 Welcome to American Issues Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today's title is The Putin Wing of the Republican Party. Mark Twain said that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And what are we rhyming with? Back in 1950, about 1954, there was a senator by the name of Joseph McCarthy who created a whole lot of hysteria about communists everywhere. Communists that were infiltrated in the government and in your backyard. There was a communist behind every bush and it created what was known as the Red Scare. There was the fear that Russia was influencing government and how government conducted its business. Well, let's fast forward. And 2023, 2024. And maybe this time that it's not a Red Scare. Maybe there was a fact that there was a Russian influence not only in our government, but deeply seated in our government in the form of many senators and certainly our former president. He seems to be a very much a Putin apologist and a quiet supporter, but it's not so quiet anymore. He's saying overt things like what he said about NATO, the NATO comments that Russia could do whatever the hell it wants. And certainly his comments back in 2000, I believe it was 2017 or 16, about Helsinki and him trusting Putin over his own intelligent agencies. So we have some examples that we're gonna discuss today and with that, I'd like to welcome my co-host, Jay Fidel. Hey, good morning, Jay. Good morning, Jim. Jay, I wanna read a quote from Liz Cheney. And I think this sums it up beautiful as what the concern is right now about how many of our senators, House of Representatives, even our potentially our speaker of the House seems to be saddling up and cuddling up to Russia and specifically Vladimir Putin. Here's what she said. When you think about Donald Trump, for example, pledging retribution, what Vladimir Putin did to Alexei Navi is what retribution looks like in a country where the leader is not subject to the rule of law. You know, have Putin, the Putin wing in the Republican Party. Your reaction to that, that quotation, recent quotation from her. He's right. You know, she's been right on a lot of things and I'm glad she spoke out about it. I'm glad she said that because it's true. You know, I was thinking regarding our discussions of this, that this particular spread and that, you know, the Republican Party should be seen in biological terms. And what I mean is you, Tim and me, we're not the same person that we were when we were younger. Our cells change. Our cells get old, they're replaced by other cells. We may look the same and genetically we may have the same attributes but the body is not the same as it was. And the Republican Party is not the same as it was. This has happened with political parties in this country in the past also or maybe in other countries. It changes, it evolves, it re-creates itself just like a biological process in human beings. So I'm thinking, you know, you're talking about the Republican Party, Liz Cheney's talking about the Putin wing of the Republican Party. Is that the same Republican Party? Answer, no. A lot of legislators in Congress who we treated as Republicans aren't in Congress anymore. They've been intimidated out. They've decided to retire. Trump has made it impossible for them to stay there one way or another. And you have new Republicans, Republicans that are acolytes. And I think that's what's happened. This is not the Republican Party that we used to call the Republican Party and it's something else. We actually need a new name for it. As for Putin, you know, I remember, you know, the stories about Putin in the early days, the Jim Comey affair when Trump tried to, you know, squash the investigation, the Mueller investigation, the FBI investigation, he was doing everything he could to accommodate Putin and to obliterate any connection between him and Putin. But the fact is there's been a connection. Putin helped him get elected. And maybe it was even more significant than we know. And he owes something to Putin. And he's paying back now. He's always been paying back to Putin. And so when you look at this and you connect the dots as we like to do, you find out that Trump has accommodated Putin from the beginning of his presidential adventure. And I think this is so dangerous for the country because Trump has probably with the advice of Putin, with the help of Putin, he's turned the Republican Party inside out and made it an instrument for Putin. And I would say that she's right. There's the Putin wing of the Republican Party. But I would say, you know, it may be worse than that. Putin owns Trump, Trump owns the Republican Party. The Republican Party is Putin. That's as scary as it gets, but that's what's happening. The power, you know, derivatively belongs to Putin in this country. Watch and you will see. You know, of recent few days, you've heard a lot of people have to explicitly state that Russia is an enemy of the United States. I mean, it's explicit and is being repeated often. Yet it doesn't seem to really weigh in with a lot of folks. And I'll say more than just the MAGA Republicans, but now some Republicans in general. I mean, we have a report that Russia has potentially nuclear weapons that could go up in space and potentially take out satellites. My God, I mean, you know, what happened in October, 1957, when this thing called Sputnik, a satellite with no arms capability, scared the living daylights out of Americans that the Russians had put something in an Earth's orbit that was harmless, yet look what it caused. It caused a panic and the forthcoming military arms buildup and space race. Yet here we have it, news reports that Putin could be, you know, months or a year away from implementing nuclear weapons in outer space. Yet it doesn't seem to register on the Richter scale. We have other stories. This