“Whenever the people are well-informed,” Thomas Jefferson opined, “they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” Nations that “expect to be ignorant and free,” Jefferson added, “expect what never was and never will be.”

But as demonstrated by the Trump administration’s takedown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, disinformation, amplified by social media, poses an even greater threat to democracy than ignorance does.

Over the last few weeks, Elon Musk, chair of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, posted hundreds of denunciations of USAID. The agency, he declared without evidence is a “criminal money laundering organization,” a “viper’s nest of radical Marxists who hate America” and “a ball of worms.”

Because the agency provided grants to Eco Health Alliance to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which has been accused of releasing COVID-19 from a lab, Musk claimed that “our tax dollars were used effectively, to, in the end, kill Americans.” Musk also shared a fake video, produced by Russia, showing USAID paying celebrities to visit Ukraine. The time has come, he asserted, for USAID “to die.”

Meanwhile, President Trump asserted that USAID staff “turned out to be radical left lunatics.” A report on the “tremendous fraud” at USAID, he indicated, would soon be released. A few days later, Trump fired the USAID’s inspector general after he issued a report warning that $489........

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