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Journalist Markham Hislop interviews leading energy experts from around the world about the energy transition and climate change.
Welcome to the 03/29/2025 episode of the energy show. The working title for today's show is is Trump a fascist? Now I'm gonna be talking to Llewellyn King. He is the host of the White House Chronicles on US public broadcaster NPR, and he's been a journalist for seventy years. He wrote a great column, today about this issue or an angle on this issue.
Speaker 1:Llewelyn, good to see you, man. Always good to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you. Welcome.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk about this episode will be in two parts. of all, we're gonna talk about the the definition of fascism. Is Trump a fascist? Not everybody agrees on this point, and then we're gonna discuss your column. And I sent you a column, a substack, actually, from Canadian author Dan Gardner, who's written about this.
Speaker 1:It was very good. And, I'll put a link, for everybody who wants to read it. I'll put a link in the description so you can you can take a look at it. Because he talked about the very how you know, what do experts, what do historians and political scientists think about this issue? What is fascism?
Speaker 1:Is Donald Trump a fascist? And he came down solidly on the conclusion that Trump is, in fact, a fascist. You grew up in you know, you've you spent a lot of time in Europe. What's your take on that issue?
Speaker 2:I I think it's a a sort of silly argument, actually. He's not a classic fascist. He's not a national socialist. He he is a an egomaniac. But what he does do is he uses all the tools, the same tools that the fascists use, go after the institutions, the media, and the entire apparatus of opinion formation.
Speaker 2:So you can say he's a fascist in the sense that all authoritarians use the same tools. They run parallel worlds in which ordinary people are unaffected. You know, critical issues are hugely changed. He uses also several fascist tools, several things that we associate with the German fascist, Hitler, and that is find an enemy. Attack that enemy with Hitler, with the communists and the Jews, with Trump, its immigrants, and, other various forces in the society, the forces of liberalism generally that he castigates and goes after.
Speaker 2:But remember, his approach to governance and to thinking is very incoherent. There isn't a solid, straightforward, put your finger on it, Trump point of view or Trump philosophy. What he does have in the background around him are some people who might be described as fascist who are very good at dragging him into positions that he would never have got to on his own.
Speaker 1:Right. And then we've said think about Elon Musk in in that in that sense.
Speaker 2:And it needs Elon Musk is excuse me. Sorry, Malcolm. I I think Elon Musk is more tool than planner. The planners are people like Stephen Miller in the White House. They they're people like that, who, really do have an agenda, and I've had it for a long time.
Speaker 2:And those are the people who, are driving the Trump movement. Musk is an enormously gifted, rather bizarre human being, probably on the spectrum, almost certainly on the spectrum. He has all the characteristics. Had a brother who was on the spectrum. I can recognize it, I think.
Speaker 2:Very gifted in some ways. He is responsible for bringing about, I think, the the the electric car revolution, solar power revolution. Certainly, he's done extraordinary things in space. But what he's doing now is, running wild with the encouragement of the president. I don't think he'll even go on much longer, but he is, laying siege to the institutions and the governance, the mechanisms of government in The United States.
Speaker 1:And the mechanisms and institutions of democracy, essentially. That's that's what they're
Speaker 2:they're after. I'm not sure they're after democracy. I think I think democracy is a casualty rather than the objective was not to destroy democracy, but it's a casualty. Whenever anyone is acting in an authoritarian way, democracy has to be a casualty, and it certainly is in the democracy is up for grabs at the moment. We are not operating as a democracy.
Speaker 1:Now one of the things that is of interest to Canadians because there's an old saying in Canada that whatever happens in The US five years later, it drifts across the border into Canada. And we're seeing already I wouldn't call them fascist or Trumpist, sort of Trump adjacent. We've we've seen the conservative party of Canada leader Pierre Poliev, who has many of these sort of maple, mega attributes or positions. We've seen debt Alberta premier Danielle Smith. I mean, just of two days ago, she was down being interviewed by Ben Shapiro, the the MAGA podcaster.
