February 20 - A "Bad and Nasty" Woman Organizer of Today's "Not-My-President's Day" Actions; For Profit President; Trump's Cronies' Shady Back-Channel Deal to End Sanctions on Russia

Full Program

Part 1

We begin on this President’s Day with demonstrations in opposition to the month-old Trump Administration across the country organized around the theme of “Not-my-President’s Day”. One of the organizers of today demonstrations, Melanie Manos, joins us from Detroit. She is one of the lead organizers of “Bad and Nasty”, an online art and activist community organizing “not-my-President’s Day” coordinated performances and actions around the country. We will discuss the role of the arts, satire and humor that has emerged as a way to both deal with the reality of a Trump presidency and protest it, as millions of people in the U.S. and around the world are taking to the streets in more and more demonstrations which started with the women’s marches on the day after Trump’s inauguration. They drew huge crowds compared to the day before, a comparison that has not sat well with Trump who has been offering up his own altered reality and alternative facts ever since.

Part 2

Then we speak with Rick Claypool, the research director at Public Citizen who is the author of a new report just out “For Profit President”, that analyzes Trump’s first 30 days in a day-by-day review of the new Trump Administration’s first month that has seen an extraordinary grant of power to corporate interests in Donald Trump’s get rich-quick-scheme known as the American presidency. We will discuss this full-fledged assault on our health, safety, environment, workers, consumers, financial security, civil rights and other protections.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the report by The New York Times on an initiative by close Trump associates involving a back-channel plan for Trump to lift sanctions on Russia in exchange for a peace plan with Russia and Ukraine. Alexander Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University whose latest book is “Ukraine Versus Russia: Revolution, Democracy and War”, joins us to discuss the shady characters in this deal involving a disgraced Ukrainian politician, a Russian-American businessman with long-standing ties to Trump and prior convictions for stock manipulation involving the Mafia, along with Trump’s personal attorney.