Title: The New 'State Media.' Plus, Podcasters Are Running the FBI.

Brooke Gladstone: The White House has filled the briefing room with Trump loyalists and they're asking the hard-hitting questions.

Speaker 2: You should break that speech from President Trump. Can we expect that pace to continue as the first 100 days moves along here?

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Absolutely.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, Trump's government of right-wing influencers expands with a cop turned podcaster joining the FBI.

Brandy Zadrozny: Bongino was using his proximity as a Secret Service agent as a way to suggest that he was in the room and that this proximity birthed in him this desire to root out bureaucratic Washington no-goodness.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, three years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Trump's still charmed by Putin.

Yaroslav Trofimov: If you see how Trump is speaking now about global politics, it's very much just like Putin.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. [music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. How about launching the show with Chico Marx?

Mrs. Teasdale: Your Excellency, I thought you left.

Chicolini: Oh, no, I no leave.

Mrs. Teasdale: I saw you with my own eyes.

Chicolini: Well, who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Brooke Gladstone: I think for many news consumers, what makes this moment so maddening is how the truth has so little bearing on policy. For instance, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency claims $65 billion in savings. For all the calamitous chaos it's causing nationwide, it can show receipts for only about $9.6 billion. As for its claims of rampant corruption, deceased Social Security recipients and missing federal workers, no receipts at all. No matter.

Trump: Here are some of the flagrant scams that, as an example, they've spent money on and we've been able to recapture $520 million for a consultant to-- $520 million.

Brooke Gladstone: The president at the Conservative Political Action Conference last Saturday. Not just there, all month he's been decrying this scam to governors at the White House.

Trump: $520 million was given for a consultant to do ESG, that's environmental, social, and governance investments, in Africa. $520 million.

Brooke Gladstone: Signing executive orders at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump: $520 million for a consultant on the environment. It's called environmental, social, and governance investments in Africa. $520 million.

Brooke Gladstone: The Washington Post's fact checker-in-chief, Glenn Kessler, had a field day on this one. For one thing, he found that much of the contract had already been awarded, so Trump can't brag about getting back $520 million. For another, social and governance activities are not in the contract. Best of all, the contract was to promote investment and American business under a program started by Trump. Undeterred, he'll repeat what he chooses. His media will repeat it too. Just like his claim that the Capitol riot was a day of peace and love, ultimately, we'll begin to suspect our lying eyes. The important thing is the repetition.

Now, there's been a fair amount of research on something called the illusory truth effect, first identified in 1977. It found that repeated statements are easier to process and so are perceived to be more truthful than follow-up statements. In the press, we call those follow-ups fact checks. This segment is about repetition in the context of the president's media. At his administration's first press briefing last month, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a shakeup in the briefing room.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: We're also opening up this briefing room to new media voices who produce news-related content and whose outlet is not already represented by one of the seats in this room. We welcome independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators to apply for credentials to cover this White House.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, the White House announced this week that the White House Correspondents' Association would no longer be choosing who gets to fill the precious 49 seats in the briefing room or who writes the pool reports when the president is on the road.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team. Legacy outlets, who have participated in the press pool for decades, will still be allowed to join, fear not. We will also be offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility.

Brooke Gladstone: Who are these new media voices coming in from the cold? Many of the chosen are the very conspiracy theorists, propagandists, and far-right influencers that Anna Merlan covers, a senior reporter at Mother Jones. She says the seat that's designated especially for new media, and here the occupants wrote rotate, have held actual reporters, but also those who don't report but merely praise, like John Stoll, the head of news at X.

John Stoll: I also thank you, Karoline, for opening this seat up to new media. It really is a testament, not only to your open-mindedness but also to innovation that you'd actually think about folks that are not traditionally credentialed to be in this room.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's Rumble podcaster John Ashbrook using his seat to search for truth.

John Ashbrook: Thank you very much. Karoline, in your first briefing, the media went after this administration for supporting illegal immigrants they claimed were not criminals.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: That's right.

John Ashbrook: The question is, do you think they're out of touch with Americans demanding action on our border crisis?

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: The media out of touch? I think the media certainly isn't out of touch.

Brooke Gladstone: Is that how this goes?

Anna Merlan: [laughs] That's how this goes. I'm sorry, I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing because these are incredible levels of comment, not a question. If I had asked a question like this of a Democratic administration, I think it would have gone viral on Twitter with people making fun of me.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's go through some of these new media names like Jack Posobiec. He's a senior editor of Human Events, a far-right publication, and he recently traveled with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Ukraine.

Anna Merlan: Jack Posobiec is a far-right activist and podcaster. He came onto the scene first during the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which, as you remember, was a false conspiracy theory about child trafficking happening in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

Brooke Gladstone: By Democrats and maybe run by Hillary Clinton?

