 I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Check Hawaii Global Connections on a given Thursday with Carlos Suarez. We're talking about the Teflon President, shades of the Teflon Don, if you will. Any other president would be gone by now. Carlos, welcome to the show. Aloha, Jay. It's great to reconnect always and, you know, continue our dialogue about these, you know, pressing matters of the day, global issues. You know, in my case, as I offer, as you know, a global perspective, both because I'm in Mexico and a Mexican and what have you. But, boy, we are living in interesting times, no doubt. And, you know, it seems like every week, every few days, we have little driblets coming out that would in past times put out any previous leader. We've called the show the Teflon President. And maybe just for, maybe we have some younger viewers who may not know what that means. But you may recall as we were there at the time back in the 80s, I think it was in the early 80s, there was a senator from the state of Colorado, Pat Schroeder, and she made a reference to Donald, I'm sorry, Ronald Reagan, President Reagan, how he had this ability to avoid any blame. And Teflon refers to the coating of these pans, like a nonstick pan, that basically, you know, nothing unwanted can stick to him. And we're looking today at Donald Trump, a remarkable how many tell all tale books have come out and many of them from people who he hired and that worked for him or otherwise, like his his niece, who put out this recent book, a very insider perspective, even with audio tapes. I mean, this isn't just the written word. Look at the most recent, what's coming out now, Bob Woodward's latest book, Rage. It's got some audio tapes. So now it's not really in question. And yet I say that because, boy, it's very likely that none of this is going to change a lot of votes. It's very likely that it will be spun as sort of, you know, more of the same hoax. And it's just remarkable. I mean, how can we understand this? How can we explain this that we live in a time where no matter how much dirt his opponents or his past allies may uncover, the voters will forgive him, the base will be there to support him. And I'm just guessing, but I could imagine if you had a group of these hardcore Trump supporters, this would be dismissed. It's irrelevant. It's a hoax. It's a, you know, whatever. Let's talk about that. By the way, my recollection is that back in the day of the mafia in New York, they were all called Don this and Don that. And it was one particular Don who was called the Teflon Don because he always escaped, you know, Elliot Ness and the boys. He always escaped the FBI. And even when he went to jail, he was Teflon. They couldn't really nail him. Finally, they did though. And I guess maybe that's the point of all this. Finally, they did get him. But, you know, I, you know, I want to go back to something we discussed in an earlier show. And that is American history. The Midwest, they were farmers, they were into agriculture in the 19th century. And they had, they had a working economy in a regional way. All of a sudden, the railroads came. Vanderbilt and the like, those guys were building great railroads. And they began offering shipping opportunities for the farmers to ship their goods to the coastal states. And the problem is this changed everything. And all of a sudden the farmers had much bigger markets. They had to make their farmers bigger. They had to borrow money. They were in another place. And the problem is the railroads charged a lot of money. It was really extortionate. You know, once they got the farmer to ship on the railroad, they nailed them for big bucks. And the farmers began to resent that. And I think that was the beginning of a resentment that has taken, you know, that existed in the late 19th century and through the 20th century and still exists today. Maybe people don't realize where it came from. That's where it came from. Let me be clear. The resentment is what? Towards Washington? Towards East Coast? Yeah. Money, power, capital concentrations in Wall Street, which changed their lives for the worst, which nailed them, which made them subservient to the railroad capital interest. And it began there and maybe it went from, so, you know, then you have the privilege class in the East Coast. This is what Thomas Friedman was saying on PBS last night. And other, he was on a number of channels last time. I was interested to see they all wanted a piece of him last night. The question was, why does the base still support Trump? You know, when he makes ridiculous remarks about the military and about certain national service. And then, it gets worse with the tapes that Woodward, you know, came up with in his rage book. And the answer, at least in part, is that the base sees itself on the low end here. The base is disadvantaged. They're not the privileged people. They're not educated. They have an ongoing disadvantage against the people who go to good schools or who go to college. That's simple. And they're resentful of this. And what Trump says to them is, I understand your pain. I'm with you, even though he's really not at all. That's the biggest lie of all. Trump says, I will make it right for you. I will balance the scales. I will show those hotshots, the privileged fellows with the educations. I will show them that you guys have a lot of clout, too. So I'm going to back you up. And he has this kind of strange relationship with them that keeps on giving. So even if he lies and cheats and does all this, they're willing to forgive him because they believe he understands them. They believe he's willing to protect them. It is a mafia don kind of thing. They're within Trump's protection somehow, even though it's not true at all. Well, no, I certainly concur with that. I mean, and there's another part that just can't help. I'm constantly dealing with this, as you know, teaching