The Young Turks - Bolton is OUT!

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

John Bolton has been fired! Ana Kasparian, Emma Vigeland, and John Iadarola, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Hey, guys, you've heard of the Young Turks podcast because you're listening to it right now. But make sure that you subscribe and give it a five star rating if you like it. Thank you for listening. This is TYT. Welcome. I'm your host, Anna Kasparian.

Jank is in Houston, I think, I don't know, but he will be in Houston for debate coverage later this week. John Iderola and Emma Biglin join me for hour one. Hour two, we'll have a completely different panel, I'm super excited, we're going to have Adrian Lawrence join us, and we're also going to talk about this incredible Janine Piro video. Someone calls her out, I want to say to her face. but it was a phone call on C-SPAN, and it's incredible.

Well, all you can see is her face. So that helps. All you can see is her face because it's C-SPAN, so they don't go to B-roll or anything. And so while this caller is like going at it, you can see her facial expressions and it's wonderful. You don't want to miss that. Before we get to the stories today, I want to do some housekeeping and make some announcements. First off, Shop TYT, that is one of the many ways you can help support the Young Turks. Of course, we have membership and all of that.

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John Bolton is no longer working for the Trump administration. Now, Trump himself attempted to make it appear as though he fired Bolton, but of course, as with anything, Trump says, it's a lie. Now let me give you the details of what Trump tweeted, and then we're gonna give you the reality of how this all went down. Trump said today, via Twitter, I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the administration.

And therefore, I asked John for his resignation, which was. was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new national security advisor next week. Well, that's not quite how things went down. In fact, we found out about the reality on Fox News of all places. Take a look. Bolton was on the guidance to be here.

So were you two blindsided by what occurred today that he's no longer with the administration? Was it news to you today? Because last night we were told he would be here today. Let's go to Fox News. Then, of course, we heard from the just-fired John Bolton saying that, no, it didn't actually play out that way. I offered to resign last night, and President Trump said, let's talk about it tomorrow. John Bolton just texted me, just now he's watching. Can you read it?

Yeah, he said, let's be clear, I resigned. And I said, do you mind if I say that while you were talking? And he wrote, yes. So John Bolton has just told me, texted me to said, I resigned. And right prior to that, John Bolton also tweeted, quote, I offered to resign last night, and President Trump said, let's talk about it tomorrow. Now, I broke up with you. It's insane.

You can't fire me, I quit, except the opposite. Yeah, I do like, like, I just, I picture them talking and they're going really poorly, and Trump says, let's talk about it tomorrow. And he's like, okay, maybe we can save this relationship. And then, of course. It's just like, it's been cheating on him with Mike Pompey. Trump, like, is many bad things. He's all the bad things, but petty is what he's the most, I think.

Well, for a guy who seems to care a lot about optics and his own image, he's managed to, you know, be the worst president in U.S. history. I mean, everyone is always criticizing him with the exception of power hungry members of his own administration and right-wing media. Well, optics for him is not the traditional way that we think, you know, how someone's supposed to appear presidential, he wants to consistently appear strong, but he's too dumb to actually appear strong, so he just appears petulant and petty. So that's, he's not bright enough to pull off the PR stunt that he's trying to consistently

do, which is that of a competent president, a strong president, and he doesn't know how to actually maneuver it because he's not that bright. Yeah. Right. Now Bolton no longer working in the Trump administration is not a bad thing. Oh, it's a great thing. A notable warhawk, he is a warmonger. It was very clear that there were disagreements between himself and Donald Trump when it came

to possibly invading Iran. And I'm glad that Trump called off an airstrike in response to Iran shooting down a US drone. I mean, in any potential conflict the United States has, Bolton has attempted to push both Donald Trump and successfully, previous administrations into more war. So I'm glad that Bolton's out. But that's not to say that he wouldn't be replaced by someone who's even worse. You never know who Trump could replace him with. Now right now, he's being replaced by some other individual.

I don't know too much about him yet. K.T. McFarland is his name. But it's gonna be temporary. And when he does get replaced by someone, I'm worried it could be someone who is just as hawkish, if not more hawkish than John Bolton, but we'll see. Yeah, and let's also, I mean, it should be obvious, but let's bear in mind who put John Bolton in the position he was in, Donald Trump. Yeah.

I would assume knowing all you need to know about John Bolton's reputation, which is just that he's never met a group of non-white people that he wants to blow up, and yet he chose him. And so you don't get points, you just get back up to zero from the negative you went into when you chose John Bolton as your advisor. And the reason why he chose John Bolton is because they agreed on tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, but they disagreed on what to do moving forward, because Trump surprisingly wanted to take a more diplomatic role in negotiating with Iran, whereas Bolton just wanted

to invade. Yeah, because no one who isn't this much of a warmonger wants to invade Iran. It's four times the size of Iraq, we already know how much of a disaster that was. And apparently when you read more into it, people like Steve Manuching were massaging Trump's ego basically saying that, you know, you didn't want to go to the Iraq war. into the Iraq war, but Bolton did, so he's been wrong on this. Why would you trust him? And Mnuchin didn't really like that he was pushing for the tariffs and all of that.

