White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

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“This Time It’s Different” is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything.

Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, he believes, bigger and more transformative than anything that has yet happened.

He says AI is exponential and human thinking is linear. I think that means we can’t get our minds around it.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, echoes Hatamleh.

Cole believes that AI will be as impactful as the printing press, the internet and COVID-19. He also believes 2027 will be a seminal year: a year in which AI will batter the workforce, particularly white-collar workers.

For journalists, AI presents two challenges: jobs lost to AI writing and editing, and the loss of truth. How can we identify AI-generated misinformation? The New York Times said simply: We can’t.

But I am more optimistic.

I have been reporting on AI since well before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Eventually, I think AI will be able to control itself, to red flag its own excesses and those who are abusing it with fake information.

I base this rather outlandish conclusion on the idea that AI has a near-human dimension which it gets from absorbing all published human knowledge and that knowledge is full of discipline, morals and strictures. Surely, these are also absorbed in the neural networks.

I have tested this concept on AI savants across the spectrum for several years. They all had the same response: It is a great question.

Besides its trumpeted use in advancing medicine at warp speed, AI could become more useful in providing truth where it has been concealed by political skullduggery or phony research.

Consider the general apprehension that President Donald Trump may order the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books.

Well, aficionados in the world of national security and AI tell me that AI could easily scour all available data on employment, job vacancies and inflation and presto: reliable numbers. The key, USC’s Cole emphasizes, is inputting complete prompts.

In other words, AI could check the data put out by the government. That leads to the possibility of a kind of AI shadow government, revealing falsehoods and correcting speculation.

If AI poses a huge possibility for misinformation, it also must have within it the ability to verify truth, to set the record straight, to be a gargantuan fact-checker.

It could be a truth central for the government, immune to insults, out of the reach of the FBI, ICE or the Justice Department — and, above all, a truth-speaking force that won’t be primaried.

The idea of shadow government isn’t confined to what might be done by AI but is already taking shape where DOGE-ing has left missions shattered, people distraught and sometimes an agency unable to perform. So, networks of resolute civil servants inside and outside government are working to preserve data, hide critical discoveries and keep vital research alive. This kind of shadow activity is taking place at the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense departments, the National Institutes of Health and those who interface with them in the research community.

In the wider world, job loss to AI — or if you want to be optimistic, job adjustment — has already begun. It will accelerate but can be absorbed once we recognize the need to reshape the workforce. Is it time to pick a new career or at least think about it?

The political class, all of it, is out to lunch. Instead of wrangling about social issues, it should be looking to the future, a future which has a new force. Much as automation was a force to be accommodated, this revolution can’t be legislated or regulated into submission, but it can be managed and prepared for. Like all great changes, it is redolent with possibility and fear.

Trump Hostility To Wind And Solar Has Utilities Treading Softly

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This commentary was originally published in Forbes.

President Donald Trump reiterated his hostility to wind generation when he arrived in Scotland for what was ostensibly a private visit. “Stop the windmills,” he said.

But the world isn’t stopping its windmill development and neither is the United States, although it has become more difficult and has put U.S. electric utilities in an awkward position: It is a love that dare not speak its name, one might say.

Utilities love that wind and solar can provide inexpensive electricity, offsetting the high expense of battery storage.

It is believed that Trump’s well-documented animus to wind turbines is rooted in his golf resort in Balmedie, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2013, Trump attempted to prevent the construction of a small offshore wind farm — just 11 turbines — located roughly 2.2 miles from his Trump International Golf Links, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He argued that the wind farm would spoil views from his golf course and negatively impact tourism in the area.

Trump seemingly didn’t just take against the local authorities, but against wind in general and offshore wind in particular.

Yet fair winds are blowing in the world for renewables.

Francesco La Camera, director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, an official United Nations observer, told me that in 2024, an astounding 92 percent of new global generation was from wind and solar, with solar leading wind in new generation. We spoke recently when La Camera was in New York.

My informal survey of U.S. utilities reveals they are pleased with the Trump administration’s efforts to simplify licensing and its push to natural gas, but they are also keen advocates of wind and solar.

