 Yo, we're back here on Think Tech, ooh, on a Friday, ooh, Trump week, ooh, every Friday. Well, next week we're gonna change it, we're gonna change it to Wednesday, I think, yeah. Right. And Cynthia Sinclair, Phi Beta Kappa at UH, we're not kidding, this is really important. We only deal with the best, Cynthia. Welcome back to your show. Thank you so much, thank you so much. Okay, Trump week, you know, I titled this, what did I title this? Let me tell you what I think it should be titled anyway. You know, Trump hasn't been in the headlines, but he's been busy in the back room. He's been busy doing bad things like wiping out environmental regulations and the like. No more clean water. Yeah, right, clean water, wetlands. Wetlands, forget it, yeah. But let's go down a list, we have many points today. It seems like, you know, one of the connected dots thing about our show is there's more to talk about every single week. And our mission and our challenge is to try to hold it down, but there's so much coming up with him. So what do you got on there first, Cynthia? Well, the Democratic debate happened last night, right? It was a big deal. He was flying a plane overhead, I'm kidding. No, he was in Baltimore, giving his speech, right? No, no, but he had somebody flying a plane over the convention. Oh, you're kidding, I didn't know that. Yeah, in Texas, they had the plane flying over it saying vote for Trump. Oh my God. It's called Ubers. Anyway, that's what he was, that was his role in the convention. The biggest thing that people are talking about is when Julian Castro went after Biden and was wrong when he did it. But for the most part, there was a lot of, he mostly just talked about healthcare. There was very little talk about Trump. I'd like to see more talk about Trump. I'd like to see more talk about the fact that he didn't really win the election. It was a fake win that was brought on by help from Russians and his own collusion with them. So I have a problem with everybody treating him like he's a legitimate president when he really isn't. Yeah, you know, and when Harris did this, Biden a few, you know, debates ago, she went down in my estimation. I thought it was tacky, it was low class to do that. And when Castro did it last night, Thursday night. Last night, yeah. You know, he went down in my estimation to it's tacky, why do that? Plus he was wrong. Sorry, plus he was wrong. Plus he was wrong. So I mean, it's a cheap shot at best. And I agree with you totally. They ought to focus on Trump. There was a piece in the New York Times, I think this morning, of saying, gee whiz, they spent an enormous, Leonhardt, they spent an enormous amount of time on healthcare and about exactly what the healthcare insurance policy is gonna look like. People don't, they don't really wanna get into the weeds that way. We have bigger fish to fry. We have more salient, dangerous problems to deal with. I agree. And the Democrats are all wrong. And part of it is, of course, the journalist moderators. There was another piece about saying, why do you always use journalists? You think they walk on water? How about using history professors, political science professors? How about using, you know, people from the universities in that area? Right. Instead of always living with the journalists. Journalists are looking for raw meat. It's not to their credit that they do this. Anyway, that's my cut on the debates. It looks like by the numbers and the numbers can change. We know that. They may not be of any consequence later on. It looks like Biden is vying with what, Bernie? Warren, no. Warren and Bernie. The three of them. The three of them. Not clear what's gonna happen. Things will change. I agree. And the important thing to me and to many, many other people is who's capable of winning against Trump? Because if the one person who ultimately stands up is gonna suffer all kinds of slings and arrows and trumps hands, he's gonna try to decimate them if he can. And they have to be able to deal with that. What else you got on your list? Well, just one quick last thing is that I don't, in my own opinion- What else you got on your list, Cynthia? I don't think Biden can do it. And I think that Warren can. Well, we had something happen in, you know, South Carolina, we were hoping that the Democrat was gonna pull it out, but he barely almost did. It was 48 to about 50 something. I don't know what to say. So close. So close that it makes me think there was another cheating issue going on. Could be, could be. We've got so much gerrymandering happening. And so much- Suppression. Suppression, voter suppression happening that I think that probably was involved, especially in the South. And they're closing polls. They're changing the hours of, you know, being able to access them. So that's gonna have a big impact. And yet still, this guy almost won. So I think it's too bad that he didn't- Republicans don't do themselves any service because in the years to come, everybody will remember this and treat them accordingly. The other sad legal event was that the judge in San Francisco said, no, you can't make sanctuary seekers go through another country in order to seek sanctuary in the United States. Because Trump is trying to undo sanctuary as a concern. Right, right. Without congressional approval. But the courts reversed that. So I'm sad to see that. That wasn't a good thing. They reversed so that you mean they will be able to stop? They validated Trump's policy by requiring to go through other countries. And there are some countries, you know, in Central America that really don't like