How the leopard ate your face

And other tales of the vibe shift

Being a bookend to last weekend’s satire on bullies

Once Upon A Time, O My Best Beloved, there was a Republican senator from the state of Kansas - that Time being last week. And he was pleading for the new president to undo one of his first actions – effectively dismantling the USAID organisation with no notice. Moran’s particular concern was with the $340 million of food aid that was stranded at US ports awaiting shipment. "Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes”, said Moran, "Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low."

For the best part of seventy two years the farmers of Kansas – the Wheat State - have sold much of their produce to USAID and other agencies under a programme called Food for Peace. At the time that Moran made his plea the webpages for Food for Peace and all of USAID websites had been shut down. A day or so earlier Elon Musk had gone on his platform to tell his millions of followers that while they had been relaxing, “We [the team at the supposedly advisory Department for Government Efficiency or DOGE] spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper." In another post he explained that "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die”. Donald Trump, questioned about Musk’s actions seemed to endorse them when he wrote off the 20.000 plus USAID employees as “radical lunatics”.

Jerry Moran is a hardline conservative, pro-gun, anti-abortion and all the rest of it. But his state not only benefits from the food sales, it is also proud of what it has achieved. A Republican Congressman in a speech last year expressed his gratitude to the founders of the programme, “two brave Kansans who saw America's ability to answer the noble calling to feed a hungry world and to recognizing it as the morally right, strategically wise, and fiscally responsible thing to do."

Food for Peace is just one of a plethora of programmes run by or funded by USAID. During the Biden administration Republican Senator Marco Rubio from Florida urged the White House to support the budget requests for USAID in order to “send a clear message that United States has a comprehensive strategy to counter the Chinese communist parties expanding global influence and the increasing threat that it poses to US security interest in those of our allies and partners”. Rubio also praised USAID’s work in tackling tuberculosis and malaria, supporting child health and maternal care programmes and giving support to democratic elections around the world.

Now Rubio is Donald Trump’s Secretary of State (ie Foreign Secretary) and the question of how best to further America’s influence around the world is nominally one for him to answer. Can he row back on a decision which seemed to leave USAID American employees abroad 30 days to relocate their families? Which will see 40,000 Kenyan health workers suddenly unfunded? Which has left those tackling a new Ebola outbreak in Uganda in limbo?

On Saturday morning Moran was able to announce that he had good news and that Rubio had “approved shipping to resume, allowing NGOs to distribute the $560 million of American-grown food aid sitting in US & global ports to those in need.” The leopard had, for the moment, decided not to eat his face.

That expression is one of two irritating phrases that will recur in this article. It originates in a tweet from 2015 after a woman on Question Time was heard to complain that although she was a Conservative voter, the party had let her down in an entirely predictable way. An Adrian Bott commented under a picture, “’I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party”. A relative of the frog and scorpion story the expression denotes pleasurable if angry schadenfreude that sometimes people have done what you strongly advised them not to do and are now suffering for it. Moran and his state (by 57% to 41%) backed Trump, especially voters in rural areas, and now nemesis in the shape of the richest man in the world had come for them and their food aid to the poorest people in the world.

Others finding their faces being chewed included Venezuelans who had enjoyed Temporary Protected Status status and had now had this revoked making them liable for deportation. Many had supported Trump, with one woman telling journalists that the community felt used. “During the campaign, the elected officials from the Republican Party, they actually told us that he was not going to touch the documented people. They said, 'No, it is with undocumented people.'"

Never mind the leopards, feel the vibe shift

But these are migrant faces no-one much cares about. We are in the early days and the most recent poll conducted by CBS shows approval for Trump standing at 59% - a very high figure. The blizzard of initiatives taken in the weeks since his inauguration – the “flooding of the zone” – has created the impression of intense activity well in advance of any kind of assessment of what these changes mean (or indeed, whether many of them are legal).

Even so, and despite the administration being in its infancy, we are being invited by some intellectuals to contemplate something they call a “vibe shift”. In essence, it is suggested, we should take note of a wholesale global movement from weedy liberalism towards intensely active… er. Towards intensely active what? Not conservatism certainly, because conserving is the last thing on its inchoate agenda.