March 22 - Projective Identification From the Mentally Ill President; What Outrage Would it Take for Republicans to Abandon Trump?; A Reckoning for Facebook

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an analysis of how much Trump is a trapped animal inside the Oval Office with Robert Mueller closing in on him. Lance Dodes, a Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute who was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is a contributor to the recent book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, joins us. We discuss the psychological manifestation of projective identification that Trump exhibits as he blames Hillary Clinton and others for what he does and who he is, turning them into crooks, liars, cheats and bullies while Trump lashes out with mounting fury against Robert Mueller. We will speculate about what would happen if Trump were to shut down the investigation, which, if completed, will likely be the only time in Trump’s life that he has not gotten away with cheating people and breaking the law.

Part 2

Then we explore further the possibility that Trump will not be able to contain his impulses and will suddenly fire Sessions or Rosenstein to shut down Mueller, despite assurances that he has no intention to do so, which was what he was saying before he fired Tillerson. David Halperin, a senior fellow at Republic Report who was a special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton and counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, joins us to discuss what outrage on the part of Trump would be sufficient for the Republicans to take a moral stand which so far they have failed to do.

Part 3

Then finally, with Facebook’s stock taking a hit and users abandoning the platform while politicians call for investigations and transparency, we examine the fallout from the revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s abuse of personal data. A leading voice in warning about the monopoly power of the tech giants and their business model of surveillance capitalism, Jonathan Taplin, joins us to discuss an overdue reckoning and his recent book “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy”.