So Trump's, it wasn't his anti-interventionist tendencies that caused him to fire Bolting, which is what ideally, that's what we'd want. It was his ego per usual. Yeah, and I remain incredibly worried about what's going to happen with Iran. Because it's one thing, like, as you rightly pointed out, he canceled the airstrike after okaying theirstrike. That's right. And he did rip up the Iran nuclear cords, which material increases the odds of a war with them,

and also of them developing the nuclear weapons that will be used as the pretext for a war with them. So, I mean, look, I guess Trump is less of a hawk than John Bolton, but so is virtually every human that's ever lived. So I don't know how much credit he deserves. I mean, Lindsay Graham might be either on the same page in terms of hawkishness or even more hawkish. McCain was rough too, but yeah. McCain was rough, but he's not in the equation anymore. So I do want to go to this next video because it features Pompeo, Mike Pompeo, and just pay close attention to his tone.

He seems almost jovial, and he does draw attention to some disagreements. Take a look. Did John Bolton get fired or did he quit and did he leave the White House because he disagreed with you in particular over toxic totality? So last night, the president asked for Ambassador Bolton's resignation. As I understand it, it was received this morning. Was it because of this disagreement? I'll leave to the president to talk about the reasons he made decision.

But I would say this. The president's entitled to the staff that he wants. I don't talk about the inner workings of how this all goes. We all give our candid opinions. There were many times Ambassador Bolton and I disagree. That's to be sure. But that's true for lots of people with whom I interact. My mission said, as always, to make sure as I run the Department of State is to deliver America's diplomacy.

I know everyone's talked about this for an awfully long time. There were definitely places that Ambassador and I, Bolton and I, had different views about how we should proceed. Well, he has Mnuchin going over his shoulder. Those were the two amigos who basically ousted him. And they're just grinning to each other, like talking behind the scenes. We got the guy out. It's, I mean, their days are numbered. We all know how Trump operates.

We all know that Trump has loyalty to no one. Mike Pompeo might think he's in Trump's good graces today by sucking up to him and giving him everything he wants. But one small, even misconception that Trump has toward Pompeo, let's say Pompeo might appear to be a little too overly ambitious within the administration, you're gone. It's a very thin line, Pompeo, so you might be snickering and laughing now. But again, your days are numbered. Everyone's days are numbered if you're in the Trump administration.

But one conversation I wanted to have was, you know, Pompeo says, I think the president should be able to surround himself with a bunch of yes men who enable him and do everything he wants. And so my question is, look, I think that it makes sense to have members of your cabinet, you know, have a similar philosophy maybe, a similar ideology, worldview, whatever it is. But you want to surround yourself with people who are willing to challenge you because no human being is perfect. So let's say, let's take Trump out of the equation. Let's just put President Perfect in, you know, in that position.

Now even President Perfect has flaws. No one's actually perfect. I know that I'm not perfect. I know that I like to be challenged on some of my preconceived notions because that helps me grow, that helps me make better decisions. In the executive branch, does it make sense to surround yourself with a bunch of yes men? If you actually want to run government correctly. Well, that was part of the criticism of Bush, right, was that he surrounded himself consistently

with yes men because he was too intellectually and curious to actually ask these large questions. It's the same thing with Trump times a million. He's the most intellectually and curious man on the face of the planet. And when you look more and read more details about the firing of Bolton, Bolton and Pompeo apparently largely agreed about how to handle Iran, how to handle North Korea, but disagreed on how to handle Trump, how to handle him. So basically, Bolton wanted to push him, push him, push him to be more belligerent. And Pompeo wanted to be more sleazy about it, even though their end goals were still the same.

More war, more brown Muslims bombed and killed indiscriminately, more belligerents towards North Korea, more military industrial complex getting enriched and more donors getting their pockets filled. Yeah, and in terms of their, you mentioned deferring on how to handle Trump. I mean, he demonstrated that he knows how he's supposed to handle Trump there. He knows exactly what happened with the resignation versus fire. But he knows if he says that he'll probably be fired. He can't acknowledge reality because he knows that he's working for a four-year-old in a really

old body. That's it, really. He gets that. You asked, wouldn't you want a team of people who would question you if you wanted to run government properly? Yes, if that's what you wanted to do. But we know that for Trump, I mean, is that in the top 20 of his priorities? Let me just be clear.

I mean, you want people who might challenge you on certain policy proposals or executive action you might want to take. I mean, no one wants to surround themselves with people who constantly question everything they do and challenge everything they do. But in this case, I mean, look at what Trump has successfully done. He immediately gets rid of people who challenge him. He gets rid of people who he deems too ambitious, who might want to outshine him in the administration. Just to give you a little history lesson, and it's very recent history, Trump has had three national

security advisors, Bolton, Michael Flynn, and H.R. McMaster. In his defense, one of them was a criminal, so he couldn't hold on him for very long. One of them. Yeah, well, yeah, you know, an easily identifiable criminal. Fair enough. Under our system. And there's been nothing but chaos within his administration when it comes to other roles. Trump has also churned out two Homeland Security Secretaries, John Kelly, and Kirsten Nielsen, and a National Security Agency Director, Mike Rogers. He's lost a deputy National Security Advisor, K.T. McFarland, oh, I'm sorry, KT. McFarland was a former national security advisor. I had mentioned earlier that he was replacing Bolton, but that's not the case.

