 It's Wednesday, July 15th, it's 11 o'clock, it's Trump week. I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and this week's title of the show is Trump Gives Roger Stone a Get Out of Jail Card Free. Let me introduce our guest today. Today, Stephanie Dalton and Winston Welch. Good morning, everyone. How are you? Stephanie, let's go to you. As always, a fast and furious week, full of news stories that would, in normal times, would be two or three days of a news cycle. Now, it barely merits 10 hours, 15 hours of a news cycle because there's just so much. Drinking out of the fire hydrant, so to speak. Okay, well, you know, Stephanie? Donald Trump basically gave clemency to Roger Stone. He gave him the Get Out of Free jail card. Even opposed was the most loyal lackey for Donald Trump. That's William Barr, our attorney general. Even William Barr said he is guilty. What do you think is the most glaring issue of this clemency? Again, it wasn't a full pardon. It's basically he won't serve time. Well, it's a stunner again, but not surprising that Trump can deliver that, and I'm sure we're in for more. All of the work of the good people and who went through the trial with him is they must feel exhausted by it. But I think that he is eligible to be re-indicted, actually, in this arrangement. I'm no lawyer and I don't know the details. He's also eligible to continue his appeal. Okay, good. So I did hear that it might be if Trump becomes a private citizen again, he might just get picked up in there, whether it's unindicted co-conspirator, and I don't think that that's as big an issue with with the stone thing as it was with Michael, the lawyer. So I think there's a longer story here if anybody is going to have the energy to follow up on all of this work in the event that he is a private citizen and eligible for these investigations. So I'll look forward to that. I mean, it's just exhausting now, and we know that he'll follow all the others too. So I'm not sure that that's exactly what you wanted, but I've stopped really mulling on the very thing anymore. Well, I almost made the title of this show Trump's legal quid pro quo. And that is, hey, Roger, you don't talk about me and I'll get you out of the hot seed. Don't talk about what you know about me and all our shady dealings throughout the decades, and particularly during the 2016 election and your involvement with WikiLeaks and Russia. So, you know, Donald Trump has basically succeeded in burying that story and burying that testimony. Now, Republicans, they like law and order, and how does this smack with their sense of what law and order is when you basically give someone who is a self-admitted, self-confessed line to the FBI and also witness tampering? He pled guilty on both those counts. If you're a law and order type of person, how does this sit with you? Well, if I'm still being addressed here, I think it's demoralizing, devastatingly demoralizing, as you say, the Republicans stood for all of these principles and we're just not hearing anything back from them. We're not hearing any pushback and they're not hearing any reminders to the leader about, although he had, he did have the pushback on making the, to actually for performing the act and he paid absolutely no attention. So it's another, he's going to do what he wants to do, you know, without consideration for any consequences whatsoever, and that's one thing he's never had, and so that hopefully those will come after this. We may be around to witness those, or we may not, but right now there are no consequences because there are no tools for managing this, even though he is admittedly involved in it with Stone and Stone admitted that in the interview he gave to a reporter and it made it clear that they were covering for each other. So what are we supposed to do now? Yeah, what do you do now? Winston, same question. Let me ask you this. Donald Trump says repeatedly now that he is the law and order president. He drays himself more with a Confederate flag than he does the United States flag. He's the law and order president yet he does everything that smacks in the face of what is considered law and order and that is dishing out your clemency and or pardons to people that you know as a favor for keeping silent about you. Same question you is how does this smack in the face of people who believe in law and order, even Republicans? Well it's alternative law and order in an era of alternative facts, so it's, you know, it's not surprising at all and we are going to see more of it and what was the article I saw this morning? Will he pardon himself and is there, is that allowable? And the article is going on to say during the Clinton trial, which now seems like a kindergarten show, if I compare it, what it was, that they thought that there was the basis to do that, but that seems like and you know what, we just need to be rid of it. We need to move on as the nation, as a people. Every norm has been violated. Laws have been stretched and abused and manipulated to a point that we don't recognize what is law anymore and the type of order that he may have in mind is not what most Americans have in mind and so I think as