students at the, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, there's this puzzle. How can such a pretty significant population continue to support him in light of what we see? And I mean, we're talking about college students who tend to be more open-minded. They're reading information. They're assessing news. But I go back to this, the challenges that we have, especially in the U.S., a large population now that does not read good information, daily news, and social media is a mixed bag. It's a double-edged sword. Yes, we are accessing information overload, but it's also very easy to just continually see the things that reinforce our biases and much of the research and social sciences has shown us that. If anything, rather than more information, we tend to be skewing towards the information we like or want. But even just more than that, again, people just are not really informed, I think. You know, it's one thing to be, well, again, I just leave it at that that I think people just are not taking time and almost don't care. And at the end of the day, if you don't have an informed citizenship or citizenry, if you will, it's difficult to build community, to build understanding, to reach consensus. And as well, how do we explain now what we've seen for years, several years now, a deepening polarization? We talk about it all the time, right? You almost have two different realities in the world. Can I add one footnote to that? There's a movie on Netflix, a documentary that just came out called The Social Dilemma. You would be very interested in seeing that. It's the story of social media, especially Zuckerberg and Facebook, where he has worked it out so that he has the ability to predict what you are going to do based on his analysis of the data he gets from you. And then beyond that, this is so interesting to actually influence the public opinion of large groups of people. This is very often nefarious, and it's happening now. It's part of what you're talking about. Sure. And then look, it's part and parcel. This has been going on for quite some time. Almost we could say from the 1950s forward, we had a big sort of a behavioral revolution, again, in the social science. And that is the access through the computer age to do more information, more data, more sort of rigorous analysis. And today, whether it's a grocery store doing its marketing, a real estate firm understanding consumer behavior, there's just a wealth of data and information. Obviously, some of it can be good and valuable, but some of it can be used for more nefarious purposes. And even shaping, let's say, consumer demands or interest. This is an area I don't know a great deal about, but I imagine the same happening is essentially in the political sphere. What do we have now? The new norm as of 2016 is that now we have interference by foreign governments, the Russians, the Chinese, and interfering in a way where they're going into social media and shaping the dialogue, the narrative, adding more confusion, more complexity, more chaos, all in the name of just creating that chaos. Now, again, the United States after World War II began a lot of this propaganda and influencing elections in Greece and Turkey and other parts of Eastern Europe in its own way. So fundamentally, this is something that big powers have been in the business in. But today with social media, it's remarkable how they can use sophisticated computer algorithms and learn how to shape public opinion. It's quite scary when you think carefully about it. And it's difficult to disrupt, it's difficult to uncover, although obviously much effort is being made. And so when they can determine our intelligence community, this comes from some kind of a server that's linked to the state security services of the Russian government. It's because they really can do that. Now, again, others would be more skeptical and maybe with views. How do we know that for sure? The reality is that it's there, it's happening and we're just coming to terms with it now. And given President Trump and some of the allegations we've heard from others most recently, he has made an effort to try to minimize and obviously didn't do much to look into what the Russians have been doing. We still remain with this big puzzle about whether somehow the Russians or Putin seem to have something on Trump that keeps him from ever being critical or taking a stronger position on Russia. Yeah, there are a lot of intelligence, so a former intelligence people who say that. There's no way to explain his connection with Putin, except that Putin has something on him. And I believe that, I believe that for some time. And it's not going to surprise me at all that one day somebody whistleblowers on that and we find out what it was. I mean, even as recently as this week, whistleblower came out and said, you've seen this whistleblower from the intelligence community comes out and says, I was told to downplay our intelligence that we're getting on Russia's manipulation of our voting. I was ton of doubt play that and to focus more on China. That's a very interesting that this is exactly what Trump is saying. Trump is trying to create an intelligence message by manipulating the intelligence community. It's very scary that we are not getting the right information and furthermore, if you look at that movie, you will see that Zuckerberg can tune it up. He could say, and this is part of the movie, he can say to his and these guys are very sophisticated in the movie. They're not kids. These are the senior executives in social media who created social media. Zuckerberg can say, I want more people to dislike North Korea. I'm going to tune it up. He can change public opinion that fast instantly, but tune it down. And of course, that leads to the whole phenomenon that I can tune it up on Trump or I can tune it up on some other campaign or down. This is very scary that one company could have so much control