 Aloha. It's September the 9th. It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. It's Trump week. I'm Tim Appichella, your host. Title of this show is Suckers and Losers. His words are discussed. You know, each week for the past three and a half years of watching Donald Trump, I say to myself, where's the floor? Where's the basement to his behavior? Where's the floor to his words? How low can this thing go? My answer came last Friday when the Atlantic Art Up came out by written by Jeffrey Goldberg. This article was published. And in the article, what struck me as the basement, the floor, was when he said, and is quoted to say, why do I have to visit that cemetery? It's filled with losers. Or in the part where Bellawood, France, where a thousand Marines of the Fourth Brigade Division, they gave their lives to keep the Germans from advancing and Trump referred to their sacrifices, suckers. Or in Arlington, at the grave site of General John Kelly, his chief of staff, the grave of Robert Kelly, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. And Trump turned to John Kelly and said, I don't get it. What do they get out of it? You know, veterans that support Trump, they have their reasons. My question to those veterans, though, is this what you expected from your commander in chief? Do you just accept Trump's usual refrain and often heard its lies? It's fake news? Do you stay with that because it conflicts with your idea of who you want Donald Trump to be versus who Donald Trump really is? You know, Trump said about the story, who would say a thing like that? Only an animal would say that. Well, you know, think about that statement and think about his words, suckers and losers, and think about that on Wednesday, November the 11th, 2020 Veterans Day, as he places the wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Think about his words. And if this doesn't bother you, this doesn't upset you. If this doesn't outrage you, then think about why that is because it should. With me today are our guests, Jay Fidel, Stephanie Dalton, Cynthia Lees and Claire, and Winston Welch. Welcome, everybody. Nice to be here. Jay, let me go to you. What do you think Donald Trump has such disdain for our military? And also, in the same question, your feelings and comments about his terminology about our heroes, our fallen soldiers, be it World War One, World War Two or any time or in the Vietnam conflict, his words are just deplorable. Your thoughts? He's a racist. He's ignorant. He hasn't studied history. He didn't do very well in school. He's a really pathetic character. Don't forget that he got out of Vietnam because he had a bone spur on his heel. The problem is when they asked him which heel he couldn't answer that. He doesn't know because it was neither heel. So what you have here is a guy who really is out for himself, not out for the country, and he makes fun of those who are out for the country. The problem is the insult is not just to the guys who died. It's not just to the guys who were wounded. It's not just to the guys in uniform. It's to the country in general. Think about it. It's everybody who is here in this democracy by virtue of the blood has been spilled over all of our history. He's dumping on everything. And I just don't understand why anybody would stand for him under those circumstances. You know, Fox News confirmed this story with the sources. Now the sources are unnamed. But that reporter for Fox News was able to verify that which Goldberg wrote. And I'm not sure that makes a difference. Whether they hear it on Fox News or any any news service, be it Washington Post, New York Times, AP, I'm not sure if that's getting into the cerebellum of veterans who have supported Trump all these years. And I mystified as to why that is. And maybe it's changing. We get reports that the polling for veterans is shifting away from Trump. And that might have been one of the reasons why he decided to pull funding for the, I think it was a 100-year publication of the Stars and Stripes, which he had now has restored as a result of this article. But I'm just not hearing the outrage from veteran groups or from the veterans of foreign wars organizations. I'm not hearing the outrage. And I don't know if that's a result of them not believing the story, or they just don't want to admit it's occurred. That's the question. And people are really dedicated to him. And it's almost like it doesn't matter what he does, shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue and the like. And things are speeding up, you know, as you brought up before the show began. There are people waiting in the wings with more of these things, more books, more commentary, more tapes, more things that show you what he's really made of. But the base persists. And in some states, the two Biden and Trump are closer than they were before this kind of stuff started to come out. It's unbelievable how they will back him. A lot of people, a lot of Trumpers will back him no matter what happens. Hopefully, there's a tipping point in here sometime in the next 50 days where it will finally catch. But to me, that's the big question. And of course, interacting with that question is the failure of the voting system and what the damage that he has done to the post office. All right. Thank