informant, last named Smirnov, who was the plant that gave the FBI all this information about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden being involved with kickbacks and financial impropriety bribes. Yet that story now is broken, that he's lied, and most likely he got his stories from Russian plants. Yet doesn't seem to be a concern for the Republicans. They've been duped for years, and yet here they go. Your thoughts about that? In January of 2017, there were two demonstrations near the Plaza Hotel at the southeast corner of Central Park on opposite sides of the street. And I don't remember the issue, but it was an issue with some contention at the time. And on one side of the street, the demonstrators were pro that issue, and on the other side of the street, they were against that issue. Come to find that Russia created both demonstrations just to divide us. And I think Russia's been doing that all along. So the thing with this informant, it's just one of a string of things that has been happening. And you say it's a surprise, and it's pretty scary that they would have such control of our public thinking, and thus our public policy. I think it's been happening all along. Why not? The mark of an autocracy is that you don't spend time improving a lot of your people. You spend time making war, making trouble, making nuclear weapons in space. And that is so, look, North Korea, and the huge percentage of the available resources are going to missiles and bombs and all that. Look at Hamas, look at Iran. These guys are spending every last penny on war, not making life better for their people. I think there's a connection between autocracy and negative initiatives like that. So I'm not surprised. I think Putin's been doing it all along. His economy is one-twentieth of the American economy. It's really small. And yet- It's less than the economy of Texas. And he spends all his time and money fighting with us. Why can't he help the Russian people? They don't know. And the Republicans here don't know. They're confused, and they're under the spell, the cult spell of Trump. So they're misinformed, uninformed, and they buy into this. I remember one other point. I remember, also back in the early days of Trump, the New York Times sent a reporter to gun shows in the South. And one of the questions that they asked everybody at these gun shows, how do you feel about Russia? It was a surprise of surprises, because these were red states which used to hate Russia, which used to think there were a bunch of filthy pink-o communists in Russia. Okay, now all of a sudden, they're all saying, everybody interviewed said, you know what, we've been giving Russia a bad deal. We have to treat them nicer. They're really our friends. There's a lot. You know, it's one thing if somebody in a liberal state said that. But these are not people who are liberal in liberal states. These are people who have somehow changed their minds. And I think the base, the cult, they like Russia. He has gotten them to like Russia. In the country, it's not just the Republican wing of the party or rather the Putin wing of the Republican party. It's most of the Republican party. It's the ones who are controlling things in any event like Johnson. It's also their supporters, their voters, wow. You know, not that we need the likes of Joseph McCarthy because he destroyed a lot of careers and created us, you know, individuals in our society to be ostracized. We even had some suicides as a result of McCarthy's persecution of innocent Americans. Not that we need that kind of individual, but is it necessary to start pinpointing a spotlight on all the examples of overt Putin support from our senators and our former president, Donald Trump? Is it time for that or do we just, you know, say, yeah, it's the way it is and, you know, nothing to be seen here, move along? It's the former. And frankly, I don't think the press has done a good job. They haven't connected these thoughts for us. They haven't shown that Putin is manipulating our elections to a degree we never understood. We never, we didn't believe in it. You know, we were, I don't want to say optimistic about the integrity of our election system and our information systems and our media, what not. But the fact is that the media, and I mean all media, haven't really picked up on this. They haven't shown it to us. And somebody should be doing that. Well, just the opposite. We had the former media darling of Fox News. And I say that word loosely, news, Fox Entertainment. We had Tucker Carlson basically giving a softball interview to Vladimir Putin. But worse that, he's in the Russian marketplace telling Americans, oh, you know, Russia's not so bad. It's pretty good. He went to the supermarket and he's gone into the, you know, the public transportation, showing the best that Russia has to offer. But I guarantee you, if you move five blocks west, it's not so nice. What about Tucker Carlson also responding to an inquiry from a reporter saying, all leaders kill people some more than others. This is what Donald Trump said during the presidential debate about, you know, the United States has killed people too when he is being taken the task about his support for Russia. So do we have the media working against keeping Russian influence out of the marketplace? The other media have footage of him in the stores in the metro there in Moscow. And they make fun of him. They make fun of him. They make fun of Tucker Carlson, but they don't really connect thoughts. What really happened here? How in the world did he get an audience with Putin? Why didn't Putin agree with that? Why did he take the time to run around Moscow and show us how beautiful it is? You know, there's more here than meets the eye. They made fun of him. They laughed at him. We all laughed at him. Tucker is