And an ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coates, and his deputy, Sue Gordon, left their posts last month. So, again, it's complete and utter chaos within this administration, and it just continues on and on. If you don't agree with everything Trump wants, he's going to come for you. Yeah, and everybody should have predicted it because we knew from his business career that this is how he was, he just wants yes men, which is, which is again, like, this is something I've been saying for two years now, like that the Trump supporters say that Trump is an example of a strong alpha person.

He's literally a demonstration on a daily basis of every way that a man can be weak. And your inability to have your views questioned is not strength. Lincoln had his team of rivals, he's got a team of rodents, that's all that's left on the sinking ship. You should be able to surround yourself with people who are smarter in their areas that you are. Doesn't mean that you have to follow what they say, but you should at least listen to their advice. Trump, when he was talking, I think it was about Afghanistan, he said, I take my own advice.

What does that even mean? I don't know. The only thing it means is we have a pathetic president. That's all that it means in practice. So Hogan Gidley, who is the press secretary for the White House, says that Charles Cupperman will be the individual temporarily replaced. bolton. And we'll see how this all plays out later. Well, Sean Hannity needs time to move his stuff into the White House.

God. I think I need a break just to recover from the thought of that. So let's do that. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we have more news for you, including people in the federal government facing insane threats by our Commerce Secretary if they disagree with Trump publicly. We need to talk about a relatively new show. called Un-F-The-Republic, or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful.

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the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional wisdom and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school.

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all at the same time. Right back. Hey guys, welcome back to TYT. I love our members, but I feel like we've been neglecting TYT live a little bit. So I'm gonna start with TYT live and then go to members' comments. Electic miscellaneous says, wow, Bolton Live tweeting Fox News. Let's hope he doesn't find out about us on TYT Live. We don't need any war criminals around here.

I'm a Derpy Dragon says, let's not celebrate too early. Horrible chicken hawks are a dime a dozen, trained and educated at our most elite, institutions, cut off one head, two more shall take its place. Hail Hydra. All right, and then I want to read a few. I get that reference. I don't get it. It's superheroes stuff.

It's a Captain America thing. Okay, then I feel less bad about not getting it. Cognos, Cognosco, this says, between two liars there's no truth. The high guy, these remember comments, ooh, the high guy, says, I was thinking about, because we're doing old school tonight, Emma. Oh, that's gonna be a fun. Old school. Should we have a little ex-ma? Maybe.

Maybe. We'll talk about it later. All right, the high guy says, I mean, I always thought this administration was high school-esque. This just cemented it into reality. I mean, really though? Like last week with all of the Sharpie, you know, controversy. I mean, there were so many things even before this. Yes, it's high school as they're crazy.

True North remember says Emma, John and Anna, is it Friday already? What a power panel. Oh, thank you. Can I make a quick comment about the video you played? Yeah, of course. So we showed the Killmead thing, right? Yeah. And I don't watch that show.

Do either of you watch that show at all? Regularly. Regularly? Yeah. So he interrupted her. So she was reading off of Twitter on her phone. And he interrupted her to say that he had been texting on his phone. Is that what the show is?

Are they all just like browsing their phone though? That was two out of five people in the panel were actively disengaged. Like, can you imagine? Can you imagine if we were doing that? In their porridge in the morning anyway. Yeah, that's true. Why are we even caring about their programming? I just can't imagine if you were presenting, I looked over in Emma's like on Instagram.

Can you imagine? I mean, that used to happen. That used to happen on the show. I mean, Ben has his computer on the desk. Yeah, that's true. But I'm used to it, it's fine. My favorite was when Ben would interrupt me in the middle of presenting a story to tell me about what he just read online in regard to the story that I had.

I'm in the middle of presenting. Like, let me finish presenting the story. Anyway, I love Ben. And let's move on to the rest of the news. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had allegedly threatened individuals working for the NOAA with firing them if they continue to contradict Donald Trump and his allegations that Hurricane Dorian was going to negatively impact Alabama. Now this story was originally reported by the New York Times.

And now a couple of Democratic lawmakers are calling for Wilbur Ross to get fired, which means that Donald Trump will likely protect him. Let's just keep it real, why would Trump listen to Democratic lawmakers? But nonetheless, I give them credit for speaking out. Representative Paul Tonko is one of those representatives, and he says, quote, reporting now suggests that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross put the safety of countless Americans at risk by compromising Americans hurricane warning system just to protect the president's ego. If these reports are true, Secretary Ross needs to take responsibility and resign.

Good luck with that. Now, Representative Don Byers says, quote, Wilbur Ross does not deserve the trust of the American people or place in the cabinet, and he should be dismissed immediately. Now, just to give you some more details on what Ross did, according to the Times, Ross threatened to fire top employees at the Federal Scientific Agency responsible for weather forecast last Friday after the agency's Birmingham, office contradicted President Trump's claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama.

And this is according to three people familiar with the discussion. And the tweet that upset both Trump and Ross was this one. It said Alabama will not see any impacts from Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. So, the National Weather Service, the Birmingham division of it, tweeting the truth about how Alabamaans don't need to worry about Hurricane Dorian upset Donald Trump and Ross. And people were threatened with firings if they didn't change course.

