New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.

Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What's his legacy, if we know that yet?”

Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true.”

He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in.”

At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady. With that in mind, Brooks reference to the trio of communist dictators comes across as even more absurd:

Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.

Pol Pot had people murdered because they wore glasses, Mao killed tens of millions of people in a man-made famine and political oppression, and Stalin killed around 4 million Ukrainians in a genocide that modern Russia’s inability to come to terms with Stalin's legacy and how it helped create a separate Ukrainian national identity have resulted in 11 years of bloodshed. Stalin was also responsible for the deaths of millions more through other aspects of his tyrannical rule.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk—just like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and others—by contrast, decided to cut foreign aid, and in the one example Brooks cites, it is arguably not even true. Brooks can’t weasel out of it by invoking the trio of genocidal tyrants and then say they are not the same. As Trump goes after PBS’s federal funding, PBS insists that they are not a partisan, left-wing entity, but their main allegedly conservative commentator just made a claim so unbelievably preposterous that one can be justified in resenting having to take it seriously. Yet, because PBS wants conservative tax dollars to subsidize such claims, we must.

Here is a transcript for the May 30 show:

PBS News Hour

5/30/2025

7:38 PM ET

AMNA NAWAZ: David, how do you look at it? What's his legacy, if we know that yet?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I'm not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you're at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget.

So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true.

But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in.

Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy.

And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.