.” “The fact that, according to President Trump, the plane would not remain in service to the United States but would rather be donated to his presidential library after his term concludes further raises the possibility that this ‘nice gesture’ is intended as a bribe to Donald Trump,” Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee charged in a letter to Trump’s attorney general and White House counsel. The plan, they argued, was “corrupt.” Though legally Trump cannot simply pocket funds and assets intended for the library, he faces few other limits. He could choose to “take a salary,” Levy told Mother Jones. “He can fly around on the plane.” Trump’s ability to raise donations that he could later personally benefit from creates a major ethical issue, Levy argued. “The fact that he can solicit those contributions” from people currying his favor during his presidency, Levy said, “makes them corruption.”

Nayib Bukele is so popular with the US right that his refusal Monday to free a Maryland man with no criminal record mistakenly sent to a supermax prison in a foreign country was greeted by MAGA types as being, basically, badass. The Salvadorian president who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator” was already a Trumpworld darling partly because of his gift for authoritarian showmanship— and his apparent success reducing crime by jailing alleged criminals with little due process. But his US popularity is also the product of a years-long courtship of American right-wing influencers, media, and politicians organized by Damian Merlo, a 50-year-old Miami-based lobbyist who has become, as the Central American newspaper El Faro put it last year, “a sort of ambassador to the Trump-aligned Right” for Latin American leaders. Merlo earned more than $1.5 million for his firm since 2022 by pitching Bukele to right-leaning lawmakers and influencers, as Anna Massoglia reported Monday in her Influence Brief newsletter. Merlo did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones. Bukele’s willingness to accept and indefinitely imprison Trump administration deportees who have not been charged with a crime or afforded any meaningful due process is a policy reward that followed three years of partisan outreach overseen by Merlo. This is a new kind of foreign influence campaign that Trump has made possible: Lobbying that relies on far-right to far-right ideological affinity and aggressive embrace of MAGA messaging to win access and sway with the new administration. Traditionally, many foreign leaders have hedged their bets in the US by hiring lobbyists with ties on both sides of the aisle. But Bukele, who was elected president in 2019, has recently employed only Merlo, a guy who posted a photo of himself wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt just before the 2022 midterms and has dispensed with any pretense of outreach to Democrats. It’s working for now, though the disdain with which Bukele treated critics of Trump’s policies may prove problematic for the Salvadorian president should Democrats return to power in coming years. Merlo got his start in the business of lobbying on behalf of foreign strongmen when he worked as a vice president at Otto Reich and Associates, according to an online bio. That’s the lobbying firm founded by Reich, the Cuban-American extremist exile who played a prominent role in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. From his post as head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, Reich worked with Col. Oliver North to manipulate the US media to generate support for the Nicaraguan guerillas against the Sandinista government. In 1987, a report from the Comptroller General found that Reich’s office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” that were “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.” Reich in 2006 famously praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet claiming that he had “saved Chilean democracy from communist takeover.” Merlo later worked for the International Republican Institute, a right-leaning nonprofit group that has been accused of working to overthrow Democratic governments it dislikes, including Haiti’s in 2004. Still, after striking out on his own, Merlo also worked as a special assistant to Haiti’s former president Michel Martelly, and as a lobbyist for that country. Last year, the US government officially sanctioned Martelly for his involvement in drug trafficking and ties to the armed criminal gangs that have terrorized the poor country. Merlo, who is Argentinian, has also worked for Argentina’s President Javier Milei. According to FARA filings, he began working for Bukele in 2020, helping efforts to boost US investment in El Salvador. Merlo has said that he helped arrange that country’s much-hyped adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a policy which, under IMF pressure, was quietly undone last month. But as a PR stunt, the move was a success, drawing attention to El Salvador as a crypto-friendly outpost, at least according to Merlo. “We call it the Great Rebranding. It was genius,” Merlo told Time. “We could have paid millions to a PR firm to rebrand El Salvador. Instead, we just adopted Bitcoin.” (Merlo has since become a lobbyist for the crypto-currency company Tether.) Merlo in 2023 and 2024 lobbied MAGA figures including Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo.,) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for Bukele, according to Foreign Agent Registration Act filings and news reports. Last November, Merlo met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). Merlo’s recent filing said, vaguely, that all his lobbying contacts were “about the importance of fostering strong dialogue between the US and El Salvador.” Merlo has made himself a fixture in Trumpworld, with appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago—“It’s the place to be and the place to be seen,” he told Fortune last year—accompanying Bukele on a trip to visit SpaceX with Elon Musk, and meeting at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference with Matt Schlapp, chairman of the conference, and Schlapp’s wife Mercedes, who is one of Trump’s former communications directors. > What an honor to join @nayibbukele and @elonmusk – aim for the stars and > you’ll get to mars – maybe meet a few aliens along the way! @SpaceX @Tesla > pic.twitter.com/5XyXKsEQC8 > > — Damian (@Damianmerlo) September 21, 2024 Merlo has also had extensive contacts with right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson. In May last year, the former Fox News host interviewed him, characterizing his leadership as a model for the US. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” Tucker gushed in a post promoting the interview. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.” > President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving > the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI > > — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024 Carlson has been a reliable Bukele booster, even promoting a February interview in which Bukele claimed that “MS-13 participates in Satanic child sacrifice rituals.” The Salvadoran constitution limits the national presidency to a single five-year term. But after taking office in 2019, Bukele systematically purged the judicial system of independent judges and replaced the members of the Supreme Court with his loyalists, who green-lighted his run for a second term. Merlo sprung into action, arranging for MAGA luminaires to attend Bukele’s swearing-in last June. The power grab didn’t stop a gaggle of Americans from celebrating Bukele’s reelection. Trump Jr., his then-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, since nominated as US Ambassador to Greece, Carlson, Lee, and Gaetz were among the attendees. Democratic Reps. Lou Correa of California and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas also attended the inauguration, in a small nod at bipartisanship.  The US visitors were ushered to restaurants and new Google offices, taken on a tour of the newly safe downtown San Salvador, and watched as Bukele—clad in what Time called “a striking suit with a stiff, gold-embroidered collar and cuffs that evoked a cross between Latin American revolutionary war heroes and Star Wars”—was inaugurated for what has been seen as an illegal second term. Merlo celebrated the event as “the hottest ticket in the Americas.” After returning to the US, Gaetz helped form a new El Salvador Caucus in Congress. The former Florida congressman described it as a sort of Bukele fan club, saying it aimed to “nurture and advance the US-El Salvador relationship to encourage strong borders, strong culture, and the strong reforms that President Bukele has put into effect.” “Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well,” Gaetz said. “So that we can experience a triumphant return of safety and prosperity that we once inspired in others.” > “Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the > great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well.” Soon after, Gaetz headed south again to visit the notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration is now sending Venezuelan immigrants and where the president has discussed sending American citizens. Gaetz touted the prison in a slickly-produced video, touted by Bukele on X, that foreshadowed the video of Venezuelan migrants arriving there, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s infamous Rolex-accessorized appearance at the facility. Behind the scenes, Merlo was involved. He appeared in a still shot of a sunglasses-adorned Gaetz standing in a hallway amid cells in a video that CNN used in a story on Gaetz’s visit. “Courtesy Damian Merlo,” the photo’s tagline says. Shortly after Trump’s election last year, Merlo penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald, bashing Joe Biden’s policies and urging the incoming Trump administration to look to El Salvador as a “model” for addressing the root causes of illegal immigration. “President Bukele’s crackdown on crime has made El Salvador the safest country in the region, fueling economic growth and even reversing migration flows,” Merlo wrote. Rubio, whom Trump had just nominated as Secretary of State, “understands this model well, having visited El Salvador and witnessed its success under Bukele’s leadership,” Merlo noted. The op-ed identified Merlo as “a Republican strategist and Latin America expert” and “president of the Latin America Advisory Group, a PR and government relations firm based in Miami.” It did not say that Merlo worked for Bukele. Following an inquiry by Mother Jones, the Herald updated the tagline of the piece with a correction stating that the paper had failed to follow its guidelines on the piece. “The Herald did not disclose in this commentary that Merlo’s company had El Salvador as a client,” the note said. One lobbying priority for El Salvador, promoted by Gaetz and the El Salvador caucus, has been to have the State Department to upgrade the country’s travel advisory to Level One, a designation that ranked the country as a safer tourist spot than many European countries. Last week the State Department complied, upgrading its guidance for El Salvador, long known for its US-trained death squads and MS-13 gangs, suggesting it is now a safer place for Americans to vacation than France. (The advisory presumably is not intended for Venezuelan asylum seekers forcibly sent to El Salvador because they have tattoos.) Announcing the change, Rubio credited Buklele’s leadership as “crucial in improving the security of his country for foreign travelers.”

