Donald Trump is apparently struggling to get his message across to the Iranian people because one of his MAGA goons fired the people whose job it would have been to amplify it.
The president has repeatedly called on everyday Iranians to rise up amid his ongoing attacks against the Islamic regime and “take over your government” since he first launched those strikes more than 11 days ago.
Sources at Voice of America—funded by the U.S. government, and which has historically served as a pillar of soft power abroad—have now told CNN that efforts to disseminate the president’s message have fallen flat after Trump media adviser Kari Lake fired almost all of the broadcaster’s staff last year.
“We had a really good tool in the information war, and now it’s gone,” one network employee said. “You can’t just flip it on the next day.”
“I think even more difficult is the audience trust, because we disappeared for almost a year,” they added.
Lake, who has twice run and twice failed to secure public office on a Republican ticket, is a stalwart Trump loyalist and vocal supporter of the president’s thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
She served last year as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The agency oversees VOA, where Lake tried to fire more than 1,000 employees.
CNN further reports Lake scaled back on broadcast infrastructure and cancelled contracts with satellite providers facilitating broadcasts in the Middle East, contributing to an outage in the days before Trump launched his now-ongoing assault against Iran.
Former VOA employees later sued Lake over their firings. A judge ruled over the weekend that she was “plainly ineligible” to serve as chief of USAGM because her appointment had not been approved by the Senate.
Lake responded by slamming the Ronald Reagan-appointed justice as an anti-Trump “activist,” and says she will appeal the ruling.
The Daily Beast has contacted USAGM for comment on this story.