Anna Merlan: Indeed, that was the conspiracy theory, despite the fact that the pizza parlor, as you'll recall, did not have a basement. Posobiec first came on the scene to promote Pizzagate and actually in 2017, as I wrote, he was briefly granted White House press credentials during the first Trump administration when he was working for a Canadian outlet called Rebel Media, a right-wing outlet. At the time, that made news, as did the fact that the Trump administration was granting press passes to other places like Infowars and a conspiratorial outlet called Gateway Pundit. Posobiec didn't last long in the briefing room then, but this time, he's even skipping being in the briefing room at all, and now he's just traveling with members of the administration.

Brooke Gladstone: Also on the scene is Natalie Winters, a correspondent for Steve Bannon's War Room. Tell me about her.

Anna Merlan: Natalie Winters is an interesting figure. She is very young and she's just been named as an investigative reporter and White House correspondent at Steve Bannon's War Room. As my colleagues at Mother Jones have written, in one of her previous roles, she was paid by the backers of a Chinese businessman accused of fraud to write flattering stories about him for various right-wing publications. Those stories did not disclose that she was being paid by the backers of that businessman. We should also note, like Natalie Winters, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, was also previously paid by allies of the same Chinese businessman and convicted fraudster that Natalie Winters was paid by to put her name on op-eds in right-wing news outlets praising his work.

Brooke Gladstone: Winters went on to falsely accuse Mother Jones of being a Beijing propaganda front in an article for the right-wing headline USA. I guess she's known for throwing punches back. She did it on Wednesday on the White House lawn.

Anna Merlan: She did.

Natalie Winters: Spare me the idea that any of the members of this press corps, who are standing right behind me right now, give a damn about free speech because they don't. They're the state media, they're the state propagandists that frankly the CCP would envy. All they do is carry water and carry the talking points, whether it be the intel community, the Biden regime, the Pentagon, the deep state, you name it. I think the White House needs to strip these people of their seats, fill it with new media. I'm so disgusted of these people and their sense of superiority.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, Mike Lindell, My Pillow Guy, who was also an election fraud conspiracy theorist, now has the Mike Lindell Media Group that has two White House correspondents, right?

Anna Merlan: Yes, it is fascinating. One of them is a former professional makeup artist turned political pundit. The press release about her hiring talks a lot about her patriotism and her belief that God has placed her at the My Pillow Guy's TV network. Her name is Alison Steinberg. In her press release, she said, "I will now be on the ground giving live updates from DC. In this era of fake news, I'm eager and excited to bring truth and shine light into the darkness."

Brooke Gladstone: Who's the other one?

Anna Merlan: Cara Castronuova, who is a former reporter for Gateway Pundit and Newsmax, which are both right-wing news sites. She's identified as an investigative journalist and an athlete. I believe she's a former boxer.

Brooke Gladstone: The Daily Wire has sent Mary Margaret Olohan, who's the author of a book about people who, in the words of a subtitle, escaped the gender ideology cult and who's Instagrammed herself partying at Trump's Mar-a-Lago. Does she have a hard press pass or was she just in one of those rotating seats?

Anna Merlan: I believe she has a hard pass. Two other Daily Wire figures delivered these remarks, talking about needing to be in the briefing room and needing to "bring the American public these stories and sharing with them the truth that legacy media has no intention of ever sharing with them." To date, her work in that department has involved things like tweeting screenshots of executive orders, taking a video of President Trump walking into a room, and tweeting photos of a list of accomplishments that White House staff handed out to reporters.

Brooke Gladstone: Former ESPN host Sage Steele has gotten a turn in the new media seed.

Anna Merlan: Yes, Sage Steele became increasingly involved in right-wing media circles after leaving ESPN and settling a lawsuit with them. What was interesting about Ms. Steele was that she was in the new media seat on February 5th and asked a question about "men in women's sports," which is clearly a transphobic reference to trans women. Then hours later, she was standing behind President Trump at an event where he was signing an executive order that purported to keep "men out of women's sports."

Brooke Gladstone: There was also a shakeup of pool reporters who cover Trump. For people who may not get the significance of that, could you tell me about the White House Correspondents' Association and how it came to have that power?

Anna Merlan: The White House Correspondents' Association is over 100 years old. For decades, people who are part of the Correspondents' Association news outlets have been part of the press pool on a rotating basis. At events like on Air Force One or other places where the full media can't be accommodated, a member of the WHCA is sent and they deliver what are called these pool reports where they just write down a very fact-based, very straightforward recounting of whatever happened in these moments when the full press isn't there. Instead, what the White House is doing here is they're saying, "We're going to choose who has access to the president." It's not a stretch to think that outlets like Steve Bannon's War Room are going to approach pool reports differently than NBC or the New York Times does.

