I have, like I suspect many readers, been in quite a bad mood for the last two months. My go-to joke explaining why — which I feel like should land with readers of this newsletter — has become: “I didn’t realize quite how much my overall optimism about the state of the world depended on the fact that Lindsey Graham likes foreign aid.”

To unpack that a bit: For many years, the US spent tens of billions annually on foreign aid, including billions on vaccinations, preventive gear, and treatments for cheap-to-treat killers like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.

It did that not because a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals have been in power continuously for decades, but because a critical mass of conservative Republicans like Graham (and former President George W. Bush, and former House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, etc.) genuinely supported foreign aid, often out of sincere moral conviction. Aid actually grew dramatically under Bush, and remained roughly constant through President Barack Obama’s time in office and during Donald Trump’s first term.