July 16 – Is Donald Trump the Greatest Threat to US Security?; An Investigation Into the Kushner-Run Trump Digital Operation; How Erdogan Has Used the Coup Against Him to Install a Dictatorship

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the unprecedented and alarming possibility that the greatest threat to our national security is the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Joining us is Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council under presidents Johnson and Nixon and is the author of “Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and their Failed Ideals”. We will discuss the deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance, avarice and amateurism, that characterize this chaotic administration which so far has not had to deal with an international crisis, but in the event that the White House is faced with a serious challenge as is likely to be the case, how will the petulant, childish, insecure and unstable leader we have in the Oval Office deal with it? Particularly if it requires the steady and experienced hands of Generals Mattis and McMaster who Trump apparently does not listen to, but instead, will the fate of the world rest on the advice of a white nationalist nihilist Stephen Bannon, a neophyte reactionary throwback, Stephen Miller, and a Hungarian fascist Sebastian Gorka?

Part 2

Then we speak with Peter Stone, a special correspondent for McClatchy DC Bureau about his latest article co-authored with Greg Gordon “Trump-Russia investigations probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation”. We investigate Kushner’s relationship with the right wing billionaire Mercers and Jared’s use of their social media data mining company Cambridge Analytica of which Stephen Bannon is a board member. And since Russia deployed armies of bots carrying pro-Trump messages and used human “troll farms” to flood social media and the Internet with anti-Hillary stories, we look into what collusion took place between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Part 3

Then finally, on the first anniversary of the botched coup in Turkey, that President Erdogan is celebrating as a victory for democracy as he rolls back democratic rights and jails thousands of teachers, soldiers, judges, lawyers and journalists, in a creeping dictatorship, we assess whether the coup itself was fabricated or manipulated. A former senior advisor and foreign affairs expert to the State Department during the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations, David Phillips, joins us to discuss his latest article at The Huffington Post “Was Turkey’s Coup for Real?”