Brooke Gladstone: One thing we haven't actually spent a lot of time on is the fact that the official White House statements, some of them, were going to be made available not by the White House, but on X.

Anna Merlan: Actually, now you can't see statements on X unless you are logged in. It requires you to have an X account. As far as transparency goes and basic accessibility goes, it's not great. In a lot of ways, we're seeing access to information narrowing. We're seeing a hostility towards the idea that the administration is accountable to answering questions and giving statements to the press and to the public in ways that people find disturbing.

Brooke Gladstone: I guess one thing that we can count on that hasn't changed is that the press secretary continues the long Trump legacy of deriding the legacy media from the podium.

Anna Merlan: That is true. They are continuing to do that.

Brooke Gladstone: Sarah Huckabee Sanders was certainly full of division. Of course, Sean Spicer infamously chided the legacy media for accurately reporting on the size of Trump's inauguration. Here's a clip of Melissa McCarthy on SNL doing Sean Spicer.

Melissa McCarthy: We'll do a couple questions. Go. Glenn Thrush, New York Times. Boo. Go ahead.

[laughter]

Bobby Moynihan: Yes, I wanted to ask about the travel ban on Muslims.

Melissa McCarthy: It's not a ban.

Bobby Moynihan: I'm sorry?

Melissa McCarthy: It's not a ban. The travel ban is not a ban, which makes it not a ban.

Bobby Moynihan: You just called it a ban.

Melissa McCarthy: You said ban. Now I'm saying it. Fuck you.

Bobby Moynihan: The president tweeted and I quote, "If the ban were announced with a one-week notice."

Melissa McCarthy: Yes, exactly. You just said that. He's quoting you. It's your words.

Anna Merlan: You can make a good case that the relationship between the White House and the press should be fundamentally adversarial, right?

Brooke Gladstone: It always has been.

Anna Merlan: Yes, it always has been. Of course, people were critical, for instance, of the Biden administration and of Joe Biden for holding fewer press conferences than previous presidents. These are long-standing arguments. We should note, I'm not a White House reporter. I don't cover the White House in person. I am a reporter who writes about conspiracy theories. The outlets that I have covered for years are now the ones that are often present for these events, breaking news, getting a version of exclusives, I guess you could call them, which is very interesting for me to be watching InfoWars as part of my regular coverage and to see quotes from administration officials. It is unusual.

Brooke Gladstone: Those press conferences never have offered much in the way of fact. Leavitt doesn't ever really answer the media's questions in any case. What happens in that briefing room is accessible to all. I wonder if maybe there's an upside here for the fact-based media. I'm guessing they could spend their time more productively.

Anna Merlan: Well, here's how I think about it. Investigative reporting, scoops, investigations, those don't happen because you get access to the White House briefing room. I think everybody is clear that that's not the role that those things serve, but it is important for a democratic society to have members of the administration up there taking questions from the press, as much of the press as possible. This is about, I'm sorry to be overstating things here, but this is about preserving fundamental elements of our democracy. While the fact-based legacy mainstream media, whatever you want to call it, can spend our time doing other things, I think what this says about accountability on the part of the White House is not great.

Brooke Gladstone: Anna, thank you very much.

Anna Merlan: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, podcasters now run the FBI. What could go wrong?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. It's a MAGA media world and we're all just living in it.

Mike Cernovich: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients? Will that really happen?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: It's sitting on my desk right now.

Micah Loewinger: Attorney General Pam Bondi on Fox Wednesday, after congressional Republicans sent letters to the DOJ demanding the release of a new trove of classified Epstein records that may or may not exist.

Attorney General Pam Bondi: I'm reviewing JFK files, MLK files. That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.

Micah Loewinger: Then on Thursday, libs of TikTok, Mike Cernovich, and a group of far-right personalities got special access to the release.

Mike Cernovich: Today, the White House made a big show of handing a bunch of conservative influencers binders labeled the Epstein Files Phase 1, but the whole stunt was a bust.

Micah Loewinger: The binders made for a nice photo op, but they contained nothing that hadn't been disclosed in prior leaks and court records. For a group of influencers who present themselves as the replacement for the White House press corps, they are, in a way, getting what they asked for. Lies and obfuscation straight from the administration, the kind that even spin doctors can't spin.

Attorney General Pam Bondi: What's interesting is we're all waiting for bombshells, we're all waiting for juicy stuff, and that's not what's in this binder. That's not what's in this binder at all.

Mike Cernovich: It is the biggest disappointment, I think, that you'll find. I encourage you to do your own homework.

