Latest / 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel / Attacks on Enemies, Environment, Health & Rights

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Attacks on Enemies, Environment, Health & Rights · 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So militarized nationalism at home and aggression
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: abroad have really characterized
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: the last two weeks of the Trump presidency.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as we've passed the year of Trump's second term,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: the Trump action tracker passed 2300 recorded authoritarian actions.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the news at the moment just feels relentless.
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  SPEAKER_00: we've logged over 135 actions just in the last two weeks.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for instance, it's only been three weeks since Trump
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: attacked Venezuela, captured President Maduro asserted
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  SPEAKER_00: that the US controlled the country and appropriated its oil,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it's barely been in the news, barely
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  SPEAKER_00: been mentioned for the last ten days.
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  SPEAKER_00: So imagine what else has barely been mentioned.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what this is going to be is a round up of
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  SPEAKER_00: just some of the most important things that have happened
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  SPEAKER_00: that haven't really been on the front pages.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that includes attacks on enemies, attacks on the environment,
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  SPEAKER_00: attacks on health, attacks on civil rights.
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  SPEAKER_00: And finally, the nationalist stuff that has just flown under the radar.
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  SPEAKER_00: So on attacking enemies, here
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  SPEAKER_00: are some of the major things that have happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the US Justice Department has formally opened
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  SPEAKER_00: a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell,
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  SPEAKER_00: who's the Federal Reserve chair.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the pretext for this is the central bank's renovation
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  SPEAKER_00: of its Washington headquarters, which has gone way over budget.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they're
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  SPEAKER_00: saying that he lied to Congress about what the project involved.
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  SPEAKER_00: Powell then took the really unusual step of releasing a video statement
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  SPEAKER_00: where he called this
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  SPEAKER_00: an unprecedented attack and basically said it was because
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  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump is so angry with him for refusing to lower interest rates,
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  SPEAKER_00: despite masses of public pressure from the president to do so.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then just over a week later,
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  SPEAKER_00: Trump called former special counsel Jack Smith a deranged animal
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  SPEAKER_00: because he was clearly watching Smith's public testimony over Trump's
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  SPEAKER_00: involvement in the attempted overturning of the 2020 election.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then said, towards the end of last year, there were six veteran
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  SPEAKER_00: congressmen, women and senators who basically released a video
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  SPEAKER_00: which, laid out the legal position for people currently
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  SPEAKER_00: serving in the military about serving illegal orders,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is that actually they are allowed
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  SPEAKER_00: and they should be disobeying any illegal orders.
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  SPEAKER_00: This obviously sent the administration into,
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  SPEAKER_00: a bit of a spin at the time, but now there are more consequences.
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  SPEAKER_00: So we've already seen that
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  SPEAKER_00: Senator Mark Kelly has been targeted by, Hegseth.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's had his pension and his military honors reduced,
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  SPEAKER_00: and is under investigation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then two weeks ago, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin also said
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  SPEAKER_00: she was under federal investigation for her participation in the video.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then a few days after that,
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  SPEAKER_00: three more Democrats who were in the video said that they were also
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  SPEAKER_00: being investigated for their participation.
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  SPEAKER_00: So this is really quite a blatant attempt to use,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Department of Justice as a tool to suppress dissent.
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  SPEAKER_00: And these aren't the only Democrats who have been targeted
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  SPEAKER_00: by the Department of Justice in a blatant attempt to shut them up.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right.
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  SPEAKER_00: So Minnesota's been in the headlines, basically for the last two weeks
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  SPEAKER_00: because of the surge of ICE agents there.
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  SPEAKER_00: And some really prominent opponents have been the governor of Minnesota
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  SPEAKER_00: Tim Walz, the attorney general of Minnesota,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey.
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  SPEAKER_00: about a week ago, the Justice Department
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  SPEAKER_00: issued subpoenas for the governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor, Jacob Frey,
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  SPEAKER_00: basically as part of an investigation,
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  SPEAKER_00: saying that they're impeding federal law enforcement officers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then a couple of days later, the attorney general confirmed
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  SPEAKER_00: that he'd also been subpoenaed by the Trump administration
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  SPEAKER_00: for the same reason.
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  SPEAKER_00: So they're basically using any tool that they can to
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  SPEAKER_00: try and stop and intimidate, any opponents.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that isn't confined to just Democrats.
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  SPEAKER_00: So a Republican state senator in Indiana, Travis Holdman, voted
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  SPEAKER_00: against the redistricting law in Indiana,
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  SPEAKER_00: which basically the intent of that law
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  SPEAKER_00: was to give the Republicans more congressional seats in the midterms.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trump continually pressured the state Senate in Indiana to vote for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: This guy didn't, it actually didn't pass overall.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Trump is now publicly supporting a primary challenger
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  SPEAKER_00: to Travis Holdman.
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  SPEAKER_00: There.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then there are companies that he's been attacking.
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  SPEAKER_00: So this week, a set of polling companies
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  SPEAKER_00: reported in different newspapers, including The New York Times,
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  SPEAKER_00: basically reported that his public polling is pretty bad right now,
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  SPEAKER_00: that lots of his policies are incredibly unpopular in the nation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trump has said this is all fake news, and he's basically
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  SPEAKER_00: saying that he's suing them for publishing it.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's also now sued JP Morgan Chase for $5 billion.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's saying that JP Morgan illegally stopped offering him
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  SPEAKER_00: banking services in the wake of the January 6th Capitol riot.
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  SPEAKER_00: JP Morgan denies there's any, anything wrong with that decision?
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  SPEAKER_00: And obviously they're going to take it to court.
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  SPEAKER_00: He also said that he might block the company Exxon Mobile,
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  SPEAKER_00: from investing in Venezuela
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  SPEAKER_00: after basically, the CEO of ExxonMobil said
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  SPEAKER_00: that the country was uninvestible during a white House meeting.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what Trump wanted, was for the kind of the the oil barons
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  SPEAKER_00: to be really pro his intervention in Venezuela
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  SPEAKER_00: say, yes, yes, yes, we're going to dig in fact,
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  SPEAKER_00: some of them, many,
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  SPEAKER_00: many of them apparently
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  SPEAKER_00: privately saying you can't really invest in Venezuela.
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  SPEAKER_00: The ExxonMobil guy said it publicly and he is now
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  SPEAKER_00: being publicly, punished for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: and then moving on to states.
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  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump said that starting the 1st February,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's going to deny federal funding to any state
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  SPEAKER_00: that is home to any local government that is restricting
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  SPEAKER_00: his immigration policies.
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  SPEAKER_00: So basically, if you're in a state that has a sanctuary city
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  SPEAKER_00: and it doesn't matter where you are in that state, your state's
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  SPEAKER_00: now not going to get any, any federal funding.
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  SPEAKER_00: that will actually probably affect a lot of Republican areas.
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  SPEAKER_00: And, it seems like a very, a very significant escalation
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  to the threats
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  SPEAKER_00: he's already made to deny federal funding to the cities themselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: So moving on to the environment now, the environmental attacks,
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  SPEAKER_00: actually quite rarely reported, but they do really matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: So one thing that came out, a couple of weeks ago
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  SPEAKER_00: is that the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, has basically said
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  SPEAKER_00: that when it's thinking about rules on air pollution, it's going to stop
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  SPEAKER_00: considering their impacts on human lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right?
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  SPEAKER_00: And so all they're going to do is calculate
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  SPEAKER_00: the cost to industry when they set pollution limits.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's clear that this means there's going to be higher pollution
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  SPEAKER_00: because it's expensive.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's more expensive
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  SPEAKER_00: to to to run industries that have lower pollution levels.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's going to be very expensive for people themselves,
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  SPEAKER_00: both in terms of the health and the cost
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  SPEAKER_00: to treat health conditions because of pollution.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then a couple of days later, the administration announced
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  SPEAKER_00: that it was going to revise
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  SPEAKER_00: some Biden-era pollution protections for waterways.
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  SPEAKER_00: So again, this is about making things easier for industry.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the EPA said it would and that that would speed up the permitting
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  SPEAKER_00: of energy and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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  SPEAKER_00: So again, what they're doing is basically prioritizing,
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  SPEAKER_00: the commercial world over the environmental world.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, in
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  SPEAKER_00: a really quite depressing move.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trump announced that he was drawing the US
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  SPEAKER_00: from this international agreement that forms the basis
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  SPEAKER_00: for all countries to rein in climate change,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that's called
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  SPEAKER_00: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not a particularly, exciting name, but it's been in place
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  SPEAKER_00: for 34 years, and every single other nation of the world is a member,
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  SPEAKER_00: except now the US.
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  SPEAKER_00: Moving on to health, there are just some quite, depressing things.
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  SPEAKER_00: One thing is that the centers for Disease Control
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  SPEAKER_00: or the CDC has said it's going to block,
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  SPEAKER_00: messaging used by overdose prevention groups across the US.
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  SPEAKER_00: And basically, this is an idea of harm reduction,
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  SPEAKER_00: where you're not necessarily
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  SPEAKER_00: going to be able to stop people taking drugs.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what you try to do is you try to get them to take them more safely,
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  SPEAKER_00: to save their lives, and also
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  SPEAKER_00: to reduce the burden on hospitals and emergency responders.
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  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is to say, never use alone so that there's
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  SPEAKER_00: someone there who can rescue you if you do have an overdose.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's just kind of considered
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  SPEAKER_00: a really core part of how to reduce harm from drugs.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the CDC is now saying that you're not allowed to use that messaging.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you have any kind of state funding.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there are more attacks on vaccines
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  SPEAKER_00: as well in the last couple of weeks.
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  SPEAKER_00: So Kirk Malone, who's a pediatric cardiologist and is the new chair,
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  SPEAKER_00: the RFK junior picked chair of the Advisory
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  SPEAKER_00: Committee on Immunization Practices, shortened to ACIP.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was in a podcast and he basically said,
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  SPEAKER_00: do we really need polio vaccination?
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  SPEAKER_00: And also question the other kind of longstanding
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  SPEAKER_00: diseases that have been vaccinated against in childhood for decades.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he basically was saying, oh, we have to think about individual
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  SPEAKER_00: rights over public health.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason that is, is so worrying is because
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  SPEAKER_00: polio is not yet extinct in the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are still reservoirs of it is very infectious.
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  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, the
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  SPEAKER_00: the eradication of polio from almost all countries in the world
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  SPEAKER_00: has been one of the major public health successes of the last century.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it used to to kill and permanently maim
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  SPEAKER_00: tens of thousands of children.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we have a really effective vaccine.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a very safe vaccine.
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  SPEAKER_00: And just making sure that everyone stays
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  SPEAKER_00: vaccinated is a way of making sure that it can never come back.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he's now questioning that.
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  SPEAKER_00: We also know that the administration has been attacking
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  SPEAKER_00: the measles vaccine,
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  SPEAKER_00: that it hasn't been supportive of it, that it's being quite kind of,
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  SPEAKER_00: unconcerned about the quite large measles
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  SPEAKER_00: outbreaks that have happened in the US over the last year.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they kind of talked about it as inevitable.
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  SPEAKER_00: It isn't inevitable, right.
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  SPEAKER_00: Measles was declared eliminated in the US only about 20 years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: As in, it just wasn't there.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the only times you have measles, if someone caught it abroad
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  SPEAKER_00: and basically now officially America
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  SPEAKER_00: has lost its status of having eliminated measles.
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  SPEAKER_00: You think that the center for Disease Control and Prevention
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  SPEAKER_00: would care about that?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's literally in its core purpose.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the principal deputy director said the other day
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  SPEAKER_00: that he doesn't view the loss of the country's measles
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  SPEAKER_00: elimination status as a significant event,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that it was just the cost of doing business.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't even know what that means, to be honest with you.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so again, I'm going to end on international action.
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  SPEAKER_00: So on the 22nd of January, the United States formally withdrew
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  SPEAKER_00: from the World Health Organization.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that basically makes good on the executive order
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  SPEAKER_00: that Trump issued on his very first day of office a year ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the US isn't leaving with its bills paid.
