Voice of America, the government-funded, state-run news website, is doing everything possible to help Ivanka Trump sell more copies of her new book, a move that most legal experts view as highly illegal. But this isn’t the first time that the government has used its resources to promote the Trump brand and it certainly won’t be the last. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
Apparently we’re still having lots of problems with the federal government and things that the federal government pays to run promoting the Donald Trump brand. The most recent example is the news outlet Voice of America which is funded by the federal government. It’s supposed to be their little news organization. Recently, they reposted an article from the Associated Press talking about how great Ivanka Trump’s new book is. Well, as it turns out, that any kind of government funded organization promoting the government itself or I should say the financial interests of the people running the government that has nothing to do with the government kind of against the law according to legal experts here.
Again, they’ve been doing this since day one. We have had the state department website promoting tourism and travel to Mar a Lago. We’ve had Kellyanne Conway go out on television and tell people buy Ivanka’s stuff and nothing has happened to them. They haven’t officially been reprimanded. Yeah, they got talked to about it I guess, but that’s not stopping them. If there is any doubt in your mind that anyone in this trump administration cares about the American public, please stop thinking that.
The only thing that Donald Trump and his family are doing is enriching themselves at the expense of American tax payers. They’re using the presidency, they are using the influence of the office of the presidency, specifically Ivanka to sell more things. Hell, her little brand of clothing and jewelry promoted a bracelet that she wore in a 60 Minutes interview shortly after the interview ended trying to sell it for $10,000. Hell, we got lots of them. Order now. They’re using this to sell their crappy goods to the American public. That is all that they are doing. They are using a government funded website that’s supposed to be nonpartisan, bipartisan, whatever you want to say. It’s just supposed to report the news and instead, Donald Trump has changed the leadership of it.
Earlier in January, congress actually restructured this little organization so that Donald Trump could pick the replacements and he picked a guy who came from Coke industries, Americans for Prosperity to run it. It is now a right wing news outlet. It is promoting potentially illegally Ivanka Trump’s book and nobody is going to do anything about it. There’s real problems with what the Trump administration is doing and not just ethically. Legally. Again, where are the outcries? Where are all the people saying this has to stop? Not just from the public because unfortunately in matters like this, the voice of the public isn’t that important. What matters is that we have members of congress saying we’re going to investigate this. We’re going to find out what clauses in the Constitution you’ve broken by promoting your brand with federal resources because that is illegal.
Now, maybe we need the people in the United States to get mad enough about it and have this large public outcry in order to force the members of congress to do it, but at this point that is all we can do. We can’t go file a complaint. We can’t start the impeachment process. Those are things that have to be done through congress. All we can do now is raise our voices and demand that congress take action against these people living in the White House who are only there so they can make a few extra dollars.