Simply, wind is cheap and as battery storage improves, so does its usefulness. Likewise, solar. However, without the tax advantages that were in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the numbers will change, but not enough to rule out renewables, the utilities tell me.

China leads the world in installed wind capacity of 561 gigawatts, followed by the United States with less than half that at 154 GW. The same goes for solar installations: China had 887 GW of solar capacity in 2024 and the United States had 239 GW.

China is also the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. This gives it market advantage globally and environmental bragging rights, even though it is still building coal-fired plants.

While utilities applaud Trump’s easing of restrictions, which might speed the use of fossil fuels, they aren’t enthusiastic about installing new coal plants or encouraging new coal mines to open. Both, they believe, would become stranded assets.

Utilities and their trade associations have been slow to criticize the administration’s hostility to wind and solar, but they have been publicly cheering gas turbines.

However, gas isn’t an immediate solution to the urgent need for more power: There is a global shortage of gas turbines with waiting lists of five years and longer. So no matter how favorably utilities look on gas, new turbines, unless they are already on hand or have set delivery dates, may not arrive for many years.

Another problem for utilities is those states that have scheduled phasing out fossil fuels in a given number of years. That issue – a clash between federal policy and state law — hasn’t been settled.

In this environment, utilities are either biding their time or cautiously seeking alternatives.

For example, facing a virtual ban on new offshore wind farms, veteran journalist Robert Whitcomb wrote in his New England Diary that the New England utilities are looking to wind power from Canada, delivered by undersea cable. Whitcomb wrote a book, “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future,” about offshore wind, published in 2007.

New England is starved of gas as there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to bring in more, so even if gas turbines were readily available, they wouldn’t be an option. New pipelines take financing, licensing in many jurisdictions, and face public hostility.

Emily Fisher, a former general counsel for the Edison Electric Institute, told me, “Five years is just a blink of an eye in utility planning.”

On July 7, Trump signed an executive order which states: “For too long the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable sources like wind and solar.

“The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy resources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration puts electricity consumption growth at 2 percent nationwide. In parts of the nation, as in some Texas cities, it is 3 percent.

 

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

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I have loads of my words to eat, a feast of kingly proportions.

I don’t know when I started, but it must have been back when I was traveling on the speaking circuit. It doesn’t matter.

This tale of getting it wrong starts in London, where I was asked to address a conference on investing in America. Most of the questions weren’t — as I imagined they would be — about investment and returns on it, or taxes, or the exportability of profits. Instead, the questions were about the U.S. legal system; how litigious we are and what that is like.

My response was that our courts are fair, there is less day-to-day litigation than you might think, and the courts can serve you as well as those who dispute your actions. I said, “Don’t be afraid of litigation. It could be your friend.”

Next stop: New Delhi. The question was how can we get more U.S. investment? My answer: Fix your courts. They are famous for how slow they are to reach a decision. Americans are used to predictable legal speed.

In Moscow, during the halcyon Mikhail Gorbachev days, I was asked about how to get U.S. companies to invest in Russia. My answer: Make sure the courts work fairly and, above all, are clear of politics.

In Ireland, I debated Martin McGuinness, the late IRA leader. It went well, despite my English accent. My contribution was to tell McGuinness that if there ever is a united Ireland, make sure the constitution doesn’t hide anything under the mat (I was thinking of slavery in America) and make sure the court system looks to that constitution, not to politics.

Why am I eating on my words? Why am I shoveling them down my throat by the (Imperial) bushel?

The front page of The Washington Post for July 18 tells the story: Three pieces there add up to up a requiem for American justice.

Exhibit 1, this headline: “In deadly raid DOJ eyes 1-day sentence.”

Exhibit 2: “Thousands here legally have 60 days to leave.”

Exhibit 3: “Brazil judge in Trump’s sights.”

Two of these shameful reports show that neither the judicial process nor the laws of the United States are sacrosanct anymore.

The third shows that the Trump administration not only doesn’t respect our own judicial processes, but also those of other countries.

The perversion of justice isn’t a domestic matter anymore.

