The Magic Eraser

May I just say that any distinction between President Trump’s personal whining and official government policy was erased this past weekend with the launch of “an official government webpage dedicated to publicly calling out journalists and news outlets whose reporting the president disputes” (Aaron Parnas).

Trump thinks that by changing narratives he can change history. Example? He’s described events of January 6 (2021) as wonderful expressions of patriotism by tourists visiting the nation’s Capitol. He’s therefore issued pardons for those responsible for damage in the millions, five deaths and injuries sustained by 174 police officers defending the Capitol.

So Trump now has a government-sanctioned website offering a handy tool by which to deny reality and offer “alternative truths.” It reeks of Germany 1937.

Since 1988, today – December 1st – has been observed globally and in the U.S. as World AIDS Day. It’s one day each year when we look clear-eyed at where we stand in the decades’ long fight against AIDS, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost. It’s a day committed to remembering and promising.

But not this year. You’ll need to forgive me if I take personally Trump’s decision to wield his magic eraser, rid us of that nasty word “AIDS” and instruct all government employees to “refrain from publicly promoting World AIDS Day through any communication channels including social media, media engagements, speeches or other public-facing messaging” (The New York Times).

World AIDS Day is too much for Donald Trump. He’s heroically issued proclamations for National Manufacturing Day and World Intellectual Property Day. But not AIDS. No sir. Despite 44 million AIDS deaths globally, 700,000 deaths in America, and 1.2 million Americans living with HIV today. Despite the numbers and the dying, Trump blocks World AIDS Day and sticks with a National Manufacturing Day.

2025 is our first year in nearly four decades that we’ll not officially, as a nation, acknowledge the struggle with AIDS. It’s also the year I published Uneasy Silence, my testimony to the truth about the AIDS epidemic and my claim to an enduring purpose. As I said there:

When in 1991 I joined the AIDS community, I was joining a company of the sick and dying. …Nearly 100% of those infected would die within less than a decade. What drew us closer and closer to one another was the virus that was killing us. We were a community wrapped in grief over a constant stream of agonizing losses.”

[Today], give me a platform or pulpit and you’ll hear me bearing witness to the slaughter of mostly young lives in the American AIDS epidemic. Bearing witness. Telling the story. Refusing to allow the nation to forget. That’s my reason to still be alive, still speak out, still keep my promise to so many who died before me.

I’ll not go quietly, because I’ve promised that they will not be forgotten (pp. 128-129).

Donald Trump may dislike the truth about AIDS. That’s a shame, his shame. He should read again the story of the brilliant New York Times journalist Jeffrey Schmalz.

We were close, close friends for the year (1992) between his first interview of me and the week he died (November 1993). …In his final article ‘he remembered hoping for a cure. “A miracle is possible…and for a long time, I thought one would happen. But let’s face it, a miracle isn’t going to happen. One day soon I will simply become one of the ninety people in America to die that day of AIDS.” And so he did.’

…In Jeffrey’s death I found the urgency of telling others how his life, how he, mattered. My life had meaning so long as I could bear witness to the constant brutalities and hourly losses along the road to AIDS. By being a witness to Jeffrey’s life and death, I’ve had a purpose to fulfill, a meaning to give another eulogy, another speech. I’ve promised it to Jeffrey and to hundreds of thousands of others who shared his fate. I’ve promised it to families suffering the losses I know too well. I’ve promised it to my children and grandchildren. I’ve promised it to myself (pp. 129-130).

And I’ve promised it to Donald Trump. He may imagine he can magically erase my promises. I’m here to say he can’t. The truth about AIDS and World AIDS Day is written all over the epidemic’s history and my personal journey. It’s a very good day to remember the losses, yield to the grief, rise to the occasion and bear witness to the truth.

History will remember a president’s imaginary eraser and the reality of millions of deaths. It will remember and it will judge those who turned a blind eye to the brutal truth.

May I just say this is "the cruelest, most senseless thing Trump has done."

