Melania and Ivanka Trump praised USAID for funding their White House projects: reports
During Donald Trump’s first term, his wife and daughter touted USAID’s role in providing vital economic assistance in Africa to promote children’s education and female entrepreneu…
Six years before Donald Trump declared the US Agency for International Development a “tremendous fraud” and ordered it to be dismantled, his wife, Melania Trump, and daughter, Ivanka Trump, promoted “successful” USAID programs that they supported in Africa.
And as the foreign assistance agency faces intense White House scrutiny for “wasteful” and “fraudulent” spending on “pet projects,” Ivanka Trump directly used more than $11,000 in USAID money in 2019 to buy video recording and reproducing equipment for a White House event when she served as a senior advisor to her father during his first term, Newsweek reported.
Meanwhile, Melania Trump touted the positive impact of USAID funding on programs during a four-country tour of Africa when she was first lady in 2018.
“We care, and we want to show the world that we care, and I’ve partnered and am working with USAID,” Melania Trump told reporters in Egypt, ABC News reported at the time. Indeed, this USAID “partnership” helped Melania Trump promote her Be Best initiative, as she touted the positive impact that U.S. aid had communities in Africa, especially when it came to improving the lives of children, ABC News reported Thursday.
Melania Trump also was famously photographed touring the pyramids and Great Sphinx in Giza, dressed in a snappy, cream-colored Ralph Lauren jacket and matching fedora. She was in Giza to to observe a USAID-backed project to limit groundwater that threatened to erode hieroglyphics in the iconic Egyptian monument, the Associated Press reported.
US First Lady Melania Trump visits Chipala Primary School in Lilongwe on October 4, 2018 during a 1-day visit in Malawi, part of her week long trip to Africa to promote her ‘Be Best’ campaign. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)During a visit with primary school students in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, Melania Trump also promoted a USAID program that distributed more than 1.4 million textbooks to students. She notably explained the value of American investments abroad, ABC News said.
“The growth and success of a country starts with educating our children,” Melania Trump said at the school, according to the White House. She also told ABC News: “When people have opportunities and societies are freer and more educated, we are stronger as the United States.”
Given the way that Melania Trump was “very impressed” that USAID staff were working so closely with local governments, a former senior USAID official told ABC News this week that it was “hard to stomach” her husband’s decision to disband the agency in his second term.
“It’s very disturbing and clearly it’s all politics,” the official told ABC News. “Until you see (the work of USAID) firsthand, it’s very difficult to understand and explain. You leave a different person.”
Senior Advisor to the U.S. President Ivanka Trump (C-R) shakes hands as she visits cocoa cooperative farmers near Adzope as the first Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative West Africa Regional Summit in April 2019 in Abidjan. (Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images)Like Melania Trump, her stepdaughter Ivanka Trump also stood behind USAID’s work during Trump’s first term and found it useful for her own purposes. As Newsweek reported, USAID documents show that she purchased software, CDs, tapes and records to use for an unspecified White House event. The purchase was approved by Jenifer Healy, who was USAID deputy chief of staff at the time.
Ivanka Trump also received positive press coverage by helping to launch a program to distribute foreign aid through USAID, ABC News reported. In 2019, Ivanka Trump celebrated when her father signed a memorandum to establish a new “Women’s Global Development and Prosperity” Initiative, aimed at empowering women in the developing world, ABC News reported. The $50 million fund, known as W-GDP, was developed to be distributed by USAID with the goal of empowering 50 million women in developing countries by 2025.
Ivanka Trump got to take credit for leading the initiative and told ABC News at the time that it would do more than provide economic assistance to women in developing countries. It would improve America’s national security, she explained.
“We know there’s a correlation between gender inequality and conflict, there’s tremendous amounts of research,” Ivanka Trump said. “There’s a reason today, the president signed W-GDP as a national security presidential memorandum. It is in our domestic security interests to empower women.”
That year, Ivanka Trump embarked on her own visit to Africa, where she met with women cocoa farmers in Adzope, Côte d’Ivoire. She was part of a delegation that announced that these female entrepreneurs would receive $2 million in assistance through USAID’s W-GDP fund, which was meant to encourage private sector investment in cocoa farming, according to the the US Embassy in Côte d’Ivoire. In Africa, Ivanka Trump also visited a coffee shop in Ethiopia, where she announced a loan backed by USAID to support coffee businesses owned by women.
But now the second Trump administration is working to undermine such investments, ABC News reported this week.
The administration announced a near-total freeze on all foreign aid and said it was putting nearly all of its more than 10,000 employees in the United States and internationally on forced administration leave, as the New York Times and Associated Press reported. The administration gave almost all USAID staffers posted overseas 30 days to return to the U.S., while agency officials were told that about 800 awards and contracts administered through the agency were being canceled.
With a more than $50 billion budget, USAID was established in 1961 by an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. It has provided foreign aid for a range of purposes, including disaster and poverty relief, technical cooperation on global issues and promoting long-term socioeconomic development and democracy, human rights and good governance in countries around the world. The agency also has faced criticism that its aid programs masked nation-meddling and overspent American tax dollars abroad, NBC News report.
A White House memo issued this week accused USAID of being “unaccountable to taxpayers” and funneling “massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” Trump said the agency’s workers were “radical left lunatics.” Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s head of his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, also went on X to promote what NBC News called fringe conspiracy theories about USAID. He also called agency “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.”
The “pet projects” that have upset the White House include programs to support diversity and inclusion in different countries, NBC and Newsweek reported. They include $1.5 million and $5.5 million to promote LGBTQ+ advocacy in Jamaica and Uganda, respectively, two countries where members of the LGBTQ+ community have few legal rights, Newsweek reported. The White House also objects to funding a University of Texas at Austin project to create personalized alternatives to commercial intrauterine devices that would be distributed to women in developing countries.
The memo moreover decried sending “$6 million to fund tourism in Egypt,” offering a reminder of Melania Trump’s iconic visit to the pyramids, a global tourist destination. According to the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in September that USAID would provide $129 million to support Egypt’s reforms in advancing “responsive government institutions and transparency,” as well as public education, public health services. The aid also would help Egypt preserve its cultural heritage and grow its tourism sector “for the benefit of Egyptians and visitors for decades to come.”
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