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Neil writes, James, people have tattoos of the Rolling Stones
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It doesn't mean that they're members of the band. That's from Neil in Barkhamstead. And, of course, if the tattoos of the Rolling Stones have been digitally added to a photograph of their hand
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then the point becomes doubly true. But that was quite a moment. Unfortunately, it is a moment among many
0:20
The effective attempt to coerce a journalist into agreeing with a lie during a television interview isn't even shocking anymore
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and I guess thanks to Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent, we are better equipped to be unshocked by this than many other observers
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and Simon joins me again now because we now know what he chose to celebrate
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during his 100-day celebration, described by President Trump at a rally in Michigan
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that you gave us the heads up on yesterday, Simon, as the most successful first 100 days of any administration
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in the history of country, of our country, according to many, many people
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I can think of one person that might typify it as such, but would he be right
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Look, I mean, he did pretty much what I thought he was going to do, even to the point of quoting from The Economist and saying that he had been described by a newspaper
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He didn't identify it as the most consequential president in American history
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So impressed was he by that description that he was thinking of subscribing to The Economist
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although, of course, he then didn't go on to explain that The Economist also argued
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that he has spent the last 100 days doing lasting damage to the United States
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to its standing, to its values and to its sense of community
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None of that, of course, reflected in this speech. I mean I think that the speech started the fired the opening salvos basically in two battles One was the midterm election campaign the shameless effort to accuse the Democrats of being radical communists who are supporting illegal immigrants that he characterized without any evidence as terrorists and the most dangerous savages on earth once again using sort of racist tropes to describe the people that he deporting en masse from the United States So a real challenge At one point
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he said, why would anybody ever vote for the Democrats? This was the beginning of the midterm
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election campaign. We're still over a year away from those congressional elections, but he's
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clearly got them in mind. But it was also yesterday, both the speech and that extraordinary
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jaw-dropping, baffling exchange with Terry Moran, a salvo in his desire to provoke a confrontation
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with the courts. He issued an open invitation last night in the speech to the US Supreme Court
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to step in and stop lower courts from trying to constrain his power. All of that talk about the
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MS-13 tattoos and they were photoshopped and Terry Moran, you know, the M and the S and the one and
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the three was added to the picture by the White House. And Terry Moran is one of the most experienced
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and widely respected journalists in this city. If you wanted to resolve whether Kilmar Abrego
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Garcia, the 29-year-old locked up in Trump's El Salvadorian gulag, is indeed a leader of MS-13
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you'd put him on trial and you'd allow the courts in the United States to adjudicate it
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What Donald Trump has done has denied him all legal process and he was deported in flagrant violation of a judge's order
3:47
On the question of the Supreme Court, would it be fair to suggest that Trump was expecting them to be more pliable
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than they're proving to be at the moment? it's been a mixed bag james and you know he falsely interprets supreme court rulings so on
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the issue of kilmar abrigo garcia the supreme court by nine to nothing unanimously has said
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to the american government you've got to bring him back you need to facilitate and effectuate
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his return to the united states the white house denies that is what the supreme court states and
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And indeed Donald Trump has now articulated that he been told by his own advisers that actually the government won in that Supreme Court ruling And this is one of the reasons why he argues that he not effectuating and facilitating
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Mr. Abrego Garcia's return to the United States. So we are now absolutely completely through the
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looking glass here. Up is down, black is white, right is left, everything is topsy-turvy
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And in that environment, it's not just a challenge to journalists to decide
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how you try to hold him to account, which is plainly impossible
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especially given that he's not surrounded himself with any restraining influences in the White House
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who can go over to him and say, Mr President, actually, we lost that case in the Supreme Court
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Do you really believe that? It's a huge challenge. Do you really believe there's no one in the White House now
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that would say that? No one. Absolutely no one. No one at all. I have a phrase, Simon, I have a catchphrase on the programme
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when I say that's not an opinion, that's counting. As if that is the deal closer
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You know, if you're actually counting, then all of the other opinions disappear. But he is, I mean, he is, he's turned opinion into counting
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He is literally claiming the polar opposite. A 9-0 loss is a 9-0 win
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Yes. And I think when we say there's no one who can restrain him, it's actually more accurate to say there's no one who is willing to restrain him or even to attempt
5:48
I mean, Senator Marco Rubio is a smart guy. You may disagree with him on policy, but he's a bright fella
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But he has completely turned turtle in this administration. You know, that iconic picture of him when he was in the Oval Office as Zelensky was being mugged by Trump and Vance
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And you could actually see Rubio kind of like hoping that sinking into the sofa, hoping that it was just going to swallow him whole
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But there is no one in any position of in any ability to restrain Trump. And that is by design
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design. He said all along he was going to do this, fill the government completely with pliant
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sycophantic figures, make America great again, loyalists, wherever he could. And we heard
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elsewhere in that speech in Michigan yesterday, you know, just breathtaking claims for which
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there was no factual basis to support them And he gets you know he makes those in the presence of members of his own cabinet who know the truth later today here who aren going to say boo to a goose Petrol eggs doge savings jobs
6:58
It was a long list of claims that are demonstrably untrue. But, of course, in the context of what we've just been discussing
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that's quite a double prong, isn't it? The Supreme Court thing and then the photoshopping
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because, of course, it's all very well being surrounded by sycophants. But for this to work or to continue to work, the media has to be brought to heel as well in an equally brutal way
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And that perhaps is what we saw yesterday. So, well, it may appear unhinged
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It's possible, again, that Trump knew exactly what he was doing. And he's now sown seeds of malinformation as opposed to misinformation that the journalist, through no fault of his own, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, has become an accomplice to
7:40
Yeah, well, they're setting up parallel structures. So we've now seen the White House Press Secretary, Caroline Levitt, on two occasions, offer briefings only to supportive representatives of pliant propaganda outlets, polemicists, including, by the way, Winston Marshall, the son of Paul Marshall, the former banjo player with Mumford and Sons, who got to ask a question of Caroline Levitt about the banjo
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about whether there are circumstances under which the United States may take dramatic steps to, as he put it
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protect people in the UK, who his freedom of speech, he argues, is being threatened by the Keir Starmer government
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And the problem in all of this is that it's not just a challenge for journalists and the media
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It's a challenge for our own prime minister. It's a challenge for Donald Trump's international interlocutors
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how do you actually think you can deal with someone who is engaging in disinformation
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making things up out of whole cloth that impact policy directly? How can you deal with that person in any kind of reliable, trusted fashion
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It's going to be enormously complicated. And it makes Ed Davies' question in the House of Commons just half an hour or so ago all the more pertinent
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Simon Marks bringing it in bang on time. Thank you