a schmuck. Okay, but the problem is there's much more. And I wanna see the press cover that to connect Putin and Tucker and Trump and others like Tucker to show that Putin is working us and Trump is working us through Putin. Maybe we don't have enough information, but at least some opinion pieces. And I saw one, it's not enough. There should be a lot of them and we should be scared because these guys are effecting public opinion and Tucker shouldn't get any coverage at all. You know, it was a couple of shows ago, Jay, that you and I talked about the dangers of ridiculing Donald Trump because, you know, it's great for late night TV, you know, the comedian hosts making fun. And we all seem to laugh along, but there's some serious stuff going on here. And the concern is that things are becoming a joke rather than serious matters. And I see that happening more and more, everything Donald Trump says and does, and people, you know, they're in a mood to ridicule, but not take it seriously. Your thoughts on that point. Yeah, exactly. I agree with you, but I would say that what happened with Tucker, okay, and what happened with this informant are only a couple of things. Trump through Putin, Putin through Trump are trying to change American public opinion, and thus, you know, the electorate. And they're gonna continue to do that between now and November. You will see more of this. Now, some of it, the FBI will catch. Some of it, maybe some of it, the press will catch, the media will catch, but a lot of it, you know, will be insinuated into the public conversation. And we, all of us, won't realize that it's been planted there. That this, in addition to the fact that Putin through the internet research agency in Moscow is working hard to send social media to the people in this country that look at social media, trying to send messages every single day. And to say nothing of Trump's efforts and Putin's efforts to affect legislators in various states to turn elections upside down. Remember, you know, he's working on, Trump is working on two levels. One is change public opinion, and attack Biden in every which way. And trust me, they, he and Putin will do that. And B, try to screw up the election system so that he has the argument in case he loses the popular vote or even the electoral vote, so that he has the argument that the system is rigged. And if he loses, I guarantee that he will make that argument. And he is trying to set the stage for that argument now. So they're working on a number of levels. High stakes poker, everything goes. And, you know, you can say there's a humor about it, but really it's not funny and it's continuing. And we can expect it to continue. And we are only hoping that the media and the intelligence agencies will catch it. But that's what's happening. At some point, does there become a national security threat thanks to Donald Trump and his influence? It is a national security threat. It's been a national security threat ever since he'll, he'll sinking. And it will continue to be a national security threat. So is it hands off because he's a presidential candidate that he could be working for the other side rather than for the United States side? You know, who was it that said if he, if he loses and he can't get back in the office, he's got a lot of secrets to sell. He's a transactional person and he's got secrets to sell. Now he's got, you know, the steel dossier to deal with and the possibility of compromise by Putin against him. You know, he's going to be obligated to do that. And the answer is, yes, he is going to work it every day. He's working it now. Well, I guess my, I guess my point is that, you know, let's say there's overt examples of Donald Trump compromising the security of the national interest and security in the United States. Do these agencies that protect us, I'm thinking the CIA and others, FBI, do they just say it's hands off because Donald Trump is political kryptonite and to intercede would be basically, how do you say it? Complying with Donald Trump's conspiracy that there's a deep state, that the government is involved with a deep state and that everything against him is a witch hunt. And so that's why if he does compromise the security of the United States, it's hands off for him. Is that a possibility? It already happened. Look at Mar-a-Lago. Look at the case, the federal case in DC over the insurrection. I mean, he's a traitor. And he every day, he has threatened the security of the United States. And the Department of Justice in those two cases has raised the, you know, has raised the alarm. Look at the Georgia case, also raised the alarm. The problem is that these intelligence agencies can't walk in and arrest him and do things on their own. They need the Department of Justice. They need the rule of law. They need to prosecute. They need to indict and prosecute. And the same thing in state cases like Georgia. And so far, you know, he's stumped the chumps. We don't have anything close to a trial date in Mar-a-Lago. We are in a kind of ethical train wreck in Georgia. God knows what's gonna happen there. I think she's coming back though, in the public mind. People do support funding Willis. But whether she gets a trial date, I don't know. And the one in Washington, you know, that's gonna depend on the Supreme Court. Maybe they all depend on the Supreme Court. And so, yes, the Department of Justice and state officials wanna, you know, protect the national security. They wanna take the benefit of what they have learned. They wanna indict, they wanna try, they wanna prosecute, and they wanna, you know, get a conviction and a punishment. But it's a long road to hold. And so far, he has been effective in staving them off. And when we get a first trial, when we start the trial, when the gallows comes down on that trial, then I'll