Last week I read an interview of Atul Gawande by Jonathan Cohn in the Bulwark Newsletter . It was far-and-away the most incisive piece I’ve read, seen or heard on the reality of dismantling USAID. You may know Gawande as a brilliant writer, surgeon, former Biden administrator. His conclusion is that the Trump Administration’s dismantling of USAID “may be the cruelest, most senseless thing Trump has done.”

I’ve severely edited the interview for length, but if you’d like to read it in its entirety I can refer you to this link.

Here’s some of Jonathan’s conversation with Gawande.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO was indignant in May when, at a hearing before Congress, lawmakers asserted that the Trump administration’s cuts to international aid were killing people.

“No one has died,” Rubio insisted. It was not an especially believable claim, even then….

Among those most alarmed was Atul Gawande, the surgeon and award-winning writer who had overseen USAID’s global health programs during the Biden administration. He spent much of the winter and spring imploring Trump allies in Congress to save the agency, citing its long history of bipartisan support, including from then-Senator Rubio. As hopes for a reprieve faded, Gawande turned to spotlighting the consequences—partly to build a case for rescuing what could be rescued and rebuilding what couldn’t, and partly just to bear witness.

“They’re trying to make the loss of life invisible,” Gawande told me this week, “they’re trying to deny the reality, and the first task is making the invisible visible....

[Infectious disease modeler] Brooke Nichols has led a team that has estimated 600,000 people have died already so far, 400,000 of them children. But it is hard to see. You can see the deaths that are related to childbirth. You may not see the deaths for a while where HIV is going out of control. It can take months or years sometimes for a death to occur from TB…. So the consequences were that the World Food Program dropped to only 40 percent of the minimum calories required for children being available.

COHN: Food rations down to 40 percent or more—what does that look like?

GAWANDE: We’re talking about the family having no more than one meal per day. That meal, they aren’t assured that they could get protein. When you don’t have adequate protein, you see some really terrible things happen—loss of skin integrity, swelling.

COHN: Why is that dangerous?

GAWANDE: Without protein and basic vitamins, you can’t create skin. You start losing the ability to form collagen. So skin wounds don’t repair.

You reach the point where the skin simply starts sloughing off and you become unable to maintain your body temperature, where you also get skin infection because there isn’t a barrier between you and infection in the outside world.

They had not seen cases like that for two decades.

At the same time, more than half of children are not yet getting access to what the modern regimen is, which is actually a lower-cost regimen as well. But rather than close that gap, the [funding was] ripped away. They were simply removed with no conscience, no willingness to wrestle with the harms being done.

None of that. Instead, a complete denial of what has been done.

COHN: There was a way to do this gradually, right? There was just this sort of blast wave of damage.

GAWANDE I think the thing to understand is that there is an assault on the idea of cooperation to solve big problems in the world, and instead a belief that domination, predatory transactions are how the U.S. wins.

And the thing is, it doesn’t even work on its own terms. This approach doesn’t make us more prosperous. It doesn’t win us more respect. It ends up costing lives. You end up funding the most expensive parts of aid, which is disaster relief. Or you end up abandoning people, being an unreliable partner, and having nobody trust you in the world.

COHN: When this was all playing out initially, there was this argument that ‘This is too expensive.’ ‘There’s tons of waste in the system.’ ‘The USAID is funding ideological agendas.’ ‘The Europeans could step up more, so why are we bearing this burden?’

I know you heard that from people. What was your answer?

GAWANDE: ...This is $24 per American taxpayer, where American taxpayers are already paying $15,000 in taxes to the US government. It’s a tiny fraction of our spending. The total amount for USAID is less than half of the budget of my hospital in Boston.

And it’s reaching hundreds of millions of people and saving lives by the millions. It is the highest-impact agency in the U.S. government. So is there more efficiency that you can get? Compare it to our own American health system, and what we are achieving out of our own health system….

COHN: This is a very disheartening story…. Someone wanting to do something — what should they do?

GAWANDE: So a couple of things.

Number one, [the Trump administration is] trying to make the loss of life invisible, they’re trying to deny the reality, and the first task is making the invisible visible.

