 Yeah, the law is something you use to punish your adversaries or to twist it for your own reverse benefit or your unethical benefit and your own personal gain. The law is not something you use for the original purpose intended. That is to help the public, help the country. I think that's kind of quotable, Tim. That's what Tim said to me before the show. That's Tim Apichella, by the way, and this is Trump Week. Welcome back. You know, nice to see you smile. Thanks for having me. We have such a long agenda today. I will never finish. Why don't we start? We have a long agenda every show. That's true, but you'll agree that it keeps getting longer. I think on the question of the law, as you mentioned a moment ago, and I think this is worth starting off with, so that California and other states have tried to maintain the Obama emissions standards or return to them after Trump pulled the wings out of them, because he's an anti-environmentalist. It's not so much that he doesn't care. He opposes environmental regulation. He wants to dismantle everything. If it was up to him, it's kind of libertarianism of environment. Just spoil the environment and mainly give it to your friends so that they can exploit it. That's what we have. So anyway, the several states, especially California, try to return to the Obama standards. And now Trump is trying to punish them, twisting the law, perverting it. Tell the story. Well, okay. So California said, we are the direct recipients of climate change. And that's a direct result, in our opinion, of the CO2 dilemma that we have. And transportation is a huge component of that, that and electricity generation in the plants. So between cars and those plants, a lot of our CO2 problems come from those two sources. So they're trying to address the big one, 800 million cars that are producing a lot of CO2. Which is tons and tons and tons. In the national interest. Yeah. Well, California is the recipient of flooding and mudslides and all these weather-related calamities, the wildfires. These are all directly correlated to, in their opinion, climate change. So they're doing something about it. And they want to stick to their standards. They want to stick to the Obama emission standards. Who can argue? Apparently Donald Trump can. And we can't even say it's the automakers, and they're trying to use their lobbying efforts to fight this. The automaker said, let's make this car that's going to adhere to those standards. We can't have a car for Californians and then have a manufacturing process that says we're going to have a car with less standards for everybody else. So that makes no sense from a production standpoint or profitability standpoint. So let's make one car for the entire nation. And that's what they wanted to do. Well, they're being sued for antitrust laws, because they got together to decide we want to adhere to these standards. I don't think that's covered by the antitrust statute. That's what they're trying to use. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I mean, it's the same kind of twist that he's doing on my other two subjects of this discussion, McCabe and Comey, both of whom, you know, were his adversaries, both of whom he fired. And McCabe was really a chakaroo because he fired him a couple of days before he was going to be entitled to retirement. Both of them wrote books about him. And it's scary business. These are, you know, civil servants who have contributed a lot to our country, the defense of our country, to our national security. And Trump is after both of them. And just when you thought, you know, that all of that was simmered down, oh no. Now he's initiating investigations through your friend, the Attorney General, Barr, which is really awful. You know, take civil servant of that seniority who has contributed that much, investigate with a view to prosecuting them. Thank you, Mr. Barr. We can only hope it happens to you. Donald Trump found his Roy Cohen in William Barr. He really did. And he twists the law against people as a weapon. And maybe trying to send a message, not only to them, but anybody who would oppose his policies or his cockamamie decisions gets punished. And the law gets twisted this way. I doubt very much what the jury would find either of those guys. Guilty of anything. Yeah, but look how much time and expense they're going to have to output as an outlay to defend. You can't get insurance for this. So, you know, they'll have to go to the bitter end before they are redeemed. This is really a sort of sad and ugly story. I think the law was intended to be used as a battering ram to punish people proactively and then send that as a message to the rest of would be whistleblowers and or people who oppose him. This is dictatorship. Yeah. And at the same time, your friend, Mr. Trump is telling the ice guys that if they break, they listen to him and he knows what he's asking him to do is illegal violation of the congressional obvious congressional intent that he will pardon them. He gives them a pass. He encourages