Heather Cox Richardson 

 

Trump’s announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed, but it drove stock futures dramatically downward. Overseas, global markets also plunged. Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Fittingly, it was former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who rang the bell opening the stock market today. Giuliani represented Newsmax, the right-wing media channel with ties to Trump. As soon as the market opened, stocks fell straight down. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1,679 points, falling about 4%, its biggest fall since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020. The S&P 500 fell 274 points, or 4.8%. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1,050 points, or almost 6%. The losses wiped out about $2 trillion.

Trump justified the tariffs by declaring that the U.S. is in the midst of a national emergency, but this afternoon he left the White House for a long weekend in Florida, where his private Doral resort outside of Miami is holding the first domestic golf tournament of the season of LIV Golf, which is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s tariffs are not an economic policy. Tariffs are generally imposed on products, not on nations. By placing them on countries, the White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs—a suggestion so outlandish that I dismissed when I saw it last night, but economist Paul Krugman today identified it as being a likely possibility. CNBC’s Steve Liesman said: “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along....”

Today, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted: “It’s now clear that the [Trump] Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”

Editor of The American Prospect David Dayen notes that there is no apparent policy behind the tariffs, no thought, for example, as to whether it is even possible for the U.S. to ramp up the kind of domestic manufacturing Trump claims to want. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS, “You’re going to see employment leaping starting today,” in fact, both automaker Stellantis and appliance manufacturer Whirlpool announced layoffs because of the tariffs.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that building and establishing a new plant in the U.S. will take a minimum of three to five years even if investors are inclined to support one, but Victoria Guida reported in Politico that corporate executives are saying they cannot invest in manufacturing until they can project costs, and Trump is far too unpredictable to enable them to do that with any confidence.

Dayen writes that Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world. His behavior is, Dayen says, “no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.” Dayen notes that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued last year for using the extraordinary power of the U.S. economy to force other countries to do as the U.S. wants, creating a U.S. sphere of influence through economic pressure.

Extending the comparison to a mob boss, Dayen notes that “protection money” could take many forms: “curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants.”

Trump’s son Eric appeared to confirm that the tariffs are a shakedown when he posted: “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with [Trump]. The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.…” Foreign affairs journalist David Rothkopf was more graphic: “These aren’t tariffs,” he wrote. “They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggested that if a government refused to negotiate with Trump, that country’s major companies should deal directly with Trump, exempting that company’s products from tariffs in exchange for a new factory or some other investment Trump wants.

Trump is overturning the past 80 years of global trade cooperation in order to concentrate power in his own hands. Congress began to take down the tariff walls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it passed the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act enabling the president to lower the high tariff rates Republicans had established with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. That tariff had worsened the Great Depression. With the turn away from tariff walls and toward international cooperation, global trade has fostered international cooperation and created the rising prosperity of the twentieth century.

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States…is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

Ending systems of global free trade dovetails with the idea of getting rid of the international rules-based order created after World War II. After that horrific war, world leaders decided to create a system of international institutions, like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide ways in which countries could protect their sovereignty and work out their differences without going to war.

Trump’s threats against other countries, including Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, are a direct rejection of those principles. That rejection reinforces the Trump regime’s embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which invaded Ukraine first in 2014 and again in 2022 and is trying to justify grabbing Ukrainian territory. Under Trump, the U.S. is siding with Russia rather than Ukraine in this war in a stunning rejection of the institutions and principles that have stabilized the globe since World War II.

Putin is now threatening NATO countries, prompting them to prepare for defense. “We are not at war,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said recently, “but we are certainly not at peace either.”

Some of those advocating tariff walls and forcing our allies to maintain their own defense suggest that creating a U.S. sphere of influence is the best way to counter a rising China, but there is no doubt that the concept of such spheres caters to the worldview of Russian and Chinese leaders. As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder points out, weakening the U.S. and its allies also benefits Russia by increasing Russia’s power relative to other countries, making it easier to establish the multipolar world Russia wants.

The Trump administration is also undermining post–World War II democracy at home. Last night, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) identified Trump’s tariffs as “a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.” Murphy pointed to Trump’s shakedown of prominent law firms, four of which he has attacked with executive orders. He also pointed to Trump’s attacks on universities, withholding government funding until their administrators bow to MAGA’s ideological demands.

Sarah D. Wire of USA Today reported that earlier this week the Institute for Museum and Library Studies was effectively closed, and over the past two days the administration told libraries across the country that grants awarded last year have been terminated. Today the administration cut federal grants for arts and humanities across the country: museums, archives, historic sites, educational projects, and so on—all defunded. It also cut this year’s funding for National History Day, a popular history program in schools that is already underway.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services slashed jobs and programs in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even as measles continues to spread and two Louisiana infants have died of whooping cough. Today, news broke that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is implementing a hiring freeze even as flash floods and tornadoes just today have killed at least seven people in the Midwest to the mid-South.

The plan, as Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands.

The administration’s crusade against the state of Maine shows what this looks like. After Maine governor Janet Mills told Trump the state would follow state and federal law rather than bow to his demands, acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek canceled contracts permitting Maine parents to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns from the hospital and for Maine families to report deaths from funeral homes. Told such a change would risk identity theft and wasteful spending, Dudek told the agency to do it anyway in order to punish Mills.

After an outcry, Dudek backtracked, but yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced she was freezing federal funds for Maine educational programs. The Trump administration would stand against “a leftist social agenda,” Rollins wrote.

The problem for Republicans is that while the sort of inflammatory language Rollins used has been a staple of the party for decades, the MAGA agenda itself is not popular. Only about 4% of voters who knew about Project 2025 wanted to see it enacted, and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs the “Department of Government Efficiency” that is slashing through government programs, is so unpopular that his support for a candidate in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election actually appeared to have hurt, rather than helped, that candidate.

