The Last American President? Analyzing Trump's Ties to Russia, Iran and Epstein

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor.

Can you hear me, Phil?

How are you? Well, I'm remote in Lewis, Delaware, and there's rain is falling on my head, but at least they're not bombs.

Yeah, well, it's five o' clock somewhere and I guess it's five o' clock with you.

It is five o' clock here. Lewis is way ahead of the rest of the nation, you know that. Well, certainly, certainly of the West Coast.

I'm glad you're having fun in Delaware. Glad someone's having fun in Delaware.

Well, you know, I mean, these days I'm having fun everywhere because all I have to do is turn on the television set and watch the end of the world. Brought to you by side effects. Ask your doctor.

We are honored to have our friend Thom Hartman join us. He's a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host whose shows are available in over half a billion homes worldwide.He's the New York Times best-selling, four-time Project Censored award-winning author of 24 books in print, 17 languages on five continents. And his new book which we're going to be speaking about today is entitled the Last American President.A Broken Man, A Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink Time.

It's going to be a musical.

Hey, Thom. Hey.

Great to be with you again.

Yeah, it's great to have you back. And thanks so much for coming on the show. I know you're a busy man.

My pleasure, Ted.

Bill,

I do have to say, you know, I've read almost all of your books in all of the languages on all of the continents. But I have to tell you, this book is particularly engaging. Your writing is, as usual, absolutely wonderful.But the thing is, we've got skin in this game, Thom. So, you know, so what you're writing about is what we're living through right now.And it is so present and so engaging and so revealing and affirming in many ways. Even though it's an extremely depressing story.

What you're doing in this book is offering some very needed context as to the shock and awe of the Trump presidency, where they fled the zone intentionally to confuse people and disorient people, while the real power that's enabling this man have their hand in the till.As you write in the book about where Trump comes from, why he is, who he is and who's exploiting him at this point, which is just absolutely fascinating and couldn't be more timely. He has started another war and it doesn't appear as though he really has a plan.

He's holding the button in his hand, but I don't think he knows how to push it yet. Let's hope not.

What's your take on this, Thom?

My take lives on kind of two levels. The first kind of surface level is that it's fairly obvious that Bibi Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Bonesaw told Trump time to attack Iran. Right.He's pretty much admitted that, as has his Secretary of State Marco Rubio.But I think at a deeper level, the thing that really concerns me is that Cash Patel fired the entire FBI team that was looking for Iranian agents in the United States who might want to do a 9 11. And when you look back at the consequences of 911 for George W. Bush, they were very, very good.I mean, Bush was, he was in the crapper, popularity wise. Most Americans, in fact a majority of Americans, thought that he had stolen the election.The five Republicans on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by his father, had given him the election. He was viewed as incompetent. He was a complete bumble BLEEP. And when 911 happened, suddenly he went from in the tank popularity to literally 90%.I mean, Gallup measured it at 90%. It never happened before.And I think that the reason why Trump and Cash Patel have killed off the FBI's work to stop Iranian secret agents in the United States from attacking us is because they wanted, they want us to be attacked. Oh dear. And that's not conspiracy theory, that's just pattern recognition. You know, it's just. Yeah, yeah. Looking at what's going on.

And we got out of 911 the Patriot Act.

Exactly. Among other things, you know, and then torture and black sites and extreme rendition and crap.

If you follow the money, which is fairly easy to do in this administration because they're so blatant. The bottom line here is we have unprecedented political and financial corruptions going on right now.We've never seen really anything like this out in the open. Was this war started because of a pedophile?

Well, I think it was convenient because of these two allegations that Trump raped two different 13 year old girls and the FBI is covering it up.I think it was convenient because people are starting to ask questions about Trump taking bribes from the UAE airplanes and a billion dollars for his crypto company and then giving them chips that the intelligence agencies were screaming, don't ever give them those chips. They've got a mutual defense agreement with China.

Right, right.

And you know, I think it was Very convenient. But I really think that he did it because Bibi Netanyahu basically talked him into it.Bibi Netanyahu has been trying to talk American presidents into attacking Iran forever.

Well, you know, we've been warned for years to stay away from BB guns because we'll shoot our eye out.