and enables them to break the law. And you know, the word comes out to me. And this is the same guy who twists the law against civil servants like McCabe and Comey. And you know, what I get out of that is, you know, that he he has violated the law in a major way, the law, the spirit, the constitution, the statute, the spirit of this country, the spirit of democracy like every day. And the word that I get out of it is Diana. And in your absence, Cynthia Sinclair and I use the word Diana a number of times. This is a word that means in Hebrew, as a matter of fact, it means it would have been enough. Okay. And you know, the thing about offering a pardon to people who he encourages to break the law, that would have been enough. You know, and so many hundreds of things and the lies and the deceptions and the inappropriate connection with, you know, with foreign leaders who are adversarial to us. I mean, we could we could have a show that would last six weeks, just identifying all the things. And every one of them is Diana. Yeah. Well, it comes to my mind. It was a quote from the McCarthy hearings back in the day. And that ever famous quote, have you no decency? Right. And he I'm sorry, but what he's doing to use the law to punish his would be enemies is is immoral and certainly not decent. Yeah. So Robert Reich formerly the Secretary of Labor under Obama, I think, Clinton, actually, Clinton, yes, Clinton, yeah. And a notable personality of, you know, a well respected government official at the time and still wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times a couple days ago. And he talked about, you know, Trump's bad acts and his devolution, his fragmentation. And he listed some of these many, many things, you know, Diana, and then he trotted out the language of the 25th Amendment. Yeah. I saw that. But the language of the 25th Amendment is not encouraging. What it says is the vice president shall become the active president if the vice president and some top leaders, I forget the exact term, in the government agree by a majority that the cabinet doesn't say the cabinet. Yeah, even his cabinet. Okay, whatever. They're top officials. You know, they agree by a majority that he's that president is no longer able to serve, presumably because he lost his marbles. Or it could be other things, I suppose. Or if that doesn't work, then a committee shall be established by Congress. Well, Congress can't do anything. It can't do gun control. They can't do anything about climate change. They're completely, they've tied, senators tied their hands, but, you know, Mitch McConnell has tied the hands of the whole Congress. That's nice. So they couldn't establish a committee like this a million years. And then if you tried, Robert Reich points out that if you tried to get the cabinet top officials of the cabinet to vote against him, you'd fire them all. And there wouldn't be any top officials. And even if you achieve this, you get pence. So the 25th Amendment doesn't look so good. No, it was closely in that. It almost enacted in 1987, when a lot of his staff felt that Ronald Reagan was, you know, just not interacting well. He was just listing in office. And they discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th. And it was Howard Baker said, no, he's fine. You know, later, of course, Ronald Reagan was discovered to be passed with all timers. It was initially put into place after Kennedy's assassination. So it wasn't clear how Johnson would fill the role of vice president. It wasn't a clear established path. So in 1967, that's when they enacted it. And President Johnson signed it into law. But that means for assassination was really kind of the original intent and how to fill this confusing pathway to the presidency if the president was assassinated or wounded or wounded, you know, one way or the other. Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't doesn't really help here because the government is so dismembered. The government is so in such a bad tone. There's no cooperation at all. And the Republic, I blame the Republicans completely on this. I think Democrats are always willing to talk, but you can't negotiate with somebody who's in bad faith. So I understand what's happening. Well, you hear the cry 25th, the 25th, the 25th. And, you know, I think in that article that you sent me, you know, it's the old adage, be careful for what you wish for. That's what he said. Yeah. And I'm not sure that chance would be all that more attractive. This takes us to what's going on in Congress about these various investigations that sound in the nature of impeachment, not clear exactly where they are on the spectrum to impeachment, but they are raising issues. Diana, you know, there's some of these issues clearly could stand alone as a ground for impeachment. So I guess the question is what is going on there? Do you have a say you've just came back from Spain? So you may not know, but you know how the Spanish feel? I do. I do. Even though there's a severe language barrier