February 7 - Alternative Facts at the National Security Council; Neocon Royalty as Number 2 at the State Department; Inside Trump's "Successful" Raid in Yemen

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the extra jeopardy the United States finds itself in with not just a president who is delusional and operates according to his own belief system, but the National Security Council that is meant to provide Trump with real-world information and intelligence is also operating in an alternative universe tailoring its own reality with NSC Advisor General Flynn reportedly rewriting the Presidential Daily Briefs. Ali Watkins, who covers national security and foreign policy for BuzzFeed News joins us to discuss the bizarre claim that Trump made to a military audience at CENTCOM headquarters in Florida that the “very dishonest press” have not reported terrorist incidents and what kind of information and from what sources is intelligence being fed to Trump about what is happening in the real world.

Part 2

Then Jacob Heilbrunn, a Senior Editor at the National Interest and author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” joins us to examine reports that the number two job at the State Department is about to be filled by Elliot Abrams who is considered neocon royalty. If today’s meeting with Trump goes well for Abrams then his nomination will be a clear repudiation of everything that Donald Trump said on the campaign trail about the disastrous Bush/Cheney Middle East misadventures. And since this former Reagan Administration and George W. Bush Administration official was so scathing in his criticism of Trump in his role as advisor to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Abrams closeness to Netanyahu and Jared Kushner and his hawkish stance in favor of a war with Iran would indicate the reasons why Abrams got the job.

Part 3

The finally we look into the recent U.S. raid in Yemen against AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that the Trump White House is claiming as a great success although the evidence presented by the Pentagon of a captured al Qaeda video turned out to be a decade old and available online. An expert on Yemen, Sheila Carapico, a Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond and author of “Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf” joins us.