Speaker 1:So this we have a lot at stake here, in Canada as we watch you go through this. What what's the mood in The United States? Is there any resist any pushback against what Trump is doing?
Speaker 2:You have basically and I hate to say this. You have essentially educated people pushing back and people less well educated, and that's a terrible division to make, going along, who have essentially drunk the Kool Aid, who believe, in this strange, unachievable make America great again. They can't tell you when it was great. I think it was great in recent years when more people were more prosperous, employment was full, there was relative peace in the world, that it's probably very recently the last thirty years that America was great. They have some idealized idea of, maybe, the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Nobody will answer that. One of the difficulties we have with our parliamentary with our presidential rather than a parliamentary system is we don't like Canada or The United Kingdom have an opportunity to pin down the government. The closest we come is the press briefings in the White House, but that's an agent of the government, the press secretary, not the government itself. And the president, when he is interviewed, just doesn't answer or lies.
Speaker 2:He makes up things. The the great casualty of this presidency has been truth. It started in the last time he was president when the idea of alternative facts emerged. It has been compounded by his frequent use of anything he doesn't like his fake, his manufactured the press secretary, Caroline Levitt, actually accused The Wall Street Journal of being which is quite a stretch of being fake news, old fashioned fake news. Interest in The Wall Street Journal is controlled by Rupert Murdoch who also controls Fox, Fox, Schnapple, which, has been probably the single most important outlet in bringing Trump to power, and I might say in getting the Brits into Brexit.
Speaker 2:So Murdoch, historically, will have a lot to answer for.
Speaker 1:There's an example in Canada that I wanna talk about. It happened on March 18, so we're talking about eleven days ago. And, 14 oil and gas CEOs signed an open letter to the political leaders of Canada because we're in a national election. It started, earlier in this week. And what they here's what they asked for, Will.
Speaker 1:They said, they want pipelines to the coast so that, Alberta and other mostly Alberta can export its, oil, to international markets, and they want, LNG plants on the West and the East Coast. What they asked the the leaders for is the next prime minister of Canada to use all available emergency powers to trample Canadian rights to build this infrastructure. Now when they do that, what they're talking about is an act in Canada called the Emergency Act. Used to be called the War Measures Act. That'll give you an idea of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:And, essentially, for their own profit, just their own ability to expand their industry, they want to, do away with any, be able to trample on the the opposition to those, projects in wherever they find them, in in whatever province, provincial governments, it's Canadian. Here's my point. Billionaires, the wealthy of of United States appear to be allying themselves with Trump. We see the same thing in Canada. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:No. I don't think that's fair. I'm not conversing with a Canadian situation. I know the general idea when you can promote the thought that something is so urgent, so important. That's how the Alaska pipeline was built, by the way.
Speaker 2:It was preempted. All other legislation, it preempted, which means it didn't have the same reviews and wasn't as subject to litigation. But in The and that's a US use of that kind of preemptive force. I don't think I think the billionaires are now terrified of him. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:Scared of them. And with particularly, I'm thinking about people who find themselves in a very strange situation, like Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. Have I used to work there. I was an assistant editor there, so I follow it quite closely. It was a long time ago that I worked there, but nonetheless, I follow it closely.
Speaker 2:It's a very good newspaper, and it publishes a lot of criticism from but Bezos has tried to mollify Trump by issuing edicts. It won't do this, and some senior writers have resigned, and an editor has quit. But Bezos is, like many of the billionaires, caught between the stockholders, his fiduciary responsibility to his many companies and their shareholders, and and this political issue. The people around Trump now, I think, are the rich people around Trump, with a few exceptions, mostly wish he would go away if they see him as being more destructive. And they are terrified of tariffs.