there. Well, number one is they just thought the Sharpie, the Sharpie dilemma was the most funniest thing on earth, where he's plotting new courses of the hurricane with his own Sharpie pen. They love that. They just thought that was wild. But I footnote to that. This goes to Trump's reputation as a joke. And there was a piece in the New York Times today, I think was the Times, that raised the question of whether our allies who he seeks, he seeks assistance from our allies because he's going to put greater sanctions on Iran as punishment for his belief. It's not entirely clear that Iran shut up the, you know, sent the drones to the Aramco oil fields in Saudi Arabia and did such damage. And you know, he needs the help of others. He needs the former allies. And the question is whether he's going to get any help from our former allies. And I would like to suggest to you here on Trump Week, Tim, he's not going to. I agree. It's a joke. Yeah. I think, you know, this day was coming, they knew it was going to come. And here it is. And I don't know if he's going to get that kind of support, maybe from England. But you know, I think France will be tentative. I think a lot of them will be very tentative. Or they're, you know, like I said, you don't necessarily, you know, you passive aggressive behavior because we're human beings. Maybe it's not a no, but we're going to take time before we decide how we want to do this. Kick the can. They'll kick the can down the road. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Maybe not the direct no, but a no by implication. That's what will happen. We'll have to study this. So anyway, so, you know, last week, Cynthia and I talked about what might be the strategy of Nancy Pelosi, namely go through these committee hearings and raise all these things and develop evidence to suggest that Diana and any one of them could be grounds for impeachment, but not actually roll them out in their entirety until a year from now. Sort of try the case, not in the Senate. Try the case in public opinion. Try the case in the media before the election. Haste him with all the things that are coming up and will come up in these congressional hearings. And that would be a strategy that would suggest, don't try to impeach him now. Wait, I think she, well, she's number one. She's not here to be with Jerry Nadler at all because he is overtly stating explicitly stating, yes, we should proceed with the impeachment. And she doesn't like that. She didn't like that being out in the airways, because I think she's got another strategy in mind. And I'm not sure getting closer to election though helps anyone. It's either do it now or don't do it at all. Because once you get into the 12 months before the election, I think that's where, you know, the American public goes, this is kind of a dirty distraction. You know, let's talk about the issues and the candidates that want to, you know, support those issues and why you keep bringing up something that's four years old, knock it off. So from that standpoint, I agree with Nancy Pelosi, but it should be done now. Now or not at all. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. There's something to find out to see if this strategy somehow, whether it's Jerry Nadler or Nancy Pelosi, is in play. Because I don't, you know, I don't think they can really get anywhere just trying to impeach them. That's going to run right. It's the ever ready battery running into the corner and they can't get through the Senate finish. But the idea was, let's, you know, let's not do a political calculation. Let's stand for a principle, a democratic principle. And let's get that out of the way, clean the runway and then move forward towards the election and, you know, our position on certain policies and principles. And put it on McConnell. And yeah, you know, so you make a statement that the Constitution is paramount to politics. And that's not happening. There's an idea. How about that? Now, what about the thing with Brett Kavanaugh, you know, in your absence, there's this whole thing last week about kind of glimmer of that. Yeah, let's get rid of him. Let's impeach him. I think that diffuses the word impeachment right now. We should be focusing on one person regarding impeachment. And also it's very hard to impeach a city, impeach a sitting judge, a sitting justice on the Supreme Court. I don't think that's going to get home. What do you think? Well, I, you know, we accuse the President Trump of distractions. I think this is a distraction on the other side of things. You know, it's not, it's not needed. It's not necessary. Is it a valid concern? Absolutely. Is it it's going to get in the way of either the impeachment of President Trump? Sir, Jerry Nellis says I don't have time for that. I don't have time to try it on that on the on the on the. This will waste a ton. Kavanaugh side. I don't have time for that. So what? They got more information. I mean, it doesn't really go anywhere. It's a news cycle story, I think. It's not going to go anywhere. It'll