I had just written yesterday in Trump wipes out 7 agencies at once about how Trump was shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent of Voice of America, and thinking that it had to be a mistake. It wasn't.
This morning, I found an article up on Whitehouse.gov called "The Voice of Radical America." Radical. It can't be. No one in their right mind…
"President Donald J Trump's executive order on Friday will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda."
Trump uses one former employee as justification for the order.
"Dan Robinson, a 34 year veteran of Voice of America, and it's former White House correspondent, wrote last year: 'I have monitored the agency's bureaucracy along with many of its reporters and concluded that it has essentially become a hubris filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media. It has sought to avoid accountability for violations of journalistic standards and mismanagement."
You know it's going downhill as soon as he says "bureaucracy." He left them in 2014. In the meantime, he seems to have become immersed in the MAGA culture, along with too many people. You would almost think from his opening bio that he was expressing competent criticism. Donald Trump has dug the guy out of the ether to be an expert. He's not.
Here's Trump's list of crimes:
"Voice of America's management told staff not to call Hamas and it's members terrorists, "except when quoting statements."
The source of this is a National Review article after the October 7th attacks. Apparently the Voice of America was simply enforcing journalistic rules. You don't call somebody a murderer directly, they're an alleged murderer. Perhaps they may have made a mistake in not loosening restrictions in this case.
Then, Trump quotes an article from 2019 in the Daily Caller. Part of their employees crimes, of course, was calling Trump a liar. Pointing out ugly things about Trump's behavior. There is an admonition in the Voice of America social media policy to be impartial. That probably just really applies to the Voice of America's accounts. You can't tell people what they can do on their own. That's freedom of speech. If them speaking out about Trump's evil is a crime, then what about all the posts that Trump and his sycophants do. VOA employees' posts are accused of being slanted and complete lies in all cases. Unfortunately for Trump, everything I read them saying about him was true. You can read for yourself and judge.
Next quoted was an article by Representative Scott Perry. It's just accusations that "Persian" employees had suppressed negative stories about Iran. Consider the source.
A correctly asked question is an article titled: "What Is 'White Privilege' and Whom Does It Help?" Because it covers that sensitive topic that examines reality, Trump automatically thinks it's false. It's a very erudite and comprehensive analysis. But it must be a DEI plot the needs to be suppressed.
The source of the next grievance is a Breitbart article that covers a ridiculous lawsuit against VOA for Islamic, and Persian bias in their reporting by the American Accountability Foundation, whose main webpage Project Sovereignty 2025. They were on the Advisory Board for Project 2025. They get dark money, have done opposition research for Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, and basically tried to get in the way of anything that Joe Biden tried to do. Their lawsuit never went anywhere along with all the other ones they tried. Absolutely worthless support information for Trump's decision.
"In October, 2020, Voice of America wrote that the 'allegations that Russia played a role in perpetuating the scandal to benefit Trump could undermine the emails credibility,' downplaying the validity of Hunter Biden's laptop story."
Here's the article. VOA asked the questions that everybody else was asking. There was nothing unique to their story at all. The information was highly suspect considering the source. Anything they said about Hunter Biden's laptop as being automatically true, is not true. But, because it's Hunter Biden's laptop it must be.
Trump's next VOA crime is a Fox News article that accuses the VOA Urdu speaking service of airing a video that was favorable to Biden. Horrors! What a travesty of justice. If Fox says it, it must be true. Here's the silly Fox News article.
A Washington Free Beacon article claims VOA fired reporters for airing a interview with a dissident Chinese billionaire. In fact, they were given instructions ahead of time on how to handle the news stories, and ignored what they were told to do completely. There were other completely spurious and unsubstantiated claims in the article. It's another one of those "consider the source" cases.
"In 2019, Voice of America ran a segment about transgender migrants seeking asylum in the United States." So what? It was covering a story. Now stories about trans aren't even allowed to be covered. Even when they happened 6 years ago, it's a crime. Here's the clip, if you want to watch it.
Trump doesn't even try to turn VOA into his propaganda outlet. He puts poor Kari Lake out of a job before she even gets to have fun.
These past "crimes" against humanity are vapid and insanely minute in nature. Trump's hatred is all about VOA's unbiased coverage of him. He just goes bonkers these days when somebody calls him a liar, cheat, thief, serial abuser, felon, and danger to the United States and the world. I'm not saying VOA led stories with those lead lines, but who could do any impartial report on Trump and not come to those conclusions? Alternative facts or fake news, they're not.
Trump had to research six years in the past to come up with "dirt." on Voice of America. Grok must not be working so well. Even artificial intelligence working on all the news of the world, couldn't find anything but these silly excuses to fit already made conclusions.
On X in February, Musk posted: "Nobody listens to them anymore. It's just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money."
On Saturday, the current director of VOA, Michael Abramowitz, said that he'd been placed on leave along with the staff of 1300 VOA employees.
Some of the local language radio stations have stopped producing news and are playing music to fill the time.
The news division is basically shut down with editors told to stop working.
Advocates for the Voice of America say that shutting it down is ceding the airwaves to China and other world powers, harming the interests of the United States abroad. The same has been claimed for USAID. These are the two most front facing organizations the government has to create goodwill around the world for the United States, and Donald Trump just doesn't care.