Speaker 2:I mean, they can do simple math. They know what happened last time. Tariffs two two legislators introduced tariffs in the nineteen twenties called the Smoot Hawley Act, which set the stage and precipitated the Great Depression. Tariffs but somehow, the president, Donald Trump, has persuaded himself that tariffs are like free money. Somebody else sends you money in order to be able to do business with you.
Speaker 2:Of course, they're inflationary. They're paid by consumers. They're devastating for trade, and yet nobody seems prepared to or been able to get it through to Trump. And he is surrounded by some rather strange advisers who actually themselves believe, and they're not the billionaires. They're not conspicuous.
Speaker 2:They're people like the treasury secretary, Scott, isn't it? Howard Lutnick, particularly difficult man, ecommerce secretary. I'm looking at the list of them. Jameson Greer, the trade representative, Devin Hassett, the National Economic Council. These are people who basically either agree with Trump or will not stand up to him, and they're going around, particularly egregious as Russell White, the office of management and budget, a very critical role.
Speaker 2:He's the he's not he doesn't have the title of controller. That's a different responsibility in The US problem, but he is essentially the chief financial officer and manager of the country, and he is a rabid right winger, tariff hawk, a very dangerous man, a very bad person to have here. We know what the general intellectual input is. It's come through an outfit called the Heritage Foundation, which is Project twenty twenty five. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Project twenty twenty five, which is oddly a membership organization, But it started out as just slightly right of center. Now it's now it's way out there in a cramped space, the other side of Rupert Murdoch.
Speaker 1:I've read the part of the project twenty twenty five document, and it is a frightening thing. And the one of the not a lot of people understand this, but the Heritage Foundation has been issuing these kinds of advisories to presidents since since Reagan. They've been doing it since 1979. That's when the one came out, and they brag in the document about how various, Republican presidents have used their document and implemented a very high percentage of their recommendations as
Speaker 2:for this. Not unusual. Very interesting subject, and that is the role of think tanks in Washington. And Heritage is a think tank in a pressure group, but the think tanks often act as a government in exile, an alternative government. Heritage was not taken seriously until Trump.
Speaker 2:It was regarded as a bit flaky. CSIS and the American Enterprise Institute were the rock solid conservative supporting, I think, James provided a lot of the people who went to work in the government. Interestingly, critical jobs in the Trump administration, I mean, people he's seen on television. This is a you remember the movie being there with beta sellers? But there's a lot about this administration which is like that.
Speaker 2:It derives all of its values from television. Trump was himself apparently, I never watched the program, and he had this program called The Apprentice, which the the great crescendo every time was when he said, you're fired. Well, he he loved being on television. Fox has constantly played up to him. Rupert Murdoch is a very interesting character.
Speaker 2:You should go and talk to my friend Conrad Black. He'll tell you all about it. You have Richard Durant and talk to Conrad. He he'll tell you all about Rupert. But what Murdoch succeeded in doing in The United Kingdom was finding a strain that nobody knew existed of chauvinism in the working class and realized that the working class in Britain had gone from being, subservient, to being, assertive.
Speaker 2:Things had changed. They had a Ford Anglia parked outside, and they were taking their holidays in Spain. They weren't going to the Butlands Holiday Camp on the train. Things had changed, and Murdoch caught on to this. And it worked marvelously He came to The United States, and it didn't work.
Speaker 2:I I had dinner with his daughter, Elizabeth, once, and she said, you know, he knew it didn't work. American newspapers don't play the same role that his newspapers in England, particularly the tabloid, The Sun. But when he did apply the same formula to cable television, it was a house on fire. It worked fabulously. Those who felt disenfranchised, those who felt that there were elites that controlled everything, and we're not always wrong, by the way.
Speaker 2:Those had felt that there were other parts of our society given preference by government over them. Essentially, the working class white, society, who are called most of the time middle class, but are in fact workers, wage waged workers. And they followed Trump, through Fox. He watched Fox, and even the defense secretary is somebody you saw on television.