that at all. I don't like that. And I don't think that any humanitarian likes that because it's very hard for them to go to another country and sit and wait on sanctuary applications in the United States when the United States is doing slow ball on the sanctuary application. So it gives Trump an open hand to slow it all down and to make sanctuary elusive, yeah. The little girl from San Francisco, that one that needs those life-saving treatments actually appeared before Congress. And still, she has no stay of execution for her. Well, Trump is doubling down. Supposed to be out tomorrow? She's ignoring her. Supposed to be out tomorrow, yeah. Ignoring, she goes before Congress and still he's ignoring it. I hope the press covers that. That's an example of the kind of things he does. And it's a death sentence for her, even though she contributed to a very important medical study. Just one of many mean things. There's one mean thing after another. It's almost that he wants to do mean things and hurt people. Well, he does. That's what motivates him. It does. I don't know how we can have a president like that. I really don't. I don't know how the world can tolerate that. Anyway, what's your next point? I think we're really not tolerating it very well. Well, the resignation of John Bolton, which wasn't really a resignation. Trump says he fired him. Bolton says he resigned. But I think I like about it, is Bolton says, don't worry, I'll have my say. In time, I'll be able to get around. I believe you will. I believe so. He's a pretty aggressive guy. He might not have been the best national security advisor for the country. Too much a hawk. On the other hand, there was a piece in the paper also about how the two of them were fighting. And he was more a hawk than Trump, believe it or not. And they had a parting of the ways. Whoever pulled the plug, parting of the ways, because they didn't agree on significant war issues, if you will. Well, the main one that split them up, so it has been because of the divorce, was that no, actually, the main one that got them was the Camp David meeting with the Taliban three days before 9-11. Afghanistan. Oh, Afghanistan, okay. There was going to be some discussion with the Taliban trying to, and Trump was really ill advised to set that meeting or try to set that meeting three days before 9-11. And Camp David? He was thoughtless. To have them on American soil to invite them here where they killed 3,000 Americans. Yeah. Yeah. And no question about that. At a stronghold? We'll be working with Al Qaeda. At a presidential stronghold, no less, to bring them there, when Trump's not going to be the president forever. But it's not clear that Bolton quit because of that. It might have been part of their argument. And it's not clear why Trump doubled back on it and changed his mind at the last minute. But one thing is clear, our discussions with the Taliban are over for a while, for a long while, perhaps. And what's happening in Afghanistan is really a tragedy. After 18 years, there's really no result. I think the big mistake that was pushed, though, is taking all the troops out of Afghanistan when we had effectively won that and put them in Iraq and leaving Afghanistan to hang on the vine. And of course, in that period, the Taliban and Al Qaeda recreated their foothold in Afghanistan. What else you got? Right. There's a new meeting with Rocket Man. I like the way you put that on the list. So Kim Jong-un, now there's something that you were just telling me about. Kim Jong-un said a few days ago that he wanted to have talks with Trump. And maybe you could say that Kim Jong-un's recent Rocket Man stuff, his various missiles off into the Sea of Japan, what have you, are intended to soften Trump for negotiations. That's Trump's actual, that's Trump's style, too. Oh yeah. Soften the other side. Anyway, but then it comes out yesterday that one American agency, maybe intelligence agency, has found and is investigating Kim Jong-un's hacking of American companies and the American government, American municipalities with these ransom, these ransom programs. Oh, ransomware, yeah. You know, it started with WannaCry a few years ago and it's gotten much bigger. And some municipalities like in Florida, for example, paid half a million dollars to get their data back. Others have resisted. There's no clear policy on it. There's no clear solution or defense to it either. And come to find, this is Kim Jong-un. So while Trump is doing kissy face and sending love letters and all that stuff, the fact is, and I really wonder why the agencies didn't either know or tell him about this before, while he's doing kissy face with Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-un is holding up our municipalities and corporations for huge money. And where does that money go? That whole initiative is intended to fund his nuclear program. So it makes it even worse that he's doing this hacking scam thing on American institutions and government agencies, government instrumentalities and using that, it's all for the purpose of funding his nuclear program. I don't think there's gonna be a meeting anytime soon after that article. It's gonna be an investigation, but not a meeting. I hope not, right? You don't need to rub noses anymore. It leaves Trump looking like he's been cuckolded by the guy, you know, with the love letters and he's been screwed from behind by Kim Jong-un. The whole time, that's what I think. He's just been playing him the whole time. Right, right, this is horrendous. It doesn't make Trump look good at all. I agree. Well, I don't think much