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The Mars Perseverance rover is on a mission many space scientists believe to be the most ambitious and important since the moon landing in 1969. Since that day in 2021, it has roamed the surface of Mars, digging up precisely chosen soil samples then caching them for a future return to Earth. The aim of the project: to determine once and for all whether life ever developed on the red planet. “This is profoundly important,” said Scott Hubbard, who previously served as NASA’s first Mars program director. “It’s not just curiosity, nice-to-know science. I think this would have a profound effect on all humanity.”

On May 2, 2025, four years into the Perseverance mission, the Trump administration released . The document orders billions in what Hubbard called “draconian” cuts to the space agency. “It takes NASA, in equivalent terms, back to about 1960,” he said. The proposal would slash about half of NASA’s science budget, eliminate more than 40 existing or future missions and cancel Mars Sample Return entirely. “It’s just so profoundly destructive,” Hubbard said.

By abandoning its own mission to return pristine soil samples from another world, the Trump administration will be tossing away billions of dollars in sunk costs and ceding one of the most vital aspects of the 21st-century space race to the Chinese government, which recently announced . Dozens if not hundreds of the most talented scientists and engineers in the world will leave NASA for other countries or the private sector. As seems to be the case in sector after sector under Trump, America will become less ambitious, less capable, less interested in actual greatness than in empty pageantry and violence at home. 

II: Screamin’ Freedom

Last Saturday, I was in Washington at Trump’s multimillion-dollar birthday parade for the United States army. The extraordinary event, which some had compared in the lead-up to the Nuremberg Rallies or a Workers’ Day parade in North Korea, was billed as an opportunity to show off how truly great America has become again under Trump. In person, I found it all slightly underwhelming. It was neither the fascist extravaganza Trump’s critics had predicted, nor the packed display of fealty Trump’s supporters likely expected.

In the end, the whole thing felt to me . There were fighter jets, guitar riffs, corporate sponsors, country music and fireworks. I have never been to a NASCAR race, but the vibe seemed very close to what I’ve seen of them on TV: thousands of patriots pinking in the sun, huddled near a roadway, watching vehicles roll by. Volunteers handed out free samples of “”-flavoured energy drink in star-spangled cans. A military choir sang “God Bless America”; the crowd sang along. When it was over, the massive TV screens set up on the National Mall showed Trump walking out with his wife. “Woo! Big Daddy!” a man shouted behind me in the thinning crowd. Then a second time, quieter this time, almost to himself: “Big Daddy.”

If everything Trump does exists on a spectrum from the terrifying to the absurd, Saturday’s parade was definitely closer to the latter end. I don’t think it was meant as a deliberate distraction. I don’t believe, having watched him for a decade, that’s how Trump operates. He wasn’t deliberately trying to hide what’s going on behind the scenes in his America. He just happened to achieve the same outcome by doing exactly what he has very publicly wanted to do anyway: salute a bunch of tanks on the streets of D.C.

To put it another way, I don’t think Trump was trying to hide the increasingly dark reality of his rule with Saturday’s spectacle, precisely because, for Trump, I don’t think there is a line between the spectacular and the real. He was born rich — his father was a successful real estate developer. But one of the ways he got richer as an adult was by loudly selling the idea of his own success, even when it was only a mirage. He told the tabloids he was a billionaire long before he became one. He put his name on hotels he didn’t own. He was for having falsely inflated the value of his many properties, including Mar-a-Lago.

In that context, the military parade made a particular kind of Trumpian sense. In his world, reality is less malleable than it is subject to a kind of New Age affirmation. It is what he says it is. America is great again: just look at this beautiful parade.

III: Peak Mortality

On the afternoon before Trump’s army spectacle, I was in the offices of the in downtown Washington. Founded by a former child actress who unknowingly passed HIV on to her children after acquiring the virus through a blood transfusion, the Elizabeth Glaser Foundation has been active for decades in Africa and around the world, helping mothers and their children prevent and treat HIV and AIDS. In February, the foundation, like scores of others like it, found out, initially on X then through a series of formal written orders, that every one of its U.S. government-funded projects had to stop, immediately. “We expected there would be a review of grants and projects (under the Trump administration),” Catherine Connor, the foundation’s vice-president of public policy and advocacy, told me. “That was anticipated. What I think wasn’t anticipated was the ferocity with which this all arrived.”

