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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Is Donald Trump weaponizing social media to enforce his desired policies, or are conservative social media influencers doing more to influence and enforce their policies on him now? Maybe this morning's news conference with 10 alleged Jeffrey Epstein victims, led by one Democrat and one very MAGA Republican in Congress is an example of that. Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the news organization Semafor, has a new column called No more ‘Yes, Minister’: How Trump and social media broke the bureaucracy. We'll talk about that now. Maybe some of Ben's other recent columns and whatever revelations might be coming about alleged abusers other than Epstein, but enabled by Epstein from this news conference.

So far, nothing like that has emerged from the reports that I'm seeing. As Ben Smith's bio page reminds us, he has previously been the media columnist for the New York Times, the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, a political reporter for Politico nationally and the Daily News in New York.

His new column on Semafor is called Washington View, which he says is designed to help readers understand the Trump administration as it seeks to remake the US Government and American society and reshape everything from private enterprise to global trade. Ben, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ben Smith: You left out longtime Brian Lehrer listener and fan. It is nice to be back on here. It's been a little while.

Brian Lehrer: Glad to hear. To what end does Trump want to break the bureaucracy? Is it really the independence of the bureaucracy, an authoritarian project to make sure every decision about scientific findings, or COVID vaccines, or interest rates, or jobs numbers, or court decisions, or news reporting Voice of America, other things that were previously supposed to have some insulation from politics, all are now directed to make him look right about everything or all powerful, so don't mess with him. Is that why Trump and social media are trying to break the bureaucracy, or is it more complicated than that?

Ben Smith: I don't think that's how they see it. I spent time talking to people in Washington about how they see what they're doing. I would say there are a few different strands. One is something that every president has felt, which is that there are these institutions that are opaque from the outside, and if you are Barack Obama, you've been elected to pull troops out of Afghanistan, and somehow the Pentagon keeps pulling the football away whenever you try to pull troops out of Afghanistan and they trick you into sending more troops into Afghanistan, which is basically what happened to Obama and then happened to Trump in the first term, who also promised to pull troops out of Afghanistan.

Again, the bureaucracy successfully foiled, like one of his main campaign promises and something he actually was really trying to do, as was Obama. There's always a frustration in the White House that these big agencies, the Pentagon number one, but also things like the FDA, the CDC, seem to be impossible to get your hands on the levers of power. That is one of the strands.

Another is that Trump believes that some of these people are out to get him, hate him, are not aligned with the project. I don't know what he believes. The people around him believe that this is the democratic thing to do, may also be authoritarian, but ultimately Trump was elected by a popular vote and the government should do what he says.

These are really anti-institutionalists is, I think, how they would see it, rather than anti-democratic. Then a third thing is that they believe, as somebody told one of my colleagues, that "expertise is fake". They genuinely do not believe, in many cases, in the value of what a lot of people consider or what I would consider expertise, from health care to diplomacy.

Brian Lehrer: The social media aspect of this, which is central to your article, Trump has used social media effectively since he first started running for president 10 years ago. Then there was the period after January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt, when Twitter, under its old ownership and other platforms, banned him under their disinformation policies.

Then, of course, he started his own platform, Truth Social. That's quite a journey. Do you see Trump using social media differently as president in his second term than he did in his first?

Ben Smith: I think in his first term he used social media primarily to program television, to drive the media conversation. He would tweet something and then it would go everywhere. That's how he was using it. Then we did run what, in retrospect was a natural experiment. Like if Trump is banned from social media, will he go away? Will he become less popular?

The answer was no, which does tell you something. I'm not sure what. Now he's really governing through and via social media. He's climbed astride the tiger and is riding the tiger of social media and is living in this very intense feedback loop with his supporters, which in a way is surrendering a certain amount of power to whatever the heck is happening on social media, to whatever influencer has the loudest voice, has the most attention, can get most directly in front of the president.

Brian Lehrer: Is this in a way democracy at work rather than, or in addition to maybe authoritarianism if Trump or anyone, maybe Republican senator and physician, Bill Cassidy, who's in the news today for refusing to call out RFK Jr. on breaking the medical science basis of the CDC.

The going critique is that Cassidy is afraid of his voters who will align with Trump and RFK over him, even though he does have the expertise, even though expertise is on the chopping block and knows better. If that's the case, can we see this as democracy at work, the will of the voting public as the most powerful political force and maybe that is democracy.

Ben Smith: I might not put it quite that way, but certainly, yes, Trump is in touch with the Demos, or with some of it. Again, Cassidy is afraid of the minority of Republican voters who vote in his primary. Quite a bit of what Trump's doing is quite unpopular. It's not like he's governing via the polls. He's governing via the loudest voices on social media.

Certainly it is pitting social media, which in some sense is a democratic medium, against institutions that are really deliberately set up to restrain unrestrained democracy. The Federal Reserve, for instance, the US Senate, things whose structure like appointments that have really long terms, the federal courts, are really set up to be a counterweight to exactly this kind of democracy. That's how Trump sees it.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "The breaking of the bureaucracy is to replace the state with the party. This is the key infrastructure of authoritarian regimes. It's how they control society." Listeners, anyone else want to weigh in with phone calls or texts for Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief at Semafor, on Trump and social media either way.

