a significant type of blowback including in red districts not to the idea of Donald Trump he won a narrow election so the idea was just over about one and a half points over half of the voting public said yes to that idea what we're seeing now is significant even if all the votes are in and we're in the governing era as I've told you and that is opposition to the reality the policies some of which had been hinted at some of which from Elon Musk are very different from what was campaigned on and we're seeing
it strong Broad and in red areas so what are those policies a lot of the recent say first month plus has focused from the federal government under the Trump Administration on a cabinet that many viewed as extreme and in some places inexperienced indiscriminate Mass layoffs that term is not an opinion or an observation it is what people like the outgoing FDA Chief nonpartisan experts concerned Republicans and others have said and the misuse of the possibly and the times definitely legitimate concerns in our government about waste Fraud and Abuse combine all that with some blunders and
mistakes which again not an outside opinion but even the Trump Administration has had to admit like when they've fired people and then rushed to try to rehire them the next day which amounts to the governing chaos of sorry or we messed up or how do we undo what we did yesterday and so the American public in ways that we're measuring tonight and this is our top story is hearing about this and although there is usually a honeymoon period and there is usually more kind of receptivity to the first 100 days that combined with a bunch
of executive orders that have gotten caught in the courts that have drawn attention to a sort of governing style that people think may not be delivering for them is igniting something real New Town Halls rounds of them over the weekend you may have heard about some of this Rachel mattow has reported on this you've seen some of the footage some of this is going viral online so depending on how you get your news or where you live you may have heard more or less about it but this is a real thing including in many red
districts where Republican lawmakers a month into this round two rebooted Trump now musk experiment are facing their constituents they're being challenged over the way these cuts are being carried out over some of the mistakes I mentioned and clearly by an unadvertised and now hugely influential role of one unelected billionaire control the budget not the president and you are doing us a disservice to set that down and not stand up for us the House of Representatives and the Senate are totally abdicating their responsibility when are you going to rest control as the Congress back from the
executive and stop hurting your constituents it hit overp [Applause] do your job do your job when will you stand up to them and say that is enough he's gotten rid of Birthright [Applause] citizenship illegal as Elon musk's young Tech AIDS and experts in that field seem to think that governing must be much simpler than what they do in a single Lane of a single technology company so they're walking into agencies in the federal government here's some footage courtesy of 60 Minutes on them just walking in making their announcements issuing press releases and trying to use
Tech and even sometimes online propaganda tools where you push out information you say it's great that you're disrupting and sometimes they'll admit some people in Tech and elsewhere well they'll be a little misleading just to get the point across to go viral and yet we don't have a ton of new information over this month of that actually finding the waste Fraud and Abuse certainly not more than the inspector's General that Trump fired and the other traditional men's means I should say the common tactic here though the common effort is under Elon Musk and I want
to remind you we've already seen how he dabbles in these issues whether it's sort of flying by the seat of his pants online when he's jumped into other controversies or in December when there was a bipartisan spending Bill and he sabotaged and remember he posted multiple falsehoods misstatements what appeared to be knowing purposeful lies about it I'm not going to repeat all the lies we' got some of the fact check headlines on that but it's relevant again tonight because you have to remember this is a pattern and if you have a pattern of misleading Behavior
it makes it look more intentional than if you made a mistake corrected it and tried not to do it again he bought Twitter renamed X to have influence on that platform he also used it to crack down on free speech and Views he disagrees with which is leg to do with a business but it was the opposite of what he claimed his purpose was he tries to get what he wants out of this type of process and looks at the other stuff along the way as just kind of part of the business negotiation a kind
of collateral damage now many people view this as gaming the system as not being on the level and again to be as Fair as possible there are plenty of folks who could say Okay Ari but isn't that politics and don't both sides do a certain amount of that and the answer is up to a point yes but those false claims I mentioned in December which I'm not going to repeat on this factual newscast and some of the recent efforts he has made to completely misstate what amount of cuts they're getting kind of gives away the
game it reminds you that they're not achieving in the first month at least the actual amount of cuts that they think would be good enough so they have to exaggerate inflate or lie now in court this wouldn't work right in court there's actually a mechanism for evidence the evidence has to be admitted so if you say to a judge I have made up numbers that aren't true about government cuts to prove this case about whether something's efficient the judge would say we're not admitting that and the jury would never hear it well the internet is