Micah Loewinger: The real winner of this farce was the Trump White House, which disclosed nothing new that could harm its own while still driving attention to its far-right echo chamber, a breeding ground for propagandists, conspiracy theories, and now civil servants.

Mike Cernovich: Remember Watergate? We had political operatives break into a building to steal information, which is 100% criminal. People are prosecuted, and rightly so.

Micah Loewinger: This is Kash Patel, now director of the FBI, speaking on his podcast Kash's Corner in 2022.

Kash Patel: Now you have a six-year saga of criminal activity from Russiagate to the raid. It's the same people at the FBI DOJ who started and launched Russiagate that are now supervising and doing the Mar-a-Lago raid, the search warrant.

Micah Loewinger: In his first full week on the job, Patel announced he planned to move some 1,500 FBI agents out of DC and into field offices around the country. He asked mixed martial arts fighters from the UFC to help train FBI agents, and he broke a big promise about who would fill the deputy director role, his number two.

Speaker 7: According to the FBI Agents Association, they say that Patel committed to them, that he was hoping to and interested in hiring a career FBI agent, as has always been the case in this job.

Micah Loewinger: Then on Sunday.

Speaker 8: President Trump has named a former Secret Service agent and conservative podcaster as the new deputy director of the FBI. Dan Bongino will serve as the FBI's second in command to the agency's director, Kash Patel.

Dan Bongino: I get it. If you are a political opponent of mine that has been involved with proudly celebrating a weaponized justice system.

Micah Loewinger: Bongino on his podcast Monday.

Dan Bongino: You don't understand how a guy like me who discusses partisan content in an opinion show can go and do a unquestionably nonpartisan job. I'm going to ask you a simple question. Have you seen what I did before I came here? I'm committed to service. People play different--

Brandy Zadrozny: Bongino was pretty smart in terms of using his Secret Service background, and really law enforcement background as a New York cop, as a way to thrust him into politics.

Micah Loewinger: Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter at NBC News, where she covers the Internet. She co-authored the recent piece, Dan Bongino's Yearslong History of FBI Criticism and Conspiracy Theories.

Brandy Zadrozny: He used this proximity as a Secret Service agent to Bush and then Obama as a way to suggest that he was in the room. He claimed that he was privy to the room where it happened during Obamacare and he saw the negotiations and he said it made him want to run so he could do something about it. Some of his Secret Service agent colleagues came forward and said, "We don't really get access to the room where those things happen." He didn't win the elections that he ran for. He ran three separate times for different congressional seats, but he did find a foothold in right-wing media.

Micah Loewinger: In 2015, he launched his podcast, The Dan Bongino Show. Initially, you've said it floundered, but then around 2017, he really jumped whole hog onto the Trump train. How did he come to embrace MAGA and what do you think this did for his following?

Brandy Zadrozny: Bongino, 2015, 2016, had this little podcast. It wasn't really doing so well, but when his audience started to grow, it was clear that he understood the audience that he could scoop up when he hitched his wagon to Trump's star. Then on to 2017, you saw him latch onto these narratives that were really, really pro-Trump narratives. He became a huge proponent of this conspiracy theory called Spygate, this theory that the FBI was spying on Trump's 2016 campaign in an effort to rig the election for Hillary Clinton.

Dan Bongino: The devastating disclosures of the FBI implanting confidential informant spies inside the Trump team were so devastating that the only way for the Democrats to get away from looking like a bunch of police state tyrants was to insist that they weren't spying or investigating the Trump team, they were investigating the Russians.

Brandy Zadrozny: Bongino suggested, as part of a larger narrative, that Democrats and biased members of the FBI were all colluding to steal the election from Trump.

Micah Loewinger: This was kind of a departure for Bongino because, prior to this, he had been fairly mild about the FBI on his show, right?

Brandy Zadrozny: Pretty deferential. He was a law and order guy. Remember that, law and order? That was a thing. What it is now is that the institutions are bad, they are corrupt, and so someone like Bongino needs to go in and strip them of the DEI and the democratic ideology and all the rest that has infiltrated and is now weaponized against Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure that allowed Bongino to have an explosively popular show. In 2022, he was banned from YouTube, where he would host the video version of his podcasts for his comments about the efficacy of masks during the pandemic. He then moved over to Rumble, which is sort of a right-wing alternative to YouTube. What role did that site play in his ascendance?

Brandy Zadrozny: Huge. We in the media, myself included, I remember getting assignments because I was the Internet reporter and I would get assignments to look into the alternative media thing happening. That was Gab and Rumble and a host of other places that I just didn't think would be a thing, and no one really did. Bongino was really smart. Again, he saw the ascendancy of something that not many other people did. I think he was Rumble's first major creator, moving his show over there.