be gone in a few days. The other thing we talked about in your absence, which I dwell on just thinking about it, is the the great deal maker who wrote the book The Art of the Geo. Actually, Cynthia pointed out that he didn't write it. Schwartz. It was it was ghosted. Yeah, Schwartz was the author. Yeah, but he's, you know, he quotes it and he stands behind the notion that he's a great deal maker. But you know, one thing is clear. We're 900 days in now. This we discussed this last week. He hasn't made any deals. No deals. He has not made a single deal. Let me just run down the thing. He certainly hasn't made a deal with with Russia. Not a deal that he would reveal. Right. Maybe there's something under the table there, but it's not a deal for the country. Maybe it's personal deal, you know. He hasn't made a deal with China. Xi Jinping is laughing up its sleeve at him. I don't know this thing about retrenching the the tariffs. That's just for public display. The fact is that he hasn't made any deals with China. He has no control over China. And China is much smarter than he is. And by the way, he, meaning the sole proprietorship government we have, he doesn't have a staff. He doesn't rely on a staff. And every appointment makes that more and more clear, including O'Brien, Robert O'Brien, you know, whose claim to fame is that he negotiated a hostage situation. For a wrap. A wrap. For a wrap in Sweden. Yeah. Who cares? Honestly, sorry. You know, bottom line is that he's not qualified to be the National Security Advisor. That's a very complex and dangerous job. That's not going to work. In fact, none of the appointments. And Giuliani, Giuliani is embroiled now in a ridiculous divorce case in New York State for a second or third wife. He's not functioning anymore. He's one of the disappearing acts. We can have a show all about disappearing acts. Many, many, many. But the point is about the agreements. There's been no agreement about Venezuela. And Guido had disappeared. There's been no agreement about Brazil and the fires in Brazil. There's been no agreement about North Korea. Nothing. All that talk about love letters and everything. Nothing. And it's just as threatening as it was for my money. I think he's unraveling a lot of the lines. This is like in Japan, that's putting pressure on it. Deal breaking is what I see it. Yeah, breaking them in Europe. All over Europe, they're not going to trust him again. And there's been no, I think I missed a few, no deal on Iran. Not even close. Not even close. No deal on Israel. Not even close. And he backed the wrong horse with Netanyahu and encouraged Netanyahu to do all these wild things. So the bottom line is that the brilliant deal maker, the art of the deal, hasn't done a single deal. Name one, will you? Will you name one? Somebody name one. There has been no deal. We need someone to call in during the show. But the worst failure to make a deal of all is that he hasn't made a deal with Congress. He's neutralized Congress. That's not a deal. So what we have is a very, you know, discouraging. No, I'll take the other side. Are there people who would argue against that? Yeah, he made a deal with McConnell. Well, he made a deal with McConnell, but remember, he made a deal with the American public and to cut your taxes. But he really didn't. That tax cut was really for the corporations. It was a payoff. It was a payoff for it. And guess what? It worked. He got his support. Well, they, you know, and then, you know, the American public hasn't seen now that much gain out of that tax cut. All we got is a, you know, potential trillion-dollar deficit addition that over the next 10 years. This demagoguery is what it was. And demagoguery, too. That's a deal. Pay off to farmers. Isn't that a deal? Give them billions. Actually, they didn't give them billions. Trump is holding it back. But give them hypothetically billions. They don't feel so bad about losing their soy crop. That's really terrible. So now Washington Square Park. A few days ago, maybe over the weekend, Elizabeth Warren shows up at Washington. And I know Washington Square Park. I spent many, many happy hours in Washington Square. It's the foot of Fifth Avenue. It's nestled in the, you know, among all the buildings from NYU there and Greenwich Village. It's a very active, young, vital kind of place. It's the center of New York for many people. It was for me. Was it kind of similar to Hyde Park, where you have people speaking their different opinions? Not the same way. I know the Speaker's Corner, but a lot of people, you know, talking with each other. People whose relationships are functioned on Washington Square Park. They can see each other. They stroll their babies around, walk their dogs, what have you. Okay. Elizabeth Warren comes. And there are two big signs on Washington Square Arch, which is huge. Looks like the Champs-Elysees, you know, the Arc de Triomphe. Same Roman architecture. And big signs of Warren and then a huge American flag, like Patton, the movie. Remember that huge