May 4 - Trump's Historical Upheaval of the Political Life of the USA; "It's Even Worse Than It Was"; NATO and Russia's Buildup in Eastern Europe

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the extraordinary historical upheaval in the political life of the United States as a hotel and casino developer with no discernable political platform or affiliation, the reality TV star Donald Trump, becomes the presumptive head of one of America’s two major parties and the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States. Jacob Heilbrunn who is a Editor at The National Interest and author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons”, joins us to discuss dismay and division within the GOP over Trump’s triumph in the Republican primaries and whether the presumptive candidate can assuage the foreign policy anxiety of the neocons and soften his misogyny by choosing a woman as his running mate.

Part 2

Then we assess the reaction to Donald Trump by traditional conservatives and his chances of beating Hillary Clinton with Norman Ornstein, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and co-author of the best-seller “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”, now in an updated version “It’s Even Worse Than It Was”. He joins us to discuss how the Republican Party’s embrace and enabling of the anti-government Tea Party has resulted in the capture of the GOP by an outsider who has capitalized on the alienation and anger the party encouraged.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the tit-for-tat military buildup in Eastern Europe with NATO planning to rotate battalions and Russia threatening to deploy divisions as the two sides appear to be drifting into a new Cold War confrontation. Gordon Hahn, a Professor and Researcher in the Terrorism Research and Education at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey who was a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, joins us to discuss growing tensions between a paranoid Russia in distress and an E.U. facing disintegration.