For me at least, someone who monitors right-wing media, it's become a one-stop shop for how to monitor what right-wing creators are doing now, and it's really effective in that way. Don Jr. has a show there now. You can watch Steve Bannon to Charlie Kirk to everybody else. Everybody's on Rumble now.

Micah Loewinger: Over on Rumble, and in this sort of media empire that he's built, which has this video streaming component, he's on radio stations, he has a top 10 podcast, The Dan Bongino Show. As you mentioned, his rhetoric about the FBI has really heated up.

Brandy Zadrozny: Bongino and his show really pushed this debunked idea that the FBI helped manipulate the 2020 campaign when it came to Trump. He was this huge fan of the Twitter files. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up internal documents to a handful of partisan journalists. In these documents, everybody rooted through, and what they came out with was that the government and the mainstream media was colluding and forcing social media companies to censor conservative Americans. That's not really what it was.

Actually, when you really look at the Twitter files, you see really complicated decisions about content moderation that the government media and social media were wrestling with. One example of something that Bongino really glommed onto was the Hunter Biden laptop story. That is a New York Post story. The government was worried at the time about Russian meddling in the election and the planting of false stories. They pointed it out to Twitter and Facebook, and Twitter and Facebook leapt on it immediately. Both now say they regret that decision, but they probably shouldn't have strangled the reach of that New York Post story, the Hunter Biden laptop story, because the narrative from that was that--

Dan Bongino: Two FBI agents have been identified in documents pressuring Facebook to suppress the Post's accurate and factual reporting about Hunter Biden. It sure looks as if the FBI deliberately pre-censored a legitimate story for a political aim.

Brandy Zadrozny: The other thing that he has been quite extreme on surrounding January 6th, he suggested that the FBI played a role in inciting or allowing the Capitol riot to happen.

Dan Bongino: You're going to start asking once you find out who really incited this "insurrection." I'm telling you, this is an inside job.

Brandy Zadrozny: That was all part of a plot to crack down on conservative activism. He supported these ex-FBI agents who were ousted for supporting January 6th and spreading these January 6th conspiracy theories inside the agency. They were put on leave and he held them up and had them on his show even, painted them as whistleblowers, all as, again, evidence that there was this inside job around January 6th and that the FBI was part of some cover-up.

Micah Loewinger: Last year or so, he started calling the bureaucracy a threat to America. Now he will take the mantle as the number two position. In a recent episode of his podcast, a sort of victory lap where he's making the announcement himself, charting out the future of his program, he said he would help FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and President Trump realize their vision for the bureau. What is that vision?

Brandy Zadrozny: It's important to know that he has repeatedly said that he refuses to move on from the stolen 2020 election because he says that it hasn't been studied thoroughly, it hasn't been investigated thoroughly. Now he's in a position with Kash Patel, who says the same thing.

Dan Bongino: The FBI is lost. It's broken, irredeemably corrupt at this point.

Brandy Zadrozny: One would assume, if he believes that it's a corrupt organization and it's filled with corrupt agents and needs to be, as he's called it, disbanded, I assume that that is what we will see because that is what he has said.

Micah Loewinger: Bongino has made videos targeting you and your reporting as recently as last week. What has he been saying and why is he coming after you?

Brandy Zadrozny: We've talked about this before, but my early beat was the weirdos on the Internet. Around 2016, those weirdos, including Dan Bongino, became really politically important. Their fealty to Donald Trump and their loyalty to him became politically valuable. I'm not famous, but they know who I am, especially because I report on mis and disinformation, and a lot of their pet subjects revolve around that. I am often reporting on them.

A lot of times, what Dan Bongino seemingly doesn't like about me is that I'm in his wheelhouse because a lot of reporters haven't found these people so politically important. I've been along for the ride the whole time. Most recently, he was upset that I quibbled with the idea that USAID funded journalists because people that worked for USAID bought subscriptions to some papers. I think he called me a twit or something. What happens when he does this is that you, as a reporter, are swarmed on social media by people who call themselves Bongino's army and people who say stuff like, "You've been Bonginoed, which is creative."

Now, he is seemingly privy to the country's intelligence and information all at his fingertips. What does he do with that new power? How does he use that?

Micah Loewinger: Are you worried he's going to come after you?

Brandy Zadrozny: Gosh, I don't know what to expect anymore. Again, I think we're in this moment of we're finding out. When you think about this conspiracy theory of the witch hunts against Donald Trump, one pillar of this conspiracy theory is the belief that members of the media are in cahoots with all of the other arms of the people that are involved in this plan to steal the election or whatever against Donald Trump. It wouldn't surprise me if Bongino and the other loyalists that are now in power move some of their targets to the media itself.