we're coming clearer and we're coming up for air and you're seeing even a couple of heads breaking the surface from former Republicans lifting up and saying, oh wow, where have we been? What has gone on? You're just seeing basic starts of that as there may be some sort of movement away, but honestly Donald Trump is completely supported by his base. That is not going to change, so anybody who's viewing these pardons that are going to come down the pike as something that's wrong, they will not view it that way. They will view it that that is a political persecution that needed to be remedied by a presidential pardon and so I don't think it's going to matter at all and it doesn't matter what will Barr's, William Barr says, or Lindsey Graham or anybody else. Well, don't forget Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney, yes, one Republican that's left. What Mitt says is a course, at the moment, is Romney says it's true and that this is, you know, an incredible breach of public trust, but we wouldn't, shouldn't, would we expect anything less, I don't think so. Part of this question was continuation of a shift in the polling. Quinnipiac just came out today showing Donald Trump on a national level at least 15 points off from Joe Biden. Now, we weren't at 15 points, so I don't know if it's, you know, one catastrophe story after another that's contributing to these shifting polls, whether it's the, you know, the COVID-19 story that Donald Trump is going out of his way to ignore or is it his, you know, embracing the Confederate flag and racism as his strategy or is it now shifting the polls where it's, you know, these, these pardons and clemencies for these crooks, they're crooks and the bottom line is we don't know exactly what recipe is in the mix that's making these polls shift even wider than where they were from a week, two weeks ago. It seems like people are just exhausted and if they look around them at the trail of chaos and destruction that has happened over the last four years, it doesn't matter what vantage point you're looking from. Are you happier? Do you have better relationships now than you did four years ago? Are you tighter with your neighbors and your friends and your co-workers? Is our society more cohesive? Do we have stronger shared values as a nation? People are exhausted and I think that they're just looking for, yeah, I saw one never Trump or said he just assumed vote for a can of tomato soup at this point. And I think someone said I'd eat a tuna fish sandwich rather than vote for. Yeah, but we have to realize I think the important thing is that those polls, people not, you have people that absolutely support Donald Trump and whatever parts that they're supporting that are, it's hard for us to understand it but we need to understand it after he's gone and when he goes and hopefully we will have an election that results in a, I don't even call it a victory, but yeah, a win for Joe Biden but that is the beginning of some reconciliation and healing of the nation and that's where we really need to look and focus our energies because we have been so distracted and bamboozled and just hit between the eyes every single day over the last four years. It's been from the campaign that these assaults on our morals, values, integrity, all of that has been going on for so long that I'm looking forward to what's coming up and how do we begin to process this and heal as a people and try and understand and move on. And that's where maybe people are looking for and that is why the poll numbers are dropping. It's just like we cannot take four more years of this even if I do love 80% of what it has to say. Well, this poll number that I'm going to throw out here is going to kind of transition to our next topic in question. That is, you know, it's not just the 52, 37% shifting of national polls even in the swing states. Now, Joe Biden is in a 12, 13-point lead and so swing states of course are more important statistics than a national poll, but here's one that I think is really quite illuminating if you will and that is 70% of all parents are very, very concerned about sending their kids to school. And that does touch a lot of Donald Trump's base. That 70% cannot be Democrats and independence alone has to be some of Donald Trump's loyal followers. And by the way, their parents and I would think that even parents despite their politics do not want to use their children as experiments for Donald Trump's reelection desires and hopes and dreams. Winston, what do you think about that 70%? You're going to experience the same thing. Cognitive dissonance that we have had the entire time where you may be aghast at one policy, one statement, one whatever and even cumulatively, but there is a cognitive dissonance between that and then the reality of supporting the continuation of Donald Trump and everything that he stands for. So I don't, these polls, I don't put much stock in them because we saw where he was behind back with the race with Hillary and he came out ahead because people once they're behind that curtain or in the privacy of licking the stamp of putting on the envelope, however you're voting, they will, they