******

The Trump budget cuts are moving through the system, like a virus. There are clusters of damage and some slow lower infection, but nonetheless are capable of inflicting severe harm.

I was reminded of this when at a Newport Classical Music Festival concert last week, the deputy chairman announced that they needed $40,000 to make up for the termination in National Endowment for the Humanities’ funding.

Now you could argue that Newport Classical will get by, and divine music will continue to echo through the Gilded Age mansions — known as “cottages” — without the government’s help.

But what about less-affluent places where concerts, plays and ramp-on for young people in the arts will be reduced or ended due to a lack of government support?

******

Some things take a long  time to invent.

Take cup holders in cars. No technology was needed but it wasn’t until the 1980s that a convenience store chain realized that their hot coffee needed a place of rest in cars.

They came up with a plastic device that hooked over a window. Okay unless you opened the window inadvertently, in which case the coffee or other liquid would land squarely in the customer’s lap. Ouch!

Detroit saw the possibilities and soon you were urged to buy an automobile based on how many drinks could be stowed safely in built-in cup holders during travel. Not to be outdone by Detroit, and all the other car manufacturers, recreational boats were next to secure drinks in holders.

One has to wonder why this wasn’t done in carriages or stagecoaches a long time before the automobile?

******

I flew from Rhode Island to Washington this week and I am writing this on my return trip on the train — unquestionably, a superior way of making this trip.

Of course, predictably, the plane was late, but I was feeling smugly superior. I had scored a first-class seat. My wife found me a first-class fare that was cheaper than coach. I think the term of art for this is: Go figure.

For my lucky break up front, I had nice service and a choice of protein bars or Biscoff cookies. For this people pay a lot of money?  Go figure.

Europe Knows Russia and Is Deeply Afraid

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Europe is naked and afraid.

That was the message at a recent meeting of the U.K. Section of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), at which I was an invited speaker.

It preceded a stark warning just over a week later from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, also speaking in London, who said the danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia won’t recede even if there is peace in Ukraine.

Rutte said defense spending must increase across Europe and recommended that it should reach 5 percent of GDP. Singling out Britain, he said if the Brits don’t do so, they should learn to speak Russian. He said Russia could overwhelm NATO by 2030.

The British journalists’ session reflected fear of Russia and astonishment at the United States. There was fear that Russia would invade the weaker states and that NATO had been neutered. Fear that the world’s most effective defense alliance, NATO, is no longer operational.

There was astonishment that America had abandoned its longstanding policies of support for Europe and preparedness to keep Russia in check. And there was disillusionment that President Trump would turn away from Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.

The tone in Europe toward the United States isn’t one simply of anger or sorrow, but anger tinged with sorrow. Europeans see themselves as vulnerable in a way that  hasn’t been true since the end of World War II.

They also are shattered by the change in America under Trump; his hostility to Europe, his tariffs and his preparedness to side with Russia. “How can this happen to America?” the British AEJ members asked me.

In many conversations, I found disbelief that America could do this to Europe, and that Trump should lean so far toward Putin. In Europe, where Putin has been an existential threat and where he invaded Ukraine, there is general amazement that Trump seems to crave the approbation of the Russian president.

Speaking to the journalist’s meeting via video from Romania, Edward Lucas, a former senior editor of The Economist, and now a columnist for The Times of London and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy, said, “Donald Trump has turned the transatlantic relationship on its head. He wants to be friends with Vladimir Putin. We are in a bad mess.”

He said he saw no realistic possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine in the near future, and he said Trump had made it clear that he was prepared to walk away from trying to bring peace “if it proved too hard.”

Lucas suggested that if European nations continue to back Ukraine after a Russian-dictated peace offer endorsed by America, Trump will punish them. He might do this by withdrawing U.S. assets from Europe, pulling back large numbers of troops from the 80,000 stationed there, and refusing to replace the American supreme commander of Europe.

“Then we will see how defenseless Europe is,” he said.

In Washington, it seems there is little understanding of the true weakness of Europe. No understanding that money alone won’t buy security for Europe.

