In his podcast studio, Joe Rogan sat for three hours, cigar smoldering and brow furrowed, as his guest held forth about the dark history of America’s influence abroad.
The highlights were familiar to any left-wing critic of American power: The U.S. Agency for International Development’s involvement in the Southeast Asian heroin trade in the 1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency’s infiltration of the American left. “Rogue U.S.A.I.D. operations in Cuba.” And the windfalls American oil companies have reaped from “U.S. regime change efforts.”
But Mr. Rogan’s guest on the Feb. 12 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” was not a Marxist professor or a muckraking Intercept writer. He was a former speechwriter in President Trump’s first administration named Mike Benz, whose work has been cited regularly by Elon Musk as justification for shutting down U.S.A.I.D., the 64-year-old foreign aid agency.
“The MAGA movement is fighting the ghost of Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Benz said, referring to the former president’s support for international development.
Amid all the radical moves early in the second Trump presidency, this might be the most literally radical: the borrowing of historically left-wing critiques of American power to justify the right-wing ambition of dismantling longstanding government agencies.
For decades, influential thinkers on the left have criticized American soft-power programs, covert operations and military presence abroad as parts of a particularly American form of imperialism: one that subverts the popular will of other countries’ citizens to serve the interests of the U.S. government and multinational corporations while also producing dangerous consequences — unfettered presidential power, diminished civil liberties — at home.
Mr. Trump’s allies have borrowed liberally from this argument while turning it on its head. They have been using it to justify new frontiers of executive power and the extraordinary empowerment of Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual.
“These left-wing critiques appear to now be being adopted, appropriated and weaponized by MAGA and Trump loyalists,” said Hugh Wilford, a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach and the author of “The CIA: An Imperial History.”
As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk has accused U.S.A.I.D. of “money laundering” and has reposted claims that the agency’s government-backed, democracy-promotion programs are “a C.I.A. front.” During her confirmation hearings, Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, criticized covert operations to arm proxies in Syria and “regime change wars” across the Middle East.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has blamed the war in Ukraine on the foreign policy establishment’s “strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion.”
The Center for Renewing America, a think tank that was until recently led by Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, has joined in, too. A paper the group published this month accused the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization created during the Reagan presidency to support democracy and civil society abroad, of being a “tool for neoconservative nation-building.”
None of this is without precedent in the politics of Mr. Trump, who has revived a long dormant strain of Republican skepticism of foreign interventions. Mr. Trump criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a candidate in 2016, and he considered rolling U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department early in his first presidency. He also inveighed against the country’s intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. after he came under investigation late in that election for his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.
But Mr. Trump’s second administration has gone further, embracing specific narratives about nefarious motives behind humanitarian aid and covert operations that were long the province of the left, even as his advisers denounce the same programs as hotbeds of “far left activists.”
Mr. Trump has put the left in the awkward position of defending institutions and policies it once criticized.
“It’s this weird fun-house mirror moment,” said Daniel Immerwahr, a historian of U.S. foreign policy at Northwestern University.
Mr. Benz, who will speak this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, is perhaps the clearest example of the phenomenon. A former corporate lawyer and anonymous far-right social media personality, he has become a clear influence on Mr. Musk.
Mr. Musk has replied to Mr. Benz’s posts close to 300 times on X and has cited him in nearly half of his posts mentioning U.S.A.I.D., which he has blamed for censorship in Europe and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political career, among other things. Mr. Benz did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
In podcast interviews and posts on X that have earned him nearly one million followers on the platform, Mr. Benz claims that contemporary efforts to combat online misinformation can trace their lineages back to a Cold War-era history of intelligence agencies using benign-appearing development programs as pawns in the war against Soviet influence across the globe.
The most egregious such activities were curtailed after a series of revelations about intelligence-agency abuses beginning in the late 1960s, which led to overhauls of the Central Intelligence Agency and other institutions in the 1970s. The 1980s saw more transparent soft-power initiatives under the auspices of agencies like U.S.A.I.D. and government-funded organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy.
Broadly supported by anti-communist Republicans and Democrats, these efforts were often met with skepticism on the left — and now, by Mr. Benz and Mr. Musk.
They argue that U.S. government influence campaigns that once undermined the populist left in other countries were co-opted by liberals after the end of the Cold War, and are now being used against the populist right at home and abroad. As evidence, they point to grants to independent media and civil-society programs in Europe that have been critical of right-wing governments and support for misinformation-countering campaigns that have often targeted right-wing social media activity.
“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op,” Mr. Musk wrote in a Feb. 3 post on X citing Mr. Benz.
To make this case, Mr. Benz has marshaled the decades-old work of left-wing journalists and scholars, such as the historian Alfred McCoy, whose research on the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D.’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia earned the ire of the C.I.A. in the early 1970s.
Other arguments made by Trump allies echo those of President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Russian-funded media outlets. Following popular protests against Kremlin-friendly governments in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, which were supported by the Bush and Obama administrations and American nongovernmental organizations, the Kremlin cast that support as a “coup” and a continuation of the United States’ Cold War machinations. Mr. Benz and the Center for Renewing America have each echoed that argument.
Mr. Vought’s think tank has accused the National Endowment for Democracy of serving as “the tip of the proverbial spear for heightened C.I.A. and State Department efforts to foster political revolution in Ukraine.” In a December interview with Mr. Rogan, Mr. Benz claimed that “the U.S. did effectively Jan. 6 the Yanukovich government out of power” in Ukraine in 2014, pointing to its direct and indirect funding of independent media organizations in the country.
Mr. McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was not familiar with Mr. Benz’s work, but said he had noticed a modest uptick in sales of his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” since Mr. Benz cited him this month.
Mr. McCoy, who was shot at by U.S.-backed guerrillas while investigating U.S.A.I.D. in Laos in 1971, said that applying his work from that era to the agency now was a mistake. In the post-Cold War period, “I would venture that U.S.A.I.D. is as good if not better than any of the others that are out there,” he said, and cutting it would be “a tragedy for the people affected.”
“I think it’s sort of appalling, actually,” he said.
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