Independent Agency CEO: 'DOGE has broken into our building.'
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How large were the protests in Serbia?
Thanks, Stuart Holm, for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here this Monday night. They said that by nightfall, the turnout was somewhere north of 325,000 people. Look at the size of this. We knew in advance that this is going to be a big demonstration. The government knew it was coming. The government had parked a whole bunch of tractors around their Capitol building in anticipation that there were going to be a lot of people there. And they thought the wall of tractors might put people off, I guess. All through that afternoon, Saturday afternoon, you could see the crowd starting to build up in the capital city. But when they ended up at night at something like three hundred and look at that. 325,000 people in the streets. I think pretty much everybody was surprised. This happened Saturday in Serbia, in a country that's only got about 6.6 million people.
They got a third of a million people to show up at a single demonstration when they don't even have 7 million people in the entire country for their population. If you want to compare that to us, if we got a similar proportion of our country's population to all show up for the same demonstration, that would be a demonstration of about 17 million people. Yeah, this is just massive. This is Belgrade this weekend. Serbia's president is pro-Putin and pro-Trump. The people of Serbia are not. And they are mobilizing in almost unbelievable numbers now to try to get rid of their president. These are the biggest protests that have happened in that country in a generation. Absolutely massive. President Donald Trump's son, Don Jr., the brunette, he visited Serbia last week and said that he thought the protests there were artificial, that they weren't real. The real Serbian people certainly wouldn't be protesting against their leadership. The Serbian president posted photos of himself with Don Jr., He was greeting a head of state or something.
The Serbian president also ordered police in that country to raid the offices of four of the major civil society NGOs in that country. The police went in without warrants. They went in armed and they just took everything at those organizations. The justification for them doing that was Donald Trump. Trump is trying to abolish USAID, trying to close down America's foreign aid agency. In so doing, Trump's top campaign donor Elon Musk called USAID a criminal organization. Remember when he said that? That has had consequences. Serbia's government is deciding that they're taking that literally. Well, it's Donald Trump's top campaign donor saying they're criminals. They're taking that literally and essentially operating now on the assumption, or at least on the pretext, that any organization that ever got any support from USAID must be a criminal organization. And so now they've got armed police raids and shutting those organizations down and the threat of, in fact, criminal charges.
What sparked the political movement in Serbia?
That said, the people of that country in absolutely massive numbers would seem to disagree. What's going on in that country started as a group of students protesting against corruption and its consequences. In November, there was a disaster at a Serbian train station. The concrete roof of a train station in Serbia collapsed and it killed 15 people. And that might not sound like a political event, but it has sparked this huge political movement because students, after that disaster, took to the streets and said, reasonably, that the reason that train station roof was improperly built and it therefore collapsed is because the government is corrupt. And that's the kind of construction you get when the only criteria for getting a government contract is cronyism and bribery instead of actually knowing how to do the work. That is the kind of accident you get when your terrible train station construction passes inspection and opens up to the public, not because it's actually safe or properly built, but because the necessary bribes were paid.
Corrupt countries, oligarchic countries, autocratic countries are lousy countries. Bad governance means bad standards of living, means bad economies, means worse lives for everybody except the people at the very top. And these students started demonstrating against their Putin and Trump-style corrupt government in November.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How large were the protests in Serbia?
0:00–3:09
2
What sparked the political movement in Serbia?
3:09–5:28
3
How are protests against authoritarian governments spreading?
5:28–12:47
4
What happened at the U.S. Africa Development Foundation?
12:47–17:22
5
Why is Doge attempting to access government buildings?
17:22–21:42
6
What legal actions are being taken against Doge?
21:42–25:59
7
How unprecedented is the use of force between U.S. agencies?
25:59–43:25
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Rachel Maddow Show
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