November 17 - Donald Trump: The Hands-Off Presidency; Assessing a New White House National Security Team; Trump as a Throwback to His Father's Chauvinistic Male Patriarchy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with indications that Donald Trump will be a hands-off president based on the chaos going on with the transition in which Vice President-elect Mike Pence is doing the serious work while Trump does photo-ops with a prizefighter and celebrity interviews for TMZ. Timothy McCarthy, a Lecturer on History, Literature and Public Policy and Director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at The Harvard Kennedy School, joins us. The author of “Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism”, we discuss what is needed to inspire the majority of Americans that did not vote for Donald Trump who will soon be subject to the passage of a radical right wing legislative agenda orchestrated by Mike Pence and pushed aggressively by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, that along with a Supreme Court packed with reactionary corporatist judges approved by the Koch Brothers, will make America great again for plutocrats and their heirs.

Part 2

Then we assess the new White House national security team that is rumored to be headed by General Michael Flynn as the president’s national security advisor with Senator Jeff Sessions and Senator Tom Cotton reported as leading contenders for Secretary of Defense. David Phillips, the Director of the Peace-building and Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University who is a foreign affairs expert and former senior advisor to the administrations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, joins us to discuss his latest article at The Huffington Post “Lt. General Michael T. Flynn: Gun for Hire”.

Part 3

Then finally John Densmore, an original and founding member of “The Doors” who co-wrote and produced numerous gold and platinum albums, joins us to discuss how the emergence of Trump brings back echoes of his early resistance to the Vietnam war and his fellow radical anti-Vietnam war activist the poet Robert Bly who became the leader of the 1990’s men’s movement. We discuss the new film “Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy” and how much Donald Trump is a throwback to the chauvinistic male patriarch his father was and the tragedy that America came so close to having a woman lead the nation but for the last-minute intervention of the right wing Republican patriarchy inside the FBI.