Yeah, I think Bernie Sanders, I think, has been very rightly pointing out over the last few days that this is just another instance of his authoritarian approach to government that whether Donald Trump told Wilber Ross to say this or not, Wilbur Ross knows who he's working for. And he knows that there cannot be, like reality has to just be shaped to fit whatever Trump says. And to give you an idea of how dangerous this is, it's easy for us to look at this situation where Trump mistakenly thought that a state was gonna get hit that wasn't. And when it wasn't, he kept doubling down and saying that it would have.

There was not much like risk there, like people weren't going to be hit. But what if he said that a state was going to be hit? And they're now thinking, well, do we warn people that they should perhaps leave and then lose our jobs? People's lives could be on the line, hypothetically, if people who are supposed to be warning us about hurricanes or God knows what other natural disasters suddenly have to pretend that it's not coming because they're worried that their careers will be ended if they say something. Well, that is authoritarianism at its very core, right?

Which is this infection of government institutions because of the personality of the leader. This is nothing except just catering to his ego. It serves no other governmental purpose. And this is what democracy is supposed to be, literally government for the people, by the people. But right now it's government for the one by the one. And it's becoming a huge problem with our institutions that they're supposed to be separate from all of this. I mean, you're a huge believer in science.

We all are, but you talk about climate change so much. From your perspective, how disturbing is this, I would ask you? In the particular area of climate science, I'm not super surprised that once again they're telling us that the science shouldn't matter because we know they purge the online databases, the EPA is like a just a cruel joke about what it used to be, obviously. But Republicans just do have an authoritarian approach to government. The idea that all the federal bureaucracy is there to help out Trump, that is simply not the case.

There are political appointees, he gets to choose a certain number of people, but there are career civil servants who last from president to president, and they're there to make sure that the government works, regardless of who the president is. Political loyalty should not even enter into the equation, and especially when it comes to anything having to do with natural disasters. The actual real threats to our lives, not the fake, made-up ones that we focus on a lot of the time because of the pronouncements of presidents like Trump and others. The idea that this would be perverted to the will of one petulant man, that is sad. That should be sad for everyone. It's ungoverning. Making all of the institutions that are neutral and arm of the president and the rest of it,

it's just dismantling it so government doesn't work. So if it's not something that's a direct trickle down from what the president wants, then it's basically dismantled and done away with because they don't want government to work. They want industry to run rampant. And the parts that actually are supposed to be siloed as government institutions, they have to become direct arms of whatever Donald Trump wants. You know, one of the things, just to buttress the point that you're making, one of the moves that Steve Mnuchin is making right now, along with Donald Trump, is pushing for further

deregulation of the housing market in order to make it even easier than it was before for the type of predatory lending and the type of predatory activity we saw when it came to real estate. And so this is something that's getting very little coverage. I really wanna talk about it on the show, I'll prepare the story for tomorrow, because it's something that is just gonna happen if people in the media aren't hyper-focused on the type of corrupt self-enrichment that happens in this administration. And we've talked about some of that self-enrichment too when it comes to Trump properties.

We're gonna talk about that later in the show today as well. But I do wanna bring up one other common criticism that I'm seeing toward the media for covering the Sharpie gate story, right? So look, I know it seems petty. I know it seems like in the grand scheme of things, is this really a big deal? Trump lying about Hurricane Dorian potentially impacting Alabama. Look, in and of itself, when you consider all the other things going on, maybe it's not the most important story, I get it.

But it's what this story communicates to the rest of the country and to the rest of the world. Trump is willing to throw anyone and everyone under a bus just so he doesn't have to admit that he was wrong. Now think about that for a second. The very people who go after, let's say, the New York Times or Washington Post for getting a fact wrong, and they claim, oh, they didn't retract it, they didn't apologize enough. These are the same people who'll turn around at Trump and just say, yeah, yeah, he lied, what's the big deal?

What's a big deal about? No, it's a big deal because the president of the United States needs to be honest to the American people and when he's caught in a lie and it's a blatant, brazen, obvious lie, he needs to take ownership of that and just say, hey, sorry about that, I was wrong, let's move on. And by the way, that's what a strong, confident person does. They admit they were wrong and they move on. And Trump can't do that. What happened?

I'll add that to the book on male weakness. Trump just can't do it. It's frustrating. And to a, just to make a broader point, and this isn't. necessarily just about Trump, it's just about politics in general, right? Just this inability to apply the same standards to everyone, not just your preferred politician, right? If you have specific standards and you claim that those are your values and your principles, and I'm talking about the right and the left, then you need to apply those standards and those principles to every

candidate. And that is not what's happening in this country at all. Well, that would require politics being rational and not emotional. It's not. It's 100% emotional. Yeah, it's. It's amazing. But that's why, I mean, I get into these, we're getting off topic here, but I think I just want to make this point quickly. I get into these arguments with people saying, oh, you know what Bernie Sanders is arguing isn't practical, what the progressives want isn't practical, we have to come up with solutions that will actually happen, be pragmatic.

Even if you think it's not going to happen and fine, I think shooting for the moon and then working towards compromise is the way to go, like, it doesn't, it's irrelevant. Trump said he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it. Then he got elected to be president of the United States, it's all emotional, all the time. Agreed. Cinebar Tab, who's one of our members, just wrote in and asked an important question, and I want to clarify this. Isn't Ross, the Commerce Secretary, what is he doing speaking to the NOAA?

It's because the NOAA is actually under the Commerce Department, so he does have control over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is terrifying. It's part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. All right, so let's move on to some other news. Earlier we reported that the Air Force had launched an investigation into members of the military who had been staying at a Trump property in Scotland. In fact, more and more federal money, taxpayer money has been spent at that specific resort throughout Trump's presidency.

And so the question is, hey, is there maybe a violation of the emoluments cause? Is there a waste of taxpayer money here? And what we've just learned is that Trump actually had a small deal, not a small deal. He had a significant deal with a small airport near his resort. And he had created that deal back in 2014, and then in 2015, he starts running for office. And that is the year where you can see activity at his resort increase substantially. So let's look at the reporting here. And this is the Trump Turnberry property in Scotland.

Documents obtained from Scottish government agencies show that the Trump organization and Trump himself played a direct role in setting up an arrangement between the Turnberry resort and officials at Glasgow Prestwick Airport. So as Trump began running for president, the Pentagon decided to ramp up its use of the same airport to refuel Air Force flights and gave the local airport authority, I'm sorry, gave the local airport authority the job of helping to find accommodations for flight crews who had to remain overnight. So it was kind of like a perfect cocktail for Donald Trump because he had created this

deal back in 2014, right? And Trump's like, hey, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine. I will direct more air travel through your airport as long as you direct more people. to stay in my resort. That was the deal. Then in 2015, the Pentagon comes in and decides, hey, we're gonna use this small airport in Scotland more often for refueling purposes. And so at that point, you know, Trump, or I should say this airport through Trump, starts

directing more people to stay at that resort. As part of that arrangement, the Trump organization worked to get Trump Turnberry added to a list of hotels that the airport would routinely send air crews to. even though the Turnberry resort is 20 miles from the airport farther away than many other hotels and has higher advertised prices. To the point where, as I'm sure you talked about when we initially reported on this, their per diem couldn't even buy them food. It wasn't enough to actually pay for it.

There's no reasonable reason why you would send them there. It is simply corruption. And as you pointed out, it had been in the works for a few years. And then you see 2017, the number of flights shoots up, 2018, even more. By 2018, it's more than five times what it was just three years earlier. Yeah, that's the most damning part of it. I mean, it would have been a fine deal if he weren't president of the United States, right? He's working in the hotel business.

So that sounds totally reasonable. The only thing he knows how to do is like take two things together and make a deal out of them, even if it's in the end going to bankrupt him. He always is trying to make these little things work. But when it comes to presidenting, he has no idea what he's doing, obviously. And he had no idea that something like this would be obvious to the rest of the, of us, if you just do a little bit of digging, it's problematic. He doesn't even understand what the Emoluments Clause means.

And I mean, this is just yet another example of Trump using the office of the president to enrich himself, to enrich his family, to make more money, and honestly waste finite resources on whatever makes him and his family wealthy, wealthier. So Trump was confronted about this by reporters. He doesn't do press conferences anymore. He usually speaks in front of a loud helicopter or Air Force One. So unfortunately, that's the type of audio quality we're dealing with. But nonetheless, let's take a look.

When a plane stops at a massive international airport and gets fuel, I don't own the airport. When pilots stay, I own a lot of different places, soon you'll find that out. Because I'll be at some point prior to the election, I'm going to be given out a financial report of me and it'll be extremely complete. I'm gonna give out, I'm gonna give out my financial condition and you'll be extremely shocked that the numbers are many, many times what you think. I don't need to have somebody take a room overnight at a hotel. Except you have defrauded students in the past just to make a buck.

I mean, through Trump University, that is exactly what Donald Trump did, he was found guilty of that, had to pay a settlement to the tune of $22 million. So he is beyond petty and beyond selfish and greedy. So I 100% believe that he would forge these types of deals in an effort to make a buck. And he doesn't understand the difference between government and financial institutions because he's the natural Frankenstein of the Republican Party that has so connected and interwoven industry, corruption, or through corruption, industry, corporations with what the government does, that he's just doing it.

it out in the open now, and it's just all okay for him, because he's not bright enough to see it, but he is what the GOP has created and what our broken campaign finance system has created. And the reason why he's able to do it out in the open, let's keep it real. The GOP was never going to hold him accountable. Why would they? Right. I mean, they're so tribalistic in the way that they deal with members of their own party.

They will never hold any member of their own party accountable. Don't equate them with the left, which, in my opinion, the left goes too far in nitpicking every little thing when it comes to members of the right. Like the perspective of how we hold them accountable is from the right. Right, exactly. And one other thing I wanted to add though is in our system of government where we're supposed to have checks and balances, who would hold him accountable? It would be Congress.

And what's Congress doing, specifically what's democratic leadership doing? Nothing. So if you communicate to Trump through your inaction that he's above the law, then he's going to continue enriching himself, he's gonna continue breaking the law, and he's gonna be brazen He's going to be super transparent about it. One other thing I wanted to note is that the Trump organization executives held a series of meetings with the airport officials to negotiate terms that would lead to referrals, the documents show.