Right.

Wasn't he listening?

I mean, you know, I wonder if also Trump, as addled as he is thinking Venezuela was such an easy job, he thought Iran would be easy too. They seem to be trying to blatantly suffocate Cuba and I wonder, starving them

to death, which sieges like that are against international law, but they're doing it anyway.

And first responders can't even put fires out in Cuba because they don't have gas for the engines. That's right. Begs the question. Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, US In November for the election. Where is this gonna stop?

Well, I think if he can provoke a 911 style attack against the United States or even a Tim McVeigh style attack against the United States, he will use that to declare a state of emergency and lock down the elections.

There you go.

I think that's the big end game here. Yeah, it's wonderful getting Epstein off the front pages. It's great. Covering up the graft and corruption of his family.Tearing down the east wing of the White House, for God's sake. I mean, all this other stuff, the Hitler style banner on the Justice Department, now, all of that, it's great. Nobody's squealing about that stuff.But, you know, the real prize here is hanging out of the House and Senate so that nobody can do a serious investigation of these guys while they're still in office.

In your latest book, the Last American President, you get into the context of Donald Trump. And being from New York, I've had the unfortunate displeasure of observing Trump since the 70s. We know that he's cognitively slipping.The question is, who is allowing this to happen and who's benefiting from that following money. Your book lays all this out. Who are the real adversaries of democracy?

Well, one of my biggest concerns is that J.D.vance and the billionaires behind him, Peter Thiel, basically made him, took him from being an obscure author of hillbilly heaven or whatever it was, to hillbilly elegy. I guess to a United States Senator, they're in a position to really benefit substantially from things like the 25th Amendment.I think one of the reasons why J.D.vance is not giving Trump smart advice, why he's not, you know, defending him more vigorously, why he's kind of letting a lot of this stuff slip through and slide through is because he's hoping that Trump will be deposed because he's next in line. I mean, you know, he's, he's, he's the, he'll be the principal beneficiary of the 25th Amendment, you know, or anything like that.And of course he would be the one who would have to pull the trigger, but he wouldn't be able to do that until there was a consensus in the cabinet. And, you know, that's probably a ways down the road.

I've always seen him as the bizarre behind the throne, waiting for the king to die so that he can move in. He looks like that. He looks like an evil wizard, doesn't he?

Or an incel schoolboy.

Yes, yes, quite.

He's a very strange looking man.

He is. Do you think that Trump is compromised in some way when you look at what he has said and done of Russia against our national interests?Again, who's benefiting from this? Trying to dismantle NATO, going against Canada, attacking our own citizens. Who benefits from this? Our adversaries do. Putin.Is it really a case of what people say, that he likes dictators, he fancies himself that way, or do you think that Trump maybe is compromised?For example, Jeffrey Epstein, as I understand it, after he had a falling out with Trump, went out and sought meetings with Putin videos, we know that he went to Epstein's properties. There's evidence to show there was underage rape conducted by both Trump and Epstein.He's laundered lots of money for the Russians through his Trump Tower. Do you think there's really something that he has on Trump?

Craig Unger has done the real deep dive on this stuff. House of Bush, House Assad, House of Trump, House of Putin or whatever it is.And he tracks this back to 1987, when Trump was married to a, whose father was a KGB informant. She was Czech. And they went to Russia on a vacation and were taken under the wing of the kgb.And then after spending a week or two in Russia, they came back to the United States.And lo and behold, Trump goes up to New Hampshire and gives a campaign speech and says that he's thinking of running for president and then buys a full page ad in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times saying it's time for America to pull out a NATO. And echoing Russia talking points. That was 1987. That was, you know, the old Soviet Union.And Craig Unger posits that Trump has Basically been in their pocket both philosophically and financially ever since. And then, of course, in the late 90s and early 2000s, you had both of Trump's sons on different separate occasions, actually several years apart.Eric and Don Jr both telling media figures that, you know, it wasn't a problem, that after his fifth or sixth bankruptcy and after his casino was multiply indicted and hit with multimillion dollar fines for money laundering on behalf of the Russian mob, and then lost his casinos and Vegas wouldn't even give him a casino license for his Trump hotel. That, you know, they both came out and said, well, you know, we can't borrow money from American banks anymore.They won't give us money because we've declared bankruptcy so long, but we've got all these Russian oligarchs who are more than happy to give us money.