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  SPEAKER_00: WHO officials have said that the US has failed to pay its membership
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  SPEAKER_00: fees for both 2024 and 2025,
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  SPEAKER_00: and basically owes $280 million to the W.H.O..
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  SPEAKER_00: The US says it's going to not going to pay.
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  SPEAKER_00: WHO says the withdrawal isn't complete until the US does pay,
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  SPEAKER_00: but nonetheless, I think it's, an alliance that is well and truly dead.
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  SPEAKER_00: And both the United States and the World Health Organization
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  SPEAKER_00: are the worse for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: and then they just a couple of things on civil rights that I think
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  SPEAKER_00: you really should know about.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing is that the US Equal Employment Opportunity
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  SPEAKER_00: Commission has scrapped
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  SPEAKER_00: guidance that protected LGBTQ workers in the workplace.
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  SPEAKER_00: So basically, if you're a lesbian, gay, bi, trans or queer,
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  SPEAKER_00: you now have fewer protections against discrimination at work.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing that happened
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  SPEAKER_00: is that the National Park Service has removed an exhibit on slavery
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  SPEAKER_00: at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they're doing that because Trump signed an executive order
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  SPEAKER_00: last March, basically saying that the national parks have to remove
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  SPEAKER_00: all educational materials that promote corrosive ideology.
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  SPEAKER_00: And apparently,
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  SPEAKER_00: exhibits on slavery
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  SPEAKER_00: and the harm of slavery counts as corrosive ideology.
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  SPEAKER_00: So finally, let's just take a look at some of the nationalism
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  SPEAKER_00: that has kind of flown under the radar in the last two weeks.
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  SPEAKER_00: So firstly, as of the 21st of January,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration has indefinitely suspended
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  SPEAKER_00: immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that basically has added another 36 countries
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  SPEAKER_00: to the banned list that was itself expanded at the end of last year.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the freeze now also includes
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  SPEAKER_00: applicants from Brazil, Egypt, Russia and Iran.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then
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  SPEAKER_00: if you look at the Department of Homeland
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  SPEAKER_00: Security’s Twitter or X feed, it is really bleak.
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  SPEAKER_00: It has a lot of imagery and slogans that echo
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  SPEAKER_00: fascist slogans from 1930s Europe.
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  SPEAKER_00: And last week, trade union leaders in the US basically called out
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  SPEAKER_00: the administration for this and said that their social media
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: really shows a rhetorical
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  SPEAKER_00: what they called a rhetorical shift towards white supremacy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And one example that they cited was a video
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  SPEAKER_00: posted by the Department of Homeland Security
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  SPEAKER_00: that was captioned remember who you are American
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  SPEAKER_00: with the phrase one homeland, one people, one heritage.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they compared that to the 1930s.
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  SPEAKER_00: So in the 1930s, a prominent Nazi slogan was “Ein Volk Ein Reich
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Ein Führer”, which translates as one people, one realm, one leader.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then in another social media post, this time from the white House
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  SPEAKER_00: and about Greenland, there was more borrowing from racist
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  SPEAKER_00: far-Right subculture, according to an extremism expert.
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  SPEAKER_00: Basically, the white House posted an image
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  SPEAKER_00: of a kind of a snowy landscape with the question “Which way,
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  SPEAKER_00: Greenland Man?” and this echoes, what the expert called a key
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  SPEAKER_00: concept in neo-Nazi and white supremacist subculture.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: finally, in quite a kind of a chilling attack
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  SPEAKER_00: on free speech, really, the Pentagon said it's planning
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: to commandeer the, newspaper Stars and Stripes.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a government funded newspaper that covers the military.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: It has long been kind of considered
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: to be independent, and it's very proud of being the U.S.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: military's independent news source.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, the Pentagon says it's now
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: going to take control and align it with official department messaging.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of things you might have missed over the last two weeks.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I, I will try and come back when I have time.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: But there's it's quite you know, we're a year in and
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: it's kind of quite scary
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: looking back as to how far things have gone in the last year.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it really makes you wonder how far they're going to go
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: in the next one.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But people are watching the recording.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is this thing.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then hopefully
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: the most important thing this year is they'll be voting.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So see you soon.