Micah Loewinger: Brenden Dilley, who is a colleague and contemporary of Dan Bongino, recently made a very interesting observation, which is that he and his buddies in this far-right podcaster universe, who were once on the outside conspiracizing about the FBI, are now literally on the inside, so much so that he said--

Brenden Dilley: There's going to be nobody left doing podcasts soon because the top people are all going to work for the government.

Micah Loewinger: As somebody who's been along for the ride for so long, Brandy, what is it like to see these people welcomed in to the seat of American power?

Brandy Zadrozny: Bananas. Absolutely bananas. I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. I think it does send a signal to other creators that this is the way to power. I can name a million creators that started as nothing, libs of TikTok, nothing, and is now affecting decisions at DOGE, which is affecting every piece of our government. I think that once, where Dan Bongino was alone was one of the few people operating in this way and making this kind of media. Now I think there are a long line of successors. People are trying to recreate the magic of that formula, which, again, is just owning the libs, fealty to Donald Trump, and provocative statements.

Micah Loewinger: Brandy, thank you very much.

Brandy Zadrozny: My pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter at NBC News, covering the Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Russia's two-pronged war in Ukraine involves bombing its people and erasing its history.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week marks three years since Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine as part of a full-scale invasion. On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the White House to meet with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance in front of the cameras.

Trump: I want to get this thing over with. You see the hatred he's got for Putin. It's very tough.

Brooke Gladstone: Then ensued. Well, just listen.

Trump: You have to be thankful. You don't have the cards. You're buried there. Your people are dying.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: I've been telling you this. I know.

Trump: You're running low on soldiers.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Don't--

Trump: Listen.

Brooke Gladstone: This mugging of a supposed American ally went on for more than 10 minutes.

Trump: You're running low on soldiers. It would be a damn good thing. Then you tell us, "I don't want to a ceasefire. I don't want a ceasefire. I want to go and I wanted this." Look, if you could get a ceasefire right now, I tell you, you take it so the bullets stop flying and your men stop getting killed.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Of course, we want to stop the war, but I said to you with guarantees.

Trump: You're saying you don't want a ceasefire because you'll get a ceasefire faster than a degree.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ask our people about ceasefire, what they think.

Brooke Gladstone: Afterwards, our president went on Truth Social and said that ZelenskyY had "disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he's ready for peace." This is obviously a profound shift in especially the Republican Party's once very hawkish stance on Russia and one that reflects the particular preferences of Donald Trump. Here he is enthralled by Putin's wily recasting of Russia's initial incursions into Crimea just two days before he launched a direct attack on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in 2022.

Trump: I said, "This is genius."

Brooke Gladstone: He loved the rhetorical spin that Putin put on his aggression.

Trump: Oh, that's wonderful. Putin is now saying it's independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, "How smart is that?" He's going to go in and be a peacekeeper.

Brooke Gladstone: Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of No Country for Love, a historical novel about tragedy and survival in Ukraine. Yaroslav, welcome to the show.

Yaroslav Trofimov: Great to be on the show.

Brooke Gladstone: Take us back to 2018. In July of that year in Helsinki, President Trump and Vladimir Putin had just met behind closed doors. Trump emerges and says.

Trump: Our relationship has never been worse. That changed as of about four hours ago.

Yaroslav Trofimov: The chemistry between Putin and Trump was something remarkable, was smiles and joy.

Brooke Gladstone: Then Trump was asked about the finding of American intelligence that the Russians were responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee.

Trump: I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this. I don't see any reason why it would be.

Yaroslav Trofimov: The outrage was immediate. The leaders of the American national security establishment, who were sitting in the front row in their press conference, complained on a flight back to the US, and within 24 hours, President Trump said he had misspoken and he had been misunderstood. Trump actually ended up appointing Russia hawks like John Bolton, introduced tougher sanctions on Russia, and sold weapons to Ukraine, something that President Obama had refused to do. The pressure was so high at the time that he didn't really have the room for what he always wanted, which is a warmer relationship with President Putin.

Brooke Gladstone: He couldn't have that warmer relationship because there were some experienced professionals on his team the first time. Now those guardrails are gone, and he can say pretty much whatever he wants, even that Ukraine started the war.

Trump: Today, I heard, "Oh, well, we weren't invited." Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.

Yaroslav Trofimov: The entire world was watching on February 24th, 2022, as Russian tanks rolled across the border unprovoked. Saying that Ukraine started the war defies not just common sense, your basic sensory faculties. Yet this obvious untruth truth was not challenged.

Brooke Gladstone: Why do you think Russia has this special appeal to Trump beyond business opportunities?

