CNN’s smuggest host, Anderson Cooper, got absolutely blown out of the water on Monday, February 5, when he tried going on a tedious and tiresome screed about the Trump Administration’s efforts to reign in wasteful government spending by shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Particularly, Cooper was upset that Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk had announced that DOGE would be utterly destroying USAID, as he posted on X, saying, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” That was then confirmed by Marco Rubio.
It was about that subject that CNN’s Anderson Cooper freaked out on his show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” alongside fellow far-left CNN contributor Van Jones. The two went on the warpath over the financial measure, with Van Jones even declaring that people would “die in very large numbers around the world” because individuals on medication for HIV delivered for free through USAID’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) wouldn’t be getting it anymore, at least through that channel.
Shutting down Van Jones’ claims about PEPFAR and USAID generally, GOP strategist Brad Todd pushed back on it and explained what’s really going on with the funding situation, saying, “That’s not an event today. Marco Rubio wrote congressional leaders to explain their moves on USAID and why they’re moving it to the State Department.”
That’s when Anderson Cooper chimed in and essentially accused the Trump Administration of targeting its attacks on the HIV-afflicted, whereas in reality nearly all funding from USAID was paused. He said, trying to silence Todd, that Van Jones was “specifically talking about HIV medication and PEPFAR.”
That’s when Todd really fired back and shut down Anderson Cooper by pointing to the facts of USAID’s inception and what it ought be used for, rather than just broad spending around the world. He said, “Well, hold on just a second. The goal is to make sure the programs and the people administering them align with U.S. foreign policy goals. You know, we started USAID in 1961 as a way to counter the Soviet Union’s influence. Today, we need to use it to counter the Belt and Road Initiative is China.”
Cooper sounded like a broken record, responding not by disputing the point but by freaking out about it. He said, losing it over the idea that USAID funding would draw to a close, “But PEPFAR, which is what Van was talking about, was actually started by George W. Bush, and it saved 25 million lives over it since that time.”
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The two then continued to argue about the program, with Todd eventually returning to his main point, which is that whatever money is spent through USAID should be focused on making American citizens better off, something that seems far from being the case with the current program and its bloated administration, along with the general sorts of things the money was being spent on. Watch them argue here:
Featured image credit; screengrab from the embedded video