Now party members have to deal with the fact their president has tanked the economy by enacting what the National Review says is likely the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history. Now countries around the globe are imposing reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. while also negotiating their own trade agreements that cut out the U.S. Those agreements are not only for products like soybeans, but also for weapons, a development the administration is protesting.

Republican members of Congress could stop Trump at any time. In the case of tariffs, they could simply reassert their constitutional power to manage tariffs. If they choose not to and the economy doesn’t recover and thrive as Trump keeps promising, voters can be expected to hold them, as well as him, to account.

Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.

Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”

 

David Rawlings - Lindsey Button

A pretty young girl come down the mountain Lindsey Button, Lindsey Button A pretty young girl come down the mountain A long time ago

Trump Exec Order Gives DOGE Access to Voter Rolls

 "No joke. On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump issued an extraordinary Executive Order that would give “the DOGE Administrator,” that is, Elon Musk, access to the voter files of every state for the purpose of purging millions of Americans from voter rolls as suspected “non-citizens.”

 The Brennan Center for Justice of New York University’s School of Law warned, when Trump first suggested this plan, “the lie of non-citizen voting…could lead to the purging of hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.” But Brennan wildly underestimated Trump’s and Musk’s ambitions. “Hundreds of thousands” could be purged in a single state.

Take Georgia. In a pre-dawn call today, Gerald Griggs, the President of the NAACP of Georgia, told me that the Georgia Secretary of State is about to remove 466,000 voters from the rolls, notably, four times Trump’s “victory” margin last year."

read report bY Greg Palast

Trump Exec Order Gives DOGE Access to Voter Rolls

Bread Lines and Salty Drinking Water:

 

Shipments surged into Gaza after Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire, even if they weren’t enough. Then Israel blocked the border again to pressure Hamas in truce talks.

 

By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair

Photographs and Video by Saher Alghorra

Outside the Zadna Bakery in central Gaza one recent afternoon, the long lines of people waiting for bread were threatening to dissolve into chaos at any minute.

A security guard shouted at the crowds that pushed toward the bakery door to wait their turn. But no one was listening.

Just a few steps away, scalpers were hawking loaves they had gotten earlier that day for three times the original price. The sunset meal that breaks Muslims’ daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan was approaching and across Gaza, bread, water, cooking gas and other basics were hard to come by — once again.

Lines had not been this desperate, nor markets this empty, since before the Israel-Hamas cease-fire took hold on Jan. 19. The truce had allowed aid to surge into Gaza for the first time after 15 months of conflict during which residents received only a trickle of supplies.

But no aid has gotten in since March 2. That was the day Israel blocked all goods in a bid to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the current cease-fire stage and releasing more hostages sooner, instead of moving to the next phase, which would involve more challenging negotiations to permanently end to the war.

Now, the aid cutoff, exacerbated by panic buying and unscrupulous traders who gouge prices, is driving prices to levels that few can afford. Shortages of fresh vegetables and fruit and rising prices are forcing people to once again fall back on canned food such as beans.

Though the canned food provides calories, experts say, people — and children in particular — need a diverse diet that includes fresh foods to stave off malnutrition.

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A family preparing food to break the daytime fast for the holy month of Ramadan in the rubble of their destroyed home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, this month.

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Children filling water bottles in Gaza City last month.

For the first six weeks of the cease-fire, aid workers and traders delivered food for Gazans, many still weak from months of malnutrition. Medical supplies for bombed-out hospitals, plastic pipes to restore water supplies and fuel to power everything also began to flow in.

Data from aid groups and the United Nations showed that children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers were eating better. And more centers started offering treatment for malnutrition, the United Nations said.

These were only small steps toward relieving the devastation wrought by the war, which destroyed more than half of Gaza’s buildings and put many of its two million residents at risk of famine.

Even with the sharp increase in aid after the truce began, Gaza health officials reported that at least six newborn babies had died from hypothermia in February for lack of warm clothes, blankets, shelter or medical care, a figure cited by the United Nations. The reports could not be independently verified.

Most hospitals remain only partly operational, if at all.

Aid groups, the United Nations and several Western governments have urged Israel to allow shipments to resume, criticizing its use of humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in negotiations and, in some cases, saying that the cutoff violates international law.

Instead, Israel is turning up the pressure.

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Tents for displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza last month.

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Refilling gas bottles in Gaza City last month. With fuel blocked, it has been tough to find gas for vehicles and cooking gas for food.

Last Sunday, it severed electricity supplies to the territory — a move that shuttered most operations at a water desalination plant and deprived about 600,000 people in central Gaza of clean drinking water, according to the United Nations.

The Israeli energy minister has hinted that a water cutoff might be next. Some wells are still functioning in central Gaza, aid officials say, but they supply only brackish water, which poses long-term health risks to those who drink it.

Israel had already closed off all other sources of electricity that it used to provide for Gaza, a measure that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war. That left essential services to run on solar panels or generators, if power was available at all.

Now there is no fuel coming in for anything, including generators, ambulances or cars.

Israel argues that about 25,000 truckloads of aid that Gaza has received in recent weeks have given people sufficient food.

“There is no shortage of essential products in the strip whatsoever,” the Foreign Ministry said last week. It repeated assertions that Hamas is taking over the aid entering Gaza and that half the group’s budget in Gaza comes from exploiting aid trucks.

Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”

Gaza residents say that, for the moment, at least, they do have food, though often not enough.

But supplies that humanitarian groups amassed in the first six weeks of the cease-fire are already dwindling, aid officials warn. That has already forced six bakeries in Gaza to close and aid groups and community kitchens to reduce the food rations they hand out.

