Trump's Cultural Revolution: the dismantling of truth

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0:32Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:38Jon Sopel:We turn now to a, frankly, jaw-dropping story. New reporting on the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The Trump administration is now taking a look at everything, it appears. They exhibit themselves, the text on museum walls, the latest move by the White House to impose the president's view on American culture. And some breaking news this afternoon. The White House now confirming the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been fired. E.J. Antony's nomination already had critics concerned the administration might manipulate critical economic data to fit the president's agenda.

1:15And now he's talking about getting rid of the Bureau's flagship report altogether. The D.C. National Guard have started showing up on city streets here in Washington. Trump also took over D.C. Police Department, doing so for 30 days. President Trump claims the district is one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world, despite the fact that police data shows violent crime is actually down.

1:40Jon Sopel:Those are clips about the Smithsonian Museum, about the Bureau for Labor Statistics and policing in the capital, Washington, D.C. They may seem like disparate stories, but they have a common thread running through them. The actions Trump has taken, with all of them this week, begs one big question. Is he dismantling truth to make himself the only trustworthy narrator of America's history? Welcome to the News Agents USA.

2:17Jon Sopel:It's John in London. And it's Emily. And you are, I think, in France, and you've been attacked. I've been attacked by a rabid dog. No, luckily not by a rabid dog, by a dog. And I have to say, thank you for everyone who has reached out to ask how the leg is doing. The leg is doing as well as I could possibly hope, but there has been no running for a week or so. It was very traumatic. You ever been bitten by a dog? No, I haven't been bitten by a dog, I'm relieved to say. Why did the dog bite you? I just, I mean, the question is, if a dog is coming after you, Do you stop and talk to it or do you run as fast as you can?

2:53Because I feel like there's a sort of metaphor of our age here. Do you try and find common ground? Do you talk it down from its anger? Do you agree to disagree agreeably or do you just kind of get the hell out of there? And I legged it up the hill and some of my calf was stuck in its mouth.

3:10Jon Sopel:I think you should have been. Look, let's just talk about this as rational adults. I want to reason with you about why you don't want to bite my calf. Exactly. Tastes disgusting. Yeah. Anyway, the leg is healing. And thanks to everyone who reached out. Well, I hope you're feeling better. Look, later in the episode, you're going to hear the most extraordinary interview with a Texas state representative who has fled the state, along with all her other Democrat colleagues, to stop the passing of a law that will gerrymander the state to give the Republicans potentially five extra seats in the midterm elections next year.

3:55Jon Sopel:she is in hiding she cannot say where she is and she is fearful this is like really serious it's really serious and people are making jokes and people are saying we're on vacation and i want to be home but i can't be home i have to be where i am really that interview is worth listening to in full but first we have to talk about what is happening in washington right now and there's a whole series of things that have kind of coalesced into a whole that seem to suggest that somehow whether it be the smithsonian museum whether it be the bureau of labor statistics whether it be harvard university whether it be something else it's all pointing in one direction that you can only think one thing and it has to go along with Donald Trump's view of what the truth is, his truth.

4:56Yes, Donald Trump, or at least his administration, has recently been lecturing the UK about, quote unquote, its human rights abuses and its censorship. And meanwhile, if you cast your eye over the pond, what do you see? overreach on the streets of Washington, overreach in terms of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, overreach in some of the highest educational institutions like Harvard, overreach into cultural institutions which should well be left alone. And this is from a man who is trying to convince us that he values freedom of speech. He doesn't. He clearly doesn't. He wants absolute control of everything in America.

5:37And I guess we should start with what's happened on the streets of Washington. You talked about it yesterday on the newsagents, but essentially, under a law called Home Rule, Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, he manages to place the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. He gets to call this order for 24 hours. And then if he calls upon emergency, the need for emergency powers, he can extend it for 30 days. And what we are seeing here is essentially an excuse to put the military on the streets. And I think in Trump's sort of perfect world, this is how the pieces fall, that Washington is somewhere between a militarized zone and a real estate project.

6:28That's kind of how he sees perfection. And you've talked about how the stats don't really add up. As ever with Trump, there is a grain of truth. Of course, DC has very violent crime. It had 187 homicides. It peaked during the pandemic two years ago. It's come down by 30%. But of course, there is violent crime on the streets. and the rate is, I think, something like seven or eight times worse than New York. And of course, this all flared up because this guy they call Big Boy, you know, a staffer on the Doge Project, a 19-year-old young white man was attacked, carjacked, set upon, terrible set of circumstances.