So, in fact. In fact, Thom, you're saying he wants to reduce the world to rubble because of his love of the ruble?

That could be. I love the way your mind thinks, Phil.

Thank you. So do the doctors who are studying me.

So, yeah, I think it's entirely possible that Putin owns him.And whether it's that he owns him because he's blackmailing him with Epstein, videos of Trump and porking young girls, or whether it's because Putin, I mean, you know, six weeks before the 2016 election, Trump gave Putin a million dollars and signed a contract for a Trump hotel in Moscow.

Right.

You know, the deal was done. Right. If he wasn't elected, they were going to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The Trump Soho Tower in New York was an open collaboration between Trump and a couple of oligarchs from Russia.

That's right.

He's been doing this for a long time. And we know that Putin plays the long game. He's a strategic genius.Find a vulnerable asset that could become a powerful person in the country, an influential person. Do you think Trump would have become president had the Russians not supported him through social media and other covert operations?

No, I don't think so. And by the way, it wasn't just the Russians. It was the Iranians as well.The Iranians played a huge role in the 2016 election, particularly in swing states, mailing millions and millions of emails to registered Democrats and, you know, basically threatening them to go vote for. Vote for Trump. It was a really remarkable effort.And Trump is now citing that effort by way of saying, the Iranians are trying to mess with our elections. Therefore, I had to bomb Iran, which is weird because they were doing it on behalf of Trump. To help Trump.I don't think that Trump ever would have become president were it not for Russian interference.

That's right. Trump says Iran because of Iran.

That accounts for the first election. But how, after an insurrection and 34 felony convictions and his obvious sexual provocations and court cases involved, how did he get reelected?

Well, Greg palace did the math on this, and he got the actual numbers from the swing states that elected Trump, Weirdly, every single one of them.And what he found was that in those states, 4.7 million American citizens who should have been eligible to vote were not able to vote or didn't have their vote counted.About a million and a half of them were people who had done mail in ballots where the Republicans had hired thousands of people to challenge signatures and say, ah, signature doesn't look right. And at that point, once your ballot is challenged, you've got to physically show up at the Secretary of State's office and prove that you're you.So that's a million and a half votes that didn't get counted.And then the other three and a half million were people who were purged from the voting rolls, mostly black and brown people in those same swing states. And palace did the math. And the guy's got a master's degree in statistics.He did the math and found that had those people been able to vote, you'd have Kamala Harris as president by huge margin, and the Democrats right now would control the House and Senate.

But, you know, Thom, in your book, you also point out that this is a favored tactic of the Republican Party over decades.

You make the claim that there hasn't been a fair election since before Nixon.

Yeah. Since before Nixon. Yeah. The last legitimately elected Republican president was Dwight Eisenhower. Richard Nixon committed treason to become president.He reached out to the Vietnamese and blew up the peace deal that Lyndon Johnson had negotiated in August of 1968. They were on the verge of signing it when Nixon blew it up.LBJ called up Everett Dirksen, who was the Republican leader of the Senate, and said, this is wrong, Everett. This is treason. And Everett said, I know. And they tried to reach out to Nixon, and Nixon refused to back off. Off. So that's. That was the 68 election.In the 72 election, Nixon said that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Turned out there was no such thing.That's why we got the War powers resolution in 1973 that Trump claims he's using right now, but he's lying through his teeth. Then you had Reagan. Reagan reached out to the Ayatollahs, or at least Bill Casey, his campaign manager that he made head of the CIA.Afterwards, Bill Casey reached out to the ayatollahs and we now have, by the way, the lieutenant, former lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, on the record in the New York Times, saying that he went with Casey to Paris to negotiate this deal and said to the Iranians, you guys hang on to the hostages until after the election and we'll have Israel ship you spare parts for your F15s right now because you've got an aging fleet and they need new tires was the big thing. Oh, boy. You know, because they wanted to take over the Shah's military. So the Iranians said, cool, we'll do that.Totally screwed Jimmy Carter and made Ronald Reagan president. Reagan committed treason to become president. Then you got George W. Bush. He wasn't actually elected. He supposedly won Florida by 527 votes.But the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Gannett USA Today did a recount a year later and found that by any measure, that when you recounted all the ballots, Al Gore won the election.Not to mention the fact that just three months before the election, George Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, had had Kathleen Harris, the Secretary of state, knock 90,000 African Americans, all legitimate voters, all U.S. citizens, off the voting rolls. So when they showed up, they were told, sorry, you can't vote 90,000 people. And Bush won that by 527 votes.So that was an illegitimate election, not to mention the Supreme Court's role in that.And then, of course, you've got Trump becoming president in 2016 with Russian help, you know, cutting the deal with WikiLeaks and hacking the and John Podesta's emails and blowing those out. There's good polling on this showing that had that whole email thing never happened, Hillary Clinton would have easily become president.And then, frankly, I think in 2024, you've got Russians and Iranians intervening in the election again, all over social media, not to mention Elon Musk and X. So it's like we have not had a legitimately elected by the popular vote, by the people, Republican election president since Dwight Eisenhower.It's crazy when you think about it.