The order to block aid also cut off Gaza’s access to commercial goods imported by traders.

In the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, a street market was quiet this week as the vendors’ stocks of fruits, vegetables, oil, sugar and flour ran low. Vegetable sellers said the price of onions and carrots had doubled, zucchini had nearly quadrupled and lemons cost nearly 10 times as much. Eggplants were hard to find and potatoes impossible.

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Food handouts in Beit Lahiya this week.

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A Palestinian man carrying food aid back to his family in northern Gaza last month.

As a result, the sellers said, the few customers who still came bought only a couple of vegetables, not by the kilogram as many once did. Others had not had the means to buy anything for months.

Many Gazans lost their jobs and spent their savings to survive the war. When prices skyrocketed, they were left almost completely reliant on aid.

Yasmin al-Attar, 38, and her husband, a driver, wandered from stall to stall in the Deir al-Balah market, looking for the cheapest prices on a recent day. They have seven children, a disabled sister and two aging parents to support.

It had been hard enough to afford the bare minimum of ingredients for iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, Ms. al-Attar said. But with fuel blocked, it was also getting tough to find fuel for her husband’s car and for cooking.

“Just three days ago, I felt a little relief because prices seemed reasonable,” she said. Now, the same money would only be enough for a much smaller quantity of vegetables.

“How can this possibly be enough for my big family?” she said.

That night, she said, they would probably make do with lentil soup, with no vegetables. And after that? Maybe more canned food.

Stall owners and shoppers alike blamed large-scale traders for the shortages, at least in part, saying they were hoarding supplies to push up prices and maximize their profits. Any vegetables available at reasonable prices were being snapped up and resold for much more, said Eissa Fayyad, 32, a vegetable seller in Deir al-Balah.

It did not help that people rushed out to buy more than they needed as soon as they heard about the Israeli decision to blockade aid again, said Khalil Reziq, 38, a police officer in the city of Khan Younis in central Gaza whose division oversees markets and shops.

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Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza last month.

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A Palestinian family setting up a tent beside their destroyed home in northern Gaza.

Hamas police officers have warned businesses against price-gouging, vendors and shoppers said. In some cases, Mr. Reziq said, his unit had confiscated vendors’ goods and sold them for cheaper on the spot.

But such measures have done little to solve the underlying supply problem.

Beyond the immediate challenge of supplying food, water, medical supplies and tents to Gazans — many thousands of them still displaced — aid officials said their inability to bring in supplies had set back longer-term recovery efforts.

Some had been distributing vegetable seeds and animal feed to farmers so Gaza could start raising more of its own food, while others had been working on rebuilding the water infrastructure and clearing debris and unexploded ordnance.

None of it was easy, aid officials said, because Israel had restricted or barred items including the heavy machinery required to repair infrastructure, generators and more. Israel maintains that Palestinian militants could use these items for military purposes.

For many Gazans now, the focus is back on survival.

“There’s no bombing at the moment, but I still feel like I’m living in a war with everything I’m going through,” said Nevine Siam, 38, who is sheltering at her brother’s house with 30 other people.

She said her sister’s entire family had been killed during the fighting. Her children ask her to make Ramadan meals like the ones they remember from before the war. But without an income, she can get nothing but canned food in aid packages.

Where she is, she said, there are no celebrations and no festive decorations for the holy month.

“It feels as if the joy has been extinguished,” she said.

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A tent in the rubble in northern Gaza last month. Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”

 

 THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

‘Severance’ Finale: Which Theories Were Correct?

 
Some fans correctly predicted some of the episode’s biggest revelations. But other mysteries remain, and many more were introduced.

 

By Maya Salam

Maya S. has spent three years combing through “Severance” subreddits and is ready to reintegrate into society.

The “Severance” rabbit hole online is deep, with fans sharing theories about the meaning of the notes used for elevator dings, the true nature of the Lumon Industries office (is it actually a hospital?) and other arcana. Would any of them pay off in the Season 2 finale?

Yes, as it turned out. In fact, one of the most popular predictions prevailed in the explosive episode: The numbers Mark S. had been diligently sorting on his terminal were indeed the building blocks of his wife Gemma’s mind. With every file he completed, a new consciousness — or “innie” — of hers was created to be tortured on the testing floor.

The effort culminated in Cold Harbor, his 25th and final file, which Mark S. completed as part of a greater scheme and collaboration between his innie and outie to free her.

This work, which relied on Mark S.’s gut instinct, was — as Harmony Cobel confirmed — tied to “the four tempers,” a philosophy developed by the Lumon founder Kier Eagan: woe, frolic, dread and malice. Hats off to the “Severance” enthusiasts who saw that coming!

And while the big Cold Harbor revelations will satiate devotees for a moment, many other questions remain, and many more were introduced.

Yes, we learned that the goats serve some sort of ceremonial and sacrificial purpose. “This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” the Lumon fixer Mr. Drummond tells Lorne, of the Mammalians Nurturable department, as he hands her a bolt gun to kill the animal.

But surely this is just one element of a much bigger arc — one that may include the riddle of the pompous author Ricken, Mark’s brother-in-law, who “Severance” enthusiasts grew increasingly interested in as Season 2 unfolded. (Some of my co-workers even hoped the finale would be devoted entirely to him.)

Of the many goat-related theories and clues attached to Ricken, my favorite is that his phone alarm, which we hear during the Season 1 book reading, is a cowbell: the same sound that was used in the Mammalians Nurturable room this season to get everyone’s attention. Is Ricken a goat’s outie? (Also, is it too conspiratorial to find a connection between cowbell and Cobel? When it comes to “Severance,” almost anything goes.)

