Reality or reality TV?

KCRW's Left, Right & Center

KCRW

352865, News

4.2 • 4.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donald Trump’s return to office has inspired constant breaking news headlines. This week: The administration faces scrutiny after the Elon Musk-led DOGE team instructed all federal workers to justify their employment via email. Should government workers take the threats seriously?

Differentiating what’s worth worrying about might be difficult when words like “oligarchy” and “autocracy” get thrown around. Trump may be a polarizing figure, but is he definitionally an oligarch? KCRW examines how messaging affects the national conversation about the presidency.

Later, the Left, Right, and Center panel takes a listener question about the merits of American bicameral politics over parliamentary systems. Does our current government enable this kind of disconnect between executives and the electorate? Could a parliamentary shift fix our problems?

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, it's time for left, right, and center, everybody.
0:03.9	I am David Green with Sarah Isger on the right and Moa Lathie on the left.
0:08.7	We appreciate you being here.
0:11.1	So many things I want to talk about today.
0:14.3	First, Sarah Mo, did you catch the video that Donald Trump posted on his social media?
0:21.4	It's like a glitzy AI futuristic video of Gaza that has a big statue of Trump in gold in a main plaza.
0:34.6	It also looks like an Atlantic City style casino called Trump Gaza.
0:38.8	Trump and Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu shirtless on the beach, AI versions.
0:44.8	I don't think they would have filmed that together, but who knows with Donald Trump?
0:49.1	And then he's dancing in the street.
0:51.7	I mean, it's really disturbing.
0:55.0	And he's got a lot of criticism for it.
0:56.8	I mean, you use the word disturbing.
0:59.0	I just, I used the word lame.
1:01.9	It was just dumb.
1:04.5	Like, I don't know what it was meant to convey other than to get people like us talking about it. He loves to get under our skin.
1:13.6	He loves to troll the world, right? Yeah. But like it's like my son's middle school buddies got together
1:24.0	and decided they wanted to put together a dumb video that they would sit around and laugh
1:31.0	about and everyone else would look at and just say, well, that's just dumb. That's what he did. It was a middle
1:36.6	school dumb thing. Yeah. I guess that's the point that I wanted to make and bringing that up is that
1:43.5	that's what's happening.
1:44.7	Like that is this, a lot of what we're seeing in this presidency so far. I mean, to me it feels like
	...

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