makes Trump look good. Another makes him look good. So he's trying to make himself look good though by talking about China, you know, I think he's just doing it and some of the reporting that I read and heard also is a similar idea that he's just doing it to control the stock market. That's the only reason he's talking about China being also great and wonderful, although we do know that China did come out and rescinds. I bought some soy. They bought some soy. So they rescinded some of the tariffs and bought some stuff. Their tariffs. And Trump, you know, deferred the tariffs he had threatened for. But only till October 1st. It's not like they had to... The idea is to grab the headlines. That's the idea is to keep on the headlines. That's what I figure too. He just wants to control, well, and the stock market goes by kind of the headlines. So, you know, that's what... He's learned how to do that. He's learned how to control the media. And he's learned how to control the headlines for the stock market. Well, I watched him in his speech. Well, I watched most of it. I couldn't handle all of it. But I watched most of his speech in Baltimore, the GOP. And it was incredibly... He's lies through the whole thing and spins everything so that it looks like, you know, the Democrats just want to ruin the country and he's our only hope. And it was just incredible to watch him do that. It's amazing how somebody can just lie their way through the campaign, then lie their way through the presidency and 40% of Americans... 40% of Americans believe the lies, lie after lie, when the responsible news organizations the country are pulling it out. And he, in fact, counting coup on all the lies. But you mentioned before, we should talk about, you know, the decline in his numbers. What do you got? Oh, I've got some good numbers, actually. He's gone down quite a bit, even. So, CNN did a poll. They just wanted to know, do you think that Trump deserves to be re-elected? 36% said no and 60% said yes. So, and then ABC did a poll and he's, in June, he was at 44% and now he's at 38%. CNN did a poll, same kind of numbers. He's down five or six points in all of the polls from 43 to 39 and Gallup did one from 44 to 39. So he's down five or six points since June, well now. Maybe people are starting to wake up. Can we only hope? I don't know. Hope the farmers are. You know, that's why the soy deal was so important because the farmers were squawking. You know, they don't want a giveaway. I mean, what he's doing is he's taking our tax money and by the way, we have trillion dollar deficits under him and he's taking our tax money and paying them off so they're quiet even when they're going bankrupt. So now he's trying to pay them off again by trying to reduce the tariffs in this kind of temporary truce for a few days and the thought that they're starting to make anti-Trump sounds. I hope that they straighten out and I hope they realize that this is only temporary and the fact is that he's not helping them, hasn't helped them at all. If they had listened to his speech yesterday in Baltimore, which I thought was kind of ironic that he's going to Baltimore after all the stuff that he said about Baltimore just recently, it's like, did you bring extra security with you, dude? For all those rats and you know. Sure he did. He didn't even bring it up at all and I thought he might, but he didn't even touch it. But what surprised me was the reactions of the GOP in the audience. All of these, you know, congressmen and senators and everybody that's in there and they are just eating it up, clapping and loving everything he's doing and just. I remember he's got people scattered through there, you know. Get started, yes. You get the people standing behind him with the signs. The whole thing is calculated. This happened in the Bush, in the W. Bush administration. Well, Cheney came out here one time and I went at the convention center and they had the whole thing wired, you know. It wasn't a natural organic kind of response to him. So the same thing, but worse, much worse is happening under Trump. Right, I agree. Like they started shouting, four more years, four more years. And you could just tell by the way it started. It wasn't like a, like you said, it wasn't like this organic response. One person over here and it kind of spread over here, but it didn't even go through the whole crowd. And I thought, oh, well, and so he stopped it. And I thought, oh, okay, you can tell I was a plant. They always do that. Well, comedians do it. They put somebody to laugh. They put a bunch of dirty tricks going in, like four or five states have killed primaries. Oh my gosh, that to me is huge. This is horrendous, you know. Now it's not the first time a state has killed a primary, but under Trump, a number of them have and it's all the red states and all states in which he has this big base. So it's really awful what he's doing. And you get all these little things that he's doing around the country in terms of suppression and suppressing any Republican contender for the nomination. At the same time, a lot of Republicans are leaving. They're leaving Congress. The ones that have some kind of scruples. Too bad they can't stay around and do stuff. And do something, which is what? And they don't have enough scruples in my mind. And that takes us to gun control, you know. So we have all this noise about gun control until in a couple of days ago, the corporations, big corporations, all kinds of big corporations get together and make an appeal. It was to Congress, but it was really to Trump and what's his name? Leader