We also learned that the comically creepy Jame Eagan, the Lumon chief executive and Helena Eagan’s father, has “sired” many children “in the shadows.” But who exactly? And why, in the finale, does he tell Helly R. that he no longer loves Helena and that he, instead, sees the “fire of Kier” in her?

After Mark and Gemma break out of the testing floor, a breathless Dr. Mauer (reminder: he was a doctor in the fertility clinic flashback) yells, “You’ll kill them all!” Is he referring to all of the innies (including the dozens in her head), all of the outies or some other group we haven’t even begun to imagine?

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Other significant lingering questions that will require fans’ patience:

• Where is Irving? Recall that in the penultimate episode, he was sent off on a train to presumably never return.

• How did Gemma become a prisoner of Lumon, and what was that she signed at the fertility clinic? (There was a Lumon logo on her intake form.)

• And will she escape the premises after her brief, poignant reunion with Mark ended with her being forsaken by her husband’s innie? Or will she end up back on the testing floor?

• How many other minds are being severed to bits down there?

• Is full reintegration even possible?

• Will Mr. Milchick, who did the very most during the celebration of Mark S.’s Cold Harbor completion, sour on Lumon after enduring a barrage of microaggressions from higher-ups and outright aggressions from his subordinates? Or will he hold tighter than ever to his post as manager?

• Why exactly did the Lumon leaders call the completion of Cold Harbor one of the greatest moments in the history of Earth?

• And for all of their grandiose claims about eliminating pain from the human experience, while inflicting unspeakable pain on the innies, will we learn what they really want and whom they consider to be human?

As for me, I can’t shake the feeling that Helly R., who risked everything to help Mark S. free Gemma, would never have derailed his escape at the last minute. She even seemed to have come to terms, begrudgingly, with the fact that she and Helena are the same person, dispelling any notion Mark S. had of them finding happiness together in the end.

Was the Glasgow Block (again) initiated? Was that actually Helena running hand in hand with Mark S. into the inescapable bowels of the office? Or did Jame Eagan, no longer seeing Kier in Helena, somehow replace or integrate her with Helly R.?

The good news is that Apple on Friday announced that “Severance” has been officially renewed for a third season. The great news is that Ben Stiller, an executive producer and frequent director, has assured fans that they won’t have to wait three more years for Season 3, as they did between the first two.

But please, try to enjoy both pieces of news equally.

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Emile thanks you for reading.Credit...Apple TV+

Hundreds of Thousands Will Die

 

 

 

By David Remnick

The New Yorker

 

t is hard to calculate all the good that Atul Gawande has done in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard, he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. A contributor to The New Yorker since 1998, he has published widely on issues of public health. His 2007 article in the magazine and the book that emerged from it, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” have been sources of clarity and truth in the debate over health-care costs. In 2014, he published “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” a vivid, poetic, compassionate narrative that presents unforgettable descriptions of the ways the body ages and our end-of-life choices.

Gawande’s work on public health was influential in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and, starting in November, 2020, he served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. In July, 2021, Biden nominated him as the assistant administrator for the Bureau of Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked to limit disease outbreaks overseas. Gawande, who is fifty-nine, resigned the position on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency.

When we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande, usually a wry, high-spirited presence, was in a grave mood. There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. He was, after all, watching Trump and Elon Musk dismantle, gleefully, a global health agency that had only lately been for him a source of devotion and inspiration. As a surgeon, Gawande had long been in a position to save one life at a time. More recently, and all too briefly, he was part of a vast collective responsible for untold good around the world. And now, as he made plain, that collective has been deliberately cast into chaos, even ruins. The cost in human lives is sure to be immense. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

President Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., a job that you’ve described as the greatest job in medicine. You stepped down on Trump’s Inauguration Day, and he immediately began targeting U.S.A.I.D. with an executive order that halted all foreign aid. Did you know, or did you intuit, that Trump would act the way he has?

I had no idea. In the previous Trump Administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the “normals.” They had a head of U.S.A.I.D. who was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkle on it, which I didn’t disagree with. They called it “the journey to self-reliance,” and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, to enable stronger economies, more capacity—and we weren’t doing enough of that. I actually continued much of the work that had occurred during that time.

Tell me a little bit about what you were in charge of and what good was being done in the world.

I had twenty-five hundred people, between D.C. and sixty-five countries around the world, working on advancing health and protecting Americans from diseases and outbreaks abroad. The aim was to work with countries to build their systems so that we protected global health security and improved global outcomes—from reducing H.I.V./AIDS and other infectious diseases like malaria and T.B., to strengthening primary health-care systems, so that those countries would move on from depending on aid from donors. In three years, we documented saving more than 1.2 million lives after COVID alone.

Let’s pause on that. Your part of U.S.A.I.D. was responsible, demonstrably, for saving 1.2 million lives—from what?

So, COVID was the first global reduction in life expectancy in seventy years, and it disrupted the ability across the world to deliver basic health services, which includes H.I.V./AIDS [medications], but also included childhood immunizations, and managing diarrhea and pneumonia. Part of my target was to reduce the percentage of deaths in any given country that occur before the age of fifty. The teams would focus on the top three to five killers. In some places, that would be H.I.V.; in some places that would be T.B. Safe childbirth was a huge part of the work. And immunizations: forty per cent of the gains in survival for children under five in the past fifty years in the world came from vaccines alone. So vaccines were a big part of the work as well.

What was the case against this kind of work? It just seems like an absolute good.