I say either way because now we're going to get to whether Frankenstein's monster, if you want to call it that, right wing influencers are coming for their creator. The larger questions for democracy and media, the Epstein news conference or other things related. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 call or text. I do want to ask you, Ben, is the fact that this Epstein news conference is even happening today an example of Frankenstein's monster turning on its creator?

Now, I haven't seen the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein yet. I don't know if there are these kinds of contemporary social or political implications. We'll have to wait till it's released next month, everybody except those who are at the Vienna Film festival. The Dr. Frankenstein's monster allegory, Trump empowered right wing social media as a political enforcement army, but maybe they're becoming more powerful than him and turning on him at their will, and maybe him denouncing COVID vaccines is an example of that. How much do you think that's happening?

Ben Smith: Oh, I think it's happening a pretty large degree. I would say to your listener's text, these folks are not sitting around reading Lenin and thinking about how to create a state party apparatus, and have very mixed motives, a lot of them vengeance against enemies perceived as having persecuted them. I think that you can over theorize what's happening. At least that's not how they think about it.

They're improvising. Absolutely, in particular, he appointed people who love the Epstein extended conspiracy universe, which is a mix of facts, missing pieces of information, stuff that is made up, stuff that has been rehashed over and over. They keep releasing the same documents, for instance, as revelations and ultimately a story that was investigated extremely deeply and aggressively by a generation of federal prosecutors and investigative journalists who did reveal quite a bit of awful stuff.

There has not really been much new revealed by this White House, by all these influencers who have then did, I think from Trump's perspective, very inconveniently rip the seal off this whole thing when one of the incontrovertible facts of the story is that Epstein and Trump spent a lot of time together basically chasing women in the '80s and '90s.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip from the news conference of a woman who describes herself as an Epstein survivor, Anouska de Giorgio, addressing President Trump directly.

Anouska de Giorgio: President Trump, you have so much influence and power in this situation. Please use that influence and power to help us because we need it now and this country needs it now.

Brian Lehrer: Who's leading and who's following, Ben?

Ben Smith: I think Trump is very sensitive to this kind of thing exactly, and is trying to figure out a way out of this that does not involve more extended conversations about his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which is just totally real and undenied. Although not necessarily a conspiracy, all this stuff you could have if you read the New York Post in the 1980s and '90s, this wasn't top secret.

Brian Lehrer: Back to the bureaucracy, we talked on yesterday's show about how the Centers for Disease Control did not respond to requests for help when local officials from Texas asked for it when the measles outbreak began there this year. That was from reporting by KFF Health News. Is that a good example of what your article is about, Trump with help from social media, breaking the bureaucracy?

Ben Smith: I think the rise of RFK and the vaccine backlash are certainly a feature of this. In that specific case, was that Donald Trump's decision, was that RFK's decision, I think is a more specific question. I think Trump's disavowal of Operation Warp Speed, which I think at one point he saw and a lot of people saw as the single most successful feature of his presidency, is a reaction to this broad backlash to vaccines that's obviously rooted in social media.

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting how that has morphed, in my opinion, from what was originally backlash, not to Trump and his leadership in developing the vaccine so quickly, Operation Warp Speed, but to the mandates. That allowed the RFK Jr. crowd, the actual anti-vax crowd, to get their hooks into it, it seems to me. Then that became the big thing and people forgot about mandates as opposed to the vaccines themselves.

Now Trump is following along because he has to, even just by appointing RFK and letting him wreak havoc as we talked about in our previous segment today, with people not even understanding what the new COVID vaccine rules are.

Ben Smith: These social media movements are not great at land swinging the pendulum away one way and then just gently bringing it right back to the middle. As you say, now has swung from you should have a choice, to we're going to make it really hard for you to get a vaccine, apparently here in New York today. Similarly on speech, it swung from we need free speech on campuses, to we need to shut down pro=Palestinian speech in a very aggressive way.

Brian Lehrer: Anne on Staten island, you're on WNYC with Ben Smith, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semafor. Hi, Anne.

Anne: Oh, hi. I'm so pleased to be included. I'd like to recommend this book by Yuval Harari, who's a professor from the University of Jerusalem. It's called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. I've read it three times now. What I wanted to point out, what the gentleman was saying is about an autocracy and a democracy.

He discusses the fact that you can have people voting in open elections, but as long as the so called strong man, he does say man, controls information, it becomes an autocracy. I think that is brilliant because we are bombarded by disinformation. It's not misinformation, it's disinformation. You can tell I'm really excited about this book and I heartily recommend it. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Anne, thank you very much. That's an influential book, Nexus by Yuval Harari. Ben, we've made that distinction on this show and I think it's important, misinformation and disinformation. There's a lot of stuff that is not intentionally wrong that people pass around on social media, but then there's the stuff that is intentionally wrong and that's the disinformation.