And yet Gore in 2000, he thought it was good for the country not to contest it.

He caved.

Why did the Democrats stand for this?

I think the turn happened in 1980 when we got our first actual reactionary or revolutionary Republican president who wasn't just going to take over the reins of power and use it in small ways, like Nixon had to help out his buddies or, you know, harass his enemies, but instead wanted to fundamentally change the nature of American government.I mean, you know, Reagan's tax policies have brought us all these billionaires and transferred over $50 trillion of wealth from the bottom 99% of us up to the top 100th of 1% over that same period of time. Among other things, you know, gutting the epa.His EPA administrator, Ann Gorsuch, who was Neil Gorsuch, is on the Supreme Court's mother, you know, had to resign to avoid prosecution for her corruption running the epa, for example. So Reagan came in and said, we don't respect the institutions of American government. We think government is the problem.Government isn't the solution to the problem, it is the problem. He said that right out loud.

That's right.

His first inaugural address. And so you've got Republicans who don't respect the institutions of America or the institutions of our government and are perfectly willing to.To screw around with them and ruin things, whereas you've got Democrats who still are institutionalists to this day. They still believe that the institutions are worthy of preserving, worthy of respecting.Now, in a lot of ways, that looks like Democrats being wimps, and to some extent it is. And to some extent it's Democrats, you know, perhaps not wanting to rock the boat or just, you know, get through the next election or whatever.But I think the biggest.The biggest line of cleavage here between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans have become reactionaries and revolutionaries, essentially, and Democrats haven't. And the Democrats need to go back to that, by the way, because that's what Franklin Roosevelt was. FDR transformed America.He took us from a fairly weak federal government and strong states to a strong federal government and weak states. He created the modern welfare state. He created the modern American middle class.When FDR came into office, the middle class was less than a quarter of us.By the time the New Deal started To erode in 1981, when Ronald Reagan declared war on it, 2/3, 66, 65% of Americans were in the middle class with a single paycheck. Now it's down to 47%, and it requires two paychecks, and that's only at 47%.You know, what you see is the insane damage that these Republican revolutionaries have done to the United States over the last 55 years or 45 years. And it's time for the Democrats. And you're hearing, by the way, this kind of rhetoric from people like AOC and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.And Sheldon Whitehouse and, you know, some of the genuine progressives out there.It's time for the Democratic Party to go back to its essentially reactionary, revolutionary roots in the New Deal and come up with a new New Deal and transform America again.And now, you know, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration have shown that the stuff that FDR was doing that just had Republicans beside themselves. I mean, they were calling him a dictator. They were screaming about it. They wanted to impeach the Supreme Court.Knocked him down over and over and over and over again until 1937, when he started threatening to expand the court. And suddenly, Owen Roberts switched his vote. It was called the Switch in Time. That saved nine.And suddenly the New Deal was okay, but FDR was a revolutionary, and we need another fdr.

