Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the government shutdown and the blame-game underway with President Trump calling for the “nuclear option” in the Senate to take away the filibuster from the Democrats and leave them completely powerless in the face of a thuggish, uncompromising and unyielding Republican House and Senate and a criminally incompetent president. Jim Manley, a 21 year veteran of the U.S. Senate who served as a senior advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the past six years and before that as an aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, joins us. We discuss the Republican finger-pointing at Senator Schumer and the feigned indignation coming from Republican Majority Leader McConnell who has shut the Democrats out of any negotiation and when they have been let in on a bi-partisan basis, they soon find themselves hung out to dry and jilted by a joke of a president who does not know what he wants and is easily swayed by the hawkish hardliners he listens to Stephen Miller and his Chief of Staff General Kelly.   

Part 2

Then we assess the growing crisis with two NATO allies at loggerheads as Turkish jets pound the U.S.’s Kurdish allies in the Syria/Turkey border area while Turkey’s surrogates in the Free Syrian Army along with Turkish troops launch a ground offensive. Max Hoffman, the Associate Director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress where he focusses on Turkey and the Kurdish regions, joins us to discuss the dictator of Turkey Erdogan’s vow to “strangle this force at birth” meaning the Syrian Kurdish military force the U.S. has backed and wants to maintain as a long-term military presence in the region.    

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia. He joins us to discuss his article at MediaVillage.com “Why the News Needs to Deconstruct Trump’s Dangerous Jingoism” and how much the North Koreans have done an end-run around Trump’s belligerent rhetoric by sending their Olympians to compete in the Winter Games under a common flag with their pre-Olympic delegation to Seoul led by a North Korean pop singer who has created a K-pop media frenzy in the South.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with two important new and revealing studies assessing the first year of the Trump Administration, the first “Trump’s National Security and Foreign Policy Failures: Year One” and the second “What Internet search data reveal about Donald Trump’s first year in office”. Daniel Benaim, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as a Middle East policy adviser and foreign policy speechwriter at the White House, the Department of State, and the U.S. Senate, joins us to discuss his report on the first year of Trump’s abysmal foreign policy record which has left America more isolated and less respected, and the extraordinary speech in the senate today by Republican Senator Jeff Flake who likened Trump to Joseph Stalin and other despots warning “The president has it precisely backwards – despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy” and in terms of Trump’s lasting damage to our foreign policy, “Mr. President, so powerful is the presidency that the damage done by the sustained attack on the truth will not be confined to the president’s time in office.”

Part 2

Then we speak with Darrell West, the vice president and Director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the Founding Director of the Center for Technological Innovation. He is the author of “Billionaires; Reflections on the Upper Crust” and the author of a new report “What Internet search data reveal about Donald Trump’s first year in office” which finds that over the year the public’s interest in Trump has dropped dramatically while interest in his impeachment has spiked.

Part 3