7:07But it takes one trigger like that to tell Donald Trump that we are in a state of emergency. D.C. is in a state of emergency, and nothing less than guards, troops on the streets of Washington, will suffice to correct it. Anyone you ask in Washington will tell you that actually what you need is, what, better housing, you need to have better social contract with the people that live there, you have to try and get to the bottom of why crime is affected. Don't just put federal agents on the streets. But Trump is once again ignoring all those facts, ignoring the stats, and pursuing his own line of, I guess, just sort of like nuclear button outrage, right?

7:49Jon Sopel:Yeah, well, it's interesting. I was with someone last night who had been at the dinner with Trump when he was in Aberdeen at his golf course. And apparently Trump said, if I get my press secretary with me and if we've made an announcement and it hasn't caused outrage in the first 10 minutes on social media, then we failed. and you know the ease with which we kind of just go oh my god look what he's done now that's what Donald Trump is aiming to do with a lot of this stuff because he thinks that his base loves him provoking the establishment and poking it in the way that he's done over bringing the troops onto the streets of a democrat-run city like Washington DC but you know I go back to this story of the sacking of the person who was head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, they're just there counting the numbers.

8:45Jon Sopel:They gave a reappraisal of the jobs report saying that the demand for new employees was weaker than, you know, previously thought. And this was just based on data. And Donald Trump immediately came out and said, this is rigged on the basis of nothing. And so the person who was head of the bureau gets fired. And now Donald Trump is appointing this guy called E.J. Anthony from the Heritage Foundation, who had been very critical of the way the Labour statistics were compiled, who had gone on Steve Bannon's podcast to rail against the Bureau of Labour statistics. He is a right wing economist and he is now going to get the job because he is going to presumably deliver the statistics that Donald Trump wants.

9:32Jon Sopel:The statistics are the statistics. And that is the sort of extraordinary thing that we now find ourselves in, where Donald Trump is going to presumably massage the truth about the state of the US economy. That has serious long term consequences. Yeah, that's how it starts. You decide not to show full transparency, and then you show the ones that work, and then you don't show the others that don't work. And so you create this illusion of things ticking along all right. And I think, you know, one of the scariest things is, and I've even heard sort of, you know, political strategists, people who fight campaigns saying this, is that perception is reality now, right?

10:13All you have to do is create the perception, and it becomes the reality. So you look at something like Trump standing there and saying, Washington's a very dangerous city. Now, of course, there are a million examples, a million ways you can say, oh, yeah, nobody wants to see carjackings, nobody wants to see homicides on the streets of the Capitol. So who's going to contradict him? And once again, I think there are always traps made for his opponents, which is, how do you take this on? Do you criticise and put yourself on the wrong side of law and order? Or do you kind of end up agreeing with him and going into the data and saying, well, yeah, we've really got to get on top of this problem.

10:57This is a terrible problem. And making his case for him. And what's happening with the Smithsonian Museum, which is actually a sort of collection of museums. It's the jewel in the crown, isn't it? Of Washington, D.C. Ahead of the 250th anniversary next year, Donald Trump is saying, I'm not a big fan of some of the things that are on display there, but let's just start at the beginning. Let's just have an inventory of exactly what pieces you're showing, exactly what you're promoting, exactly who we're talking about here. And once again, it looks like part of his, I guess at the time he would have called it, his DEI wokeness.

11:38But essentially, it is an erasing of many parts of America's African-American history, black history, brown history, the cultural part of American history that made it so rich. And Trump's kind of saying, I don't think we really need to promote this stuff as much as we were. And the irony is that, you know, for all his kind of thrashing around people like Mamdani, calling him a communist and a socialist, the person that Trump is really sounding like now is Chairman Mao. This is exactly what the Cultural Revolution was about. You know, back in the mid-1960s, Mao came along, he rewrote history. Oh, what famine?

12:22There was never a famine. You want to point out a famine? Well, you're no longer part of the history books. In fact, you're going to be disappeared. Oh, what books? What old, you know, culture? Oh, I think we'll just get rid of that. Let's just get rid of the museum pieces. Let's just get rid of the books. Let's just get rid of anyone who liked the old way of doing things. This is Mao's cultural revolution, but kind of repackaged as an anti-woke Trump version of Project 2025. And it's sort of ludicrous that the person who seems to embody Trump most readily now is this sort of big, fat Chinese communist that we thought died 40, 50 years ago.

