January 7 – How Donald Trump’s Mental Health is Now a Public Health Matter; Is Senator Lindsey Graham Being Blackmailed?; Ryan and the Republicans Are Now Colluding With Trump to Shut Mueller Down

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Trump’s “when did you stop beating your wife” defense of his mental health in response to the revelations in Michael Wolff’s book with Trump’s claim that he is a “very stable genius”, and speak with a prominent psychiatrist who has been urging lawmakers to act on the dangers posed by a president exhibiting manifest signs of psychological frailty under ordinary circumstances who under stress, could cause catastrophic damage to the country and the world. Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine who was the lead organizer of the Duty to Warn conference and the editor of the bestseller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”, joins us to discuss her warning that the personal health of public figures is their private affair, until, that is, it becomes a threat to public health, and her article at The Guardian “Trump is now dangerous – that makes his mental health a matter of public interest”.

Part 2

Then we speak with Sarah Kendzior, a journalist who specializes in the authoritarian states of Central Asia and is an op-ed columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. She joins us to discuss the sudden about face of Senator Lindsey Graham who went from being an acerbic critic of Trump to a gushing sycophant and her concern that Trump is following the playbook of his mentor Roy Cohn and is possibly blackmailing Lindsey Graham using information the Russians hacked from the RNC and the senator’s private email.   

Part 3

Then finally we look further into the extent to which Republican leaders have thrown their lot in with Trump and are now actively colluding in a purge of the DOJ and the FBI following Speaker Paul Ryan’s decision to back the highly partisan White House flunky House Intelligence Chairman Devon Nunes’s sabotage of the Mueller investigation by subpoenaing FBI documents that are evidence in the on-going Russia probe which will surely end up in Trump’s hands and cripple Mueller’s inquiry. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing editor at Harper’s in legal affairs and national security, joins us.