Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump inflaming the combustible situation with North Korea with name-calling and threats that play to his base but could ignite a catastrophic war. Norman Ornstein, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and co-author of “It’s Even Worse Than it Was” whose forthcoming book is “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not Yet Deported” joins us. We discuss whether there is a method to Trump’s madness in continually riling up his base with overheated attacks on his enemies while constructing an alternative reality via propaganda pumped out by Fox News and Sinclair. In addition to unlimited financial backing from billionaires and on-going efforts to suppress the vote, would this be enough to keep him in power? Particularly as long as the Democrats fail to exhibit leadership and offer a narrative beyond Trump is a disaster and if you vote for him you’re an idiot, a refrain which Hillary Clinton ran on unsuccessfully.

Part 2

Then we get an assessment of why South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has faced six no-confidence votes in parliament and how he dodged the latest bullet in a 189 to 177 vote despite mounting evidence of his corrupt ties to the wealthy Gupta brothers. Ambassador John Campbell, a former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria who was political counselor to the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria during South Africa’s first non-racial election and is the author of “Morning in South Africa”, joins us to discuss how long the ruling ANC can excuse corruption while clinging to the moral authority bequeathed to them by Mandela.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the sudden reversal of the Justice Department in withdrawing support from a case before the Supreme Court challenging how voters were purged from the rolls in the important swing state of Ohio. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, joins us to discuss how much the Trump Justice Department’s switching to support Ohio’s aggressive purging of voter rolls in the middle of a case is tied to the Administration’s wider efforts at voter suppression via the Kobach Commission.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the warning from Attorney General Sessions to would-be leakers “Don’t do it!” and his threat to reporters that he is “reviewing” press subpoenas that would force journalists to reveal their sources or face jail time. Cora Currier, a journalist who, as a reporting fellow at ProPublica covered national security, and now covers national security and press freedom for The Intercept, joins us to discuss Sessions’ response to humiliating public criticism from Trump that he was “VERY weak on Intel leakers” and the release of embarrassing transcripts of the president’s private conversations with world leaders. We examine the DOJ’s pursuit of three times as many leak investigations that occurred under the Obama Administration and the FBI’s creation of a new unit to handle the investigations.

Part 2

Then we look into why Donald Trump holds so many campaign-style rallies in West Virginia and why the state’s governor and only billionaire made an appearance at last Thursday’s rally to announce that he had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Bob Kincaid the co-founder of the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Campaign and the President of the Coal River Mountain Watch joins us to explain Trump’s popularity in a state with the nation’s worst opioid addiction crisis and the highest death rate from opioids yet is the most dependent on Medicaid funds to address the crisis as Trump plans to cut Medicaid and proposed a 95% cut in funding for the agency leading the charge against the country’s opioid epidemic.

Part 3

Then finally we assess why the United Auto Workers failed in their bid to unionize the Nissan plant in Mississippi at which the majority of workers voted with the company against the UAW in a bitterly contested campaign. An expert on labor issues, Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies labor, information technology and the organization of work, joins us to discuss the latest defeat for labor in the “right to work” South.