Yaroslav Trofimov: If you talk to people who served in his administration, he was fascinated by the power that is wielded by Putin, or for that matter, Xi Jinping. He would always question, "Why can't I do this? Why can they do so much more?" There is also a shared vision of how the world should be run. If you see how Trump is speaking now about global politics, it's very much just like Putin in 19th-century imperialist discourse.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a view shared also by an ultra-conservative portion of the Republican base, which now regards Russia as a kind of exemplar of traditional values, a social order reminiscent of the '50s. What is it that they think they see in Russia?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Yes, that's really bizarre, because there is the Russia as it exists, which is a country with one of the world's highest abortion and divorce rates, with a shrinking population, social crisis, massive immigration, by the way, mostly Muslim, and corruption that is endemic. Then there's this imagined Russia, in part because of very skillful propaganda by Putin, to cast Russia as this Christian utopia haven for family values.

In fact, as he's carrying out the war in Ukraine, where he's killing women and children and destroying cities and breaking families apart, driving millions from their homes and from the country, he's casting this as the war to preserve the values, to make sure our children are not corrupted by all these perversions imported from the West, and then they will always have only a father and a mother and not two fathers. This discourse of traditional values is working.

Brooke Gladstone: How is he spreading it? How are Americans consuming it? Who are the principal voices out there promoting this vision?

Yaroslav Trofimov: First of all, you had, for a long time, outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik that were broadcasting in English and they have a very skillful use of social media now. Also, a lot of people that are promoted by Elon Musk on X are also promoting this narrative.

Brooke Gladstone: There was something you put in one of your articles that was so fascinating to me, that Russia now has a special immigration program for Americans and others who are fleeing woke values. They have to pack up and put all their stuff in a push cart because of DEI, I guess. In February of '22, Putin said, "We're fighting so that our children have one mother, one father, and no one is perverted by the decadent West." I have some tape of Joseph Rose, an American YouTuber, who moved to Russia in 2022.

Joseph Rose: Because right now, you've got the West that's experimenting with living without traditional family values and you've got traditional family values type people in the West, Christians, conservatives, people like that, going, "Oh my gosh, what's happening to my world? What do I do?" They don't know that there is a place where they could live the life they want to live, and that's over here in Russia.

Yaroslav Trofimov: It's remarkable how the language is being weaponized. What are the traditional values? The first traditional value is thou shalt not kill. Yet this entire part of the murderous nature of the Russian state is pretty obscure by the fact that, "Oh, well, they banned gay marriage. They must be very traditional and Christian." It's a very à la carte way of choosing your traditional values.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, to conduct this war, you really have to demonize the enemy. I don't know how many Americans are familiar with Aleksandr Dugin and the role he plays, but he does play a big role, right?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Big enough to be a guest of Tucker Carlson's show. He's a self-described Russian fascist. He has a very complicated philosophy and view of the world, but it's basically fascism and imperialism and Russian supremacy. He says that, "Well, we can divide the world with the Americans. We'll get to Europe, they can keep maybe the British Isles."

Brooke Gladstone: Dugin has actually argued that ethnic Russians should take over the land from "Dublin to Vladivostok."

Yaroslav Trofimov: I guess in other statements, he's shown some flexibility and willingness over how to divide the world. The fact is that what Putin was demanding ahead of the invasion of Ukraine when he was meeting the US in the summer of 2021 was not dramatically different. He was demanding the rollback of NATO to where it was at the end of The Cold War and what the Russians call the new security architecture of Europe, which means restoration of Russian control in one shape or another over Central and Eastern Europe.

The only reason that we're not talking about this right now is because Ukraine, which was supposed to be a three-day special military operation, did not collapse. The Russian army is bogged down and still unable to win the war, which has given this reprieve to the rest of Europe.

Brooke Gladstone: You suggest that Russia has served as a great symbol for American politics over the years. Right now, for some, it's serving as a beacon of traditional values. It's been other things at other times. Why is that the place where American politics tends to project its hopes and anxieties?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Well, because it was looming in the popular imagination, kind of the only peer of the United States for a long time during the Cold War. It was seen as this sort of the other side of the mirror. Nearly a century ago, a large part of the American, but also European left, was in thrall of Stalin's Russia because it was imagined as this land of equality and feminism and development and flourishing of the arts and the sciences when, in reality, it was a brutal, murderous society killing millions of its own citizens, where famines were widespread and where pretty much everyone was a slave to the state.

Now we have Putin's Russia being idolized by the other side of the political spectrum and for other reasons. again, the Russia they imagine is very far removed from the actual Russia that exists.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that nowadays, the messaging is segmented. For one audience, Ukrainians are portrayed as Nazis. For another, as Trojan horses for woke values and far-left ideology. Those things are a bit contradictory, but we do live in a time where plenty of people are capable of believing both those things at once.