American flag? Yeah, I do remember that. Yes. Okay. And here's Elizabeth Warren. And she is talking, turning the whole thing over. You know, going after the corporations, going after the lobbyists, changing the systems, purifying it so it works for the benefit of the people. I think I summarized about an hour of her talk. She was brilliant. Basically, promising or making overtures what President Trump got elected on, which he hasn't fulfilled, at all. She's really going to do it. I mean, she's got a plan to this that. She's a powerhouse. And the people there in the park, and there were tens of thousands of them right around Washington Square Arch, and they were cheering. They were ecstatic to hear, you know, promise after promise, plan after plan. It was a brilliant speech. And it really changed my view of whether she could do it. She could meet Trump at the pass. Well, she's climbing in the numbers. Absolutely climbing in the numbers. Bernie seems to be tired compared to her. She's not tired at all. And I think Buttigieg is a good mind, a good speaker. But he's, in many ways, conventional. And speaking of conventional, so is Biden. Very conventional. Right. And query at this crisis point in our history, can we afford to be conventional? It's, you know, one of the issues that came up while you were going is, can we return to the way it was before Trump? Wasn't that great? No, that's why Trump got elected. Right. He wanted to return to a time before that, an indefinite time. Maybe in the 20s or 30s. Whenever they wore white hoods over their head, I can't remember exactly when that was. And the days of the Ku Klux Klan. So, I mean, by the way, the white supremacists are really awful. There's some footage out about the beating they rendered to this guy in Charlottesville. It was awful what these guys did. And that's what we have now. We have white supremacists who have come out and do stuff like that. El Paso's prime example, I already say it that way. It's what it is. Anyway, so what I got out of that is that she is better than I thought. She's more compelling. But also, and this is really, this is what I want to post to you, is we are not necessarily in a time when we can have conventional. Conventional won't do the job. It may not win against him. And it won't win for a lot of people in this country. People are ready to upend the system. She represents that. Sanders does in his own way, but she has their act together. She's not a declared socialist. He is. And I just don't think, again, the independents or the moderate Republicans, anyone looking for a vote other than Trump, they just can't go with a self-professed socialist. They can't do it. And she could be that alternative. But she's also perceived as on the liberal progressive side of things. And Joe Biden fills that niche for them. That he's not that. Well, we haven't done well with that niche, honestly. When she goes, you got to go on YouTube and look for Elizabeth Warren. One of the shows, I don't know, CNN had a really excellent interview with her on her beginnings and growing up and how she's come to be as a candidate right now. And it was fascinating. She really is a grassroots kind of person. Yeah, one of the people. Yeah. But she's got her act together. She's very akamai about so many things. And I think she realizes the structural problems that we have to clean up before we can go forward and have the country we want. And one of them is the corporations controlling too much with too much money. Citizens United got to get rid of that. Wall Street. How could the Supreme Court have done that? Wall Street, the way they control everything with money. With money. And the super PACs, all of this twists the political process. And she sees that. Good for her. And she has a plan to deal with it. Well, she's a real policy wonk. But she's able to communicate it in a far different way than Hillary Clinton ever could. You know, she's got that fire in the belly. And these policy proposals, they're really solid. They're really solid. And they're not just kind of vague and ethereal. They're really solid proposals on a lot of policy issues. And so I admire that. I admire that a great deal. But I concern just because she's my seed. Well, I tell you my concern. The other she was so she goes after the corporations. We're going to bring that down. That's not going to happen anymore. Really? Corporations sell a lot of money into the global corporations. They're bottomless pits of money and power and influence. How do you stop them? Because they will invest against you. You know, change to the citizens of the United? That's going to take something. I think Matt Kavanaugh is going to vote to change to the citizens. I don't think so. And all the Republicans on the court, they're not going to do that. So that's one side. The other side is the most interesting. When she went after lobbyists, she says she's going to outlaw lobbyists. She's going to get rid of them all. One way or the other. When we heard clean up the swamp four years ago, you