Ben Smith: Yes. Although I think there was so much energy in the last few years put into a taxonomy of these different kinds of information in a way that I think departed a little from the way Trump does politics and the way his supporters see it, which is, is it really the information value of these statements when they say Obama was born in Kenya, is that like you would place a bet on the idea that Obama was born in Kenya or is that a slur? Is that a political emotional statement?

I think that there's an impulse for him that [unintelligible 00:15:23] my personal pointy headed media part of the world, to try to argue facts and figure out the truth value of statements that I think are often really political tools rather than arguments exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Lucy writes, "The first executive order froze all federal research. Trump is at war with any objective information that can potentially contradict what comes out of his mouth as supportive RFK demonstrates that." Another one, "Trump does understand loyalty and self dealing, so it's not that much of a leap to an authoritarian kleptocracy," writes another listener. Ben, in our last few minutes, you want to tell us about your new column, Washington View? You were already writing columns for Semafor. What's in this new framing?

Ben Smith: I've been writing about media for a few years. I think that just as you talk to, whether it's people here in New York or business leaders or people around the world, just the obvious question everybody asks is, "What the heck is happening in Washington? What is going on there? Really what is Trump's administration thinking?"

I think there's so much abstract analysis that goes into-- I think in a lot of abstract description, what is this moment in history and how does-- Things that are probably well left to academics, but I think what journalists can do is just try to talk to the people currently running the country and figure out how they're thinking about this moment, what they are trying to do.

It's a messy picture. There are a lot of factions. There are people who are up and people who are down and Trump's changing his mind all the time, based in no small part on pressure from random social media influencers. I think just the biggest question in the world right now is how are they making these decisions? Which company are they going to take 10% of and try to direct? It's a hugely changed world and Washington's right at the center of it.

Brian Lehrer: As a former New York Times media columnist and co-founder now of two news organizations, BuzzFeed News now Semafor, how do you see the state of journalism given its economics? Forget Trump pressure for a minute, just economics. BuzzFeed News folded not because you were doing bad or irrelevant work, but I think for macroeconomic forces, one might say.

Ben Smith: BuzzFeed, in a way what we're trying to do is do quality news on top of social media. We couldn't make the economics of that work is the shortest and maybe most self excusing version of that story. The economics of journalism are really tough, but I think in a way the scarier and yet also better news is, a lot of publications, the New York Times first among them, but certainly Semafor too, are really figuring out how to build a business, how to employ journalists, how to do really good work and stand up to the Trump administration.

In almost every case that's by aiming that journalism at people who in some sense can really pay for it. Places like the FT with a $400 a year subscription, Bloomberg with a $300 a year subscription are doing great work. It does point toward a world where you have really high quality information for elites and a sea of videos from influencers for everybody else. It's a bit scary. By the way, Semafor, the website is free. Come check us out. I do think that's a scary prospect, even if it's a good one for the business of employing journalists.

Brian Lehrer: Besides Semafor, and by the way, we have no paywall, is there a solution to that real news for the elite, but not for everybody else.

Ben Smith: I think if you want to be optimistic and hopeful about it, is that most people actually would prefer to be told the truth than to be lied to, and that as these new channels settle out, that there will be lots of places to find high quality information on social media or on whatever it is that TikTok and Instagram turn themselves into.

Brian Lehrer: Some hyper local news organizations are springing up, whether or not anybody's making a living from them, this attempt that I think you can't suppress in our society of trying to report what's going on at the community level as well as at the national level. That's an optimistic thought. I hope reality bears it out.

I will ask you one more thing about Semafor. This comes with some praise, Ben, because I see that you're doing some very audience-facing transparency efforts. You and some of your reporters will publish separately the facts of a story, then your take, labeled as such, and then different points of view, labeled as such. What's the goal of that structure? Do you think it's working?

Ben Smith: I would say, I think we have gotten a really good reception to this exercise in breaking down the written news article, where particularly if it's by, by the way, a really good journalist, you know that they have a take. Often the way they disguise that take is by quoting an expert in the third paragraph who says the thing that they think.

If you're in on the joke, you realize that's what they're doing, or maybe they use adjectives. I think we just felt like that's a outmoded structure. Also a lot of readers are sophisticated enough that they're reading for bias. They're reading to try to understand what the slant is. The thing is, very sophisticated journalists usually do have--

It's not necessarily a partisan slant, but they do think, "This project isn't likely to work," or, "This person is a huge talent." I think I'd rather let them say that in a context where you have to be open to the possibility as a journalist that even if your facts are right, your analysis is wrong. That's what we try to signal and be open to.

Brian Lehrer: With that note of humility, we end with Ben Smith. Humility is always in too short supply, so thank you.

Ben Smith: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief at Semafor, and now the author of a new recurring column on Semafor called Washington View. Ben, thanks a lot.

Ben Smith: Thanks, Brian.

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