may say one thing, but then they will do another. So until we get certified, and it has to be a big win so that there's no thing, so either he's going to go down kicking and screaming all the way there or he at some point will say I want to salvage whatever I have left and try and bring the nation together and have a magnanimous loss. I hope that's what we see. I mean, if anything else, it's just going to be disaster for our country or further disaster, but we'll pick up the pieces and we will move on and we will emerge. We're going to get to that question before the show is over on what a post-Trump government looks like just after this question here. So hey, Stephanie, if you're a parent and you're, you have children that are of school age, and let's say you're an avid Trump supporter, what are you going to do? Are you going to follow Donald Trump's political suggestion and forge ahead and bring your kids to school or are you going to think twice about it and you're going to do homeschool or basically reject Donald Trump's message? Well, remember that if I am that I have a voice and I'm powerful and I have a president who's doing things that I prefer be done by a president. So I have a particular comfort level with all of this, okay? On the other hand, if I have children and there is this bug out here, this is very scary and I probably will not be willing to risk a child getting sick, much less complicated illnesses, and much less dying would really send us back to some rudimentary behavior, I think, beyond civil disobedience. Donald Trump basically passed off California as a liberal state and it's a big mistake if they're going to do internet online learning, but that's California, what do you expect from them? Well, Texas just announced that they're going to do the exact same thing. They're going to go on to online education and they're going to reject Donald Trump's message about pushing forward through the open schools. I wanted to quote Arnie Duncan and he's been on a couple of times, who was Obama's Secretary of Education. Of course, we saw the current Secretary of Education be completely flabbergasted and inarticulate when she was asked on CNN what's the plan for an occurrence and that was kind of like asking her, you know, if there's a wild shooter in the hallways of elementary schools, what's your plan? Presumably there's a plan, but on this one with the virus she had no plan at all. And so then Arnie Duncan said that you might wait. Ronald, Donald Trump, there is for him, there is no number. There's no 50 kids dead. There's no hundred people dead. There's no 500 people gone. There's no thousands being sick and ill and on the way to those trucks that they're all hauling in now because they need more space for the bodies. That will not move him. He is totally unaffected by any of those numbers. So there is nothing there to motivate him to pay attention to the actual circumstances that he's putting the children in and the concerns that the parents have, much less the teachers who have to go in and be accosted by, you know, just multiple sources of infection potentially. So I think that that was good advice. He said do not pay attention to him. You go to your local leaders and your local people that you elected and put in place and they will make the decisions about the schools. So I think that that gives us a way of thinking about everything with any trying to solve the problem by Donald Trump is about he doesn't really care about it except in so far as it approaches his own needs to be elected. And he brought it up on the day that we had the book coming out by his niece. So it was brought up only because that he, it's not like he cared about getting the school topic on the agenda, but he was trying to distract from the niece's book coming out that day. So that was a good point. That's a good point, Stephanie. And, you know, this is going to illustrate a little bit of his thinking when asked about, you know, parents concerned about sending their children to school. Donald Trump basically said schools should be open, schools should be open, kids want to go to school, and they're losing a lot of our lives by keeping things closed. We saved a lot of lives, we saved millions of lives, and we did for the national good. So what he's doing, he's grasping on the fact that, well, two or three million people haven't died. So that's success. I mean, he's changed the narrative of what success looks like that is not two or three million lives lost. It's, you know, 137,000, and that's a big difference. It could have been two or three million. So he's trying to redefine the bar of success, and he's trying to ram that down the throat of parents that really aren't going to play ball with this idea. Well, not when it comes to the children. Not when it comes to children. Okay, I can understand people are distracted from that by the current concerns they all have themselves, but Trump is only interested in getting parents back to work. If he has any, or in the water here, it's only about getting the babysitting system going again. Not anything about the quality of education or the way it's going to be done, or preserving