June 1 - Trump Joins Bannon's Dark Side to Trash the Planet; Hundred of Saudi Students in the US Have Joined ISIS; Living in Fear in Trump's America

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with today’s expected announcement by Donald Trump that he is taking the United States out of the 195-nation Paris Accords on combating climate change claiming he is fulfilling “my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens”. Without bothering to analyze the absurd and specious justifications Trump offered, we will speak with Bruce Bartlett, a former senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. He joins us to discuss his concern that “the evidence is becoming overwhelming that Trump lacks the temperament, basic knowledge or intelligence to be a minimally competent president” and the deeper problem of a leader unable to absorb essential information who listens to the white nationalist world view of a bitter, failed Hollywood producer driven by hatred of liberals, rather than the only adults in his inner circle Gary Cohn and General McMaster, whose tenuous tenure lasts only as long as they are prepared to cover-up Trump’s alarming incompetence. We will assess the even greater danger to the nation if one of the adults quits in disgust, only to be replaced by another Bannon, as well as Bruce Bartlett’s forthcoming book “The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks” and his article at The Guardian, “Donald Trump’s incompetence is a problem. His staff should intervene”.

Part 2

Then we examine an alarming new report on the real terrorist threat facing the nation that the White House and the Washington political establishment is ignoring or covering up, and that is the fact that 400 Saudi and Kuwaiti students living in the United States mostly on government scholarships have joined terrorist groups, mainly ISIS, with some of them returning back to the United States. Ali Al-Ahmed, the co-author of the new report “From American College Campuses to ISIS Camps, How Hundreds of Saudis Joined ISIS in the U.S”, joins us to discuss how the Saudi government has blocked this information from the U.S. government and the failure of American intelligence and the lack of coordination among federal agencies.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the impact that Trump’s immigration policies are having on migrant workers and their families, with American-born kids living in fear that their parents could be deported at any moment. Gabriel Thompson, a journalist who has worked with immigrant laborers in the lettuce fields of Arizona and the poultry plants of Alabama, joins us to discuss his latest book “Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture”.