of the Senate. Oh my God, now you've got me like, Mitch, Moscow, Mitch, you mean McConnell? There we go. So it was really an appeal to the Senate, you know, to finally let bills for gun control that have passed in the House be at least considered in the Senate. And, you know, they came, they made a strong pitch. They went wide. They would talk to everybody. They sent a letter to everybody in the Senate, everybody in the Senate. And nothing has happened so far. And I speculate that nothing will happen. It won't be any gun control, even though the voices are, the voices are increasing now, yeah. Moscow Mitch's stance on the whole thing is he's not willing to do anything until he knows that the president is on board. And he's said that. So it's not like we just wonder if that's what he's doing. That's not what the Constitution caught him for. He has come out and made a statement saying that he won't. Now, this is the only thing about the debate last night that I think could go wrong for NATO or work. And it was a very impassioned thing that he said and I agree with him, but I'm afraid that people that are kind of on the fence with this whole gun thing, he said, you, what did he say? Hell yes, we're gonna take back all of the, all of the AR-15s and all the AK-47s. We're gonna take them back. Yes, we're gonna buy them back. You bet we're gonna take those guns back. And you know what he talked about? Had the mom that he had spoken with that was in El Paso, who she watched her daughter die and bleed out because there were so many people shot that they didn't have enough ambulances to get to this gal and she died before the people could get to her. And you know, the mom couldn't do anything about it. If it wasn't this, you know, he made the point of these guns were made for war, to shoot somebody as many times as you can. He hasn't done anything in all these years, all the way back to Sandy Hook. And we really had, you know, even Columbine, nothing. So, you know, we have the issue and I think this pervades everything that'll take a moment about it, is that, you know, should the American public do select a candidate, a democratic candidate who will change the system all around, who will be revolutionary, or should the American public pick a candidate like Biden who will be incremental, evolutionary. You know, and I think there's a lot of people around who would like to turn this thing on its head and do some drastic changes before it's too late. And the question I put to you is, is it too late or should we take evolutionary or revolutionary? What do you think? Oh, I personally think revolutionary because in this particular time, normally I wouldn't, but because of all the things that Trump has done, we can't have a moderate get in there. We need somebody who's gonna get in there and try to fix this mess that he's made. It's true, but you know, that is not gonna bring, that is not gonna bring the base over. On the other hand, maybe nothing will bring the base over. That you can't bring the base over. So maybe you'll have to appeal people to middle class people and say, wait a minute, we got such serious problems here, we've really gotta redo the system. What else you got, Nielis? Okay, how have we changed? Oh, we already did both of those things. Is there a recession coming? What do you think? You know, he appointed someone else to the Fed Board, a guy who was said publicly, and of course, this guy will be approved in the Senate, guaranteed. Jay Powell is gone? No, no, no. Just another member of the board. Oh, okay. This guy has said publicly he believes in lowering rates. So what Trump is doing is he's trying, pushing to lower rates and he'll criticize Powell again. And so he's gonna blame someone else for his mischievous. And I think that we're gonna see that go on. One commentator yesterday's paper said, don't expect a recession or a depression per se. Don't expect anything dramatic. Expect flat and down slow. And I think that may be the case, not because that's what should happen by all the indicators and all the mistakes the government has made, but because Trump is trying to boost it up and to some extent he may be successful. And the thing has a momentum all of itself and maybe it'll go down slowly, but one thing is clear, it's not gonna go up. The mistakes are so profound and there's so many mistakes. And furthermore, if you link national security with the economy, and I think you should, and with the global order for that matter, because the economy is global. And with climate change, which has a big effect on the economy. Yes, it does. Every place these extreme storms hit. I mean, we don't know what's gonna happen, but none of it is promising. None of it looks good. So, you know, and by the way, at one o'clock today, we're gonna do an interview of a guy who was the commandant of the Coast Guard, Paul Zuckoff, who gave a talk at the, Paul Chung lecture at UH last week, two weeks ago. And so we can talk about those very things because he's a government insider and he can speak about climate change. And he can speak about national security. One of the things he mentioned in his talk, and I mentioned this in the same connection, is that Russia has put assets and facilities near the Arctic, which is melting, and which is now freely navigable. And they have taken the position that because of that, it belongs to them. They have said to the United States and others that if the United States and others wanna, you know, put a ship through that passage, this is close to the North Pole, they should ask permission from Russia. Oh, my. And this