One case is that it could have been more efficient, right? Americans imagine that huge sums of money go to this work. Polls show that they think that a quarter of our spending goes to foreign aid. In fact, on a budget for our global health work that is less than half the budget of the hospital where I did surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of millions of people, with programs that saved lives by the millions. That’s why I describe it as the best job in medicine that people have never heard of. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine experiencing. So the case against it—I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money laundering, that this was corruption.

Where would he get this idea? Where does this mythology come from?

Well, what’s hard to parse is: What is just willful ignorance? Not just ignorance—it’s lying, right? For example, there’s a statistic that they push that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s dollars actually got to recipients in the world. Now, this is a willful distortion of a statistic that says that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding went to local organizations as opposed to multinational organizations and others. There’s a legitimate criticism to be made that that percentage should be higher, that more local organizations should get the funds. I did a lot of work that raised those numbers considerably, got it to thirty per cent, but that was not the debate they were having. They’re claiming that the money’s not actually reaching people and that corruption is taking it away, when, in fact, the reach—the ability to get to enormous numbers of people—has been a best buy in health and in humanitarian assistance for a long time.

Now the over-all agency, as I understand it, had about ten thousand people working for it. How many are working at U.S.A.I.D. now?

Actually, the number was about thirteen thousand. And the over-all number now—it’s hard to estimate because people are being turned on and off like a light switch—

Turned on and off, meaning their computers are shut down?

Yeah, and they’re being terminated and then getting unterminated—like, “Oops, sorry, we let the Ebola team go.” You heard Elon Musk say something to that effect in the Oval Office. “But we’ve brought them back, don’t worry.” It’s a moving target, but this is what I’d say: more than eighty per cent of the contracts have been terminated, representing the work that is done by U.S.A.I.D. and the for-profit and not-for-profit organizations they work with, like Catholic Relief Services and the like. And more than eighty per cent of the staff has been put on administrative leave, terminated, or dismissed in one way or the other.

So it’s been obliterated.

It has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean, at this point, it’s six weeks in. Twenty million people with H.I.V., for example—including five hundred thousand children—who had received medicines that keep them alive have now been cut off for six weeks.

A lot of people are going to die as a result of this. Am I wrong?

The internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.

I’m sorry, Atul. I have to stop my cool journalistic questioning and say: This is nothing short of outrageous. How is it possible that this is happening? Obviously, these facts are filtering up to Elon Musk, to Donald Trump, and to the Administration at large. And they don’t care?

The logic is to deny the reality, either because they simply don’t want to believe it—that they’re so steeped in the idea that government officials are corrupt and lazy and unable to deliver anything, and that a group of young twentysomething engineers will fix it all—or they are indifferent. And when Musk waves around the chainsaw—we are seeing what surgery on the U.S. government with a chainsaw looks like at U.S.A.I.D. And it’s just the beginning of the playbook. This was the soft target. This is affecting people abroad—it’s tens of thousands of jobs at home, so there’s harm here; there’s disease that will get here, etc. But this was the easy target. Now it’s being brought to the N.I.H., to the C.D.C., to critical parts of not only the health enterprise but other important functions of government.

So the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other such bureaucracies that do equal medical good will also get slammed?

Are being slammed. So here’s the playbook: you take the Treasury’s payment system—DOGE and Musk took over the information system for the Treasury and the payments in the government; you take over the H.R. software, so you can turn people’s badges and computer access on and off at will; you take over the buildings—they cancelled the leases, so you don’t have buildings. U.S.A.I.D.—the headquarters was given to the Customs and Border Protection folks. And then you’ve got it all, right? And then he’s got X, which feeds right into Fox News, and you’ve got control of the media as well. It’s a brilliant playbook.

But from the outside, at least, Atul, and maybe from your vantage point as well: this looks like absolute chaos. I’ve been reading this week that staff posted overseas are stranded, fired without a plane ticket home. From the inside, what does it look like?

One example: U.S.A.I.D. staff in the Congo had to flee for their lives and watch on television as their own home was destroyed and their kids’ belongings attacked. And then when they called for help and backup, they could not get it. I spoke to staff involved in one woman’s case, a pregnant woman in her third trimester, in a conflict zone. They have maternity leave just like everybody else there. But because the contracts had been turned off, they couldn’t get a flight out, and were not guaranteed safe passage, and couldn’t get care for her complications, and ended up having to get cared for locally without the setup to address her needs. One person said to me, as she’s enduring these things, “My government is attacking me. We ought to be ashamed. Our entire system of checks and balances has failed us.”

What’s been the reaction in these countries, in the governments, and among the people? The sense of abandonment must be intense on all sides.

There are broadly three areas. The biggest part of U.S.A.I.D. is the FEMA for disasters abroad. It’s called the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and they bring earthquake response; wildfire response; response in conflicts, in famines. These are the people who suit up, and get assistance, and stabilize places where things are going wrong.

The Global Health Bureau, which I led, is the second-largest part of the agency, and that does work around diseases and health threats, as well as advancing health systems in low- and middle-income countries around the world. There’s coöperation on solving global problems, like stopping pandemics, and addressing measles outbreaks, and so on.

The third is advancing countries’ economies, freedom, and democracy. John F. Kennedy, when he formed U.S.A.I.D. in 1961, said that it was to counter the adversaries of freedom and to provide compassionate support for the development of the world. U.S.A.I.D. has kept Ukraine’s health system going and gave vital support to keep their energy infrastructure going, as Russia attacked it. In Haiti, this is the response team that has sought to stabilize what’s become a gang-controlled part of the country. Our health teams kept almost half of the primary health-care system for the population going. So around the world: stopping fentanyl flow, bringing in independent media. All of that has been wiped out completely. And in many cases, the people behind that work—most of the people we’re working with, local partners to keep these things going—are now being attacked. Those partners are now being attacked, in country after country.