the lives of all the people in that industry. And that is what is so deplorable. Is it at no time has he spoken to the numbers of people that are down? And when he does it, it's kind of, you know, very sad. It's flat. It's flat. It just falls flat on his face. No empathy, no anything. No, I'm going to work, do everything I can to have not one more life given over to this bug. There's just nothing that he's done in that regard. So it's really quite frightening. And I don't know, power is what is very magical. And people will do anything for power. But I think that when it gets down to risk in the children of the nation. I don't know. I don't think that woman you asked me to be for a while. I think that might get some thinking going. Okay. Thank you, Stephanie. Winston, you might have heard of a gentleman by the name of Chuck Woolery. This was the game show host for the Love Connection. And Chuck Woolery, I didn't know he was a scientist, and I don't think he is a scientist. But he had an opinion that Donald Trump actually agreed with. And he retweeted it. And then later on kind of mimic, basically restated it, saying that the COVID-19 is basically a hoax. So this is what Chuck Woolery stated. The most outrageous lies are the ones about COVID-19. Everyone is lying, the CDC, media, Democrats, or doctors. Not all, but most. We are told to trust. I think all of us is about the election, keeping the economy from coming back, which I think it's about the election. I'm sick of it. So Donald Trump is saying, yeah, this hoax of a virus, which he initially back in February said it was a Democratic hoax. Then he switched positions and said, okay, it's real, and we're going to do what we can. And we're going to try to clamp things down. Now he's back to, I'm not going to pay attention to it. It's irrelevant. I've moved past it. I'm on to the election, my reelection. And by the way, Chuck Woolery, he knows exactly what he's talking about because it's still a hoax. Your comments about Chuck Woolery and his statement, and the fact that- I like to venture as a game show host. You know, you think about this, and it's not that ordinary citizens shouldn't be concerned and involved. So to that effect, to that level, that's great. But to have the president of the United States retweeting something like this, hey, let's- there was incredible progress. So if it's a hoax, we have to remember Donald Trump wore a mask this week visiting a hospital of Walter Reed. So if it's a hoax, then he's- I don't know what the point of that. I cannot imagine how much people could hold him pleaded with him to do that. But there was an interesting article by George Will. Who is the conservative columnist? Today, the nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is yet to come. And it says it hasn't reached it. The spiral has not reached its nadir yet, but worse can confidently be expected. And the nation's floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. This is from the conservative columnist. Yeah, gangster regime. That's incredible to hear from George Will. And you know, that's just it. It is- we're looking at this- so there may be some intellectual components that are starting to come over and realize it for what it is and the damage is being done. And obviously, George Will. But you saw this in a couple of other things. But even Lindsey Graham, when he started to peep out his head a little bit, I'm just wondering did his handlers tell him to do- what was the gain in that? Because I- you know, we still- the loyalty is to Donald Trump. And we have to realize that and say, so as we look beyond, and I know you want to get to that question, is how do we move beyond Donald Trump and Trump-lican values and get back to American values, where we say we don't put children in cages? Like, that is a- that's just a- can we all agree on that, but despite anything else? And those types of questions. But we're not there yet, and we're not going to get there with this. And we're not- no, because we don't share those. I mean that is what is so interesting because these people are in power and it's their value system that is running these things, which is Trump's and all of the- the people that are in that administration. They are enacting a different value system from what traditionally George Will would agree and all of these people that are rejecting it. It is not going to be- Stephanie, if the leader of this, what I call, I'll quote Hillary Clinton, basket of deplorables, will the basket of deplorables switch around once their leader of deplorable is gone? Will they go, where have we been? What nightmare have we- we- zombie walked through and my god, what have we done? Are they going to come around and say, let's- let's bring America back again? Is that what the post-Trump America is going to look like? Are they going to see kind of where they've been and are they going to come back to the fold so to speak? Because I finally got to grapple with it. These people are not just mistaken others who will come around to agree with me. These people have their own views. They are real. We have to learn them. We have to work with them. We- we don't