Letters from an American - February 6, 2025

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

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February 6, 2025. The U.S. has seen high-profile immigration raids since Trump took office, but Dara Kerr of The Guardian today reported that the Trump administration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations. On January 24th, 2025, old online press releases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, from as much as a decade ago were updated to make Google prioritize them as new releases, thus creating the illusion that raids are taking place all over the country.

When the Guardian asked ICE and Google about the change dates, some of the new dates disappeared, dropping those stories out of the top of search results. Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them, but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power

to undeserving black and brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ plus Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the deep state, whom they blame for

destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it. But the Republicans' vision of the nation never reflected reality, and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, spent $100 million on condoms to Hamas, and that last week's fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Trump today claimed CBS defrauded the public in the greatest broadcasting scandal in history when it exercised normal editing procedures on a 60 minutes interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris that he insisted falsely involved replacing her actual answers with others. Today Trump called for CBS News and 60 Minutes to be immediately terminated despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of the press.

MAGA is amplifying right-wing lies. Today, influencers, including Musk, claim that U.S. aid secretly bankrolled Politico, claiming that the media site had taken $8 million from U.S. aid. In fact, that sum was not an annual grant, but rather years of subscriptions from across the government to Politico Pro, a pricey subscription service for data and legislative analyses for lobbyists and government officials. Politico has never taken a cent of government subsidies or state funding, said the chief executive officer of its parent company.

People are paying for political pro because they need the service, he said. It's not subsidies, it's capitalism. When Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, joined the chorus parroting the lie, fact checkers noted that her office is a subscriber. It paid $7,150 for a year-long subscription starting last January. Nonetheless, Trump posted in all caps that it looks like billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a payoff for creating good stories about the Democrats. Another story spreading disinformation appeared today after the State Department claimed that Panama had agreed to let U.S. government vessels transit the Panama Canal for free. Panamanian President Jose Raul Molino told reporters that the story was lies and falsehoods, and noted that he had told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he doesn't have the legal authority to waive transit fees for anyone. This morning at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump boasted that he had delivered water to California, saying, the water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest.

And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day. And I opened it up. It wasn't that easy to do, but I opened it up and it's pouring down. Camille von Kainel and Annie Snyder of Politico talked to Trump supporters among California's farmers. They reported today that the two billion gallons of water Trump dumped onto the ground last week was water for irrigation that could never make it to the Los Angeles fires, which were under control by the time he dumped the water in any case. For now, the farmers are sticking with Trump despite the loss of

the water intended for their fields in the dry summer but called for close coordination over the incredibly complex California water system. Brian Stelter posted a December 9th 2017 quote from the New York Times. Before taking office Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. Stelter wrote, I think about this quote a lot. Performative victories over the libs

make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power? The current administration's actions strengthen the hand of foreign nations, especially China, against the U.S. Yesterday, Pam Bondi, Trump's second choice for attorney general, the first head to withdraw after the House Ethics Committee drew attention to his drug use and sexual behavior, took the oath of office. Today, Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Foreign Influence Task

Force, or FITF, and cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. Then-Director of the FBI Christopher Wray established FITF in 2017 to stop countries like Russia and China from interfering with American politics, as Russia had done in 2016 to help elect Trump. FARA required anyone accepting money from a foreign government to declare that connection and was key in helping law enforcement agencies to dismantle foreign influence operations. Trump's 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, for example, pleaded guilty to violating Farah when he didn't disclose that he was being paid by those linked to the Russian government. In December 2020, before he left office, Trump pardoned Manafort. Prioritizing human smuggling and drug cartels, the Justice Department under Bondi is scaling back white-collar crimes like bribery of foreign officials,

kleptocracy, and money laundering. In the past few years, the Justice Department has recovered yachts, planes, and real estate from Russians sanctioned because of the attack on Ukraine. Taken together, these changes are an invitation to foreign actors to interfere in American affairs. Aaron Zalinski, a former national security prosecutor for the Justice Department, told Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law. Even worse, it's an invitation to Americans

to help them do it. The assault against the United States Agency for International Development is tangled in foreign power struggles too. Andrew Duran, Alan Rapoport, and Theodore Schlieffer of the New York Times reported today that while Trump administration officials claimed they were conducting a general review of the