I mentioned that earlier. As a list of hotels that we use, and this is a statement by a manager at the airport, as a list of hotels that we use for our business, being honest, Turnberry was always last on the list because of price. That was an email from back in June of 2015. But because of the deal, all of a sudden the airport is now suggesting that people stay at Trump's property. So going back to what we had talked about yesterday, and I think it's important to reiterate these numbers, the number of such stops by the Air Force planes rose from 180 in 2017 to 257 last year and 259.

So far this year, the 259 stops this year included 220 overnight stays at Trump's property. Since October of 2017, records show 917 payments for expenses, including fuel at the airport, worth a total of $17.2 million. And as we mentioned yesterday, the federal government has spent a total of $5.6 million at the Trump property since 2015. In the four years prior, okay, when Obama was president, the federal government spent a total of $119,000. He is robbing the U.S. taxpayer, and he's doing it transparently while Nancy Pelosi sits back

and refuses to impeach him. We got to take a break. We have more news for you when we come back, including Betsy DeVos and what she's doing to students drowning in student loans. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech.

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And if you go to ExpressVPN.com slash T-Y-T, you can get three extra months for free with this exclusive link just for T-Y-T fans. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash T-YT. Check it out today. We hope you're enjoying this free clip from The Young Turks. If you want to get the whole show and more exclusive content, while support. Reporting Independent Media, become a member at t-y-t.com slash join today. In the meantime, enjoy this free second. I have news to report from the break. John Iderola on Seth Rogan.

He's okay, I guess. That's not. I don't mean in terms of talent. Complete BS. I was responding to particular comments. I like him in his movies. We were discussing the movie Longshot. Yeah.

And I randomly decided to watch it one day, and I really enjoyed. And so did Emma. I haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen it yet. You should watch it. Although I think he did produce or EP Amazon's The Boys. Yes. Which you should definitely watch because the boys is awesome.

This is the second time you've talked about the boys to me today. You brought up Seth Rogan. I know. If you bring up Aaron Moriarty, I'll talk about it again. And please do. So some member comments for you guys. Carla Fornia. I get it.

You know we are in for an especially egregious report when analysts out a big side just before launching a I don't know that too. Sorry about that. I didn't realize I did it. I noticed it and I was like, man, we're really at that phase in like, you know, the election where it's just like every story has started with, it wasn't even an election story, it was just the Trump. I know, but it starts to wear on you. It does, it does, yeah.

Cray Cuffet says surprise that Wilbur Ross is awake long enough to have the energy to fire anybody. Oh man, I kept just focusing on his nose hairs and I was getting out. Oh, I noticed that too. Just take out loans if the government is... That's the one, that's it. Yeah, that's the crystallization. And Jay Hufford says, of course he thought he could get away with it. He thought he wouldn't, he thought we wouldn't notice he used a Sharpie.

I have to say, like, I am a little impressed by reporters who caught that because I don't know, I wouldn't think to... No, actually, you know what? It was probably more obvious in person. You should fact check everything he says. So the second he pulled up that map, yeah, you want to see the original one. I believe it was a reporter on Twitter. That was where I originally saw it. And ever since, I just thought if he'd used a white pen, you idiot, why did you use a black

Sharpie? He's an idiot. That's true. All right, well, let's move on to a story that's infuriating, especially if you care about this country's future and student loan debt. The Education Department rejected 99% of applications coming from students looking for debt forgiveness. These are individuals who are loaded with student loan debt and there are supposed to be government

programs that offer them some relief. Now ironically, the Education Department under Betsy DeVos alleged that they were expanding this program to offer more assistance to students. But if you look at the numbers and if you look at this report by the government accountability, office, she's done the exact opposite. The report by the GAO says there were 54,184 completed applications between May of 2018 and May of 2019 for the temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness program. Out of those, 53,523 were denied and only 661 were approved. So about 99% of them were rejected. And I want to just give you a little more information about this government

program because it isn't simply, oh, I have too much student loan debt, so please forgive me. First of all, I think that they should get rid of all student loan debt because that would definitely help our economy. But putting that aside, this program was specifically for individuals who agreed to take public service jobs, work in those jobs for 10 years, and pay their loan little by little throughout those 10 years. If they followed those standards after the decade was up, they were supposed to have their student loan debt, the rest of their student loan debt forgiven. But that is not what's going on. Now, let me give you some information on how Congress tried to help the Education Department

and, of course, the Education Department did little to nothing to help students. Congress expanded the program in 2018 to help students who were having trouble securing loan forgiveness through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Now, this program, again, was created in 2007. Congress set aside $700 million for the program's extension, and just 27 million of that has been used. So they're just handing them a bucket of money, and they're just not doing anything with it. They're not doing anything with it.

To help people, to help students and people who want to be public servants and part of the government, not just who wanted to get an education in the vague sense, but who wanted to actually help people, help the government, did exactly what they were supposed to do. do and no, no, drown in debt and have that go to big banks and companies that are entirely predatory on young people who just want to get an education and sign on the dotted line. No, no, no, no, no. Make sure that that's where that money stays. Yeah, so understand, if you are a student who followed the rules and you were supposed to have this debt forgiven, there is hundreds of millions of dollars more, actually, because

the Congress actually expanded the program. So there was already funding for it. Congress provided hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding. Just understand that rather than helping you with that money, the education department under Betsy DeVos's leadership has decided to give you a big fat middle finger and tell you to F off. Yeah. Now the GAO said that one of the issues is that the education department's application process is unclear and confusing and difficult to navigate through, which is part of the reason why some of these applications were submitted inaccurately with some mistakes here and there.