13:02Jon Sopel:But just to give you a kind of a specific on what we're talking about on the Smithsonian, there was a kind of, you know, been a thing about the history of dissent in America and kind of social unrest. And there is a stand about what happened on January the 6th, 2021, when a group of Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats and all the rest of it stormed the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. and the Trump administration have taken exception to that because that's not how they see it. They see that as upholding democracy, not threatening democracy, because Donald Trump won the 2020 election fair and square and Joe Biden cheated and fiddled the results.

13:43Jon Sopel:So that stand has to go from the Smithsonian Museum. And you think, hang on, you are literally rewriting history. And it's not just that history is written by the successors. That is the old line of, you know, if you win the war, you get to write the history. Donald Trump is rewriting what happened in the past to fit his narrative. And it's just that sort of intolerance of anything that contradicts him. I think one of the real, I mean, look, there's a real, there are real big cultural dangers. I think economically, and just going back to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, I just want to make this one point.

14:18Jon Sopel:It's Donald Trump's big play in the terrorist war is to get foreign nationals, foreign companies to invest massively and set up their engineering or their car plants or their textile factories in America. They're not going to do it if Donald Trump has massaged the jobs data. They are not going to make multi million pound investment decisions if they know that the monthly jobs report has been squashed or massaged or recreated to fit a Trump narrative. They want hard data to know that they're making decisions based on the right economic facts. And I think that, you know, people are going to look at this and think, I don't want anything to do with it.

15:00Jon Sopel:And the other thing that Trump has come out and said, he's gone after, you know, I mean, okay, if you think that academic institutions are within your purview, fine, you know, you're doing that. I mean, hideous. Museums, yeah, okay. Bureau of Labour's thinks he's now going after the head of Goldman Sachs for daring to say that tariffs are a bad idea and that maybe the get ahead of Goldman Sachs needs to be replaced because he doesn't accord to the Trump view of the merit of tariffs. I would say just going back to E.J. Anthony, which is a really interesting case, you know, the guy comes from the Heritage Foundation.

15:34That's the sort of the right wing think tank beloved of Liz Truss, amongst others, just to put you in the sort of economic framework work for this. If you look at his CV, it tells you the places that he's been a commentator, you know, places that he's written for, places that he's talked on. It doesn't actually give you a sense of anything that he's done as an economist. And I guess you could stand there and say, oh my God, you know, why has Trump put this guy who hasn't even got a sort of solid CV into the job? You know, will anyone trust him? I think that's part of the plan. I think, you know, he could have chosen another economist.

16:10He could have chosen somebody that he was sort of, you know, thought was neutral or thought sort of slightly favoured the Trump administration. But he put somebody in who doesn't really make any sense to anyone. And maybe that is the plan, that you get somebody who people don't really trust. Because once you have, to your point, once you have sort of created this murkiness around any of the numbers, around any of the stats coming out, Once you've basically undermined the very project of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, you can sort of make things up as you go along. You can tell people what you want, right?

16:46I mean, nobody's going to stand there going, oh, no, but it's E.J. Anthony. He can't have got the figures wrong. It's E.J. Anthony. Of course they're not. They're going to go, oh, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Right? And then you've suddenly opened people up to believing whatever you want to tell them.

17:02Jon Sopel:You know, the thing is that it just shows such a remarkable thin skin that even something as minor as a weakening jobs report is enough to get someone fired. When, you know, a month later, it might be that it's bounced back and Donald Trump can do a victory lap and say, you know, I knew we were right and all the rest of it. And yet one bad report, one thing he doesn't like and the person has to go. And I just think it sort of sets a chill atmosphere of what you can and cannot say. And it feels like there is, I don't want to exaggerate it, but it feels like there is a war on truth going on in America right now, led by Donald Trump, where you have to say what he thinks.

17:48Jon Sopel:Otherwise, you are on the wrong side of the line and you are cast into outer darkness. And that is not a country of free speech and free expression. That is a country that is, you know, under the thumb of an authoritarian ruler who just will not broke any dissent whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that links all these subjects together, you know, whether it's the troops on the streets of Washington, whether it's the overriding of the institutions, we haven't even talked about Harvard yet. I mean, Harvard is, we think, on the verge of making a payment of some$500 million to the Trump administration, essentially just to be left alone.