you, Jay. Hey, Stephanie, your thoughts as to why maybe Donald Trump isn't the commander in chief that we're usually accustomed to. Do you have any thoughts about why he has a disdain or seems to have a disdain for our American troops? Let me just bring out a real quick quote here. He said on the 8th of September, in front on the podium, he's saying, I'm not saying the military is in love with me, but the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to they want to do nothing but fight wars and all have those wonderful companies that make bombs and make planes and everything to make them stay happy. In a sense, by that quotation he was saying again, if you're a regular serviceman, you're a loser. You're a sucker because you're fighting a war just for profiteering purposes and the generals and the high command, they're in thick with it. Your thoughts. Oh, I don't think this is reflecting well on the military school. He attended for high school because you would think that there they would have instantiated some of these principles of duty, honor, and things like that and respect for the country and that and the service to it being a very high value to everybody. So that that's curious. So that didn't soak in and and obviously he's had nothing to do with it, including his own father was not, according to the Mary Trump book, not not interested in that kind of direction either for his son. So I think that there's just a lack of values and and the kinds of beliefs that we would expect to have the family incorporate in their thinking. They don't do it. So so it's deplorable. The other thing is that again, such a low level, the way he talks about these things. It's it's not even at the the level of principle, much less at the level of principle. It's just like playground talk. You know, I don't like this. I don't like that. You know, these you're stupid for it. I mean, it's just at such a low level. So that's, I don't know that that's exactly the low of Michelle Obama's when they go low, we go high. I think it's even lower than that low. We were supposed to go higher than as I said in the intro, I don't know how long, you know, I don't know how low this basement goes. And I think this is the low point of the basement. But I think in the next 55 days, I may be proven incorrect on that. Yeah, because people will vote in their own best interest. I mean, actually, if the stock market is good, there are some people that are going to vote because they believe that they're making money and that is people are going to do that. So there's some degree, some new number or percentage of people that are going to go that way. And then the Minnesota people, if they're those that are up there mining and doing things from the 18th century and don't want to come into the 21st, I mean, they have their own grant acts to grind up there. So some of the people are going to be driven by that. I prefer that they're driven by that than that they vote by cult. So I mean, we just have to realize how diverse and polyglot this country is. And I'm trying to grapple with that and understand better my fellow Americans. He's working at it. Keep working at that. Hey, Cynthia, Donald Trump's denial of this this story in the Atlantic seems pretty, pretty flimsy. He used the excuse that well, I called Melania at home and told her, oh, shoot, I can't go to the cemeteries. I really wanted to go but I can't go. Well, we know for a fact that Melania was with him on that trip. He also says, well, this can't be true because I never called John McCann a loser. Well, we also the 2015 video about how he didn't respect John McCann because he was captured, although he's shot down out of the skies. He was captured and he doesn't like captured captured heroes. We have tweets from Donald Trump back then, saying directly specifically, John McCann's a loser. So his defense of this trying to point this out as fake news or lies doesn't seem to be sticking very well. In fact, he tapped the shoulder of Sarah Sander's Huckabee and she did her dang this to try to say, well, I've been there with the president. I've never heard a word of just staying towards the military or any of its soldiers. But if that's the best he's got is using Sarah Sander's Huckabee Sanders as his go-to person to kind of bail and auto this one, I think it's kind of pathetic. Absolutely agree with you. And they have since done some fact checking on the statement that Sarah made and that it was a lie. She said she had overheard him making the phone call to tell families that their soldiers had been lost in combat. Whereas they, even I know this, they never do it over the phone. It's always in person and it's always by a military official. So of course she has to roll back everything that she said, you know, and say, oh, well, I meant that he was giving condolences calls. Well, that's not what she said. And so, you know, it's just the typical from every person in this administration. They say one thing and then they lie to cover up that what they said was a lie. So they lie again. And so that's why we've got this huge mountain of lies and people question, what is truth now? What is the lie? What is the truth now? And we question our own selves even sometimes. You have any impression about his words used, suckers and losers? I cried. I