Europe doesn’t have stand-off capacity, heavy airlift capacity, ultra-sophisticated electronic intelligence or anything approaching a defense infrastructure.

Trump has equated defense simply with money. But in Europe (although 27 of its nations are part of the European Union), there is no cohesive structure in place that could replace the role played by the United States.

Within the EU there are disagreements and there is the spoiler in the case of Hungary. Its pro-Russia ruler, Victor Orban, would like to try to block any concerted European action against Russia. The new right-wing Polish president’s hopes for good relations with Orban are a worry for most EU members.

I have long believed that there are three mutually exclusive views of Europe in the United States.

The first, favored by Trump and his MAGA allies, is that Europe is ripping off America in defense and through non-tariff trade barriers and is awash in expensive socialist systems embracing health, transportation and state nannying.

The second, favored by vacationers, is that Europe is a sort of Disney World for adults, as portrayed on PBS by Rick Steves’ travelogues: Watch the quaint people making wine or drinking beer.

The third is that Europe has been encouraged by successive administrations to accept the U.S. defense umbrella, as that favored America and its concerns, first about Soviet expansion and more recently about expansion under Putin.

Now Europe is alone in defense terms, naked and very afraid — afraid of Trump’s pivot to Putin.

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

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Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

Hello, World! America Doesn’t Have Your Back Anymore

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America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in Western Europe to the struggling masses worldwide, America has always been there to help. Its mission has been to serve and, in its serving, to promote the American brand — freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — and to keep America a revered and special place.

America was there to arbitrate an end to civil war, to rush in with aid after a natural disaster, to provide food during a famine and medical assistance during an infectious disease outbreak. America was there with an open heart and open hand.

If you want to look at this in a transactional way, which is the currency of today, we gave but we got back. The ledger is balanced. For example, we sent forth America’s food surplus to where it was needed, from Pakistan to Ethiopia, and we opened markets to our farmers.

The world’s needs established a symbiotic relationship in which we gained reverence and prestige, and our values were exported and sometimes adopted.

President Trump has characterized us as victims of a venal world that has pillaged our goodwill, stolen our manufacturing and exploited our market. The fact is that when Trump took office in January, the United States had the best-performing economy in the world, and its citizens enjoyed the products of the world at reasonable prices. Inflation was a problem, but it was beginning to come down — and it wasn’t as persistent as it had been in Britain, for example.

Trump has painted a picture of a world where our manufacturing was somehow shanghaied and carried in the depth of night to Asia.

In fact, American businesses, big and small, sought out Asian manufacturing to avail themselves of cheap but talented labor, low regulation, and a union-free environment.

Businesses will always go where the ecosystem favors them. The business ecosystem offshore was as irresistible to us as it was to a tranche of European manufacturing.

The move to Asia hollowed out the old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and New England, but unemployment has remained low. Some industries, including farming, food processing and manufacturing, suffer labor shortages.

We need manufacturing that supports national security. That includes chips, heavy electrical equipment and other essential infrastructure goods. It doesn’t include a lot of consumer goods, from clothing to toys.

Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican and a semanticist, said you couldn’t come up with the correct answer if your input was wrong, “no matter how hard you think.” Trump’s thinking about the world seems to be input-challenged.

The world isn’t changing only in how Trump has ordained but in other fundamental ones. Manufacturing in just five years will be very different. Artificial intelligence will be on the factory floor, in the planning and sales offices, and it will boost productivity. However, it won’t add jobs and probably will subtract them.

Trump would like to build a Fortress America with all that will involve, including higher prices and uncompetitive factories. While not undermining our position as the benefactor to the world, a better approach might be to build up North America and welcome Canada and Mexico into an even closer relationship.  Canada shares much of our culture, is rich in raw materials, and has been an exemplary neighbor. Mexico is a treasure trove of talent and labor.

Rather than threatening Canada and belittling Mexico, a possible future lies in a collaborative relationship with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Canada is looking for markets to the East and the West. Mexico, which is building a coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Panama Canal, is staking much on its new trade deal with the European Union.