Frankly, you point out also in one of your chapters that it was Newt Gingrich who created the false revolution of the Tea Party. Yeah, okay.And that's one of the things the Republicans have been able to do to manipulate media and to manipulate thought in such a way that they're constantly making normal citizens insecure about the basis of our democracy.

That's right.

Going back to Reagan, when they killed off the Fairness Doctrine and tilted the scale to their benefit.

The fairness doctrine in 87. I was living in Germany at the time, and I remember driving on the Audubon and listening to the.The military news, you know, the Armed Forces Radio, because you could get it anywhere in Germany on the radio.

Yeah.

And they announced that the Reagan had stopped enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine. And I thought, okay, let's see how this plays out.And then about two, three months later, I was driving on the same Autobot, and the news came on and said that CBS News had moved their news division, which had been losing money since the 30s because this was the cost of maintaining broadcast licenses on their television stations, was that you had to do what was called programming in the public interest, or the Fairness Doctrine.

That's right.

The main way that was defined as having real news at the top of every hour for radio and having at least 30 minutes or an hour, 30 minutes of local, 30 minutes of national news in prime time on the television stations. And so they had bureaus all over the world. I mean, this was all to satisfy the FCC requirement of programming in the public interest.But once that went away, the second story that I heard as I was driving down the Autobahn was that CBS News had moved their news division under the oversight, the aegis of the entertainment vice president. And, you know, within two months, ABC And NBC had done the same thing. And that was when our news ceased to be news.

You had a commitment to inform people, and that was what the news commitment was all about.And I started out then, I very much was cognizant of presenting one view, making sure that it was responsible because someone could come and say, no, I want to say that, oh, I started

in News in 1970, 67 and at WITL in Lansing, Michigan.Well, actually at 67 I was, I was a DJ, but at 68, I got a gig in the, doing the morning news from 6:00am till 10:00am, you know, Monday through Friday. And I did that for seven years. And we were operating within the, in the Fairness Doctrine.And I was also producing the afternoon talk show for the guy who owned the station.And because he was the owner of the station, the equal time rule required that if he made any political statements, I had to get somebody from the other side to come on. So that's one of my.

Thom, one of the very entertaining things about your book is that you talk about your own development as an entrepreneur and as, you know, a political spokesperson over the years. And just like you just said about being in Germany.And I think, again, it's another reason why we can identify so strongly with this book because we're looking at your own evolution as, you know, as a political observer.

Yeah, there's a bunch of little personal stories in there because, you know, I've lived all stuff.

I mean, that's right.

It's, you know, I'm an old man here now, Phil. Yeah, man, it's all happened in my lifetime.

You're listening to Sexy Boomer show, our guest, Thom Hartman, our friendly progressive, national, international, syndicated talk show host. His new book is the Last American President. A Broken Man, A Corrupt Party, A World on the Brink.Thom, in the time we have left, we're talking about influence peddling and how the game was rigged. Now it's on steroids.The notion in California of taxing the uber wealthy 5% to raise $100 million to get people health care that can't get it right now in California, which is like lunch money to these people like Zuckerberg, they're fleeing.Sergey Brin fleeing to Las Vegas, Zuckerberg fleeing to Miami just because they don't want to pay their fair share of taxes, even though they pay a substantial amount of taxes in California compared to their wealth, I would imagine it's a lot less than what a working stiff in this state has to deal with,

you know, and it amazes me because You've got Trump trumpeting the idea that we progressives, the Democrats, are all crazy people. What is motivating these mad oligarchs and plutocrats to destroy the very country that has given them the opportunity to become so obscenely wealthy?I don't get it.

Greed is blind and it's never enough, is it?

It's almost sociopathic.