of Republican opinion. Yeah, it's quite remarkable. And maybe just to put a different angle on that, obviously these are the companies that you've described their governments themselves. And today, really any government that is engaging in international politics, international relations, must address this and must take a handle on social media. And what I mean by that is they rather than just be reacting to everything, you have to be proactive. And I know this, as you know, a number of my former students, particularly from HPU are in the diplomatic service. And these are young millennials who obviously they are part of that. Now, how do you do that? You have to use the social media themselves, the platforms, obviously with more, let's see, at least said to be altruistic or community outreach connection. There are positive aspects of it. Of course, the more cynical is, Hey, we're trying to shape their opinion. And if you know, let's say this country we're working in has a negative opinion, how can we shape it? And there's a lot of more and more these days, a need for not a need, I guess it's just a it's a reality, because if you're not taking it and addressing it, and having it integral to your, let's say, foreign policy, then you're simply responding to tweets and to, you know, other social media that are defining the agenda. It's a big game now. And there's no way around it. And so I think I'm talking about the diplomatic service, but this could be even state and local government, if you're not on top of controlling your agenda over your issues, protest movements or maybe citizens or some, you know, particularly savvy young, you know, disruptor can just create chaos, right? We, you know, we're seeing the Russians doing it at the macro level, but it happens at the local and state larger, the larger question is with all of this, and I totally agree with you with all of this chaos, expanding chaos. What about democracy? What about the notion of representative government? What about people, you know, dedicated to doing the right thing on the right information? I fear for it, don't you? Yeah, no, I think so. And look, I can remember 10, 15 years ago, when the advent of this social media issue was beginning, maybe 15 years ago, there was the idea that there was an excitement, this is going to democratize, you know, access to information, anybody can participate. And some of that does still exist. Yes, we have an ability now to connect people and reach places, and so on. The part we didn't anticipate, which is this more sinister part is the ability to manipulate it for, you know, obviously, you know, more sinister purposes, and especially now foreign government. So we've heard this term cyber war, cyber war for four years, and it used to be abstract. What does it mean? Well, this is it, this is when you have, obviously, the capacity of, and it could be a small kid in a garage in Cleveland, it could be a, you know, security agency in Moscow, it could be, you know, graduate students and, you know, in a program that are there visiting. And I saw what last day or two, the Trump administration has now, I think, revoked the visas of a large number of Chinese researchers and so on. And, you know, it's very likely some of that is very real that they are there gathering, and yet how do we know or how much of it is, or how much of it is just simply, you know, doing something for a statement. But boy, this is the new reality that we're in, the new tools of warfare, the tools of propaganda. And, you know, if you don't harness it, if you don't jump on it, you're going to be just responding to it in ways that you can't control the message. And yet, look at what we see with Trump now, this barrage of books and the tell all things back to our, you know, Teflon president, at this point, he's on the defensive trying desperately to shift and change the dialogue. And yet, many of us can't help but shake our heads knowing that a week from now, 10 days from now, we'll be on to the next, the next drama, whatever it is. Yeah, he says he's he did it for altruistic reasons to try to save people from panic. And, you know, the problem is he's never done anything for altruistic reasons before. So this would be remarkable that he was trying to do anything for the benefit of the public. And yet there are people who believe that they suck it up and believe it. Yeah, or they will question, you know, the motives or the interest of anybody who's taking a critical view of it. And again, I think the curious thing about this most recent, Bob Woodward's book, it's not just a book by this prominent investigative journalist, he's got audio tapes where he's literally got Trump saying certain things. But even having said that, I go back to this, you know, you and I and maybe others can somehow see it for what it is. There will be others who will simply shake their heads and say, well, no, I don't see any problem with it or whatever. It's a perfect call. A lot of people like that. Every dedicated Trumper is coming back with some kind of response to that. They're not really being affected by it in a large part. Neither that nor the military insult, which I find remarkable. And the big question to me is, what about the people in the military whose mission, you know, it is to protect the United States and are dedicated to public service? How do they reject this notion that Trump thinks they're, what is it, suckers? Well, I think what we saw on this specific issue recently is that what we've come to learn is that among the officer corps, the more informed, I guess, more leadership of the military, there is definitely now a growing majority who are seeing that for what it is. When you talk about the average foot soldier, it goes back to the average American. People are just not terribly informed. They're not reading good information. They're not forming critical thinking skills, and they're just taking things