The Elizabeth Glaser Foundation received public funding through PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR has, for years, been considered one of the most successful global health initiatives in history. The U.S. State Department estimates the program, set up under George W. Bush, has since 2003. But on January 24, following Trump’s executive order freezing almost all U.S. spending on foreign assistance, agencies like the Elizabeth Glaser Foundation were forced to inform their partners in the field that all PEPFAR-funded work had to stop. On the ground, the results were felt immediately. “You don’t need modelling to understand that a child who’s born with HIV and doesn’t get on medication is going to die,” Connor said. “That’s just common sense.”

On February 1, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver permitting “urgent life-saving HIV treatment services” to resume under PEPFAR. That means agencies like the Elizabeth Glaser Foundation were allowed to start funding medication and HIV tests again. But what they still can’t pay for, Connor told me, are all the other programs that actually make an on-the-ground health system work. “As an organization, we have spent the last decade or so really trying to say, ‘Let’s meet our patients where they are,’” Connor told me. They’ve brought testing out into rural communities. They’ve paid to transport lab samples. They’ve created programs to deliver life-saving drugs to post office-style boxes, making it easier for impoverished communities to actually access the treatments that are there. All of that, right now, is on hold.

“Treatment is available,” Connor said. “What they’ve missed is all the things that are required to get vulnerable people facing poverty, facing these challenges, to the clinic to get those medicines.”

When we met in Washington, Connor was emphatic that these programs are not frills. She gave the example of a pregnant woman who tests positive for HIV using a rapid test in a rural community. PEPFAR-funded doctors can put the mother on antiretroviral drugs. They can test her baby, when it’s born, for HIV. But for medical reasons, they can’t use rapid tests on newborns. And since PEPFAR no longer funds any transportation services, they can’t send the full tests to an urban lab for processing. “So all of a sudden, this woman doesn’t know if her child is HIV-positive or not,” Connor said. “She may have to wait two months, three months to find out. And unfortunately, peak mortality for a child born with HIV is eight to 12 weeks.”

IV: “Great at what?”

What has made America great, when it has been great, is a moral ambition that, while rarely fully realized, is spoken nonetheless and acted upon by everyday Americans in a million quiet ways. What disturbed me most about being in Washington last week wasn’t Trump’s parade, with its modest crowds and (I have to admit, the robot dogs were kind of cool). It was the sense I got, in interview after interview, of an administration that isn’t just cold to those ambitions but is actively working against them.

The Trump administration isn’t just dismantling foreign aid, though it is doing that. Brooke Nichols, an infectious-disease modeller and health economist I spoke to, that more than 350,000 people, including more than 200,000 children, have already needlessly died because of Trump’s cuts.

It isn’t just slashing funds for Mars Sample Return and , though again, it is doing that. “The idea of conceding the future of space science to the Chinese really galls me,” Hubbard told me. “But I think that if we lose that investment in science, we really lose something profound for not only the U.S. but the whole world.”

It isn’t just cutting university research funding, , , health care and health science, and public support for the arts, though of course it is doing all of that — from more than $5 billion out of the National Institutes for Health all the way down to the entire $1.2 million budget of the , the smallest of all the Smithsonian institutions, which has since 1967 worked to document and celebrate Washington’s historically Black neighbourhoods.

It isn’t in any single one of those things, in other words. It is in the accumulation of all of them. It is in a country that is no longer even striving toward moral progress, that sneers at the idea of doing something just because it’s the right thing to do.

“Something that’s inspired me over the years is that part of the American narrative is that we can do big things. We can do great things,” Connor, who was born in Alberta but moved to the U.S. as a young child, told me. “This idea of American Greatness — the question then becomes, great at what?”