And so the GAO is suggesting that the education department improve the way this application process is done. And Betsy DeVos responded with, well, it would be nice if they gave us some funding and some time to get this done. You have the funding, you've had plenty of time, but we know what Betsy DeVos is all about. No, she just wants to keep it as convoluted as possible so she can keep it. taking money out of your pockets and just not doing anything to help you when you want to get an education. That's where her priorities lie as a billionaire who earned nothing of her money personally.

Her and her brother are basically what trust fund kids who got a lot of this money themselves. And then she has the audacity to be the head of a government institution that just sits on hundreds of millions of dollars that could help young people. And then the Republicans wonder why the GOP doesn't have any young people on their side. What, if they wanna pay off their debt, why don't they just sell one of their yachts, pay for it that way? Yeah, it's absurd. They can do whatever they want, they're in power, the EPA can trash the environment, the Department of Education can screw over students, they can do whatever they want now.

And I'm so glad that Congress is back in session. Today, AOC, during a committee meeting, she made a student loan payment and then talked about how devastating paying for her student loans has been. So she's putting attention on this. Bernie Sanders has his plan to relieve student debt. That would fix this problem, obviously. He just cancel it. Exactly, cancel the whole thing.

And I wanna give him credit in one other way, because I know this is random. I know a lot of people hate hearing this, but I've been rereading his book, Where We Go From Here, that he released- Oh, I hate hearing that. No, not that, not that part, but what comes after? And in his prolog, he talks about the 2016 election, and he lays out in great detail why it was 100% unacceptable for Donald Trump to become president. And that was why he campaigned so hard for Hillary to beat him. And it was that once they get power, they can affect your life in the lives of countless

Americans in so many ways. And like, I don't know if this particular story is like the 50th worst thing they've done or the 70th, but tens of thousands of Americans who could have gotten their debt relieved, have no chance of it happening as long as Donald Trump is in power. And it's just another reminder that the people who knew that this was coming and fought so hard to stop it, like, this is what power is. It's the power to ruin lives. And that's what they're doing every day.

Americans today have more debt than they did at the peak of the last financial collapse. And I bring that up because as Mick Mulvaney warned GOP donors, there's a recession coming. And there is a recession coming at a time when the government and the economy's been expanding. Obviously it's been working specifically for those at the very top. But the vast majority of Americans have not recovered from the last. recession. So if the next recession hits and it hits soon, I mean, can you imagine the financial position the majority of Americans are going to be in today? Oh, no. And if Republicans were smart, they would work to cancel this debt because then the people who, the students who had all this

debt would start buying homes, which they're unable to do now. And then they could be predatory with those loans and those payments then. But they're so damn worried about the short term benefits of the interest payments of the student loans that they're not going to think forward with their greed. I'm just giving you free advice to rip off the rest of us if you guys want to. Well, and by the way, as we know, the Trump administration is doing its part to deregulate any of the laws put in place after the last financial collapse. But more importantly, the predatory lending is already happening.

It's just not happening at the big banks, it's happening with non-bank lenders. In 2016, more than 50% of home mortgages were provided by these non-bank lenders. And if you read reports on their business practices, they are very much willing to sign loans to people who have incredibly low credit scores, people who just went bankrupt, because it's all about the numbers. By the way, enabled by Democrats like Mark Warner in the Senate, who allowed for predatory loan shark companies like that to just have even more power and deregulation. Our future looks bright.

I think you deserve a good amount of credit, both on air and just in the office. You're constantly warning about the coming housing crash. So we're not experts, I guess, in that way, but be careful and thank you for focusing on that. Yes. Yes. All right, so let's move on to the Koch brothers. The Koch Foundation is well known for using its money to influence elections.

But it also has other ways of swaying individuals to vote for candidates that go along with their political ideology. So Charles Koch has actually expanded his political influence through using consumer data that the Koch Foundation has collected to push very targeted ads toward individuals who might believe things like migrants are coming, they're dangerous, we need to look out for them. In fact, they have a whole organization known as I-360, which not only collects this consumer data, but uses it to target individuals with these types of ads. This was reported on by Lee Fong over at the Intercept, excellent reporting as always, and

it profiles Marsha Blackburn's Senate race in Tennessee and how she won. So let me give you the details. Koch sprawling political networks in-house technology company has mine consumer data to motivate Republican voters with dehumanizing messages that depict immigrants as invading, as an invading army of criminals and potential terrorists. Marsha Blackburn's anti-immigrant ads were distributed using an empirical approach to motivating Republican voters. The Blackburn campaign had turned to Koch's I-360 campaign or company to develop a series

of custom predictive models to peel Republican voters away from her opponent, Phil Bredesen. Now, as we know, she unfortunately won in that Senate race, but to give you an idea, Americans for Prosperity, the primary political advocacy arm of the Koch network spent $5.6 million to support Blackburn's Senate run through its nonprofit and super PAC arm. Now, with that said, you know, Marsha Blackburn hires I-360 to help her out. She realizes, oh, there's some portion of Tennessee Republicans who are anti-immigrant. that motivates them, that's their passion. And so we need to target our ads to them. And so she starts using these completely inaccurate ads about her political opponent to push the message out.