Trump has sundered old relationships and old views of what is America’s place in the world order. No longer does the world have America at its back.

This is a time of choice: The Ugly American or the Great Neighbor.

Political Fear Stalks Law, Education, Journalism, Migration

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Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.

Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.

The state under Donald Trump has a special interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.

Fear of the state has entered the political process.

Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list,” which was mostly journalists. His political paranoia was always there, and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal.

Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.

Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters, it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mainly achieved with information given or withheld.

The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies or those who disagree with it. It includes the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated,” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.

If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work, and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.

One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.

The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.

Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation, and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.

The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.

If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.

Shamefully, Columbia caved to try to salvage $400 million in research funds. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education, the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.

One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool — critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.

Traveling with the president is essential. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.

Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves. ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. Corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.

Accommodate what they have, and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes. The truth is obvious; the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.

Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty, and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.

Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.

VOA Pure Because it Wasn’t Beholden, Despite Its U.S. Funding

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It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended. 

The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.

There was only one channel and no television in  Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.

To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel “The Man of Property.”

I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.

Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed country, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest. 

But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.

Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.

What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda. 

Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda. 

Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.

Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.

The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons. 

The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.

I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.

At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)

For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, “White House Chronicle,” was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.

I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.

Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are —  at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.

We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.

Will U.S. Barons ‘Magna Carta’ Trump?

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Sitting behind President Trump at his inauguration were men who might well be called the barons of America: the big-tech billionaires who control vast wealth and public awe. They are so high in Trump’s esteem that he seated them in front of his Cabinet.

When King John of England was crowned in 1199, barons also attended him. They were the barons of England,  although most were of French descent — the result of the conquest of England in 1066 by William, Duke of Normandy, who defeated King Harold II of England in the Battle of Hastings.

The difference between John’s coronation and those of his father, Henry II, and brother, Richard I, was that he didn’t make the customary promises to uphold the rights and the norms of conduct that had become a kind of unofficial constitution. John neither embraced those norms then nor abided by them later.

King John was known to be vengeful and petty, tyrannical and greedy, but is believed to have been a relatively good administrator and a passable soldier — although many of his financial problems resulted from the loss of English lands in Normandy.

Those wars and expenditures by his father and brother on fighting the Third Crusade meant that John had a money problem. He solved the problem with high taxes and scutage — payments that were made in lieu of military service, often by wealthy individuals.

John also had a “deep state” problem. 

The King’s administration had become extremely efficient, bureaucratic, and especially good at taxation and coercion, which browned off the nobles. They were getting pushed around.

When the barons had had enough, they told the King to behave, or they would install one of the pretenders to the throne. They met in long negotiations at Runnymede, a meadow along the Thames, 22.5 miles upriver from what is now Central London. It is pretty well unchanged today, save for a monument erected by the American Bar Association in 1957.

The barons forced on John a document demanding his good behavior, and impressing upon him that even the King was not above the law.

The document that was signed on June 15, 1215 was the Magna Carta (Great Charter), limiting the king’s authority and laying down basic rules for lawful governance.

In all there are 63 sections in the document, which have affected Western culture and politics for almost 800 years. The Magna Carta is part of English and American common law, and was a foundational document for the U.S. Constitution.

It stated that the king was subject to the laws of the time, that the church could be free of the king’s administration and his interference, and that the rights of the barons and commoners were respected. Particularly, it said that no one should be imprisoned without due process.

Today’s barons in America are undoubtedly the big-tech entrepreneurs who have not only captured great wealth but also have an air of infallibility.

While John has been hard-handled by history, the Magna Carta has done superbly. John was saddled with the epithet “Bad King John” and no other English monarch has been named John.

When an American president is showing some of the excesses of John, isn’t it time for the great commercial and technological chiefs, who have so far sworn fealty to Trump, to sit him down beside another great river, the Potomac, and tell him a few truths, just as happened at Runnymede?

Since Trump’s inauguration, U.S. national and international status has deteriorated. Chaos has reigned — the government has nearly ceased to function, a pervasive fear for the future has settled in a lot of Americans, there is embarrassment and anger over the trashing of laws, circumvention of the Constitution, tearing up of treaties, aggression towards our neighbors, and a general governance by whim and ego. 