Yaroslav Trofimov: Yes. First of all, this was always the way Russian propaganda works. Their idea was that our messages don't have to be cogent. The main goal is not necessarily to convince someone that your message is true. It's to convince someone that the truth doesn't exist, to sow doubt in reality.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that Russia's war against Ukraine is fundamentally a struggle over historical memory. How does this fight over historical memory influence the way that the Russian army is conducting this war?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Well, let's start with the fact that Ukrainian history is really not known, because until recently, history of Ukraine was written by the butchers of Ukraine.

Brooke Gladstone: By the butchers of Ukraine?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Yes. Ukraine underwent a man-made famine, the Holodomor, in the 1930s that killed at least 4 million people. The world didn't really know about it, in part because some in the West were complicit with it. A man who occupies a very important place in Ukrainian history books is Walter Duranty, the correspondent of the New York Times in Moscow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for writing articles that said Ukrainian peasants are well-fed and happy and there is no famine, as people literally committing acts of cannibalism in Ukrainian villages.

From the 1930s, 1950s, Ukraine was literally the deadliest place on earth in a country that had fewer than 30 million people at the end of the 1920s. Around 15 million people were killed between the famine, the Holocaust, the war, and the insurgency that followed the war. All of us and all the people who were born in Ukraine were told by their grandparents, great grandparents, about what happened, these hidden, secret histories that were not allowed to be told in public until the end of the Soviet Union, and that only emerged later in an independent Ukraine.

This is a history that Russia not just denies, but tries to destroy. One of the first things that happen when Russian troops enter a Ukrainian town, they just come in and destroy the monuments to the victims of the Holodomor, the famine of the 1930s, because they say, well, it didn't really exist. Ukrainians are fighting for never again, and the Russians are saying, well, it never happened. Then they built monuments to the people who created this famine and to the people who perpetrated further atrocities.

People don't understand. Lots of people in the West are saying, "Well, why don't you make peace? You lost so many people in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of young men and women in this fight." The Ukrainian response right now by the society is that, "Well, we would love peace, peace is great," but we know that if we surrender, they will be killing many more people because this is what they have done in the past, and this is what they say very openly, people like Dugin, but also official Russian media, they will do again their plans for a genocidal extermination of the Ukrainians as Ukrainians are out in the open, physically eliminating Ukrainian intellectuals and re-educating the rest.

Brooke Gladstone: What is happening to the artists and intellectuals in Ukraine right now?

Yaroslav Trofimov: There was a Ukrainian children's writer named Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was pretty famous in Ukraine, who was living in a village that was occupied by the Russians in the very beginning of the war. As he was living in this village and watching how the Russian power was being exercised, he started writing a diary, a secret diary that he hid in his garden. One day, he was picked up by the Russian forces at the checkpoint outside his house. Then he was found executed.

Brooke Gladstone: Executed?

Yaroslav Trofimov: By the Russians. Several months later, the Ukrainian army liberates this village, and a Ukrainian novelist named Viktoria Merina finds out that Volodymyr Vakulenko was writing this diary. She digs in the garden, finds the diary all soggy, but still legible, and she starts writing a book of her own about all the Ukrainian writers that had been killed by the Russians over the years, since the execution of the entire Ukrainian intellectual class in the 1930s, up to this book by the writer executed by the Russians just now.

Viktoria herself didn't finish the book because she was killed by a Russian missile strike in the city of Kramatorsk. You have this cycle of physical elimination of Ukrainian voices, which is why the world doesn't know much about Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian history, because it's a war in which Russia is trying to tell Ukraine, "You do not have a history. You do not have a culture. You have no right to have your own culture." Just speaking Ukrainian, just writing in Ukrainian, is already a crime against the Russian state.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote a book called Our Enemies Will Vanish about your experience covering Russia's war in Ukraine after covering other conflicts in the Middle East. You grew up in Kyiv. You were back in Kyiv in February 2022, passing by the landmarks of your youth, when Russia launched the rockets into the city and started the war. From where you stand, three years into the conflict, what do you think of the coverage? What do you think is missing?

Yaroslav Trofimov: This is not just some sort of geopolitical game of risk. We have to focus on the individuals, on the people, people who have the same aspirations, the same desire to be happy, to fall in love, to see their grandchildren grow up, to have a career, to see the world that everyone else has.

Brooke Gladstone: How much of a toll has this taken on you?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Well, it's not easy. I've been covering wars for a very long time. If it's a war in someone else's country, you can go on holiday and check out and not necessarily think about it all the time. Here, you can't.

Brooke Gladstone: Yaroslav, thank you very much.

Yaroslav Trofimov: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul. This week we bid farewell to Brendan Dalton. Thanks for everything, Brendan. We also say goodbye to Katerina Barton. You were invaluable. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.