Why is Donald Trump calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired... again?

16:25Emily Brooks:On this occasion, I cannot help noticing the readjustments to the East Wing, Mr President. Following your visit to Windsor Castle last year. And I'm sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814.

16:49Guidy Mamman:I bet Donald Trump heard that as royal approval for his ballroom project. But in fact, all the king says was, I can't help noticing the readjustments to the East Wing. He didn't express his approval for it in any way at all.

17:02Emily Brooks:You know, I was at the king's speech in Congress yesterday, and he had a bunch of jokes there which went over well. And I guess he decided to keep up with the comedy routine at the White House. But, you know, even among those jokes, you notice that the king didn't say he approved of the construction. He just said he noted it, which if you read between the lines, maybe there is also a little bit of a criticism there. But it is interesting to see that it is a topic of discussion even during a state dinner.

17:32Guidy Mamman:Anthony, we should probably explain a little bit about where we've got to with the plans for the controversial ballroom. So the East Wing of the White House has been knocked down. There's a big gap site there. They're getting on with constructing the foundations and a kind of security bunker that's going to go underneath, but not the ballroom itself yet. And the plans are variously revised. Donald Trump quite often turns up at events or goes to meet the press at the back of Air Force One with printouts of plans of it. He's very, very proud of the columns he's going to put outside and the huge big windows of the steps leading up to it.

18:06Guidy Mamman:But it's generally perceived to be far too large for the site, a bit overly gaudy. But yeah, I mean, you know, too big, too blingy, sounds like a Trump building. But it's not going down brilliantly with voters, is it?

18:21Emily Brooks:It doesn't seem to be. I mean, the concerns are twofold, right? As you mentioned, the concerns about the size of it, the gaudiness of it, the way it's going to kind of dominate the White House grounds and cast a shadow over the executive mansion, the older parts of the building. But then there's also concerns about the process by which this was done. We talked about it in the past, but they didn't, Donald Trump didn't say anything about tearing down any part of the White House structure when this all began. Initially, people thought, oh, they're just going to pull down the fascia of the east wing and then attach the ballroom onto it.

18:55Emily Brooks:And then overnight, practically, the entire thing was raised to the ground and they started digging holes. And that's one of the reasons why this prompted a lawsuit that is ongoing. And a judge had temporarily put a hold on some of the construction, but not all of it. And he's still reviewing whether this can be allowed to proceed without congressional approval or not. And that is one of the things that has shifted now based on Saturday night's incidents and the calls for construction in the ballroom is that members of Congress now have started to talk about maybe giving explicit approval for this.

19:33Emily Brooks:That would cut the knees out from this lawsuit and maybe even giving some federal money to help supplement the hundreds of millions of dollars that Donald Trump says he has raised from private companies to build this construction. I think the concern is, Sarah, and tell me if I'm wrong here, but if this isn't popular from the beginning, do you think that Republican legislators in Congress who are going to appropriate or are proposing appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars to build this ballroom, do you think that is going to help their standing with the public that is already concerned about the price of gasoline and the amount of money that the government is spending on other things?

20:13Emily Brooks:I mean, it seems almost a strange thing to focus on. It's going to open them up to political attacks from Democrats.

20:20Guidy Mamman:Sure. Now, of course, it was Lindsey Graham who came up with the idea, who will often come up with ideas that are very much in line with Donald Trump's thinking and not necessarily every Republican in Congress will agree with. I mean, Donald Trump says he doesn't need the money in taxpayer funds. He's raised hundreds of millions, as you say, from private individuals and corporations. And we're not even allowed to know who they all are or how much they've given, which is another source of controversy around the whole ballroom idea. If Congress were to approve it, as you say, then they could go ahead.

20:52Guidy Mamman:I wonder, would that involve any more oversight, though, of the design of it? Because I mean, I think it's fair to say that the White House probably did need a large space in which to do things like host state banquets when you've got royal visitors. A ballroom isn't a bad idea. It's just the massive scale of this Trump ballroom that's so controversial.

21:12Emily Brooks:The massive scale and the way he went about doing it without seeking any kind of approval from the commissions that are normally set up to manage these sorts of things. So Congress could weigh in and Congress could change the law or give an exception that would allow Donald Trump to pretty much do whatever he wants with the construction of it, whether they say, well, we're not going to have to look at the details of the plans. Just go ahead and build your ballroom. Congress could, in theory, do that. They're the lawmaking body that sets the rules, essentially. But but, yeah, I think there is a there has been a desire and Donald Trump is right about this, a desire from presidents to find some sort of a way to host larger events that doesn't rely on tents set up on the grass in the in the South Lawn of the White House.

