Russ Baker Answers The 8 Most-Asked Questions

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Welcome to the show. You — yes, you — have wandered into yet another broadcast where reality politely exits the room, and propaganda sits down for a cigarette. Today, we ask a question that's been skulking around like a cockroach in a Manhattan apartment: Are we being distracted on purpose?

The president — part reality-TV host, part demolition derby driver in a suit — has made a career out of chaos. The man can fart out a scandal faster than most of us can microwave popcorn. But is it all just an accident? Or is there something more deliberate at play?

Imagine this: a campaign of noise, smoke, and confusion — timed precisely to blot out inconvenient truths, like, say, losing a Supreme Court race in a swing state. Is POTUS just flailing? Or is he pulling off the political equivalent of a Vegas magic act — badgering the media with one hand while slipping a tax cut to billionaires with the other?

Joining me today to unpick these tangled Christmas-lights of suspicion is Russ Baker — investigative journalist and a man who’s spent enough time around spooks, operatives, and bureaucrats to know when he smells a rat — or at least a heavily perfumed ferret in a flag pin. He’s written for The Nation, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Salon, Esquire, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, among others, covered foreign wars, done investigative reporting, written feature stories, produced content for print, online, radio and tv. He’s author of the bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty. He is founder and editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, publicly-funded news site that explores stories, topics and angles missed or ignored by the rest of the media. You can check out his SubstackNewsletter, Going Deep with Russ Baker.

Russ Baker, welcome. Before we dig into the pile of distractions, misdirections, and bureaucratic Kafka cos-play, let me ask the first of many dangerous questions:

* President says his administration is actively exploring a proposal to detain U.S. citizens and send them to prisons in El Salvador. Minutes before meeting with El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, the president could be heard embracing the concept. He said: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You've got to build about five more places", an apparent reference to more camps that would be needed in El Salvador to house U.S. citizens.

* Can you walk us through what might have been going on behind the scenes as Trump dropped his “third term” bomb? Coincidence, or just old-fashioned chaos engineering?

* Let’s talk about surveillance — from stopping scientists at the border to scraping driver’s license photos. How scared should the average American be?

* What happens when “national security” becomes a Swiss army knife for censorship? We’re seeing detentions over opinions now, right?

* This isn’t just Trump, is it? Didn’t the Biden administration quietly lay down some of this surveillance infrastructure, too?

* Why aren’t these tactics labeled for what they are — strategic psychological operations — rather than shrugged off as “Mr. T being Mr. T”?

* If tariffs hurt the working class most, and the MAGA crowd is largely working class, why hasn’t that message cut through? What’s the real failure here — the policy or the messaging?

* Final question, Russ — are we past the point where good journalism alone can wake people up? Or do we need something... bigger?

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