Speaker 1:Let's let's talk about your column, which is, political fears, docs, law, education, journalism, and migration. And an alter an a title I considered for today's show is that then Trump came for the journalists. And, one of the points that, Dan Gardner in this, substack I referred to earlier says, to the fascist, truth is contingent. What is good for the fascist is true. What is not is not true.
Speaker 1:Does that remind you of anybody? He says the Okay.
Speaker 2:That's the government now in place in The US.
Speaker 1:And he says, make it make standing and stating a truth regardless of political expedience an antifascist act. Truth equals antifascism now, apparently.
Speaker 2:Problem is it's very hard to establish truth, particularly in the age of the Internet and now of artificial intelligence. I've done a lot of reporting on artificial intelligence. And for all of us under any political system, establishing veracity is going to be very difficult. Indeed, a friend of mine made a little two minute tape of me saying things I have never said, holding positions I do not have, and it's convincing. Well, in that world, truth is already in trouble.
Speaker 2:At a meeting of the association European journalists in in Europe in in Lithuania a few years ago, other delegates approached me and said, what do we do with Russian disinformation? We don't know what's true. We publish what we get. Even when we use our own eyes, we go and see a demonstration. We see skinheads, then we find they were flown in from Russia, and this was a total phony.
Speaker 2:But when you start using artificial intelligence on the Internet, it's very dangerous. But it also establishes a disbelieving society in which it is easier to say a fact is a lie or it's not right and to substitute that fact. Remember, we all tend to believe what we want to. So we hear something that supports our belief system. We and it's presented as a fact.
Speaker 2:I get huge correspondence about, the the raping and the murdering the immigrants are doing. There's no evidence, and none of it's true. Or how other countries, especially Canada, are ripping off The United States. Well, every country I'm in, they've always feared American companies because they had such smart lawyers and tough negotiators. Nobody is ripped off in these business deals.
Speaker 2:But this idea is now abroad. It is a lie. It is a big lie, and it's gained a lot of following.
Speaker 1:A quote from your column. Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms and 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. How how bad is it, in The United States right now, in terms of people being afraid to express themselves?
Speaker 2:Theories where you are is very bad in the legal department, where if you defended, somebody who opposed Trump, you are investigated, which means you're persecuted, and you lose government contracts. You lose your security claim. Many ways that we never thought of that lawyers can be punished, and they will not be able to earn their livings. The big law firms are terrified because they all have government work. Much of it involves security clearances, and Trump is shaking them down.
Speaker 2:Scared narcissist just agreed to do volunteer work worth a $100,000,000. Another one, well, ponied up $40,000,000. This is preposterous. This is absurd. This is, as we used to say, un American.
Speaker 2:And in the media, Trump has been constantly denigrating, undermining, and now he has a press secretary, a very appealing 27 year old who doesn't understand the role of the job and who parents very effectively what he says. She has pushed aside the White House Correspondents Association, which had a very small role, but it decided who was in the pool, the people closest to covering their president, usually dependent on the size of their audience, hence, the Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, etcetera, that, the Associated Press could no longer be part of the pool because, and this is beyond belief, they will not refer to the Gulf Of Mexico as the Gulf Of America, for neither were most Americans. The Gulf Of Mexico is just fine. But and they don't like the AP style book, which is followed. Well, this is very fundamental attack in a very clever way on journalism.
Speaker 2:This is an insidious attack. It's not a frontal attack. It's not grabbing journalists and putting them in jail. It's grabbing the sources of information and inserting themselves between that and the writer.
Speaker 1:One of the issues that I that we've grappled with as an independent media is because we have we get access to experts like yourself, all over the world. But when when there are governments like, Alberta, for example, they will grant, grant access to really, disreputable ultra right wing organizations like the Rebel News and and the Western Standard and refuse interviews with us because they know they're gonna get hard hard questions. Access to those in power is one of the tools that that people like Trump use. Correct?
Speaker 2:But it's a tool that all politicians use. You know, this is not unknown. I've been doing this work for nearly seventy years. But with Trump, they're our favorites and they're our aunties. The list is open, well known, and, he certainly uses it.
Speaker 2:Occasionally, he kind of breaks down because he so loves being on television that he will give a television interview, and then he doesn't even pretend to answer the questions. But the accessibility I was trying to talk to somebody in the Department of Energy about a program I do, which is a virtual press conference. It's it's not writing. And, apparently, every agency of the government now has to clear what it says and who says it with the White House, which means that nobody can get anything because the White House doesn't have the staff to do that, and nobody has the confidence to say yes. Everybody is in some terror.
Speaker 2:Trump has various ways of terrorizing people, one of which is simply to abuse them. They all lose out of that dreadful, you know, this abuse, which has been very effective in keeping pusillanimous Republican congressmen from doing their jobs. The other way is, of course, the time honored access, which is clearly being used inside the White House now with the White House press call. But he doesn't care about the media anymore because there has been a dramatic change that we in the media do not know how to deal with and are only grasping, and that is that technology has meant that we can be bypassed. And the two agencies for bypassing us are and are Truth Truth Social and Trum's own outlet and X, which was, as you know, changed its name, but Musk bought it.
Speaker 2:Using these two billboards, they bypass media, but worse than that, we, in the media, have to go to those billboards to see what they said. Therefore, they control the message ahead of us. Rather, there was a time when the front page of major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, maybe the Los Angeles Times, they show in one of the Chicago papers, was an agenda for this country. It's what congress acted on, what the government reacted to. Now it is these two, true social and x, carry the agenda for the country, and the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, et al, have to report what was on there.
Speaker 2:So we are now in a subservient position. We are emphasizing what they said there rather than setting the agenda with our own news judgment. The action you cannot ignore what the president says. It just can't. You can't be a newspaper man that doesn't cover the news.
Speaker 2:But this is an entirely new dimension in journalism and in governance.
Speaker 1:Now you've you've been in journalism seventy years. I I'm a I'm a neophyte compared to thirty five years ago I started as a beat reporter. But what I remember is that I would and we would go to, you know, press scrums and and things with with the premier of Saskatchewan or some corporate leader. And when you asked a question, it was expected, and the politician or corp you know, the CEO, agreed that they would provide the best, most they would they would do their best to answer the question honestly, more or less, right, within they were politicians or or CEOs. There is no there messaging now is either managed, particularly in the corporate side, or people just lie, just like flat out lie.
Speaker 1:And they give you narratives. They give you, claims that have no basis in fact or or evidence or data, and that is a huge problem. I to be honest with you, I would rather interview an expert about an announcement than the person who actually made the announcement because I know I'm gonna be lied to.
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, I've said for many years, we should actually have the speech writers talk to us because they wrote the speech. I've never found that corporations were necessarily very good at answering questions. That varies a lot with the individual running the corporation, their sense of of of duty to the public, their sense of responsibility, politicians. Usually, when put on the spot, we'll try to answer because if you've got 20 reporters there in a press conference and they dodge it, the story becomes how they dodged it, which is why press conferences are, in many ways, much more effective, than, one on one interviews. But they're only effective when they're not managed if the reporters are preselected and already a certain amount of they know what sort of question will come.
Speaker 2:But when you got the forest at hand, mister president or mister you know, prime minister prime minister, you get a chance of an honest question and getting an honest answer. The very chaos of an unscheduled press conference is part of its truth and why it works. The moment you allow preselection, and then you've got management. And I I've seen it managed, and I Bill Quentin, who I had a lot of time for minor relationship with, but I saw the managing a press conference by getting in this was in Hong Kong. We'd all just come out of China, and Lewinsky scandal was going, and they didn't want a lot of so they got the Irish reporter to ask the best friend.
Speaker 2:This management goes on. But the less management, the closer to the truth, and the more likely some unanticipated truth will be revealed. As you and I both know when you're interviewing someone, it's not the hard what have you got to hide, sir, but it's the casual. Is there anything else you should tell me?