I think it's actually Mary Trump and I had an interesting conversation about this last week. She's a licensed clinical psychologist and I'm just an old psychotherapist, which is the bottom of the food chain.But I made the comment that I was of the opinion that hoarding syndrome, which is actually in the dsm, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric association, is probably a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She's of the opinion that it's a subset of one of the addiction disorders. I think both are mediated by dopamine, ocd.You get the rush when you do the repetitive behavior, addiction routine. You get the rush when you do the addictive substance. I think it's all the same thing. But anyhow, we had an interesting conversation about that.But I think that, that most of these billionaires, had they not been born wealthy. I mean, I had Bill Gates's dad on my show back 10 years ago when he was still alive.And he made the point that his son, that he made a lot of money and is, you know, not, I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he's a well paid lawyer, that his son had all these opportunities that average people don't have and therefore he could start Microsoft. That, you know, either they had, they came from a family that provide a launching pad.Or like David Ellison, they had a daddy who was actually a billionaire.That if these people were not born rich or born with opportunity and white privilege, they would be living in an apartment in SoHo, that's Florida ceiling newspapers and old tin cans and 35 cats. You know, it's hoarding syndrome. Only what they're hoarding is money instead

of, yeah, it sounds like Sewage McDuck diving into his swimming pool filled with gold coin.

Now they're hoarding public opinion. What do you think the Ellison buyup of all the media really represents in terms of a threat to national discourse and opinion?Do you think they'll trash these networks like taking Colbert off to control a narrative? What's happening?

Larry Ellison's fortune is made with Oracle. Oracle has all these big government contracts without Donald Trump's blessing.Larry and David Ellison are no longer as rich as they are, and they don't have the political power that they. They have. You know, whether they. It appears that Larry Ellison really does buy into all this MAGA stuff. I don't know about his son.I mean, I don't know either one of these guys personally, so no idea. It's a. It's just a real challenge to our democracy right now.You know, because of the Citizens United ruling, these guys have been able to not only accumulate massive wealth.A lot of that goes back to Reagan in 83, suspending enforcement of the antitrust laws and cutting everybody's tax, but also to the Telecommunications act of 96, the Clinton side. I mean, just a lot of real damage being done to America.

Right.

And the last part of your book, you do dedicate to very specific actions that we need to take on a community level and on a personal level,

there are a lot of things that we can do.I mean, you know, at the base level, just getting politically active, reaching out to your politicians, showing up for meetings, getting inside and infiltrating and changing the Democratic Party, you know, speaking out in social media, getting. There's just there. There are so many people are like, what can I do? I don't have any power. I don't. Yes, you do. And, you know, we've got. March 28th.We've got this big no Kings 3 coming up. But most important, go to vote.org and make sure that your voter registration hasn't been destroyed, particularly if you live in a red state.I mean, this is. This is happening as we speak right now in red state. We are purging voters from blue cities. And I mean, North.North Carolina just tried to purge a quarter million voters from blue cities. In North Carolina, they were stopped by a lawsuit temporarily. I mean, you know, in Georgia, they've. They've purged several million.Stacey Abrams lost a lost election by 50,000 votes after the guy that she ran against, you know, Brian Kemp, the current governor, who was then Secretary of state, had purged 100,000.

How do people get involved to monitor that?

Greg Palast is all over it. And Stacey Abrams.

I mean, Stacey Abrams.

Well, listen to your show, too, Thom.

Yeah, yeah.

Nothing wrong with that, guys.

That's right.

Lastly, Citizens United seems to be a linchpin in all of this. What is the quickest, if there is a way to defeat or overturn, large

pieces of Citizens United can be reversed. And that was the essence of the for the People Act.HRY that Nancy Pelosi tried to get through that got stabbed in the back by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.

Oh, yeah.

Large parts of it, particularly the corporate involvement in finance, in politics, can be undone by legislation. The core principles of it that corporations are persons and money is speech.Those are going to require, in all probability, a constitutional amendment.I don't see how that could be done in any other way now that the Supreme Court has decided the way they have, or by changing the composition of the court and having the court reverse itself. Those are basically the two options. So, you know, and we need to work toward all of those things.

Are you hopeful, Thom?

I am. I actually am very hopeful, yeah.

Well, you're not only hopeful, you've been very helpful and you made us all feel a lot better. Read the book. Ladies and gentlemen, we love you, Thom. Thank you for giving some time.

Thank you. Have a good one, guys.

You, too.

You too.

Thanks for inviting me on the program.

Thanks.

Anytime.

Anytime.

Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

Thanks to Thom Hartmann for coming on the show and setting us straight on what's going on. Keep hope alive. We will get through this.

Stay safe.