21:56Emily Brooks:There have been incidents where it's rained during these events and the tents have flooded. So it is kind of something that is not a bad idea in theory. I think the objections to it, one, is that just Donald Trump is doing this and people are going to knee-jerk reject anything he tries to do. Two, the style that he has put forward. and three, the means, the method with which he did this without any kind of a real advance notice or any kind of deceiving the breadth of this project until it was well underway.

22:28Guidy Mamman:Now, we've had a question about some of the things we're talking about here from Bethany in London and she asked, Dear America's team, why is no one talking about how wonderfully convenient it was for him, she means Donald Trump, that the only correspondence dinner he's ever attended gave him an additional argument for his gaudy ballroom? Am I also the only one who can't make myself believe the bullet wound after the assassination attempt? Has the unrelenting drip, drip of insanity infected my brain? Please show your honest thoughts and help me straighten it out in my poor head. Mariana, do you want to pick this up first?

23:00Noah Rothman:Yeah, I think it's a really good way of describing it, this drip, drip, because that is essentially what has been going on since the dawn of social media. But in relation to the shooting specifically, certainly since the assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump that happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, before the election. And what was notable about the online reaction then is that both people who loved Donald Trump and hated Donald Trump were saying things a little bit like what you're saying there, Bethany. I don't believe that the bullet wound was real. I think that people who don't like Donald Trump very much thought it was part of some conspiracy without any evidence at all to try and get himself elected in the election that year.

23:40Noah Rothman:And then some of the slightly more out there MAGA supporters thought that it was actually part of a kind of conspiracy to wake people up. One of them I spoke to said, oh, you know, this is trying to wake people up to the danger that the world is in and Donald Trump is in and to essentially get him elected as well. Now, I think that because those conspiracy theories went, I wouldn't say mainstream, that might be too far, but certainly they started to infect people who I think would otherwise consider themselves quite immune to disinformation. And a lot of that was very emotional content. It was the kind of stuff that makes you go, oh yeah, actually, that's a bit odd.

24:12Noah Rothman:Or, oh yeah, what happened? We didn't find out that much information about the shooter. People were asking legitimate questions, but then they were quickly spiraling into very unevidenced or kind of false realms. Now, this time around, it's like every time something happens, the same playbook, the same tactics get activated. So you see users posting, you know, this language. It was staged. It was a hoax. It was part of a conspiracy. And in a weird way, the more this happens and the more kind of like not unusual, it seems, the more people then start to believe the conspiracy theories. Because I think, you know, assassination attempts are such a such a big deal to feel like they keep happening.

24:44Noah Rothman:It's like, well, well, why does this keep why does this keep unfolding? I think it's not aided by the fact that because of social media, we can also like forensically comb through posts that alleged shooters have made. We can look at their content. Often there'll be like supposed manifestos and other things circulating. And also this particular shooting, obviously, because it was the correspondence dinner, there were loads of people like filming. There were influencers posting pictures afterwards. is I think all of that contributes to that noise that starts to make you, makes anyone kind of question the reality of what's going on and why.

25:18Noah Rothman:But the facts here ultimately are that there was a shooting attempt. There's no evidence at all it was staged. I think if you looked at some of the reaction of, for example, Melania actually, aside from all of the kind of, there's no evidence that says it was staged at all. Like you can imagine actually how scary those events are for people, particularly in light of the very near miss that happened in Pennsylvania. And so it's important, I guess, not to get lost in the social media noise and forget what a big deal this stuff is. Like that question that was asked by one of the reporters in the clips earlier.

25:48Noah Rothman:There are a lot of very, very important people in that room. And if that shooting had happened, it would have had huge, huge, huge consequences. And so just because these shootings keep sort of being thwarted in some way doesn't mean that they're any less credible.

26:02Guidy Mamman:I wonder if, and I'm just kind of thinking out loud here. So this is not necessarily a well thought through theory. But I wonder if the way Donald Trump responds to these incidents fuels people's cynicism about it. So after the assassination attempt in Butler, when, of course, we saw that famous image of him struggling to get to his feet, putting his fist in the air, shouting fight, fight, fight, as there was blood pouring from his ear, that became a really defining campaign symbol for him. He leaned in heavily to the political advantage that there was in that. He absolutely milked it to the point where people were then looking at him saying, well, hang on, if this is so central to your campaign, if this is so politically advantageous, did you create these circumstances in order to profit from it politically?

26:46Guidy Mamman:And also, we were just saying how incredibly quickly the White House pivoted to using the shooting attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to say this makes the case for why we should be building our big, beautiful ballroom. that again, you know, there's a degree of cynicism there about using the events to your advantage and such that perhaps that's maybe what leads people to look at it and think, well, hang on, did you create these events in order to use them to your advantage?