Speaker 1:On that note, I wanna wrap up our interview today, Luella, with a comment that you made, in your column where you said fear of the state has entered the political process. And, yes, I know we can go back and we can say with the examples of other presidents, other political leaders who have used the state to intimidate journalists, intimidate yes. That's the the give and take, the warp and woof of the the political process, but this is different. This is substantively different. Please explain how how it's substantively different.
Speaker 2:Manny, it's gone beyond, say, Clinton's enemies list or the way that LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would manage by withholding favors or granting favors. He did it to congress. He did it to reporters. With the reporters, it was withholding information or giving away a lot of information, creating an indebtedness and a relationship. This is a this is Washington coverage.
Speaker 2:This is how it goes. What we see now is something hugely different. The attack on the lawyers is extraordinary. The attack on the press is complete in a way it never has been. And if you go to the universities, which we have not mentioned, this administration is trying to tell the universities what can be said at a university and what can be taught.
Speaker 2:That is a huge departure. That is a massive change and a terribly bad one, evil in fact. And finally, we have people being arrested in the street by men in black wearing masks and expelled from the country without due process, without adequate charges, without explanations, and often they are innocent people, and some have been sent to a prison in El Salvador when they're supposed to be from other countries. They have no relationship to the country to which they've been deported. But when you can have men in black with face masks grabbing people in the street and there is no appellate procedure whatsoever, you have, your word, fascism.
Speaker 1:Indeed. And I might I have to point out at this point. One of the reasons why Canadian travel down to The US is down so much is because there have been several stories, at least in the national media, about Canadians who have been detained by ICE or by by the the border guards, then shipped into private prisons and have been detained for several weeks, shipped around The US to different private prisons before and they only released because there was media, attention paid to their cases. Any Canadian who, won't, you know, who could be seized like we're all we're all terrified of it. Nobody I will not go anywhere near the border for that reason alone, never mind other reasons.
Speaker 1:And so it's it's that has crept into the Canadian consciousness.
Speaker 2:Well, it's very serious. I don't think it's fully crept into the American one. Recently, there was a a student arrest, and there's a lot of, tape of them being grabbed. When the government, the state can grab you and expel you or imprison you without charges, without trial, without habeas corpus, you are in a very grave and terrible place as a society, and fear is a consequence. And fear may be the the reason for it.
Speaker 2:When governments can increase the fear in the population, they can manipulate the population. I was in Cuba in the hunch of the block information system where everybody was informing on everyone. It's essentially over now. They're tired of it. I've been to Cuba recently.
Speaker 2:It's very poor. The government is not working well, but it's not as oppressive people criticize it, at least informally, not formally. When when you get a terrified population, it is I mean, it's it's going to do whatever the government asks it to do. The law firms have been terrified. Fear has entered the marble hallways of the great law firms of America, which are fairly unique to America in their size, their wealth, their operation, their ability to influence both politics and commerce, but also to represent any and all in courts of law.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be punished because of whom you represented. That is a fundamental underlie undermining of all concepts of advocacy going back to the earliest advocates. We're a moment which is a little bit like we need to get Trump on the side the way the barons got, King John on the side and said, no more. Stop it. You play the Magna Carta, of course.
Speaker 1:Yes. Of course. century. Well, Llewellyn, I'll I'll close it our interview like this way. Trump may not, call himself a fascist.
Speaker 1:He may not deliberately may not use that word, but, it's not about what he says. It's about what he does. And it's what his government does. And so I'm prepared to call him a fascist, and I think that I agree with Dan Gardner in that regard. And so I will just give you the final word.
Speaker 1:Is Trump a fascist or not?
Speaker 2:I think that he is a very confused, despotic man. And having said all this on your program, I shall look around to see men in black are not following me.
Speaker 1:I hope they don't. Thank you very much for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cheers.
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