Richard Rhodes, the historian, uses the term “public man-made death.” He was referring to war, but also Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which would be found to kill at least 25 million people through famine.

We are in the face of a public man-made death now at large scale. And it is our opportunity to hold people accountable for that.

President Trump never offered a single definitive explanation for the elimination of USAID, and the explanations put forward varied wildly. In addition to the complaints about supposed wokeness and waste, a common claim among right-wing allies of the president was that USAID funds supported terrorism or anti-Americanism.

Meanwhile, critics of the administration speculated that Elon Musk prioritized eliminating USAID as revenge for the agency’s role in the undoing of the apartheid system of his native South Africa.

Specifically, UNICEF estimated that in 2023 timely access to community-based programs likely prevented the deaths of 1.2 million children between the ages of six months and 5 years….”

May I Just Say There’s a Reason Dictators Always Want to Censor Artists?

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the insanities of the current Administration. Each day the sun rises on new slash-and-burn strategies to destroy the America we once knew. As the assaults rain down, my hope drains out. I feel like watching Love Island and sleeping as long as possible to avoid the day’s news.

Last week a story appeared first in the New York Times reporting that the gifted artist Amy Sherald, best known for her 2018 portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, had canceled her upcoming solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Her reason? Smithsonian authorities wanted her to remove a painting of a Black transgender woman.

“I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship,” said Sherald, “especially when it targets vulnerable communities…. At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option.” I couldn’t agree more. Silence is not an option. Let the art speak out.

While thinking of Sherald’s courage, I remembered the lone man standing in front of a column of Chinese tanks. June 5, 1989. Protests in Tiananmen Square had become violent. No one knows his name and no one can forget the image of him standing, alone, waiting for the tanks to arrive. A third-of-a-century later, the photographer’s art has left us with a powerful statement of courage and dissent. An unknown man taught us the power of “No” when brought to us by art.

Last week, Conan O’Brien received the 2025 Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. O’Brien’s art is spoken humor. In his acceptance speech, O’Brien lauded Twain’s hatred for bullies because he “deeply empathized with the weak.” He brought the audience to its feet when he said, “Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He wrote that we ‘should support our country all of the time and our government when it deserves it.’” Precisely. Yes to our country and No to any art-censoring government.

For me, art has always been my refuge, a place to go when there is no other place to go. It quiets my restless spirit. In the molding of a sculpture or the weaving of threads, my troubled soul is freed to speak. My art is visual. Sometimes tactile. My hope is that it is always truthful.

In my recently published book, Uneasy Silence, I tell the story of being invited in 1995 to mount a one-woman exhibit in the US Senate’s Russell Rotunda. “My art was going on display between the marble statues of the Great Hall. No female artist had ever been so honored.” Three days before the exhibit opened, it was canceled. One Senator was offended by a sculpture speaking to AIDS and death. I might have saved the exhibit if I removed that one piece, but that one piece told the truth; I couldn’t do it. I remembered it all when taking in Amy Sherald’s story last week.

So what do we do? What have we learned from Amy Sherald, Conan O’Brien, the Tank Man, Mark Twain or , or my coming face-to-face with censorship? How can I be contented and grateful in my studio when every day brings a new slaughter of innocents?

One step in the right direction is to turn to the wisdom of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu acknowledged that human beings are “capable of the most awful atrocities…” We may not “be able to do a great deal,” he admitted, “but start where you are and do what you can where you are. And, yes, be appalled. It would be awful if we looked on all of that horrendousness and we said, Ah, it doesn’t really matter. It’s so wonderful that we can be distressed.”

If we lose the capacity to be shocked, offended and distressed, we lose the capacity to value art or being human. The artist’s role is to remind us of what is troubling and what is beautiful in the world around us, and that in art we can be “wonderfully distressed.” Alone, we may be unable to change “that horrendousness” but in bringing the truth to life in literature or music (or any form of art) we say “No” to the pressing evil and “Yes” to all that bears witness to uncensored truth. It’s enough. Start where we are. For me, it’s a trip to my studio. Come along if you wish.