What you’re describing is both human compassion and, a phrase you used earlier in our conversation, “soft power.” Describe what that is. Why is it so important to the United States and to the world? What will squandering it—what will destroying it—mean?

The tools of foreign policy, as I’ve learned, are defense, diplomacy, and development. And the development part is the soft power. We’re not sending troops into Asia and Africa and Latin America. We’re sending hundreds of thousands of civilians without uniforms, who are there to represent the United States, and to pursue common goals together—whether it’s stemming the tide of fentanyl coming across the border, addressing climate disasters, protecting the world from disease. And that soft power is a reflection of our values, what we stand for—our strong belief in freedom, self-determination, and advancement of people’s economies; bringing more stability and peace to the world. That is the fundamental nature of soft power: that we are not—what Trump is currently trying to create—a world of simply “Might makes right, and you do what we tell you,” because that does not create stability. It creates chaos and destruction.

An immoral universe in which everybody’s on their own.

That’s right. An amoral universe.

Who is standing up, if anyone, in the Administration? What about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom you mentioned. What’s his role in all of this? Back in January, he issued a waiver to allow for lifesaving services to continue. That doesn’t seem to have been at all effective.

It hasn’t happened. He has issued a waiver that said that the subset of work that is directly lifesaving—through humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and so on, and the health work that I used to lead—will continue; we don’t want these lives to be lost. And yet it hasn’t been implemented. It’s clear that he’s not in control of the mechanisms that make these things happen. DOGE does not approve the payments going out, and has not approved the payments going out, to sustain that work.

The federal courts have ruled that the freeze was likely illegal and unconstitutional, and imposed a temporary restraining order saying that it should not be implemented, that it had to be lifted—the payment freeze. Instead, they doubled down. And Marco Rubio signed on to this, tweeted about it earlier this week—that over eighty per cent of all contracts have now been terminated. And the remaining ones—they have not even made a significant dent in making back payments that are owed for work done even before Trump was inaugurated.

There’s always been skepticism, particularly on the right, about foreign aid. I remember Jesse Helms, of North Carolina, would always rail about the cost of foreign aid and how it was useless, in his view, in many senses. I am sure that in your time in office, you must have dealt with officials who were skeptical of the mission. What kind of complaints were you getting from senators and congressmen and the like, even before the Trump Administration took over in January?

It was a minority. I’ll just start by saying: the support for foreign-aid work has been recognized and supported by Republicans and Democrats for decades. But there’s been a consistent—it was a minority—that had felt that the U.S. shouldn’t be involved abroad. That’s part of an isolationist view, that extending this work is just charity; it’s not in U.S. interests and it’s not necessary for the protection of Americans. The argument is that we should be spending it at home.

They’re partly playing into the populist view that huge portions of the budget are going abroad, when that’s not been the case. But it’s also understandable that when people are suffering at home, when there are significant needs here, it can be hard to make connections to why we need to fight to stop problems abroad before they get here.

And yet we only recently endured the COVID epidemic, which by all accounts did not begin at home, and spread all over the world. Why was COVID not convincing as a manifestation of how a greater international role could help?

Certainly that didn’t convince anybody that that was able to be controlled abroad—

Because it wasn’t.

Because it wasn’t, right. And COVID did drive a significant distrust in the public-health apparatus itself because of the suffering that people endured through that entire emergency. But I would say the larger picture is—every part of government spending has its critics. One of the fascinating things about the foreign-aid budget, which has been the least popular part of the budget, is that U.S.A.I.D. was mostly never heard of. Now it has high name recognition, and has majority support for continuing its programs, whether it’s keeping energy infrastructure alive in Ukraine, stabilizing conflicts—whether it’s Haiti or other parts of the world—to keep refugees from swarming more borders, or the work of purely compassionate humanitarian assistance and health aid that reduces the over-all death rates from diseases that may yet harm us. So it’s been a significant jump in support for this work, out of awareness now of what it is, and how much less it turns out to cost.

So it took this disaster to raise awareness.

That’s human nature, right? Loss aversion. When you lose it is when you realize its value.

Atul, there’s been a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and R.F.K., Jr.—who’s now leading the Department of Health and Human Services—has advised some people, at least, to use cod-liver oil. We have this multilayered catastrophe that you’ve been describing. Where could the United States be, in a couple of years, from a health perspective? What worries you the most?

Measles is a good example. There’s actually now been a second death. We hadn’t had a child death from measles in the United States in years. We are now back up, globally, to more than a hundred thousand child deaths. I was on the phone with officials at the World Health Organization—the U.S. had chosen measles as a major area that it wanted to support. It provided eighty per cent of the support in that area, and let other countries take other components of W.H.O.’s work. So now, that money has been pulled from measles programs around the world. And having a Secretary of Health who has done more to undermine confidence in measles vaccines than anybody in the world means that that’s a singular disease that can be breaking out, and we’ll see many more child deaths that result from that.

The over-all picture, the deeper concern I have, is that as a country we’re abandoning the idea that we can come together collectively with other nations to do good in the world. People describe Trump as transactional, but this is a predatory view of the world. It is one in which you not only don’t want to participate in coöperation; you want to destroy the coöperation. There is a deep desire to make the W.H.O. ineffective in working with other nations; to make other U.N. organizations ineffective in doing their work. They already struggled with efficiency and being effective in certain domains, and yet they continue to have been very important in global health emergencies, responding and tracking outbreaks. . . .

We have a flu vaccine because there are parts of the world where flu breaks out, like China, that don’t share data with us. But they share it with the W.H.O., and the result is that we have a flu vaccine that’s tuned to the diseases coming our way by the fall. I don’t know how we’ll get a flu vaccine this fall. Either we’ll get it because people are, under the table, communicating with the W.H.O. to get the information, and the W.H.O is going to share it, even though the U.S. is no longer paying, or we’re going to work with other countries and be dependent on them for our flu vaccine. This is not a good answer.