We're going to show you a compilation of some of those ads in this next clip. Take a look. A caravan of 14,000 illegal immigrants is marching on America. But Phil Bredison? A few thousand very poor people is not a threat. Phil Bredison gave driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. It was Phil Bredison who, quote, lured illegal immigrants to Tennessee. Gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists. Phil Bredison opposes the Trump immigration ban.

Phil Bredesen, he won't stop illegal immigration because he lured it. Phil Bredesen, dangerously wrong for Tennessee. Marsha Blackburn will stand with Trump to build the wall and stop the caravan. So I can't help myself. I gotta do at least one fact check before we open this up about I-360. But Bredesen was actually the one who did away with what the previous Republican governor did with handing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. It was actually a Republican governor who did that.

Bredison gets elected and he scrapped it. But nonetheless, it doesn't matter, he didn't win. Marsha Blackburn won, and there are consequences to that because she's a terrible person. Yeah, and this is why I think worrying about the Russia disinformation campaign is a little myopic, right? Because it is an issue, it's a big issue. But disinformation like this, paid for by super PACs and people with a lot of money, who now the Supreme Court says that this is speech when it's actually propaganda, that's as big

of a problem, if not just as big of a problem, or a bigger problem is what I meant. Because really, when all of these semi-legitimate big donors are able to fund these information arms and target people specifically from within the country with less covertness, they're still able to do just as much damage. And it's terrifying. People genuinely now believe that Phil Bredesing was like doing this with driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Yeah, it would be cool if people had any ability whatsoever.

to like see an ad and know whether it's true or not, to care, to fact check it, but people don't have those defenses. It is interesting because we have laws against false advertising when it comes to companies. I mean, they still find ways to be misleading. But when it comes to political ads, you can just straight up lie. You can say anything you want. Yeah, yeah. That's the Trump rallies.

And we know that Facebook, which is a big source of this sort of stuff, they're not going to do anything, they don't care, they're making tons of money off of it. Trump's, I've had a Judlegum on multiple times he's been doing analyses of Trump's campaign spending on Facebook and he's just violating their terms of left and right and they don't do anything. Doesn't matter, because they're spending millions of dollars and Facebook wants that money. So they're not gonna do anything and people don't have the psychological guards necessary to not realize that they're being manipulated.

People get radicalized with no, they have no idea that they're being manipulated in the way that they are. Someone will start watching Alex Jones because it's a little bit funny and then two years later they really think that frogs are being turned gay. Like they just, you don't know when you start watching a show what damage it can do to you or where it can take you in the end. Yeah, and these large companies that are tech giants online. I mean, that's why I think what Elizabeth Warren did about the outset of her campaign was so important.

I went to one of her rallies and covered it in the area where Amazon was supposed to be, where she talked about breaking up big tech, because these companies, especially Facebook when we're talking about disinformation, have a monopoly over all this information that is being consumed, and people think it's gone through some filtration process when it actually hasn't. They should be regulated as public utilities as opposed to these free-flowing megacorporations like they are, because they control the revenue streams for a lot of companies, some political companies as well, media companies, and there's no regulation on what the content is.

One thing I wanted to quickly add, though, is, you know, when it comes to the right wing, we have to really pay attention to strategy and how well organized they are, because with the Koch brothers, like just focusing on them alone, you have, of course, the campaign funding, there's the money, but it's a multi-pronged approach. They go into universities and they donate billions of dollars to get, you know, the science department to not only put their name on their buildings, but it influences the science department in a way. So you, they're focusing. on education. They're focusing on these disinformation campaigns and these very targeted ads through, by the way, data that they're mining through our consumer habits, which is also pretty terrifying. They've contracted with the DISH network in order to collect some of this data. So they're working with other corporations in order to do this. So it's a very well thought out multi-pronged approach in order to accomplish what they want

to accomplish. Then you have the Federalist Society that for decades has been pushing the right wing to stack the courts with conservative judges against our best interests. So I mention all this because the left needs to get its issue together, okay? Like we need to like think not only policy wise, but strategically. What is the best path forward? How can we get organized? How can we take a step back for a second and stop with the, hey, let's police this language

because this is the most important thing we want to do at this very moment, and instead focus on, hey, how do we get the right people elected, the right people who actually want to stand for the policies that we want to accomplish, right? I think that we get distracted by things too easily, that's just my take. We have to pay close attention to how they organize on the other side, because they're better at it than we are. They've got more money. They've got more money, there's no question, but we've got the people.

If you look at the polling and you look at where the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Americans are, they like progressive issues. So if you have the people, you have leverage there. You just have to find a way to mobilize and get it done. All right. John Iderola, Emma Viglin. Thanks for joining me for Hour 1. Thank you.

Hour 2 is next. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work. Listen ad-free. Access members, only bonus content, and more. subscribing to apple podcasts at apple.co slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you soon