More than 1,300 staff placed on administrative leave as White House accuses VOA of being anti-Trump, "radical" and "leftist".

US President Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally-funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

    Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

    • JacksonLamb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      Trump may be narcissistic and senile but he still obeys his oligarch masters, probably from the usual motives of greed and fear.

      I don’t know what your local children will learn at school but he’s fast earning himself a footnote in the international history books as the epoch that marks the tipping point into waning US power.

      I may be wrong but I think the problem with the US cult of presidents/“great man of history” theory is that people like Trump keep the US populace speculating what he “wants” or “thinks” instead of on what his function is and what is actually happening.