Among the many questions that divide Americans so deeply right now is one that pains me to pose:

Should we be ashamed of our country?

Last year, when I left ABC News, I decided to call my new platform here (and soon elsewhere) “Real Patriotism,” and I did it for a reason.

Johanna—my wife and the person who knows me best, and who, I assure you, does not view me through any kind of rose-tinted spectacles—she says the only thing I love more than her is our country. That’s wrong; she’s my life. But she’s directionally correct.

I do love this country something fierce, and I’ve never agreed with those who see in our national journey only the darknesses, and judge us to be not only no better but worse than most other nations. That does not track with the facts as I see them.

Every people sins. Every people fails to live up to its own ideals. Every people has dark chapters in their history.

But Americans made a radical promise to ourselves and to the world at the moment of our birth as a nation, a promise we were betraying even as we made it, a promise we have failed to this day to fulfill. You know it in your bones: All are created equal, and in this country, the radical force of that truth will drive us, whether we like it or not.

The fact that we made that promise—however hypocritically, however much we have betrayed it—defines and distinguishes us. And that force has in fact driven us—haltingly, stumblingly, two steps forward and one step back again and again—to a better society. Lincoln understood that. So did Obama. So do most Americans.

Does Donald Trump? Does MAGA?

By the most credible accounting we have, the dismantling of USAID has killed somewhere north of 760,000 people in its first year—more than half of them children. That number comes from ImpactCounter, the peer-reviewed mortality tracker built by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, who began modeling the carnage within four days of the January 2025 aid freeze.

The breakdown: PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history—was gutted by Trump. Those cuts have produced more than 158,000 adult deaths and 16,000 child deaths.

The unlawful destruction of USAID has added more than 164,000 child deaths from pneumonia, 125,000 from diarrhea, 70,000 from malaria, and 48,000 from tuberculosis.

These are not forecasts. These are people who were alive when Donald Trump took the oath of office and are dead now.

The verdict issued by The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, is grimmer still. A July 2025 study by researchers in the United States, Spain, Brazil, and Mozambique concluded that USAID had prevented more than 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021, roughly 30 million of them children. Forecasting models from the same team project more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five, if current cuts hold.

For this, we are told, something extraordinary was bought. Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget called the cuts “egregious examples of blatant government waste and abuse.” Musk called USAID a criminal organization.

President Trump—with his usual contempt for truth—called it a den of radical lunatics. And DOGE’s website has boasted, at various points, of $170 billion, $150 billion, and roughly $202 billion in savings.

Now the receipts.

Foreign aid was about 1 percent of federal spending — roughly 17 cents per American per day, around $64 a year. Even by DOGE’s own inflated numbers, the dollars are a rounding error against the deficit. By the honest numbers, they are nothing at all.

What about the fraud?

They keep screaming about massive fraud.

They have found virtually none.

Vought told the Senate Appropriations Committee in June 2025 that the rescission package would claw back $9.3 million spent advising Russian doctors on abortion technique, $35 million on vasectomy messaging in Ethiopia, and $800,000 on Nepalese prostitution rings.

Even if you hate those projects and think its smart to cut them—a fair argument—that is less than a pittance in the scale of things. And even then—Vought has produced NO DOCUMENTATION for his claims. Federal law forbids the use of federal funds for abortions overseas, and USAID has not operated in Russia since Putin expelled it.

Paul Martin, the USAID inspector general Trump fired in February 2025, told NPR that as far as he knew, DOGE had never once referred to his office’s actual criminal fraud allegations. NPRWSIU Public Broadcasting

The “waste” was a story for Fox News hits. The cuts were the point.

Three-quarters of a million people are dead. The methodology is peer-reviewed. The mortality counter ran in real time, on the open internet.

And yet the subject has slid from the front pages, from cable, from the Sunday shows, from the well of the Senate. Nobody cares.

Half a million children die from diseases we used to treat. No hearings of consequence. No special counsel. No prosecutions.

Brooke Nichols—professor of global health at Boston University and the founder of ImpactCounter told GBH News that about once a week she looks at her own numbers and cries: “None of this had to happen.” She is astonished Americans are not angrier.

So am I.

Tocqueville understood that the strength of a free people lives in its habits—habits of association, of mutual aid, of moral self-rule. We had habits, in our better moments.

We had a habit of feeding a hungry child in northern Nigeria. We had a habit of putting antiretrovirals in the hands of a mother in Lesotho so she would not pass the virus to her newborn. We had a habit of being the country that showed up.

A habit is hard to build. It is the work of generations. But it can be broken in a single season of MAGA vandalsim.

We broke ours. The children are dead and dying because of us, as are so many others.

And we don’t even talk about it any more.

—Terry