(JOURNALISTIC) MADNESS: USAID was trying to topple Trump?

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Can that really be what he said? To our ear, Gail Collins is flirting with (conceptual) danger in this week's Conversation with Bret Stephens.

To our ear, Collins is skating out onto very thin ice. By the established rules of the game, she's not supposed to skate there.

Briefly, let's set the scene! As the center-left Collins begins her dangerous skate, the center-right Stephens has already offered these thoughts about where Trump seems to be going:

Trump Is On the Move

[...]

Stephens: He scares me. There are days when I wake up and think: If this goes on like this for four years, or even four months, we’re going to be living in an unrecognizable republic—one in which lickspittle Republican legislators and cabinet members rubber-stamp every crazy Trump idea, federal court decisions are simply ignored by the executive branch, Elon Musk creates a Department of Personal Efficiency (DOPE) that tracks and scores your every move and a booming economy keeps a majority of voters indifferent to the collapse of civic and constitutional norms. We saw that model play out in the early years of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule in Turkey.

Oof! As the colloquy continued, Stephens offered some nuance. Eventually, Collins laced up her skates:

Bret: The federal government isn’t some tech start-up where you move fast and break things.

Gail: You know I never argue foreign policy, Bret, but when Trump announced that he thought the United States should take over Gaza and “own it,” that struck me less as an issue of international affairs than another deeply scary sign that our president is … just nuts. [Collins' punctuation]

At this site, sirens started to blare. 

To our ear, Collins was tiptoeing toward a spot on the ice where she knows she mustn't go. With all deliberate tentativeness, she seemed to be wondering if the commander could possibly be clinically disordered—if he might be "nuts" in a way which isn't simply colloquial.

That's how it almost sounded to us. Also, it sounded like Collins knew that she was skating onto a dangerous part of the lake—that she knew she had to carefully couch her words.

Is something "wrong" with Donald J. Trump? No really—could something be wrong with this person?

As we noted all last week, we sometimes speak of mental illness—of "mental disorder"—in colloquial, metaphorical ways. Then too, there are the clinical uses of such terms—and the rules of this game are quite clear:

Our journalists are allowed to speak of literal "mental illness" when discussing types of street crime. By long tradition, they are not allowed to speak in such ways when discussing political figures.

This rule has been in place since (at least) the 1960s. To our ear, Collins was skating toward a place where the ice starts to get rather thin.

This brings us to the astonishing case of a strangely disordered "cable news" star. Twice nightly, on a pair of heavily watched "cable news" shows, he serves as a messaging agent for the corporate entity known as the Fox News Channel.

He's sixty years old—but he's stunningly juvenile, and he's stupendously scripted. In fairness to him, it should also be said that he's extremely well paid.

Is something "wrong" with this person? We speak, of course, of the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld, star of the nightly, primetime TV show, Gutfeld! and co-host of The Five. For today, we'll be ignoring the astonishing coarseness of his nightly presentations. Instead, let's consider the journalistic madness in which he engaged last week.

We return to last Friday night's messaging program. More specifically, we return to his messaging that night about USAID. 

Gutfeld started out as a bit of a NeverTrumper. As of today, he performs as Donald J. Trump's most long-winded and fervent supporter. 

Was Suzanne Scott forced to give him the word at one point? We hope to return to that question this week. For today, we want to show you the full extent of the "monologue" with which he opened last Friday night's Gutfeld! program.

Yes, he actually said the things you see transcribed below! We include the opening part of the monologue—the part of the presentation we included in yesterday's report.

We showed you part of what he said. Below, you see the full transcript:

GUTFELD (2/7/25): All right! To the monologue!

So the Trump administration laid off nearly all of the USAID agency staff, reducing the number from 10,000 worldwide to just under 300.

I know!

[SCATTERED APPLAUSE]

You're welcome!

But oddly, the USAID beneficiaries abroad don't seem to be the ones complaining. The foreign heads of state are so quiet. And yet it's the NGOs crying over the fact that their yearslong scams might be toast. 

And all of this is happening because DOGE has exposed a pile of programs funded by USAID to foster gender and trans propaganda in foreign countries—countries where such things don't seem to benefit stability. Because nothing will bring a Muslim country together like drag queens reading the Koran to kids.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

But that's the point. You have to destroy the world to build a new one where men can watch girls pee in locker rooms. 

Now, I've said before that the racial and gender conflict incited in America was designed to keep a unified population from focusing on the bigger problems, like crime, immigration, economy and, of course, corruption. But it wasn't to overthrow a government. It was designed to preserve the government—building a moat around its power. 