I must ask you this, more generally: You’re watching a President of the United States begin to side with Russia over Ukraine. You’re watching the dismantlement of our foreign-aid budget, and both its compassion and its effectiveness. Just the other day, we saw a Columbia University graduate—you may agree with him, disagree with him on his politics, but who has a green card—and ICE officers went to his apartment and arrested him, and presumably will deport him. It’s an assault on the First Amendment. You’re seeing universities being defunded—starting with Columbia, but it’ll hardly be the last, etc. What in your view motivates Donald Trump to behave in this way? What’s the vision that pulls this all together?

What I see happening on the health side is reflective of everything you just said. There is a fundamental desire to remove and destroy independent sources of knowledge, of power, of decision-making. So not only is U.S.A.I.D. dismantled but there’s thousands of people fired—from the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration—and a fundamental restructuring of decision-making so that political judgment drives decision-making over N.I.H. grants, which have been centralized and pulled away from the individual institutes. So the discoveries that lead to innovations in the world—that work has a political layer now. F.D.A. approvals—now wanting a political review. C.D.C. guidance—now wanting a political review. These organizations were all created by Congress to be shielded from that, so that we could have a professional, science-driven set of decisions, and not the political flavor of the moment.

Donald Trump’s preference, which he’s expressed in those actions and many others, is that his whims, just like King Henry VIII’s, should count. King Henry VIII remade an entire religion around who he wanted to marry. And this is the kind of world that Trump is wanting to create—one of loyalty trumping any other considerations. So the inspectors general who do audits over the corruption that they seem to be so upset about—they’ve been removed. Any independent judgment in society that would trump the political whims of the leader. . . . The challenge is—and I think is the source of hope for me—that a desire for chaos, for acceding to destruction, for accepting subjugation, is not a stable equilibrium. It’s not successful in delivering the goods for people, under any line of thinking.

In the end, professionally organized bureaucracies—that need to have political oversight, need to have some controls in place, but a balance that allows decision-making to happen—those have been a key engine of the prosperity of the country. Their destruction will have repercussions that I think will make the Administration very unpopular, and likely cause a backlash that balances things out. I hope we get beyond getting to the status quo ante of a stalemate between these two lines of thinking—one that advances the world through incremental collective action that’s driven around checks and balances as we advance the world ever forward, and one in which a strongman can have his way and simply look for who he can dominate.

Right now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the head of H.H.S. His targets include not only vaccine manufacturers but the pharma industry writ large. But he’s talked a lot, too, about unhealthy food in the American diet—to some extent, he’s not wrong. Do you see any upside in his role in pushing this so-called Make America Healthy Again idea?

Of course there is good. I mean, we as a country have chronic illness that is importantly tied to our nutritional habits, our exercise, and so on. But for all our unhealthiness, we’ve also had an engine of health that has enabled the top one per cent in America to have a ninety-year life expectancy today. Our job is to enable that capacity for public health and health-care delivery to get to everybody alive, I would argue, and certainly to get it to all Americans.

What’s ignored is that half the country can’t afford having a primary-care doctor and don’t have adequate public health in their communities. If R.F.K., Jr., were taking that on, more power to him. Every indication from his history is that this is an effort to highlight some important things. But how much of it’s going to actually be evidence-driven? He’s had some crazy theories about what’s going to advance chronic illness and address health.

I’d say the second thing is the utter incompetence in running things and making things work. They’ve utterly destabilized the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A.

Explain that destabilization—what it looks like from inside and what effects it’ll have.

One small example: DOGE has declared that all kinds of buildings are not necessary anymore. That includes the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. They’re saying, “Oh, everybody has to show up for work now, but you won’t have a building to work in anymore.”

No. 2 on the list is F.D.A. specialized centers around the country. There’s a laboratory in St. Louis where they have specialized equipment for testing food and drugs for safety. And so that whole capability—to insure that your foods and your medications are able to be tested for whether they have contaminants, whether they are counterfeit—that’s a basic part of good nutrition, good medicine, that could be pulled away.

Whether it’s maintaining the building infrastructure, maintaining the staff who are being purged sort of randomly left and right, or treating them not like they’re slaves but actually bringing good work out of everybody, by good management—that is what’s not happening.

I have the feeling that you, even in a short time, loved being in the federal government. What I hear in our conversation is a sense of tragedy that is not only public but that is felt very intimately by you.

I did not expect that going into government would be as meaningful to me as it was. I went into government because it was the COVID crisis and I was offered an opportunity to lead the international component of the response. We got seven hundred million vaccines out to the world. But what I found was a group of people who could achieve scale like I’d never seen. It is mission-driven. None of these people went into it for the money; it’s not like they’ve had any power—

I assume all of them could have made more money elsewhere.

Absolutely. And many of them spent their lives as Foreign Service officers living in difficult places in the world. I remember that Kyiv was under attack about eight weeks after I was sworn in. I thought I was going to be working on COVID, but this thing was erupting. First of all, our health team, along with the rest of the mission and Embassy in Kyiv, had to flee for safety. But within a week they were already saying, “We have T.B. breaking out, we have potential polio cases. How are we going to respond?” And my critical role was to say, “What’s going to kill people the most? Right now, Russia has shut down the medical supply chain, and so nearly a hundred per cent of the pharmacies just closed. Two hundred and fifty thousand H.I.V. patients can’t get their meds. A million heart patients can’t get their meds. Let’s get the pharmacies open.” And, by the way, they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put the hospitals under cyberattack and their electronic systems aren’t functioning.