As massive protests swept through the capitals of Hungary and Serbia in recent days, the embattled and increasingly autocratic leaders of both countries moved to crack down on critics, who, they insisted, have received quiet assistance from a hostile foreign entity: the United States Agency for International Development. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic, facing protests over economic conditions and corruption, have attributed their political woes to foreign conspiracies. They’ve blamed the movements threatening their power on EU bureaucrats in Brussels, on the 94-year-old George Soros, and—inspired by the actions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk—on USAID. In Budapest Saturday, tens of thousands demonstrated against Orban amid anger over inflation. The right-wing populist leader—who has trailed a center-right opponent in polls ahead of an election next year—vowed to purge critics at non-governmental organizations and media outlets that, he claims, were paid by the EU and the United States. “After today’s festive gathering comes the Easter cleaning,” Orban said. “The bugs have overwintered. We will dismantle the financial machine that has used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs and political activists. We will eliminate the entire shadow army.” Those remarks seemingly referenced Orban’s vow last month to go “line by line” through pro-democracy organizations in Hungary that have received US funding in an bid to “make their existence legally impossible.” In Belgrade on Saturday, a crowd the government said was just over 100,000 people—and which protesters said was at least 300,000—rallied in the city center against President Vucic, another right-leaning populist. The assembly was part of a mounting anti-corruption protest movement set off by the November collapse of a concrete canopy at a train station that killed 15 people. Critics have blamed the disaster on shoddy work by contractors and alleged corruption by government officials. But Vucic has called the movement a “color revolution,” using a term popularized by Vladimir Putin to suggest protesters are part of a western-funded regime-change effort. And recently, he has added USAID to the constellation of groups he says are part of the plot against him. Vucic last month cited Trump’s attack on USAID to justify raids against good-government groups, some of which had received modest funding from the agency. When a Serbian journalist last month asked Vucic about his son’s alleged links to criminals, the president responded: “How much money have you received from USAID?” Such rhetoric has quickly become common among governments in central and eastern Europe. Leaders are using Trump’s and Musk’s hyperbolic and often false attacks on USAID—including Musk’s claim that the agency is a “criminal organization”—as a cudgel to attack domestic critics and civil society. In Georgia, increasingly pro-Russian and autocratic Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has cheered Trump’s suspension of foreign aid and has accused USAID of joining in a “coordinated” attack on Georgian interests, the Guardian has reported. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico—who critics accuse of dismantling anti-corruption efforts to help political allies facing prosecution—has similarly celebrated the attacks on USAID and has asked Musk for information on past US support for non-governmental groups in that country. But the trend of adopting USAID as a bogeyman looks particularly ominous in Serbia and Hungary, as those countries’ leaders edge toward using past US support, real or alleged, as an excuse to shut down democratic opposition. “We are certainly seeing this played out in Hungary and Serbia with Orban and [Vucic] using Musk’s and others’ negative statements about USAID as a justification for cracking down on some groups that received USAID funding,” said Thomas Carothers, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump and his allies aren’t simply enabling such efforts—they are encouraging them. In a visit last week to Serbia, Donald Trump Jr. used his podcast to conduct a fawning interview with Vucic, in which the US president’s son eagerly amplified the Serbian leader’s claim that USAID funds were part of an international conspiracy aimed at undermining the Vucic government. Trump Jr. asked if the canopy collapse that set off was anti-corruption protests in Serbia had been “weaponized, perhaps like our January 6.” Vucic said he had already reached that conclusion: “I was saying the same to my people here,” he claimed. Asked by Trump Jr. about the extent to which the protests against him are “manufactured,” the Serbian president indicated the movement is wholly the work NGOs funded by USAID and other foreign organizations. “I am absolutely certain that your father and…Elon Musk and some others guys, they can recognize it easily,” Vucic said.

Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders that signaled his intent to remake the federal government—including one that paused all US foreign assistance for 90 days. The order was the first in a series of extraordinary moves that have upended the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and halted crucial, life-saving work around the world. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is on a trip to El Salvador, told reporters that he is now the acting director of USAID and that some of its functions would continue within the State Department—after a review to ensure that these programs are aligned with the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.  Foreign assistance has long been a hallmark of America’s role in the world, regardless of which party occupies the White House or controls Congress. The underlying principle is that while feeding the hungry and treating the sick are worthy efforts, doing so is also beneficial to long-term American interests in national security and trade. When USAID shipments of medical supplies arrived in Liberia during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the boxes read “FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”  The United States is the world’s single largest provider of foreign assistance, though this accounts for only one percent of the six trillion dollar federal budget. In 2023, Congress allocated $66 billion for foreign aid, which is administered through the State Department and USAID. Through bipartisan negotiations, Congress determines how foreign aid is spent on everything from disaster relief and public health to foreign military assistance and democracy promotion. Humanitarian assistance is primarily distributed by USAID, which funds partner agencies on the ground.   In the two short weeks since Trump took office, his administration has enacted an unprecedented stoppage of foreign aid and a dramatic overhaul of staff at USAID. On January 24, the State Department issued a “stop work” order for existing and new programs, with exceptions for emergency food assistance and military aid to Israel and Egypt. Though Rubio later issued an additional waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” aid workers said that the exemptions are unclear and vital programs had already been disrupted. There were reports that soup kitchens had shut down in famine-stricken Sudan. In Thailand, hospitals treating refugees fleeing the conflict in Myanmar had suspended care. In South Africa, HIV patients were turned away from US-funded clinics.  Last week, more than fifty career civil servants and foreign service officers at USAID were placed on administrative leave, followed by layoffs of nearly 400 contract employees.  To Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as a high-level political appointee at USAID during both the Biden and second Obama administrations, this was a sign that the Trump administration did not intend to perform a good-faith review of the efficacy of foreign aid programs. “This is a ‘destroy the village in order to save it’ approach,” Konyndyk, now the president of Refugees International, told me on Friday when we spoke about the foreign aid pause and the havoc inside USAID.  The future of USAID remains murky, though the Trump administration’s plans are beginning to erratically take shape. Over the weekend, Elon Musk, who is leading the government efficiency taskforce DOGE, described USAID as a “criminal organization” on X, and suggested it was “time for it to die.” Early on Monday, Musk added that Trump had given him approval to “shut it down.” After some employees were prevented from entering USAID headquarters, a group of Senate and House Democrats held a press conference condemning the administration’s actions. “Musk and his band of unelected acolytes at DOGE have… thrown the agency into chaos through a concerted campaign of harassment and intimidation of its employees,” Don Beyer, a congressman from Virginia, told reporters.  The conversation below was edited for length and clarity. How has aid and assistance traditionally fit into American foreign policy? Is it typically a priority across party lines? Leaders of both parties have, at least for the last 20 years, understood that doing good in the world is, in and of itself, an important US national interest. We operate very distinctly from, say, the way China approaches its partnerships with low-income countries. We are not doing this on a transactional basis, though we do derive benefits. But we’re not saying, “We will give you foreign aid only if you do x.”  For example, during Covid 19, which I was directly involved with, the vaccine diplomacy models of the US and China were wildly different. China’s model was they would go and they would charge extremely high prices for vaccines while demanding policy concessions. So a number of countries had to agree to remove recognition of Taiwan in order to get Chinese vaccines. Some did agree because at that time, during the tail end of the first Trump administration, the US was not sharing any vaccines. But once the US started donating our vaccines, they vastly preferred working with us. We provided them free of cost, on a humanitarian basis. It demonstrated that the partnership between those countries and the United States was one based on shared values. The Trump administration has talked about US foreign aid as a transactional tool, that we will give it to countries who do what we want and not to countries who don’t. That removes a huge strategic comparative advantage that we have vis a vis China. When it is so baldly extractive, it almost feels like extortion. To come to the executive order that President Trump signed on his first day in office, which temporarily suspended foreign assistance programs for 90 days. Can you contextualize that? Has this ever happened before?  