27:10Emily Brooks:Yeah, I think you're onto something, Sarah. I think it kind of reflects a powerlessness and a lack of control that people feel when these events happen and that they are leading to leading to developments that they don't approve of. They see an assassination attempt and they see Donald Trump perhaps benefiting from it, or they fear that people are going to start supporting Donald Trump or forgive him for what could be past indiscretions or actions that they think he should be held accountable for. And it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't seem just. So you start thinking about, well, maybe there's some sort of a larger malign actor influencing this.

27:51Emily Brooks:that it all fits together in a way that is more understandable than just random things happen. And sometimes random things happen and the people that you don't like benefit from them politically.

28:03Noah Rothman:Yeah. And I think as well that all of this is the kind of product of turbocharged algorithmic feeds where, you know, you push stuff, which comes from accounts and people that you agree with on the whole. They often share the same political views as you or you're kind of outraged by those posts and you very strongly disagree with them. But all of that creates this world where you start to trust the people you agree with rather than necessarily the people with the correct information. And I think that you are onto something, Sarah, which is that Donald Trump's ability to turn these events into something that could be positives, perhaps cite the wrong adjective, but that could be beneficial in some way.

28:39Noah Rothman:I mean, he's kind of known for that, right, as a politician. So in some ways, it shouldn't surprise people at all that he would stand up and put his fist in the air or that he would start talking about the ballroom. In lots of ways, that's completely in keeping with his character as a politician. And actually, in some ways, that kind of undermines all the conspiracy theories, because you're like, how would you expect Donald Trump to behave if he was shot at? I think the way he's behaved is very in line with what I would have anticipated. But nonetheless, I think that does add fuel to the fire and people will then decide to kind of push particular narratives.

29:09Noah Rothman:And I think there is something about like trying to understand why these events keep happening and how they're able to happen. And I think a lot of people can't really understand how it keeps getting so close. And a lot of that comes down to questions over the security services and whether failings are being repeatedly made in terms of how these venues and events are kept safe. And I think that there's perhaps a belief, certainly if you don't exist in government or, you know, you're just the average person. Like, how can this keep happening? Like, how can people get this close to the president?

29:39Noah Rothman:And I think as ever with this stuff, it often starts with a kernel of truth or a legitimate question. and then when you're being drip, drip, drip, fed this, push, push, pushed it, as Bethany says, you start to become more malleable, you're more open to it and then you get to the point where you think, oh, maybe I don't believe this happened or is true, which is actually really worrying because, as I often say, if we can't all agree on a kind of shared concept of reality, if we don't all share reality, we can't all agree the shooting happened, whatever you think of it, then we're starting to get into pretty sort of tricky territory.

30:09Guidy Mamman:In this Trump administration, though, it's actually genuinely difficult sometimes to work out what is true and what not. I've already been confused twice this week. I saw a photograph of King Charles standing in the Oval Office handing him a copy of the Declaration of Independence with all those famous signatures of the founding fathers underneath it and his own signature in a big black Sharpie scrawled over the top of them. And the first time I glanced at it, I thought, he hasn't, has he? And I thought, no, of course not. It's ridiculous. It's just a meme. It's just somebody's created it. He hasn't really defaced an original copy of the Declaration of Independence by signing it with a Sharpie pen.

30:48Guidy Mamman:But then when I saw a story that he is adding his own image to American passports that are going to be issued this year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States. And if you get a new passport, it will actually have an image of Donald Trump etched into the pages. Well, I thought that was obviously a joke, but it's not. It's real. So, you know, the atmosphere in which we live contributes to just not able to work out what's true and what's not.

31:14Noah Rothman:And very helpfully, if AmeriCasters want to know more about that, what's true and what's not, and all of the kind of conspiracy theory, meme content swirling about the attempted shooting that happened at the weekend, we are going to be dissecting it on Top Comment, which is the other podcast that I present with Matt Shea. do go and give it a listen. It will be coming out on Friday in the top comment feed.

31:37Guidy Mamman:Yeah, we'll all give that a listen. But from AmeriCast for today, we should leave it there. Just say bye-bye. Bye.

31:44Emily Brooks:Bye, y 'all.

31:52Emily Brooks:Thank you for answering our call and continuing to send your messages to us. We do read every single one. We love to hear your thoughts, your feedback and questions as well. So please do keep them coming. You can send us an email. It's americast at bbc.co.uk. The WhatsApp is 44 330 123 9480. And you can get involved in the AmeriCast Discord server. The link to that is in the description. And don't forget to subscribe. That way you will never miss an episode. Until next time, bye.

32:34Noah Rothman:The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary.

32:39Emily Brooks:And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

33:09Emily Brooks:How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.