a long ways from that so these outright falsehoods are now part of our political sort of tech shaped reality and it's not just Elon musk's platform to be clear whatever you think of him and his Trump politics the idea that these types of platforms have found that moving beyond truth is profitable is sticky is clickbait is viral is something we have seen across the board Facebook famously announcing they were pulling back on fact Checkers after Trump's criticisms prua noting that when you take this approach you're pouring a type of accelerate on those false posts which
the Facebook company once policed in other words think about it like advertising if a very effective very kind of popular ad and online ads can be shared right they can be up down reposted if a very popular ad is false but all you're doing is selling the ad space then maybe you don't care now add to that a tech agenda where you're trying to make Trump happy or prove to him that you're on his side and you have the consequences we're living with today I showed you the real town halls real people people out in
the real world talking to their elected officials based on what they understand reality to be but a lot of people are getting part of their reality from these Tech platforms that are far from neutral and that have their own money and some of them their relationship with Trump way more important to them than the truth and remember 86% right almost n out of 10 Americans get their news now what they call news from their phone or tablet but who knows whether they're actually getting factual news at all these are platforms from these Tech billionaires increasingly
politicized now I've been careful to say this predates Trump these issues are broader than any one party and around the world when we criticized Facebook for example there were issues abroad that had nothing to do with strictly right-wing politics it just had to do with whether Facebook was being a responsible Steward of the countries that operated in or not so this is in some sense bigger than us in America bigger than what we saw so clearly visualized at Trump's inauguration let's I'll actually tell let's put it in full and you probably remember the photo you
probably watched some of it that day but I want to really look at this for a minute because this was years in the making but what you got these Tech billionaires with the better seats than the cabinet with the front row reflecting both Trump's demand that they show up but also their choice within this business this environment and political environment to show up and say this is the ruling Elite right now even as they claim to be disruptors and be against the elite and we've seen several including Zuckerberg and musk try to amplify their own
voices as if they weren't known and famous enough with media appearances where what they say now undercuts their past claims of just wanting to connect people or Empower or be a neutral platform because they have pushing their politics now there is also the view that this is just the oldest story in the book money greed self-interest they want Trump for financial reasons lower tax cuts the stock market less regulation all these things that traditional Republican administrations promise and we had some reporting that when the markets rallied in those first few weeks of the Trump Administration
it was another sign people pointed to saying on the right well look markets don't lie they clearly like Trump this will be good for everybody trickle down and for a few weeks the markets were up of course the performance of any large scale markets far from guaranteed and last week we actually saw by the end of the week on paper nearly all post inauguration stock market gains wiped out stocks falling hard to end this shorten trading week the week to dat numbers everybody's in the red I think we likely have a little bit more downside
here we just don't know what the tariffs are going to bring nobody should be surprised that consumer sentiment took a pretty dramatic dip last month all the this uh belief of this being the most Pro bus Administration that has existed in the post-war period uh it's starting to be questioned you can definitely say that the administration wants to be Pro business and wants to work at least with the business and Tech leaders who are willing to bow to Trump's agenda but that doesn't necessarily mean that what we're getting in this first month are the kind
of long-term Baseline levels of stability and credibility of a federal government in a complex world that gives the markets what they need to say nothing of the Tariff war and all the other complexities that we call on The Economist to explain and yet those Tech leaders are clearly eager for now to stay in Trump's orbit to Echo what he says he's doing to go on all these podcasts as I mentioned which is with all respect to journalism to the New York Times or the TV networks that we work with those podcasts I'm showing you on
the screen are how many tens of millions of people hear about things these days and what we're seeing is a very different approach than 10 years ago from these people and remember they have a lot more control they have the algorithm they can turn things up or down they can decide what is going to be popular or fact checked and then they themselves on top of all that power want to go out and do it themselves with their own voice while then lecturing people about Free Speech principles that quite frankly several of them have flatly
contradicted for