There’s no precedent for that. It’s not uncommon for a new administration to come in and do a review, but it’s not appropriate to stop everything while you’re doing that. It’s akin to deciding that you don’t like the destination of the plane, so you’re just going to turn the engine off and crash it into the ground.  It is going to irreparably harm our foreign assistance capacity and waste enormous amounts of taxpayer resources. The administration has said they don’t like the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and other so-called “woke” programs. Frankly, I’m not even sure what that means in the context of foreign aid. But those can be rooted out in a much more surgical way, if that’s truly the goal.  The executive order described the foreign aid industry and bureaucracy as “not aligned with American interests, and in many cases, antithetical to American values.” Is there a sense that the administration thinks of the practice of foreign aid at large, as something that has become politicized?  They clearly do. One of the things that was very interesting to me, having served at USAID twice as a political appointee, was that to the career staff, their day-to- day ability to have an impact was often pretty unrelated to which party was in control. There were some who were able to do great things during the Trump administration and then ran into challenges during the Biden administration.  > “Frankly, it won’t be possible to reopen many of these programs in three > months’ time. Already, many of the organizations that work with the US > government, both domestically and internationally, are laying off staff.” But fundamentally, as career government servants, you are going with the flow of whichever party is in charge. That is an ethos that’s deeply embedded in the career government service, particularly in the foreign affairs agencies, and it’s an ethos that I think the Trump administration has never understood. They could advance their agenda much more effectively if they treated those in the building as professionals rather than as adversaries On January 24, the State Department put out a “stop work” order for both existing and future aid, with some exceptions for emergency food programs and foreign military aid. What did that look like in the agency and in the countries where aid is being performed? It prompted mass confusion within the US government about how this should be implemented, because the guidance was unclear, and there was really no template or precedent for how you do something like that. There was mass confusion amongst the partners providing aid on the ground in terms of what this meant for them. It meant pulling critical, life-saving relief out of refugee camps. It meant shutting down clinics—a lot of people will needlessly die from lack of health services.   Frankly, it won’t be possible to reopen many of these programs in three months’ time. Already, many of the organizations that work with the US government, both domestically and internationally, are laying off staff. They cannot keep the lights on.  There has been a dramatic overhaul of staffing at USAID, with some senior staff being placed on leave and hundreds of contract employees being laid off. What is the potential impact of this?  Nothing like this has happened before, and it is debilitating to the US government’s ability to meaningfully oversee and account for foreign assistance. I care deeply about the morale and the well-being of the staff who’ve been let go. But even if you don’t care about that, I would hope you care about the effective oversight of taxpayer money. Contract employers are doing the day-to-day legwork that makes that place run—from grant administration to data analytics.  What I take away from these layoffs, apart from the obvious cruelty and capriciousness of it, is that this is not how you would approach a genuine review of foreign aid. I worked very closely with the Global Health Bureau when I was at USAID, and around 50 percent of their employees are contractors. You would not suddenly halve the workforce if you expected any of this to continue.   On January 27, most of the agency’s senior leadership was put on involuntary administrative leave, including much of the general counsel’s office. That included two ethics attorneys, whose job is to advise political appointees on what they can and can’t legally do. This is exactly what you would do if you were seeking to remove any constraints to the destruction of the agency and any constraints to unlawful behavior. You get rid of all the career officials who are able to stand in your way, and all the lawyers who can tell you that what you’re doing is unlawful.  What do these early moves from the administration around foreign aid herald for the future role of the US in the world? It becomes a United States that is much diminished. This shows, in practice, what an “America First” approach to foreign policy and national security looks like: pulling back from the world, pulling back from helping people who have long relied on their partnerships with the US government. It is an America that, on the world stage, is smaller, stingier, meaner, and, ultimately, much less respected and much less influential.