Richard Gere just called USAID the most pure thing America ever did.
Your money funded a $47,000 transgender opera in Colombia and $9 million that ended up in terrorist hands.
The White House saw his AP interview and had something to say about that.
What Gere Actually Said
Gere was supposed to be promoting season two of his Paramount+ spy series The Agency when he turned the AP interview into a full-on defense of the foreign aid slush fund Trump killed on day one.
"USAID was probably the most pure thing America did up to that moment," Gere told the AP. "It was a giveaway program to needy people."
He then took a shot at Trump directly – "He wouldn't even know what it stands for, USAID. He has idiots around him who have the same ignorance about it."
https://twitter.com/DefiantLs/status/2079222296900771903?s=20
The White House Rapid Response account on X did not let that stand.
"What will the world do without millions for Guatemalan sex changes or DEI in Serbia?" the account wrote. "Because that's the type of bullshit USAID was funding."
"It was a slush fund for Radical Left activists to enrich themselves and undermine America's interests," they added.
The Numbers Gere Doesn't Want You to See
Secretary of State Marco Rubio put the hard number on it last year.
Only 12 cents of every USAID dollar actually reached anyone in need.
Eighty-eight cents went somewhere else – to administrators, left-wing NGOs, politically connected contractors, and the foreign aid industrial complex that Richard Gere spent decades celebrating.
"At USAID, 12 cents of every dollar was reaching the recipient," Rubio said. "That means that in order for us to get aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex."
That's not a charitable organization.
https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/2079278773736738896?s=20
That's a machine for moving American tax dollars into the pockets of radical left bureaucrats while occasionally dropping something on an actual needy person so nobody asks questions.
What Your Money Was Actually Buying
The White House released the receipts.
Senator Joni Ernst went first – $20 million to build a Sesame Street in Iraq, $9 million in humanitarian aid that ended up in the hands of violent terrorists, over $1 million funneled to the Wuhan lab, and funds used to support Taliban-connected contractors in Afghanistan.
Karoline Leavitt added the DEI portfolio: $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala, $1.5 million to advance diversity and inclusion in Serbian workplaces, a $70,000 DEI musical in Ireland, a $47,000 transgender opera in Colombia, and a $32,000 transgender comic book in Peru.
Richard Gere told the AP he visited USAID programs for decades and watched the whole operation up close.
Either he never looked at where the money went, or he looked and didn't care.
USAID Was Designed to Make People Like Gere Look the Other Way
Richard Gere is not a villain.
He genuinely believes he spent decades fighting for good causes.
And that's exactly how these things work.
The USAID machine was brilliant at two things: delivering just enough real humanitarian results to give celebrities like Gere a story to tell, and hiding everything else inside bureaucratic complexity no one would ever audit.
https://twitter.com/TheRealSantino/status/1904205549463634345?s=20
Twenty million for a Sesame Street in Iraq doesn't show up in an AP interview about helping AIDS victims in Mumbai.
But it shows up on your tax bill.
Trump saw through it on day one.
Rubio confirmed the math.
And the White House just said out loud what most of Washington refused to admit for sixty years – this wasn't a charity.
It was a Democrat slush fund with a humanitarian label stapled to the front.
Richard Gere is welcome to keep defending it.
The receipts are public now, and they belong to every American who paid for them.
Sources:
- Warner Todd Huston, "White House Fires Back at Richard Gere over USAID," Breitbart, July 21, 2026.
- "White House Flags Top USAID Boondoggles Under Elon Musk's Microscope," Fox News, February 4, 2025.
- "White House Releases List of USAID 'Waste and Abuse' on Everything from Al Qaeda to Trans Operas," CBN News, February 7, 2025.
- Ryan King, "Sen. Joni Ernst Warns of 'Willful Sabotage' at USAID," New York Post, February 2025.
- "White House Pushes Back on Richard Gere's USAID Comments," Washington Times, July 21, 2026.