And so as we learn that USAID was creating instability abroad, we see these same dirty tricks coming home. Because once you find yourself with a populist president who wasn't the elite choice, instability must be created artificially. Which means introducing the endless combustion of identity politics.

Elevate one's identity among others and you create conflict among groups, and there goes populist unity. People turn on themselves. What seemed to be an exported strategy to handicapped third world nations returned to where it started, like a sexually confused boomerang.

So imagine if we looked at America as a foreign country when Trump won. USAID did! You had a populist president, not an establishment puppet. What followed? Organized and immediate protests—race gender, climate, the three horsemen of funded, organized dissent. 

It was a color revolution, funded by people who pay taxes. Suddenly, you had trained agitators in the street with fresh signs and robust crowds and fueling the media that pushes incendiary hoaxes.

Add to that a crusade against so-called misinformation to empower censorship. Sound familiar? Sounds like everything USAID did  in other countries.

Now maybe we didn't mind USAID before. Sure, they toppled governments overseas, but that wouldn't happen here. Now, by shining a light on what they and our government is doing, we find that they did try to destroy a populist movement for being a challenge to their power, with identity politics as a weapon. It was divide and conquer.

No wonder the left is freaking out. They weren't just exporting chaos to the world. They were growing it here and forcing us to smoke it. 

Yes, the fellow actually said those things--and the quartet of stooges gathered around him rushed to agree with every word he had said. To watch the fellow make those remarks, you can just click here.

Is something "wrong" with this man-—with a 60-year-old man who mocks 80-year-old women, every single night of the week, for being too fat, or for being sexually unattractive, or for having used too much Botox down through the many years?

(Who asked, at least three separate times, if Hunter Biden had started "banging" or [BLEEP]ing" first lady Jill Biden yet? And yes, he actually did that, on at least three separate programs.)

Is something wrong this undisguised imitation of (journalistic) life? For today, let's get clear on what this corporate messaging agent actually seems to have said on last Friday night's program.

Were we simply hearing things, or did this nutcase actually say it? Did he actually say these things about the work of USAID?

Things this nutcase seems to have said:
USAID has been "toppling governments overseas." (No specific example was cited.) 

Here at home, USAID also tried to destroy the MAGA movement. ("Did try to destroy a populist movement for being a challenge to their power.")

Inevitably, USAID had been doing these things "to build a new [world] where men can watch girls pee in locker rooms." 

Did this nutcase corporate messaging agent actually say those things? Yes, we know—it does seem hard to believe!

But you can watch the videotape yourself. To our ear, it's hard to deny that those are the actual things this corporate nutcase seems to have said, as a quartet of corporate Stepfords awaited their chance to agree.

Full disclosure! We've edited out a few of the coarser remarks with which he littered his manifesto. Time permitting, we'll transcribe those edited remarks before the week is done.

For today, we simply wanted you to see what this fellow actually said. You may assume that we've invented those transcribed remarks. For that reason, we again provide the link by which you can watch him making his presentation.

If you choose to click that link and watch, you'll be watching an "imitation of life." You'll be seeing an imitation of journalism, of human discourse itself.  And when the four Stepfords start praising this nutcase for his torrent of strange remarks, you'll weep about the endless potential within our species for disordered if well-paid behavior.

Is something "wrong" with this messaging agent? This week, we're staying within the colloquial realm. We aren't attempting to ask about the possibility of clinical disorder.

That said, is something wrong with this angry, coarse person? Colloquially, we'd say the answer is yes. As the week proceeds, we'll show you the "sources" for this fellow's astounding remarks—and we'll being you to your knees as we transcribe the remarks which followed as the four Stepfords joined in.

This sort of thing transpires around the clock on the Fox News Channel. As it does, the major stars of our own Blue America agree to avert their gaze.

Rachel Maddow won't talk about this. The New York Times won't report this behavior. The children at Mediaite somehow manage to look away, even as they record the nightly fights on CNN's 10 p.m. program. 

This too is a type of mental disorder. And no—a very large, major modern nation can't expect to survive this way.

To our ear, Collins is flirting with a clinical suggestion about the current commander. Concerning the Fox News Channel's messaging agent, we'll simply suggest that he's deeply engaged in journalistic madness.

Rather, he's engaged in a rather obvious form of pseudo-journalistic madness. It's met by total silence from our elites in Blue America as a "night assault" proceeds—an assault we've already lost.

USAID was trying to topple Trump! Let us quote from the glorious Hawthorne:

 “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment!”

Tomorrow: Stepfords, come on down!