Latest / 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel / Trump’s Midterms money, Hegseth's military, and a 7,000 year-old casualty

Transcript

Trump’s Midterms money, Hegseth's military, and a 7,000 year-old casualty · 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So hi.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This week,
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to concentrate on different ways
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: that the administration
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: is using public money to influence the midterms.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then look at some quite disturbing
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: things that are happening in the military,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: and then talk a little bit about, foreign policy.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with public money and adverts.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: In late September, Trump posted a 30 second video on his
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Truth Social account.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: In it,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: he says that this is the final battle,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: goes on to promise to demolish the deep state
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: and to drive out the Communists, Marxists and fascists.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then that same video was played on various TV channels,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: with the tagline at the end
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: saying that this ad was paid for by the US government.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: There was then also a second ad, also paid for with public money,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: this one presenting
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's war in Iran and his leadership in glowing terms.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a long standing rule in American law that you cannot spend
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: taxpayers money on Party Political Advertising.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Money that Congress gives to a government
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: department is given for a specific purpose,
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  SPEAKER_00: and using it to boost the president's own
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: party is both against that rule and a constitutional issue,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: because it's Congress, not the president, that controls
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: public spending.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: But according to the Wall Street Journal,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: this is exactly what's happened.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: That the money for the ads was taken
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: from the budget that Congress had given
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: to the Department of Homeland Security.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: So both Democrat and Republican politicians criticized the ads.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And on Monday, Trump said he'd stop using government money
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: and pay through his super PAC, MAGA Inc., which he said he controls.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: But Trump defended the original spending as he announced this,
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: and he won't repay the roughly $10 million already spent.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is that watchdogs say that a sitting president
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: directing a super PAC
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: that takes unlimited donations may itself be illegal.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the fix may simply have created a fresh problem.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then the administration is sending refunds
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: to voters ahead of the midterms.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So there are $500 checks going to around 950,000
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: people who buy their health insurance through Obamacare.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So Reuters found that 71% of that money is going to just 13 states.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those 13 states happen to contain many of the most closely
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: fought Senate and governor races in the country.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then a few days later came an announcement of $90 payments
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: to more than 20 million people on Medicare,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: which is the health program for older Americans.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And again, they’re timed to land just before the vote.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, in this section,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk a bit about the Insurrection Act.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Insurrection Act is an old law, and it's
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: one of the only ways a president can put the American military
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: onto American streets to act against American citizens.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in an interview
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: with Time magazine, Trump was asked about the limits of his own power.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he was asked whether he would rule out invoking the Insurrection
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Act or declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: He would not it rule out,
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: and a president leaving open the option
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: of using the army or declaring a national emergency
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  SPEAKER_00: around the time of an election is simply not normal.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So now I want to talk about
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: kind of the remaking of the military in the US.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So at the end of September, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: summoned hundreds of most senior generals
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: and admirals from their posts all around the world
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  SPEAKER_00: to a single speech at the Marine Corps base in Quantico in Virginia.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in that speech, Hegseth confirmed the plan
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: to cut the number of generals and admirals by 20%.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he set out the kind of military he does want, or rather, not want.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I'm quoting him here.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: No fatties,
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  SPEAKER_00: no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors.
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  SPEAKER_00: He dismissed reports of low morale in the forces as false.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he also attacked universities, describing the Ivy League
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: and liberal arts colleges as strongholds of woke.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time
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  SPEAKER_00: Hegseth has appointed three people to
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: lead a major Pentagon study into the future of warfare, into things
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: like artificial intelligence, robotics and new weapons.
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  SPEAKER_00: So those three people are Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey,
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  SPEAKER_00: who runs a defense company,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Musk and Luckey have very large commercial interests
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  SPEAKER_00: in exactly the defense technology that this study is about.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got people who sell weapons to the Pentagon
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  SPEAKER_00: being put in charge of helping
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: to decide what kinds of weapons the Pentagon should buy.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And while Musk, who owns the AI tool grok is on the inside.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic, who owns the AI called
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Claude is out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic has been in a dispute with the Pentagon after it refused
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: to give the military unrestricted access to its systems.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The company said it was worried about its technology
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  SPEAKER_00: being used for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: In response,
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  SPEAKER_00: Hegseth designated the company a national security supply chain risk.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the Pentagon
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: has now confirmed that it has stopped using all Anthropic’s products.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: A federal judge had meanwhile ruled that the administration's actions
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: were unlawful retaliation.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Then kind of looking abroad.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The State Department has been rushing to spend more than $175 million
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  SPEAKER_00: from its flagship human rights fund, against the wishes of Congress
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: on ideological causes, including a group promoting white
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Afrikaner rights and a campaign against Brazil's Supreme Court.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: The US has also pulled out of the Council
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: of Europe's anti-corruption watchdog, and then key US allies.
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  SPEAKER_00: UK, France and the Baltic states were left off
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: an invitation list for a meeting on the future of NATO.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, I just want to end on this
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  SPEAKER_00: quite sad story that has barely been reported.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So in the Arizona desert, right on the border with Mexico,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: there is this giant fish-shaped figure scraping to the ground.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost 300ft long, called Las Playas Intaglio.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time
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  SPEAKER_00: people thought it was around 1000 years old, but a new study
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: published in September dated it properly for the first time
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: and found that it was at least 6500- 7000 years old.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that makes it older than the pyramids of Egypt.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's older than Stonehenge, and it's the oldest scientifically
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: dated carving of its kind anywhere in the Americas.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It sits on a National Wildlife Refuge on land
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  SPEAKER_00: that is the ancestral home of the Tohono O'odham people.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And back in April this year, a contractor building
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's border wall simply drove heavy machinery straight through it,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: destroying roughly a third of it and severing its head from his body.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Customs and Border Protection says the damage was inadvertent,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: but the reason it could happen at all is that the Department of Homeland
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Security has used special waivers that switch off the usual cultural
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: and environmental protection so that the wall can be built faster.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, experts say that the damage cannot be undone.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so a carving that survived for almost 7000 years
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  SPEAKER_00: has now not survived Trump's border wall.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's all for this time.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: All of the actions with their sources and more are at
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: TrumpActionTracker.info, and I'll be back in a week or two.