hasn't been tested yet, and I doubt the United States Navy is gonna take it seriously. But Russia is making this outrageous claim that it owns that area in the Arctic. We have serious problems in world and global security. Yes, we do. And global leadership economically. Yes, we do. Well, you know, was it a few weeks back, three weeks maybe ago? We were talking about that very thing. I was talking about how they have this floating nuclear plant. It's not, it's a reactor that is loadable. So that's what they're moving over there too. So they've got those big ships, ships that are capable of carrying nuclear weapons right off of Alaska now. So now they are down in Venezuela. We already know they've got an air base down there. And so they're on either side of us now. Trump is losing all these engagements. All of Afghanistan we talked about. But there's also Syria, which we are so impotent about. We really, we can't handle things south of the border. We just gave up on south of the border and for other people to take away from us. We've distanced ourselves from all of Asia. Our relationship with even our best ally, Japan, is at risk these days. And of course we have Kim Jong-un. So what's happened is Trump, in his nationalist and isolationist policies, has wrecked American leadership. Geopolitically, economically and security-wise. Absolutely. I don't think that people in Alabama or Arkansas or Kentucky know anything about that. They don't. We know when Justin Amash went back to his district and he did that one talk story town hall where he told people and he actually quoted out of the Mueller report the things about that happened. And there were tons of people afterwards that were interviewed that said, I had no idea. I had no idea there was anything bad that came out of the Mueller report. And I think, how can people live like that with their heads in the sand? And I think, hi, you are an ostrich with your head in the sand. What are you doing? Yeah. While our attorney general is going after the FBI guys who came in and really making the whole thing look like a charade, and at the same time, Congress is going after impeachment. And Nadler and others in Congress are bent on following the track of the Mueller report and other information to build a case. And we talked about that last time. Yes, we did. And the timing is as we get closer, first elections are five months away and the 2020 national election is a year away. We're gonna see more of that. It's gonna be spooned out by these investigations in the House. Query, whether it's enough, whether it's soon enough, whether the people in the base will accept any of it. But it will, I think, have some effect on the election. You can't escape that. Too many lawsuits, too many investigations, too many things are coming out. And too many people, too many media are interested in publishing that information. What else you got? I wanna add one more thing to the gun thing because I think it's kind of important. Right after Beto O'Rourke had that impassioned, please say in hell yes, we're gonna take away those AR-15s. He got a tweet from, and I can't, now I didn't write his name down, Cisco, something. And I'd remember his name and I don't. A Republican representative sends him a tweet, saying, I have an AR-15 for you or something, no. It was definitely a threat that is now being investigated as a threat. Twitter even took it down to the point, it was such a threat that Twitter took it down. I wish I had written it down. Okay, well let's move on Cynthia. What else you got? Was there a bout of time? Republicans are doing that. Okay, what else do we have? We did all of this. I think we actually are gonna end on time. And you know, the Mueller report is definite. And I want the media, and I think I sort of said this a little earlier too, is I want the media to stop acting like Trump won fair and square, right? Russia helped them win. He's a knowledge legitimate president. And no one seems to come from that place. And I have a closing point too. My closing point is the most important news piece in our time, in our lives really is climate change. Because you saw what happened in the Bahamas. That place was just flattened. It was destroyed, virtually destroyed. And other places will be destroyed like that too. Not Alabama, at least not right away. That was so stupid. They're only within the Sharpie bubble, so they're okay. My point is that Trump still denies climate change. Trump's government still denies climate change. Trump's government is doing nothing about climate change. It's denying it in every way. In fact, pulling back regulations and defenses to climate change that you would like to see. And it's horrendous because of the consequences involved. If there was no other issue that deserved him being thrown out of office, it's climate change. The whole world, including of course the US, including Hawaii right here, is at tremendous risk of these storms and sea level problems. And we had really better get a leader who can deal with it. Because as he deals with it, other people in the world deal. He has depressed the entire global effort on climate change. And that is completely intolerable in the largest sense of the word. And now we're out of time. Thank you, Cynthia. It's great to have you on this show. Thank you. Do this again next week. We will do this again next week, only on Wednesday. We will not be on Friday. We might be a little behind some of the news, but that's all right. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. Cynthia Sinclair, Phi Beta Kappa. Thank you very much, Aloha. Aloha.