feel better. But for now, I'm not optimistic that all of these threats to national security are gonna be, he's gonna be held accountable, especially before the election. If he can stave them off and win the election or somehow take back the Oval Office, he'll do a lot of pardoning. And it'll be over, at least as far as the federal cases are concerned. You know, President Biden this weekend when the death of Alexia Navalny was announced on all the news outlets, President Biden took to the microphone and basically, not basically, he's specifically and explicitly stated that Vladimir Putin is responsible for the death of Navalny. Donald Trump was mum, was silent for days on end. And then only recently has he come out to basically say that his plight is similar to Navalny's and that he too is a victim of government oppression. In what surreal world am I living in where you have a hero in the form of Alexia Navalny that was murdered by Vladimir Putin and our former president and our current candidate for the president of the United States is silent about Putin's role in that, yet he compares himself to the plight of Navalny and compares himself as such. What's surreal world am I living in, Jay? It's just another dot on the chart which shows you the connection between Trump and Putin. The first part of that where Trump said he referred to Putin's assassination days later, several days later, had been around the world a hundred times before Trump said anything about it. And that silence was deafening. He said it was a sudden death. He referred to this as a sudden death. Putin might have written that. That would be Putin's position. And so when he said that, I said, God, he, Putin is writing the script for him. And would it be the first time Putin has written the script for him? No. I think Putin is advising him. Someday history will show. The other part of it where he likens himself to a victim, well, that's his regular theme. He's a victim and he connects himself to all the victims in the world. So it's a matter of what? Deflecting the issue. It's a matter of confusing the people. It's a matter of changing the subject. You never, ever get down to the truth, never. And so he used it, was really obnoxious to use it for his own advantage. But clearly, Putin assassinated Navalny. Everyone knows that. And Biden was right to say that in so many words. And I don't know if Trump lost anybody in his base over it, but he was so obnoxious that it's hard to believe. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time, would it? Let me just connect another dot. We had the GOP basically say, we're not gonna consider funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, until we get real action at the border. Well, then unexpectedly, the Democrats said, okay, we're willing to pitch a deal that's basically match up with everything what you want almost. And that was unexpected. So then Donald Trump had to say, I'm not gonna be involved with Ukraine at all. We're not gonna support that. As the Speaker of the House said, I'm gonna introduce anything to the floor of the House of Representatives. And even though the Senate came up with a package to fund Ukraine, Mike Johnson's having no part of that. Again, to what degree is Putin influencing the demise of Ukraine and potentially Taiwan? All in that one funding package in Israel. I'm gonna have to soak my head. And that is really awful what happened there. And it's been revealed how cynical that whole thing was. Johnson is useless. He's just a conduit for Trump. And it shows you that Trump is in charge of Johnson and in charge of the, what do you wanna call it, the Putin wing of the Republican Party, in Liz Cheney's words. The Republican Party is like over. But what they did here was so destructive. Ukraine is hanging by a thread. We're not giving them anything. The EU is trying to make up for it, but hasn't yet. Putin is gonna take more territory. And in many ways, he's gonna win this war by doing so. I don't feel, the Israel thing is a little different. But I think it needs the attention of Congress. It needs support from Congress. And it needs weapons. And it needs the moral swage that the United States can provide. The United States is providing complete chaos, complete confusion that will in our lifetimes of our children will never be forgotten. The American dream is a nightmare. And this is really awful what's happened. This one incident that you described is awful beyond words. And it speaks volumes about how broken our system is, how broken our politics are, and how broken the Republican Party, if you still call it that, how broken the Republican Party is. We're gonna see more of that. I do the fact that Donald Trump does not want to fund Ukraine. Americans seem to be missing his motivations for that. Certainly the influence of Putin to Trump and from Trump to Mike Johnson. But also let's not forget what happened back in 2020 prior to the election. And Zelensky refused to create a fake file of evidence against Joe Biden. And that ultimately led to Donald Trump's first impeachment. So Donald Trump has it out for Ukraine. And do you think the American people are cognizant of that? They remember that. And then certainly do you think they're cognizant that the influence that Putin has on Donald Trump at this time? A lot of the American people don't understand that. They don't connect to us. They live day to day. And the media doesn't remind them of what's going on. The media doesn't connect to us. I'm sorry. You and me, we've been having this conversation from 2016 on forward. We connect the dots. We understand that Putin has something on Trump. Trump wants something from Putin. It's a transaction that keeps on giving like the ever-ready battery. You can assume it's gonna continue. You can assume that Trump will do everything