Donald Trump met with President Obama at the White House today for a chilly, if cordial transition meeting, as the world continues to try and make sense of it all. Joining us to help in that task today is award-winning opinion journalist and our old friend Heather Digby Parton of Salon and the Hullabaloo blog, back by popular demand. She was with us to warn, on the day Trump entered the race in June of 2015, that he would be a force to be reckoned with, while so many others scoffed.
Today we examine, among many other things, the media's role in helping to normalize Trump while demonizing Hillary Clinton, and we begin to process just some of the dangers that the 'President-elect' now presents to not only Obama's eight years of progress, but to the world and the planet. For example, see Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) minimizing waterboarding again, and suggesting that torture will once again be back on the table — just as Trump had promised during the campaign.
"What I saw (on Election Night) was the (media's) shift to suddenly seeing Donald Trump as a normal politician," Parton explains. "The campaign has been disappeared. That odious campaign that we just watched him run. The one where he promised to lock up his rival, torture terror suspects, put guns in schools, the most horrifying agenda we've ever seen from a major party candidate, and delivered in the most cretinous fashion that it's ever been delivered — that is gone. There is no remnant of it in the media. What we're seeing now is a nice, mainstream Republican candidate who appealed to 'Real Americans' and spoke to their needs, and we need to welcome him. A lot of the commentary is that Democrats really need to reach out to him and to his followers and make up for the fact that they were so rude to him."
We try to un-disappear some of Trump's "disappeared" campaign promises a bit today, while noting that there is now little, if anything, to stop the very worst of those them — from torture to massive tax cuts to gutting any and all financial and environmental regulations — from being adopted by the new Administration and a compliant Congress and Supreme Court. We also discuss the role that Obama and the Democrats have in Republicans' ability to revive the very worst of the George W. Bush Administration war crimes and more, since they refused to bring accountability previously.
And, speaking of accountability, Parton offers her thoughts on progressives who voted for third parties this year. Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for a our first Green News Report since the election, for a look at what President Trump will mean for the environment, energy and the UN climate agreement.
You can find Brad's previous editions here.
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