18:32When I was growing up, we called that menaces money. It's kind of, he's coming after your lunch money. And to be fair, Harvard has billions, you know, it has, I think, around 50 billion in its sort of various endowments. So it's not short of cash. But I think why this has been so upsetting to so many people is that Harvard has the ability, has the pockets, has the, had the temerity and had the reputation to stand up to Trump. and if Harvard now doesn't have the ability to stand up to Trump, if they are about to cut a deal, if they are about to see 500 million go and they've made very clear they don't want it going to the government, they're going to pay it out to, you know, I don't know, various courses or reparations or, you know, something that Trump decrees.

19:18They're trying to keep the government at arm's length but essentially they are bending to the will of the Trump administration and you know if Harvard cannot stand up to Trump then you kind of look around and you think who's left like where is the backbone now in America you know that the Democrats are at sixes and sevens they don't really know how to fight him they don't know what to say about you know is Trump right about crime is he is he making it up about crime is is Washington safe is it not safe they're not going to have the fight about the Smithsonian because they don't really want to be cast as the sort of, you know, protectors of whatever he's calling it, you know, the sort of woke America history.

19:57And I think you look at an institution that you think would be robust enough to take him on, rich enough, robust enough, and intellectual enough to fight the argument properly with really good lawyers. And even they're kind of going, well, yeah, but you know, it's just easier to, it's easier to sort of cut something around the back and then we can all get on. We don't, we don't want him, you know, stopping foreign students replying. We don't want him cutting our visa applications. We don't want him stepping, you know, on our toes any more than he is. I mean, I don't know. In my head, it seems crazy to think that once you've cut a deal with Trump, that he'd just leave it alone.

20:36But that's the idea. But I still go back to where I started, which is none of these subjects, none of these subjects are about Epstein. So Trump's big win this week is, yes, we're talking about crime, or we're talking about Harvard, or we're talking about museum artefacts, because he doesn't really want us to talk about Epstein. The one person I have to say who very much is talking about Epstein at the moment, and you could say it's inadvertent, but it doesn't exactly feel inadvertent, is the man who's just interrupted his family holiday in the Cotswolds, won J.D. Vance to go on Fox News to speak to Maria about how much Donald Trump wants transparency in the Epstein case.

21:22Just listen to what he said.

21:24Jon Sopel:I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files. For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did absolutely nothing about this story. We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years. Was it the right move for Comer to send subpoenas to the Clintons? It absolutely was. And it drives home how while the Democrats have tried to make this Epstein thing about anything but the fact that Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein Island all the time.

22:05Jon Sopel:Who knows what they did? But it's totally reasonable to ask these questions. What you saw in the House's subpoena is they are trying to investigate all of the things related to this particular case. I know a lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers. I want answers. It's totally reasonable to ask these questions. Exactly. So it sounds as if he's having a go at the Democrats, but he's re-oxygenating something that actually had gone away. And remember last week this time we were talking about the sort of the Cobra meeting that was meant to be held at Vance's, you know, vice presidential house.

22:40And he came out and denied that this meeting was taking place. Now, really, who leaked that then? Who leaked the meeting that was taking place? The meeting that then had to move to the White House. The meeting that actually everyone had been sort of quite quiet about until Vance came out and publicly said, oh, it's not about that at all. Here he is re-oxygenating something that Trump has kind of brilliantly managed to make go away for a whole week. And he's doing it from the Cotswolds, which you have to say takes now, right?

23:14Jon Sopel:It really does. And, you know, the funny thing is, I was just I was listening to that interview and I thought there is no way in the world Mike Pence, when he was vice president in the first term of Trump, would have dared to do something like that. J.D. Vance is not afraid to flex his muscles. And I think that Donald Trump needs to be looking over his shoulder because, yeah, J.D. Vance professes this extraordinary loyalty towards Donald Trump. But at the same time, you could see how J.D. Vance might just be positioning himself. That were bad things to emerge from the Epstein files. Well, J.D.

23:55Jon Sopel:Vance might be the beneficiary from it. We all want transparency. All want transparency. I just want to see the sunlight shine in.

24:28with gear that's up to the test when it matters most, no matter how you hunt. And covered with a VIP warranty. Grab your Vortex optics, apparel, and everything else you need at Shields.com.