somehow from, you know, whether it's their social media or if they're a Fox News fan or perhaps some other media. Yeah, and remember that when they go to boot camp and they study how to be a soldier, what's drummed into them is he's your commander-in-chief and you don't question his orders. The whole Andersonville kind of, I need to question your order on moral terms. It's not really built in to the enlisted crowd. Of course not. Yeah, I mean, that's the nature of, you know, military, I guess, socialization. You don't want them asking too many questions. And yet, I'm pleased to say because I mean, I've taught both soldiers and officers throughout my teaching career. And, you know, I guess I'm somewhat relieved to see that there's a growing sense. And again, a lot of my former students who are military professionals who begin to realize, wait a minute, this person is not representing the national interest. He's not defending the values that we're supposed to stand for. So there is a growing questioning of that. We haven't seen quite as much, I would add, in the leadership of the Republican Party. In other words, very few who have sort of been willing to take on the president. Obviously for those who are political leaders, or I'm talking about maybe a senator, a member of Congress, whatever it might be, they are fearful of what it would mean. The response by Trump can be pretty vicious, pretty tough. And so there's a personal risk for them. You know, why we don't hear that. I think the puzzle, for me, remains why some of these former military leaders, the Mathis and McMaster and maybe most recently, Jim Kelly, they are still relatively mum. And, you know, when are we going to begin to hear a little more now? We've got snippets of it here and there. Even Bolton, I mean, he had opportunities. He chose not to testify in the impeachment hearings. You could sense that he was looking out for, you know, his book sales as a strategy more. And I think for a lot of them, it's the strategy just kind of, you know, plug your nose and kind of write it out and, you know, see where it happens. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify, you know, silence if you're, you know, I guess, if these things matter to you. Very interesting article by Ann Applebaum, who writes for the Washington Post and The Guardian and maybe others. She's a, obviously, an American columnist. I think she's part of the Washington Post editorial board, matter of fact. She lives in Poland with her Polish husband. And she writes about the reasons that people in the Republican Party buy into Trump's, you know, craziness. And there are quite a few of them. One of them is, I think I'm doing the right thing. I'm helping. I shouldn't walk away from this. Maybe I can do some good for the country. That's not persuasive to me. But the most significant one is fear, just as you say. And one of her seven reasons for people going along with him is they are afraid that he is going to punish them. He has set that up as a culture point. Absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned Ann Applebaum. She's got a fascinating window because she has been integral to watching the developments there in Eastern Europe, post-communist Europe, particularly Poland. And so she is now looking at the U.S., and her most recent book, a very valuable one, is understanding how the U.S. seems to be shifting not from authoritarianism, but to and towards authoritarianism. And, you know, having seen the experience of Eastern Europe, they had the many decades of communist rule. They were liberated in the early 90s free. Suddenly in the last five, 10 years, we see a trend towards authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary in particular, you know, a concentration of power eroding democratic norms. So I say that because she is now looking at the U.S. and saying, wait a minute, we've got some lessons that you can see how countries like those that went into communism and those that came out and are now returning to a new form of authoritarianism. That's a fascinating lens to see it through, very complex, but it's a lot of these dynamics, you know, people looking out for their own interests and fearful of what it means to cross. And again, Trump, he's not your average political figure. He is known to be almost like a mafia boss. You know, if you cross him, if you, you know, say the wrong thing, he will find ways to squeeze, you know, to squeeze Teflon Teflon. He can shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and a lot of people actually believe that and they further believe, you know, that there's a good comparison to be made between him, between Trump and Hitler. There's a and there's all kinds of people. And you know, what's his name? Timothy Snyder out of Yale, who wrote on tyranny. You know, that is a scary book because it compares what's happening with Trump, with what happened in Germany and in Europe, heading to a tyranny. But what I find most interesting, and I want to post this possibility to you, is that at the same time, as you described, these, these tyrannical things happening in the United States, the last five, 10 years, and the rise up of the base and the emergence of Trump as representing the base, is at the same time, we have declined. This country is on a decline vis-à-vis China. China is making fantastic strides, even after a really bad time with COVID. They have licked COVID essentially. Their economy is humming, their creativity, their science is humming, their military is humming. You could go through every, every measure, every metric of how the United States should be advancing and find that China is advancing that way and we are not. We have diluted ourselves into exceptionalism that isn't true. And while, and while we are heading down this path toward tyranny, fact is that China, which is tyrannical itself, is doing way better than we are. Can you explain that? Well, there's no simple answer, but I think it touches on many things. Curiously, for many decades, we saw a trend towards democratization opening throughout the world. Of course, the US was a long-established firm democracy and even today is one of the, really, the longest continually existing democratic system. I say that because what we've seen now is a retrenchment, erosion of those norms, and then places where democracy may not be their primary emphasis. China is not a, you know, and yet the government will tell you they are a people's republic and they have democracy, you know, at the level throughout society. But at the end of the day, it is a variation of authoritarian rule, right? It's not democracy and the real concept. Oh, gosh, again, it's just hard to nail it down because I think that we have seen an erosion of the norms here in the US for reasons that have to do some of what we touched on, the polarization, the disenchantment. But how do we explain, again, for so long, we had this enduring quality of the US of bipartisanship, of respect, even from people you disagreed with, even our political leaders, particularly in the Congress, they had a tradition of working with the other side, even if they, you know, or even, and I think we talked about this in a previous episode that we did today, for example, in Congress, they don't socialize, they don't meet like they once did before. They all spend all the time raising money and then going back home on the weekends, so that in the end, they don't have relationships with people who they may have different values and views with, and yet at the end of the day, you come together. And we saw it's happened these last five years in particular, the gradual elimination of all the centrist politicians, those who kind of operated with this, okay, I represent this party, but we have to cross over, we have more and more pushing out to the extremes, so that now we have just very conservative Republicans and perhaps more liberal Democrats who are not overlapping, because the American political system, some people see night and day, and there are real differences, but at the end of the day, they have traditionally been centrist parties with overlap, right, conservative Democrats, more liberal Republicans, so that some portion of them overlap. Now we see this deep polarization, you know, again, no simple answers, no simple explanations. No, but you know what you've described, though, Carlos, is a problem that goes beyond Trump. This is a problem that's existed before Trump and it's being exacerbated, and you want to call him ignorant, you can, but the fact is he understands this, he understands divisiveness, he understands that polarization you talked about, so the question at the end of the day, and we have roughly 50 days to watch this unfold, is the Teflon Don going to be able to win the election using all the hook and crook things that he has behind his back, including, we don't talk about so much anymore, but the post office, he's wrecked the post office, it's a wreck, the train wreck, so the question is can he be the Teflon Don, or is this going to catch up with him? And it's a test of our democracy, it's a test of the country, every man, woman, and child, what do you think? Well, there is so much at stake with this, because it's not just a simple election of, you know, one or another person wins, if Trump should win, it will be a deepening further erosion of the democratic norms and values and institutions, and it will get worse. I think, you know, any reasonable person has to conclude that, even if you are a conservative Republican, you should be able to say, wait a minute, as it happens, this guy does not represent the Republican Party in its traditional values, he is breaking it, and we have a small number who are realizing that, others, however, who are just looking out for their own hynies are just, you know, keeping mum, and that is a sad, I think a sad situation we find ourselves in. It could go any way, I don't want to predict, I think we can anticipate it's going to get rough and continue to be nasty, and we'll have to hope for the best, and the ultimate scenarios are going to be either a blowout by Biden, in which he clearly has to accept it, maybe he resigns and pence pardons him, so he can be free, or more likely will be a scenario where it goes into some legal challenges for weeks, a messy confusion, he screams fraud, and I don't know, I don't know how that's going to play out. Less likely, I think, is that he's going to win it decisively, I think that's more difficult, but it's not inconceivable that he could pull it off with more disruption, more chaos, but we're in for an interesting ride here these next 50 plus days, so it's going to be interesting. And the funny thing is that we can, we can say that, we can say he's going to do all kinds of amazing, ridiculous things in the next 50, 50 days, who is going to stop him? Who is going to stop him? The courts are too slow. Biden is not in office. You and me, we can only talk in the media, and the media can only say things, they can't do things. So really, this is his to lose, I would say. He's got a pretty good chance at winning because I only have one more question, Carlos, and that is, do you think that you could adopt my wife and me and somehow help us get Mexican citizenship just in case? We'll do everything I can pull some strings for you, absolutely. And the best part is, you get to keep the American. You can have both, so you don't have to renounce it. So when you're ready, you always have it available. I like it. I travel with both. I have both passports. I feel like Jason Bourne depends on where I'm going, what I'm doing, but we can do that for you, Jay. Absolutely. All right. Hold that thought. We're going to have to see what happens. Thank you, Carlos. Thank you for joining me here on Global Connections. Be well. Take care. Stay safe. Aloha.