almost cried. I almost teared up again while you were talking in the beginning here, too. It breaks my heart that we could have a president speaking that way, thinking that way. It just, I love my country. I love every soldier that has gone out there and given his life for us. And so I'm going to get goosebumps and start tearing up again every time I think about the fact that we've got a man like this running our country, throwing our soldiers in harm's way every time they turn around. So it's more than just he's a deplorable, he's an awful person who has no empathy and no loyalty and no honor, but it's more than that. He's dangerous. He's definitely dangerous to every single one of our military. Well, I think General Matt has actually referred to it as such that in, you know, recently we have, you know, an FBI agent, I forget his name offhand, but he's calling Donald Trump a national threat, a security threat. So that's, I mean, that's when you have FBI saying our President of the United States is a security threat. I just don't know what to quite say to that. All right. Thank you, Cynthia. Winston, does this impact the veteran vote? Does this story of the Atlantic shift those numbers a little, a lot or not at all? Boy, you would, you would hope so. I mean, the timing with the shutdown of the Stars and Stripes or their $15 million budget, that alone just spoke a lot. That combined with the timing of the release of this article, and I think we're going to see some more releases like this that are hopefully, sadly, equally damaging, but I would hope that it does reach some people that says, wait a minute, this is how he's talking about my brother, my father, my sister, my me, you happen to be serving in the arms forces. It's a horrendous way to speak about those who served our country, who served our country for centuries, and especially coming from one who reports to command these people, I would hope that if your boss spoke about you in that way, you would react in an appropriate way. And Mass, if we've seen that the shift has taken place in the military as far as who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 versus who is supporting Joe Biden in this term, and it's been a shift. And I think this is probably part of it. I think the racial issues coming to the fore is part of it. So all of it together, there's so many points you could take. It really doesn't matter. Just choose one and look at it in any depth. But I also feared that for those folks that have drank the Kool-Aid so deeply, that it will not matter. And I would refer you again, like I did last week, about the box article, can anything change Americans' minds about Donald Trump? But when it does happen and when there were some other articles I just did want to mention is that David Brooks, who's an otherwise very sober writer, the PBS fellow with Shields and Brooks, he wrote an article on what will you do if Trump doesn't leave and is playing out the nightmare scenario. It was a very interesting one about basically preserving our constitutional order and our love of country over this, I don't want to call it partisan theory. He's obviously speaking about one person here. The other one that I thought was interesting is the nation came out with is Trump planning a coup d'etat. And while I would have retitled it, what you can do Well, don't you need the military to do that? And this isn't a heck of a way to try to get the military to support your coup d'etat agenda. Well, when you're discrediting your leaders, who are just out for a piece of the Popeye, I guess, you know, like he just did this week, then maybe you're relying on the rank and file. I don't know. But it was actually, I would retitle it and say, what we're doing as a society, traditional Republicans, Democrats and sane people to preserve our order. I thought it was a very hopeful article. I think the title was inflammatory, but it was very good and ultimately hopeful. And then the final one is Washington Post. How do we respond to our former Trump loving friends? It was basically an article that says, don't rub their nose in the pee. Just kind of pick up and move on with where you're going and say, okay, you've changed your mind. That's a great thing. And move on because that's okay. Welcome back to the fold. Okay. Thank you, Winston. Hey, switching gears, Jay. Donald Trump is the quote unquote law and order president yet are now on three separate occasions. He has encouraged voters to vote twice to commit a felony. Where do we go with this? How do we stop him from going from state to state to state saying, vote twice, test the system, cause mass confusion in the voting process? Let there be so much confusion that I could say this election is not valid. It's rigged. It's been thwarted. Is there any way of stopping Donald Trump from opening his mouth and trying to cast voters to commit felony? Do you want a short answer? I do. No. Now I want a long answer. There's a piece about his violations of the Hatch Act at his national convention. 