Treasury Department's payment system when they sought access to it, emails show that the plan all along was to freeze payments to USAID. Daniel Wu of the Washington Post noted today that the destruction of U.S. aid will take billions of dollars from American farmers as well as other businesses. And Paul Son of the New York Times reported today that authoritarian leaders, including those of Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador, are cheering on Musk's boast that he was feeding U.S. aid into the woodshipper. Musk's boast that he was feeding USAID into the woodshipper. USAID funding was less than 1% of the US budget and focused on humanitarian assistance and health care for underserved populations. But it also promoted democracy. It has monitored elections in Russia, documenting

extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid, China can step in to fill the void. China will also be able to step in at the G20 summit of the world's largest economies to be held in November, documenting extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid, China can step in to fill the void. China will also be able to step in at the G20 summit of the world's largest economies to be held in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, if Secretary of State Marco Rubio keeps his vow not to attend. Rubio says he is walking away from the international table because Trump says he is

unhappy that South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly. Trump ally Elon Musk hails from South Africa and has agreed that white South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country. South Africa has also refused official approval of Musk's Starlink satellite system because of a state requirement that 30 percent of a company must be owned locally, a requirement SpaceX has criticized. Yesterday, a White House order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years.

David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and first initial of the last name of those hires, including a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them. The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia,

called the sharing of the information over unsecured channels a disastrous national security development, adding, exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. If there are advantages for foreign adversaries in the policies of the administration currently in power, there are also advantages to favored corporations. Musk's team, along

with Trump's officials, is dismantling the government with the claim that it is inefficient and corrupt, but it appears their plan is to put Musk and his ilk in charge of the services Americans need. In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said, and here are his words as Aaron Rupar transcribed them. We're all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based.

Trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can't hook up land to satellites and you can't hook up land to satellites and you can't hook up satellites to land. It doesn't work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old broken system instead of just saying cut it loose and let's spend less money and build a great system run by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that's all it is. They use 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen and I don't know how many people of you are

good in terms of the kinds of things necessary for that and it's very complex stuff but when you have 39 companies working on hooking up different cities at different people you need one company with one set of equipment and there are some companies that have unbelievable air controller systems and they would have Bells would have gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height because it traveled a long distance before it hit It was just like just wouldn't stop follow the line, but bells and whistles would have gone off They would have had him where it actually could virtually turn the thing around It would have just never happened if we had the right equipment. And one of the things that's going to be, I'm going to

speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill, just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me I'm landing in New York and I'm using assist. I won't tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says this thing is so bad, it's so obsolete and we can't have that. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that the DOGE team is going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system, saying that experienced Washington bureaucrats are

the reason our nation's infrastructure is crumbling. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out that U.S. airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the aviation security advisory committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22 year olds fix things fast. Critics of the idea of Musk taking over the nation's air traffic control systems note that his Tesla electric vehicles

have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven. Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, God posted, thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all the time anywhere near the air traffic control system. An apparent reference to the January 16th explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that scattered debris over the region and led the Federal Aviation Administration to

lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos. There is apparently yet another reason that people will lie to gain power. Today, Catherine Long of the Wall Street Journal reported that one of Musk's young team of engineers, Marco Alés, 25, abruptly resigned after Long linked him to a social media account that championed racism and eugenics, the idea that human populations can be improved by selective breeding, an idea embraced in Nazi Germany. Last night, Senate Democrats filibustered for 30 hours in an attempt to convince Republicans to join them

in rejecting Trump's right-wing religious extremist nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt, a key author of Project 2025. In the House, Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to stop Musk and Doggie from accessing personal financial data. U.S. District Judge John Kunower indefinitely blocked Trump's executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it clearly unconstitutional. It has become ever more apparent that to our president,

the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain, Kuhnauer said. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Bondi immediately said it would appeal the ruling. And tonight, Senate Republicans confirmed

Christian nationalist vote to head the Office of Management and Budget. Steven Groves of the Associated Press noted that vote once described the budget director's job as a president's air traffic control system. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, described his confirmation as a triple header of a disaster for hardworking Americans. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.