January 9 - Trump's Son-in-Law as Senior Adviser to the President; The Clean Energy Movement is Irreversible; Catching the Right Wing Stinger in a Sting

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the appointment of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as Senior Adviser to the President and speak with William Cohan, a former Wall Street investment banker and New York Times best-selling author who writes weekly columns for The New York Times Dealbook section and Bloomberg View and has an article at Vanity Fair profiling the Trump children, “Can Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Really Run the Family Business”. We discuss Trump’s relationship with the husband of his favorite child Ivanka and Jared Kushner’s own successful real estate empire which will have to be put on hold if he takes the White House job. Although America’s soon-to-be 45^th president so far has played by his own rules and has not divested his holdings and meanwhile, thanks to Trump’s new job as leader of the free world, his main asset, the Trump brand, is now more valuable than ever.

Part 2

Then we look into President Obama’s article in the journal Science in which he wrote that the worldwide movement towards clean energy is “irreversible” and that the clean energy sector will move ahead with or without Donald Trump. Jody Freeman, The Archibald Cox Professor at Harvard Law School and the founding director of the Law School’s Environment Law and Policy Program joins us. She served as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House and we will discuss how Donald Trump will handle the promises he made to bring back jobs in coal country when the market is abandoning coal for natural gas while investments in wind and solar are on the rise, making it clear that combatting climate change is good business and good economics.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Lauren Windsor, the executive producer of The Undercurrent and the creative director of American Family Voices. She has managed to sting the stinger, having caught the notorious right wing provocateur James O’Keefe in a sting trying to sow chaos at Donald Trump’s inauguration in an effort to portray Trump’s critics as violent radicals from leftwing fringe groups. We discuss how one of O’Keefe’s operatives, Allison Maass, who was already caught trying to infiltrate Russ Feingold’s, Bernie Sanders’, and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, is caught on video offering activists huge amounts of money to disrupt Trump’s upcoming inauguration.