he can to accommodate Putin's wish to take over Ukraine. And he was opposed and will be opposed to any help from the United States even though it is our moral obligation, our geopolitical obligation. And in the process, he doesn't care how much damage he does to our allies, to NATO, to the EU, and to our reputation in the world. So the answer is clear. He's working for Putin. Putin is writing a script for him. Shameless. Now, I think the media could catch up on this. If the media could get some information, possibly from the American intelligence agencies, if they would release it, if they would share it, then maybe we'll have a different public view of this. But so far, the answer to your question is not that many people understand what's been happening. And certainly not that many people in their public party understand that this is existential to our country. You know, Chris Christie was kind of the foil against Donald Trump in this campaign for 2024. He's dropped out. Of recent, Nikki Haley seems to be taking up the mantle for Christie and start really laying things out and knocking white terms about Donald Trump and specifically about his lack of support for Ukraine and certainly how he's nuzzling up to Putin is she's becoming more and more strident about that. Does that continue for Nikki Haley? Is that gonna get her something? First, to answer that question first, I would say watch out that Donald Trump is gonna try to destroy her. Like with phony information, misinformation, disinformation, God knows what. He's going to try to destroy her because she's needling him and making statements that are adversarial and damaging to him. I was gonna say, do you think there's any damage to being created right now? Well, in the minds of some voters, and you know, we need a strong leader and she's acting like a strong leader. She's actually competing with him. You and I in our discussions have talked about the fact that there has to be somebody strong. There has to be somebody strong on the other side of the scale to beat him. Otherwise, you know, he comes off as a strong leader and a lot of people, you know, it's tropistic. They are attracted to a strong leader, even if he's dead wrong. Democrats have done that many, many times over. So it's good that she's out there testing his comments and his positions and his strength. Whether it will do her any good, that's really an open question. I thought it was cute what she did the other days. She invited the press in and they believed that she was going to withdraw from the race. She didn't tell them what she was going to speak about and she said, I'm not withdrawing from the race. I thought that was a really cool move and she's a really cool candidate, although I don't like her, you know, public policy decisions at all, sorry. But whether she can, you know, stay in and make something of it, I don't know. If he fails, if he fails, she's going to have the nomination, I think, or she has a good chance of getting it on her. And frankly, I'd like to see him fail, not because, you know, not because she is better or worse than him, but because we need to get back to normalcy. That's what she's selling. She's selling the old Republican party. She's selling normalcy and then people will be attracted to that if he wasn't around. So maybe she's hoping that, you know, it's a war of attrition and that he somehow, somebody, something will pull the rug out from under him. Like one of those indictment cases, right? If he does, you know, lose it in some of those trials, and she's going to be around. So there might be something. I think she's betting on something. She's not doing it just for a drill. Well, she has money because people are giving her money. So that's usually the rational why a candidate drops out as they just ran out of money. Let me ask you one last, we're out of time, but let me ask you one last question. If Donald Trump went away, however he went away, would the Republican party continue on this love affair with Vladimir Putin or would it return back to its former self or close to its former self? That's a good question. But, you know, I think it will change because the insanity in the Republican party is all derived from him. And the Republican party has turned out to be, you know, acolytes and cult followers following him. If he disappeared, if he was out of there, the Republican party couldn't recover, I believe. And it could go back to more of a normalcy, but that would depend on who is the successor leader. If it was somebody like Nikki Haley, there's a good chance of that, as I mentioned. So I think it's capable of recovery even when he's not there. Yeah, so it's the insanity there, it's all him. You take him out of the calculus and there's a possibility of recovery. Alrighty. You know, I just know that a strong democracy depends on strong political parties. And certainly we don't have that right now. And I think a lot of Americans are hoping for the day that we have good old-fashioned competition for the field and marketplace of ideas and good old-fashioned policies which the Republican party used to have. So your last thoughts before we conclude. Well, he's really screwed the party up by putting a little nepotism there in the management, Laura. And Laura's not the only one, there are a lot of people who are completely Trump. So to continue in the program I was making is the reinvention of the Republican party must see these people go. And the new leadership, whoever that might be, first job is to get rid of these people who are Trumpers. So as long as they're there, the sickness will continue. Alrighty. Thank you to my co-host Jay Fidel for joining us today and giving us a lot of food for thought. Won't you join us next week for American Issues Take One? I'm Tim Appichell, your host. And until then, a little hot.