And this team, in four weeks, moved the entire hospital record system to the cloud, allowing protection against cyberattacks; got oxygen systems back online; and was able to get fifty per cent of the pharmacies open in about a month, and ultimately got eighty per cent of the pharmacies open. That is just incredible.

Yes, are there some people that I had to deal with who were overly bureaucratic? Did I have to address some people who were not performing? Absolutely. Did I have to drive efficiency?

As in any work . . .

In every place you have to do that. But this was America at its best, and I was so proud to be part of that. And what frustrated me, in that job, was that I had to speak for the U.S. government. I couldn’t write for you during that time.

Believe me, I know!

I couldn’t tell the story. I’ve got a book I’m working on now in which I hope to be able to unpack all of this. It is, I think, a sad part of my leadership, that I didn’t also get to communicate what we do—partly because U.S.A.I.D. is restricted, in certain ways, from telling its story within the U.S. borders.

If you had the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and Donald Trump what you’ve been telling me for the past hour, or if they read a long report from you about lives saved, good works done, the benefits of soft power to the United States and to the world and so on—do you think it would have any effect at all?

Zero. There’s a different world view at play here. It is that power is what matters, not impact; not the over-all maximum good that you can do. And having power—wielding it in ways that can dominate the weak and partner with your friends—is the mode of existence. (When I say “partner with friends,” I mean partner with people like Putin who think the same way that you do.) It’s two entirely different world views.

But this is not just an event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions, including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”

That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

It’s tragic and outrageous, no?

That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil. ♦

 

 

 

The Fairy Tale Night of Sean Baker, Director of Dreams Gone Awry

 

 

 

By Alissa Wilkinson

Sean Baker came equipped with extra speeches, and that was wise: On the night of the Oscars, he wound up onstage four times to receive four statues.

That’s not just unusual. It’s almost unheard-of.

Baker’s film “Anora,” about a sex worker in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and then watches it all go sideways, earned five Oscars overall on Sunday. One went to its ingénue star, Mikey Madison, and four to Baker: best director, best original screenplay, best editing and best picture.

By taking home four Oscars on a single night, Baker joins just one other luminary: none other than Walt Disney, who pulled off the same trick in 1954. That year, Disney won best documentary feature (“The Living Desert”), best documentary short subject (“The Alaskan Eskimo”), best cartoon short subject (“Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”) and best two-reel short subject (“Bear Country”).

But even Disney didn’t pull off Baker’s feat: earning four Oscars on one night for the same movie. Doing so requires wearing a lot of hats, and Baker, who started his career in ultra-low-budget independent films, has a deep hatrack.

Movies are a collaborative art, and even the most hands-on filmmakers work with a team of artists and craftspeople. But writing, directing, editing and producing a film leaves a distinctive personal mark. Disney, who was heavily involved with his studio’s projects, certainly did so. Similarly, “Anora” audiences who know Baker’s work probably spotted his fingerprints from the moment the film starts. (And not just because Baker emulates John Carpenter, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson by sticking with one typeface for the titles of all his films — Aguafina Script Pro, if you were wondering.)

One of Baker’s hallmarks, the one people most often associate with him, is a focus on people who live on the margins of society, especially but not exclusively sex workers.

His 2015 film “Tangerine,” shot entirely on iPhones, is a zingy, zany comedy about transgender sex workers who go on a wild chase on Christmas Eve, shot mostly in seedier parts of Los Angeles. “The Florida Project,” Baker’s moving 2017 drama that landed Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination, centers on a little girl named Moonee who lives with her single mother in a budget motel just outside Orlando. Her mother can’t make ends meet, and eventually begins soliciting sex work online. The star of “Red Rocket,” Baker’s 2021 film, is a middle-aged porn star who’s down on his luck.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that Baker’s movies focus narrowly on sex work. Those are his characters, but the stories have a wider lens. He’s interested in the American dream, in the idea that if you just work hard enough, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make something of your life. Every one of his films features characters who’ve tried that and found it lacking. In his films, the American dream is a fairy tale — a beautiful story we repeat to one another that for many goes sour.

That’s the story of “Anora,” in which the titular enterprising young woman, played by Madison, seems to be alone in the world. She has family somewhere, but we get the clear sense that she’s been making it on her own for a long time. Her job at a high-end Midtown Manhattan strip club pays well enough, but more important, it’s where she meets her prince, who sweeps her into a fantasy world.

That’s the first act of the film; the second is a screwball comedy, and in the third we realize at one pivotal moment that our plucky heroine is not going to win the day. It’s devastating, and it’s exactly in keeping with the kind of tales Baker likes to tell. He dips into classic Hollywood genres but reimagines them for the world his characters inhabit. They live in worlds laced with neon and sunshine and last-ditch attempts to stay positive, where the promised reward is always just out of reach.

That’s a repeated theme across Baker’s films, and “The Florida Project” makes it almost literal. The characters live in the Magic Castle, a euphemistic name for a place that’s populated mostly by people who are barely holding their lives together. All that Moonee can access, despite her mother’s devoted attempts to raise them out of poverty, are cheap imitations of the glittery world just beyond her home. Their motel is, tantalizingly, just a stone’s throw from Walt Disney World.

When fairy tales don’t pan out the way movies have promised, we feel cheated. Walt Disney, and the world he created, is as responsible as anyone for creating those expectations, for giving generations of viewers the idea that Prince Charming is coming or that the evil villain will be vanquished by true love.

Baker’s take on those stories, which are full of love for his characters and his audience, turns that pattern inside out. His extraordinary Oscar night has a strange kind of resonance. It’s the sort only Hollywood can dream up.