America’s barons need to tell the president: You aren’t a king. Leave the free press free. Abide by the decisions of the courts. Stay within the law. Respect free speech wherever it is practiced. Above all, respect the Constitution, the greatest document of government probity written since the Magna Carta.

The Trump Way Comes to The Washington Post

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As Juliet might have said, “O America, America, wherefore art thou America?”

What has become of us when the president, Donald Trump, who opposes big government, wants the government to have its hand in everything, from the operation of The Kennedy Center to the regulatory commissions, to gender identification, to traffic control in New York City, to the composition of the White House press pool?

Under the pretext of cutting three shibboleths (waste,  fraud and abuse), Trump is moving to bring everything he can under his control, to infuse every apparatus of the country with the Trump brand, which emerges as a strange amalgam of personal like and dislike, enthusiasm and antipathy.

He likes the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — he who orders assassinations outside of Russia and causes his opponents to fall out of windows — so much so that he is about to throw Ukraine under the bus. Short shrift for people who have fought the Russian invader with blood and bone.

He has a strange antipathy to our allies, starting with our blameless neighbor Canada, our supply cabinet of everything from electricity to tomatoes.

He shows a marked indifference to the poor, whether they are homeless in America or dying of starvation in Africa.

He and his agent, Elon Musk the Knife, have obliterated the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended our soft-power leadership in the world and handed diplomatic opportunities to China; while at home, housing starts are far behind demand, the price of eggs is out of sight, and necessary and productive jobs in government are being axed with a kind of malicious pleasure.

The mindlessness of Musk’s marauders has cut the efficiency he is supposed to be cultivating. It is reasonable to believe that government worker productivity is at an all-time low.

If there is a word this administration enjoys it is “firing.” The Trump-Musk duopoly relishes that word. It goes back to the reality television show “The Apprentice,” when its star, Trump, loved to tell a contestant, “You’re fired!”  Now a catchphrase from a canceled TV program is central to the national government.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary assemblage of misfits and socially challenged individuals in Trump’s Cabinet — and, it must be said, who were confirmed by the Republicans in the Senate — are doing their bit to disassemble their departments, fixing things that aren’t broken, breaking things because they hated their authors or because revenge is a policy. Look to the departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security — really all the departments — and you’ll find these hearties at work.

There is a quality of cruelty that is alien to the American ethos, that is un-American, running though all of this. When everything that isn’t broken is fixed, we may lose:

—Our standing in the world as the beacon of decency.

—Our role as a guarantor of peace.

—The trust of our allies.

—Our place as the exemplary of constitutional government and the rule of law.

—Our leadership in all aspects of science, from space exploration to medicine to climate.

Nowhere is the animus of Trump and its lust to control more evident than its hatred of the free press. The free flow of news, fact, and opinion, already damaged by the economic realities of the news business and its outdated models, is an anathema to Trump. A free press is a free country. There is no alternative.

This week, the White House and the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, moved to destroy the norm of decades in the press room, where the press corps collectively through its elected body, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has assigned seats. The association also decides who will be a part of the small rotating group of journalists and photographers — the pool — who accompany the president. It has been effective and is time-honored.

Now Leavitt, a Trump triumphalist, will choose the pool and favor the inclusion of podcasters and talk-show hosts who are reliably enthusiastic about the president.

At The Washington Post — the local newspaper of government — editorial pages are to be defenestrated. The Post, which has had for decades the best editorial columnists in the nation, is to be silenced. Its owner, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, has told the editorial staff that going forward they will write only about personal liberties and free markets.

It is the end of an era of great journalism, the dimming of a bright light, the encroachment of darkness in the nation’s capital.

A newspaper can’t be perfect, and The Washington Post certainly is far from that. But it is a great newspaper, and its proprietor has been manipulated by the controlling fingers of the Trump machine: A machine that values only loyalty and brooks no criticism. A machine that is unmoved by the nation’s and world’s tears. A Romeo who doesn’t hear Juliet.