By Tom Nichols
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
“This is an awesome decision by Trump.”
What did Donald Trump just do, and who is this happy
about it? Is this a Republican politician supporting the president’s plans for
a tax cut, or perhaps a MAGA cheerleader applauding deportations? Perhaps it’s
some right-wing pundit foot-stomping his approval for an executive order about trans
athletes?
No. The “awesome decision” was to shut down the U.S.
Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the umbrella organization that provides
support not only to Voice of America but also to Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, Radio Marti, and Radio Free Asia, among other groups. And the clapping
is coming not from Washington, but from Moscow. The pleased Trump fan is Margarita Simonyan,
the head of RT and the media group that owns Russian-propaganda outlets such as
Sputnik, and one of Russia’s most venomously anti-Western television
commentators. (She once suggested
that Russia should detonate a nuclear weapon over its own territory as a
warning to the West about supporting Ukraine.)
Here’s her full
comment (made on Russian television on Sunday night) regarding Trump’s
order: “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other
outlets, because Trump unexpectedly announced that he’s closing down Radio
Liberty and Voice of America, and now they’re closed. This is an awesome
decision by Trump.”
Organizations such as the Voice of America and “the
radios,” as they have been called collectively over the years, are among
America’s best instruments of soft power. (VOA was created to counter Nazi
propaganda during World War II.) During the Cold War, people behind the Iron
Curtain relied on these institutions, and especially on RFE/RL, not because
they wanted to hear an American point of view—they already knew all about
that—but because they wanted news, real information that they could
trust. These are not independent news
organizations: They receive support from the U.S. government and other sources.
But the journalists at VOA and the radios are not mouthpieces for any
government. They are professionals who report and broadcast news and interviews
in multiple languages around the world—much to the ire of authoritarian states
that wish to control what their citizens read and hear.
Turning off these sources was not some slapdash DOGE
move. Trump personally signed an executive order on Friday, shutting down what
a White House statement
absurdly called “the Voice of Radical America.” And if the order stands—USAGM
is chartered by Congress as an independent agency, and Trump likely does not
have the authority to close it down by fiat—he will have succeeded in gutting
crucial sources of information relied on by millions of people living under
repressive governments. As Max Boot wrote
in The Washington Post on Sunday, “All of this amounts to a
stunning and self-defeating repudiation of America’s legacy as a beacon of
freedom around the world.”
Trump has long had a grudge against Voice of America in
particular; he has accused
VOA of skewing its coverage to the left, and of supporting President Joe Biden
in the 2024 campaign. He also recently bristled at what he
thought was an impertinent question from a VOA reporter regarding Gaza. (“Who
are you with?” the president asked the reporter. When she answered that she was
from VOA, Trump said, “Oh, no wonder.”)
But this is more than just a spat with VOA. By killing
off USAGM and the organizations that depend on it, Trump is pulling a thorn
from the paws of the world’s worst regimes, the people he seems to believe are
his natural political allies and co-religionists. (The news about VOA and Radio
Free Asia was happily received in Beijing,
for example, where a state-run media outlet cheered the end of America’s “lie
factory” and its “demonizing narratives” about China.)
RFE/RL also monitors the press and events in other
nations, and provides in-depth analysis of events there that mainstream Western
media do not have the time or space to explore. I know this because I wrote
some of these reports as a guest analyst for Radio Liberty’s research arm back
in the 1980s, during the Cold War. (My first article for RL was a discussion of
developments in Soviet civil-military relations.) Throughout my career as a
Soviet and Russian expert, I counted on RFE/RL for information from Eurasia. I
knew that its reporters overseas faced significant risks from the governments
they covered and hostility from autocracies—as well as various terrorist
groups—that wanted to silence them. Before the Soviet Union’s downfall, RFE/RL
was based in Munich; later, it moved to a campus in the Czech Republic with
security rivaling that of a military base.
Trump, who regards
any media he cannot control as a political enemy, is anxious to shut down these
vessels of news and information. Once closed, they will no longer annoy him,
and he will get a pat on the back from people such as Simonyan. But the new
director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seems eager to see it all
burn as well. Indeed, she’s so enthused that yesterday, she shared an X post from
Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysia-based right-wing podcaster and journalist manqué.
(He has written for RT and is still listed on its
website.) His post claimed that these organizations “produced and disseminated
far-left propaganda” and “perpetuated a pro-war narratives against Russia.”
It’s one thing for the DNI to say that she supports the
president’s decision; it’s another to see her reposting material from an online
provocateur who came to prominence fighting on Reddit over “Gamergate”
a decade ago. (I contacted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
to ask if Gabbard agrees with Cheong and believes he is a reliable source of
information. ODNI has not responded.)
No one should really be surprised that Gabbard is
amplifying such nonsense. As I wrote
last November, her views are so pro-Russian that allowing her to serve as DNI
constitutes a national-security threat. But you don’t have to take my word for
it: The journalist Julia
Davis, who monitors Russian media, has kept track of the affection with
which Gabbard is regarded in Russia. In December, the Russian state-television
host Evgeny Popov surveyed Trump’s prospective Cabinet nominees and declared that
none of them were “friends of Russia, except for Tulsi Gabbard.” And Vladimir
Solovyov, a talk-show host whose rants are depraved even by the low standards
of Russian television, referred to
Gabbard as “our girlfriend Tulsi.” (“Is she some sort of a Russian agent?”
another guest asked. “Yes,” Solovyov snapped.)
Now, some of this gloating in the Russian media is likely
just an attempt to pull on American pigtails. The Russians are very good at
this game, and they know that referring to the DNI as Russia’s “girlfriend”
will throw some Americans into a swivet. But if Gabbard isn’t a Vladimir Putin
supporter, she’s doing a good imitation of one: Any sensible American
politician would dread a public association with Cheong—today he referred to
Russia’s horrendous 2022 massacre
of civilians in the town of Bucha as a “hoax”—but Gabbard thought highly enough
of his comments to send them out under her official X account.
The courts may yet stop Trump’s assault on USAGM,
although if the agency survives, it will be headed by Kari
Lake, who has her own irresponsible plans for VOA. (If there is one bright
spot in all of this, it is that Trump’s executive order may have put Lake
out of a job.) But regardless of the eventual legal outcome, the president is
proudly showing America and the alliance of democracies it once led that he is
on the side of the world’s dictators. The Kremlin and other autocracies have
long ached to see Voice of America and Radio Liberty destroyed, but even in
their most fevered dreams, they could never have imagined that the Americans
would do the dirty work themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment