On Friday's episode of In The Arena with Kasie Hunt, they were discussing Trump's executive order to defund NPR and PBS alongside his questioning of federal funding for Harvard with its serious antisemitism problem. They couldn't actually delve into the evidence of Harvard hating Jews or the incessant liberal bias of "public" broadcasting.
New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who spent 17 years at NPR (as Lourdes, not Lulu) had a not-so-surprising theory about Trump -- he just hates "independence," anything that threatens his power. They all cast liberal bias as "independence."
This implication that Trump as an autocrat is a little bit amusing, because Lulu is not always anti-autocrat. We like to recall in her NPR days, she gushed that being kissed by one of Fidel Castro's two brothers in Cuba was like being "getting the blessing of the Holy Trinity." But Trump is not a man of the Left.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think there's a bigger theory of the case here, which isn't about Harvard or PBS or NPR or any of the other myriad places that he has directed his ire. The theory of the case is this he does not like independence. Anything that takes away from his center of power, he is trying to challenge and destroy, and that is Harvard. That is PBS and NPR, and that is other institutions as well.
And this you see over and over and over with him, that is the true threat. I'm not denying that there is a crisis of confidence in institutions writ large in this country, all of them left and right center. But that's not really what he's up to. He's not trying to redress that. He's not trying to say, hey, Harvard, be more open to the people.
He's actually threatening their very independence. He's taking away money from them for the things that they do, such as research. And PBS and NPR -- I mean, when you ask about whether or not this is legal, I mean, the money is given through the Congress. I mean, this is the way this is supposed to work. We've seen President Trump over and over and over again, write these decrees as if they're sort of royal decrees.
She added Trump should pass a law through Congress, because "just signing something at a document doesn't make it so."
This show displayed the current tendency in Anti-Trump World that you can't grant that anything he says can be treated as Reality. In this case, it extended to suggesting Harvard isn't elite. Kasie Hunt got out a ten-foot-pole, "with what many in the MAGA community view as elite institutions."
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik echoed this weird spin: "It, as you say, certainly the president's supporters would argue that these are elite institutions which are somehow aimed at against them, functioning against them."
These are supposed to be smart people, but they can't figure out that Harvard is elite and has a serious liberal and anti-Trump bias? "Um, Kasie, the president's supporters would argue that the the Democrats are functioning against them."
Folkenflik also suggested Trump hates accountability:
What -- certainly, you could also say is that these are institutions that serve as outside sources of information, and oftentimes outside sources of accountability checks on official power by providing information that the public can absorb and process and figure out how they feel about the people acting in their name. In Washington, in the White House, whether Democrat or Republican. And universities, think tanks, research institutes, and, yes, media outlets serve that function.
None of these people can acknowledge that PBS and NPR are not "sources of accountability" for Democrats, from Biden's mental decline to the Biden family influence-peddling business. The "accountability" is reserved for Republicans and conservatives. NPR has zero Republicans on staff, which they have in common with Harvard.