want them in power. So the majority does not want that in power because when they're in power then they will influence what we do like they have the Senate. And I remember when we got the House in- in, uh, 18, it was thrilling, but I said, wait, wait, what's happening over at the Senate? Because without the Senate, you're still subject, okay? And oh, aren't we subject to it? So these people are there. They've been there. That's one of the reasons they're so tightly bound because they have the power. They have their spokesperson. Well, I guess I'm referring to a political shift versus a cultural shift. And the question is, culturally, does the polarization begin to ease up a little bit between all Americans? And culturally, do we come together a little bit more about what constitutes decency, what constitutes what is right, the rule of law, what constitutes getting along with your neighbor? Not because it's a blue state or a red state because we're all Americans. Does that start to shift? Does art start to change? There are answers to that. This is the whole pro- thing that- that Hamilton and discussion about it has brought up. They had to get that constitution together so they didn't get a lot of things done, okay? As we know slavery, as a few other things. Then we ended up 100 years later, or 50 years later, 150, with the Civil War because we didn't get this stuff fixed. And we didn't work on this stuff. And now we had the Civil War and we finished that. And obviously, we didn't get that stuff fixed. And it's still eking out now, another 150 years later, because there are these different positions for people that have something to do with states' rights, okay? I mean, we can see that. And that's all my Dalton Southern relatives and laws ever talked about, was the war between the states. They never called it a Civil War, their Southerness, North Carolina. The point is that there was a war between the states and it was about states' rights, okay? So we still have that going on, that the state should be- and we just saw it with all the governors, and Trump is going with that. You guys, you states saw this thing. That was what the Civil War was about. States' rights, that's all they ever told me it was about, even though I asked about, well, what about slavery? Nobody cared about it at that time. Well, that's different. Well, guess what? I made a mistake. I made a mistake today. And that is I put this very important question towards the tail end of the show. And I should have put it in the very top of the show is that we could dedicate the time really required to talk about what our government, what our society looks like after Donald Trump, assuming that Donald Trump's not around. So the bottom line is, I think in the next show, we're going to put this same question, same topic, a little bit further up in the agenda. So before we end today, Stephanie, what's your prediction for this coming week? I think it's going to be just as hard and harder. And I think, especially as the proposals rise, I think that he's going to get more and more unwieldy and he's going to do more and more things. Like I said, I think there'll be- More outrageous. More outrageous. He's got a lot of time. So it might not all come this week, because I just realized we've got to deal with this through January. So he's got plenty of time to play around with this stuff. So there could be some stuff this week. I don't know what it might be, but I do think he's going to be derogating Biden more, much more. Something else is going to come out about that. Maybe that's my one concrete- Okay, wonderful. Thank you, Stephanie. Winston, to you, prediction for the week coming? More exhaustion. At this point, I think we just have to- we're just writing it out, and no matter- we just have to have faith that we will come together. And I totally appreciate what Stephanie's saying. We'll find the common values again. There's just been a voice given to awfulness. And no one's- very few people will want to admit, I've been a deplorable for the last four years. I'm a deplorable. What we have to say is, okay, we don't share all of our values in common, but what do we share in common? And as we've devolved to a state's rights model and new federalism, I think that's where the emphasis is going to go. And we have common things that are going to be kind of knocked down. And then different states in different regions are going to band together that have different shared values. And that would be my trend for the future. But this week, we will just pray for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all of our leaders that- She's been released from the hospital, by the way. She is in the hospital. So we will pray for their good health and good decisions, no matter who they are, while they are in power. Alrighty. Well, by the way, she has been released from the hospital. That's what I wanted to tell you. Yeah. Well, I saw it. That's very extra hard anyway. Yeah, that she stays out of the hospital. So, all right, Stephanie Dalton, Winston Welch, thank you so much for joining us on Trump Week. See us next week, 11 o'clock, Wednesday. I'm Tim Epitle, your host, Aloha.