know, if nothing else, Trump is the swamp monster. Right. You can see what's going to happen. So you have the corporations going to be fighting with her and throwing money against her. You have the lobbyists doing the same thing. Same thing. And the question I put to you, this is really a hard one, is where is Trump is going to be on that same side? He was the one who wanted to clean up the swamp, wasn't he? Come on. That was a rhetoric. That was rhetoric. And that's all it was. So in the end, then, it's going to be this kind of revolutionary thing. Good versus evil. Good versus evil. Sorry to say it. And he's going to side with the government versus chaos. And he's going to side with the corporations, and he's going to side with the lobbyists. He's going to side with the money. This is some strange bedfellows. That's not cleaning up the swamp at all. It's getting right in there in the swamp. It is in the swamp. It's neck deep. Nobody knows the difference. Deep because people will read their own, you know. Anyway, so there are a couple of other things we should talk about. I think it's quite remarkable that just as Trump did not help Puerto Rico and their suffering mightily, I mean, what happens when a country or a territory, in this case, completely loses it? No money, no government. What government there is is totally corrupt because there's no money. Puerto Rico was on the way down. It was before, but now much worse because he hasn't helped them. They haven't recovered from the storm. Even now, how many? Two, three years later. So, humas. I don't know if you caught this one. I did catch a lot of this tragedy. And what really was dismayed is that there will be no emergency asylum from the Bahamas and to the United States. And he's basically, I heard, that he had blocked that. He blocked it. He said, you have to have a visa. And this is a humanitarian crisis. Let him rot, essentially. I mean, do you see the correlation between skin color and his harsh policies? Of course. It's racist. And that's the word. And so I find that tragic. I mean, if you look at the devastation, there's just not two sticks upon each other. And the food and the water crisis is just incomprehensible. And I just can't believe we're that obtuse in not allowing people temporary sanction in the United States. I mean, the good news for Puerto Rico was they were citizens and were able to come to the United States. They are part of the United States, excuse me. So they were able to come to Florida or wherever to get out of their kind of dire situation. Bahama, not so much. Oh, Venezuela, not so much. 10% of Venezuela has left Venezuela. Go to other neighboring countries that allow them in. Not in a very friendly way, but at least they're alive. I mean, so what's happening is Trump is leading the charge on being mean, being nasty, being isolated, nationalistic. It's changing the world. But this plays perfectly into its 35%. This plays perfectly to that. And I think he's getting legal traction. I mean, while you were gone, there was a case in San Francisco that said he could not require an asylum seeker to go to the first country that they passed through to seek asylum there first. And the Supreme Court said, no, no, he can do that. Yeah. So they let him get away with it. And the result is the Statue of Liberty is coming down. The words are meaningless at this point. And what you have is a bronze statue. That's what you have. So what do you think is going to happen this week? I mean, we never finished one third of what we wanted to do. No, I'm sorry. That's all right. What do I think is going to happen? I do believe that we are going to... I'll say something on his behalf. He didn't like what Lindsey Graham said about retaliation against Iran and their oil facilities. I give Donald Trump a thumbs up on that. He also said once you get into war, it's not easy to get out of war. He just said that this morning or yesterday. I can't remember. I'll give him a thumbs up on that too. Maybe he's seen the light that entering a war isn't as easy as getting out of it. Although it would make him a wartime president, he may see the fact that the economy is going to go down the skids. And as Clinton said, it's the economy's stupid. So maybe Donald Trump isn't as stupid as I think he is. He's not in a big rush to start a military conflict with Iran, at least from what I can tell. We may disagree with that. Let me add one other thought though. Another quotable quote we'll close on this is that in the history of littered with wars that were not intended to be wars, that were only intended to be showcases, threats of war without really an intention of having a war. And somehow it gets to be a war. And I think we're on the precipice of that kind of war. The old terms, saber rattling, became something more than that. What he's doing. Well, we've got to watch it carefully. It's the most important thing for us now. All right. Thanks so much, Tim. Thank you, Jay. Great to talk to you. Good to see you again next week. Aloha. Aloha.