154 violations of the Hatch Act. So my wife said to me, she said, that's terrible. He's violating a federal statute in public and multiple times in multiple ways and arrogantly. I said, what are you going to do about it? She said, I'm going to Washington. I'm going to make a citizen's arrest. Make me dinner first, will you? The problem is, Stephanie, are you going to go to Washington, make a citizen's arrest? I don't think anybody, is William Barr going to make an arrest? William Barr, the one who is now seeking to defend Trump in a completely civilian case where he's charged with rape of a woman in Bergdorf Goodman. There's so many things where he has violated the law, but there's no apparatus to stop him. I thought about this too. This is a significant issue. So many things that he's done, but the only ones who could call him on it, the only ones who could call him on it are, well, Cyrus Vance can call him on it in New York jurisdiction, but of course, Trump is going to try to run the clock on that, is running successfully running the clock. It's not going to catch the election. The other thing, one more point, is that Trump is not going to respond to anybody. This is sort of like Xi Jinping. He's not going to respond to anybody but a chorus of people. For example, if every leader in Europe got up and criticized him, that might have an effect, and every media got up and criticized him, that could have an effect. In this country, the media is really the fifth column. The media has got to do this. Unfortunately, the media are not altogether about it, and whatever the post and the Guardian and the New York Times say, you always have, you always, I shouldn't say always, but until now, you've had Fox News defending Trump. So, Jay, are you saying the only backstop would be the provisions of the 25th Amendment? Is that the only real backstop that this country has if a president blatantly violates multiple laws, not just the Hatch Act, but multiple laws? I'm saying that there is nothing. The 25th Amendment is not going to work. You have a completely compromised attorney general. He can stop the 25th Amendment in no time. Remember, the 25th Amendment requires a vote of the cabinet. They're all stooges. They're not going to vote them out on the 25th Amendment. So, forget that. There's no way to stop him on these violations of the law, at least now, before Election Day. All we can do is vote against him, and it has to be a landslide vote for Biden. And let me say that I'm not convinced at all we're going to have a landslide vote for Biden. Stephanie, I agree with everything. Would have Donald Trump continues to go to state to state and cause chaos and confusion by instructing voters to vote twice? What then? Well, he's going to continue to do that, and worse. And my, I'm sorry I jumped in, but I wanted to say to respond to Jay's point, how are we going to manage this? Is it only the 25th Amendment? And I think that's our work. Once we get the new administration in, we're going to have to do some work to protect ourselves from such a scoundrel again. And that, I think, is much more important, because I don't think we're going to have a problem getting them out of there. By the way, Jay, I will go with Sharon to D.C. if he doesn't come out of the White House. And she and I are going in and getting him out. But anyway, I'd like to do a Army behind us, but I don't see that as much of an, it's something we can't solve. But how are we going, because can we do, is it require a constitutional convention to do this? But how are we going to protect ourselves from this level of behavior and capacity in the future now that we've seen the very worst possible play, play through, play out? Alrighty. Well, Cynthia, I know you're loaded for bear on this question. And let loose. Well, shoot, you know, voting isn't going to be the end all be all. We could all go to the polls. We could all show up. Every Democrat in the country could show up. And just a very small few people could vote for him. And he will still look like he wins because he's going to cheat. If we don't have paper balance in place. And I mean, in every single state, and how do we do that? I don't know. When you've got Republican Secretary of States everywhere, you know, Georgia is a great example. Texas just recently in the primaries when federal work lost is another good example of the level of actual tabulation manipulation that's going to be going on. We've got Ivanka Trump, who got 17 patents from China, and some of them are voting tabulation software. Now, how are we not talking about that? Every single person in this country should be screaming at the top of the rooftops. How do we deal with this? How do we stop that from happening? It's not just a matter of getting everybody out to vote. Because if they cheat, it doesn't matter if we vote. Let me ask you this, Cynthia. I mean, there's going to be an army of attorneys both on the Republican and the Democratic side on election day. An army of attorneys out there looking for inconsistencies. Let's say that blatant cases of voter fraud is discovered. What does it matter? If we can't enforce a law against Donald Trump for anything, what does it matter if voter fraud starts to take place and what authority or entity will be able to say, time out, we've got a problem here in Houston? Well, unfortunately, it's the Department of Justice, which is completely corrupted. So we're in for big trouble, which is why I think we need to set up safeguards in place long before we get to that point. And I know Jay and Tim, you guys remember, I've been screaming this for a couple years now, and I wish we could have started two years ago because I'm afraid it's too late to get those kind of stopgap measures in place at this point. So what do we do? I don't have that answer, but I know there's really smart people in this country that can come up with stuff and people that are in power, that do have power. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, come on, you guys start talking about voter safety, election security, not voting, not mail-in voting. I mean, it's like, who cares how your vote gets there, as long as it gets counted correctly? That's the part I focus on, is that how do we get it counted correctly? And so that's the biggest fear for me, and I'm not sure. I don't have the answers. I just have the questions. Alrighty. Thank you very much, Cynthia. You didn't disappoint me. I knew you had the answer. Hey, Winston, in this state, state of Hawaii, we are required to have that ballot in by election day. But many states that are going to be using mail-in ballots and or have existing election by ballot on the books, they necessarily have to be postmarked. The ballots have to be postmarked by election day. In your opinion, does the delay of tabulation of those ballots, because they're coming in days or potentially a week later than election day, does more time give Donald Trump more room to cast doubt on the validity of the election and be able to yell from the rooftops, rigged elections, see, I told you it was rigged? Does that occur because we have a, we're going to have several days after election to tabulate those ballots? Well, yes, and it doesn't, it doesn't help that the post office sorting machines have been pulled out and any number of things that have happened that will allow for him to say whatever he wants to say. He's already said that the election is rigged unless he wins. So it does, it doesn't matter. People come up with any excuse. They've already got people ready to challenge us in every contestable county and state in the union. So we need to expect it. But again, I point people to the, the nation article on about this complaining of who and just see there because there are good groups. There's non, nonpartisan groups that are working for election security so that we can say this was a free and fair election after this is all said and done, like I think Stephanie alluded to, we need to deeply look at our institutions to reinforce them. Basically, we need some steel and concrete put in there where we thought no one would ever violate these norms. We need a Sunday. That's a national voting day and we need to standardize some aspects, not all of them. I wanted the strengths about this country that may save us is that we do have a decentralized system honestly. So I'll say that again. I'm sorry. I didn't catch that. Say that again. I think one of the strengths that we do have is that we do have a decentralized system, so there cannot be one mass manipulation across the board. However, it leads to chaos as well. So there are excellent ways to make sure that people can vote safely and securely. We need to implement them in all states and have a policy that at least is uniform inside of its diversity so that we don't have this come up again along with all the other structural reforms that we need to undertake as we rebuild our nation come January 21st. I'd like to add something. You're assuming that we have a nation to rebuild. I'm more pessimistic about that. If Trump wins, we won't have a nation to rebuild. It'll be autocratic. He'll take over. I mean, completely. There won't be anything left. These arguments won't mean anything. And in fact, I'm very pessimistic about the election itself. Right now, ThinkTech is waiting on mail. That's two weeks late. We know when it was sent. We haven't received it yet. I've heard so many stories about late mail, inconsistent mail. That's going to get worse. And if you talk to somebody in the postal service, they're not going to stay till three in the morning helping sort mail by hand for the election. They're just doing their job no more, no less. And there are all kinds of failures in that system, especially when you take the automatic sorters offline. So if you're assuming that all the mail is going to be counted, if you're assuming that you can have, you know, reliability and delivery of ballots, I don't think we can. And I don't think there's anything we can do in the space of 55 days or whatever it is to get all the states together, to get a national initiative going, to pass any election security bills in Congress. It is what it is. As John Paul Sartre said, I know we don't quote him that much here on the show, as John Paul Sartre said, les jours en fait, it is what it is, man. And it's not a good picture. And I just say that Bill Maher suggested a way to do it. He was on Friday night. He's not going to be on it again. He just stopped using the mail and no orders from Amazon, no makeup, no beauty, no makeup. I heard that actually. Take the whole thing down. Great. Okay. Well, you guys get the last word. We've run out of time. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Cynthia. Thank you, Winston, for joining Trump Week. We'll see you next week. I'm Tim Apacheo, your host, Trump Week, Wednesday, 11 o'clock, aloha.