…. Dumb Talks To Even Dumber
This interview staggered me. The BBC astound me on a daily basis. They are awfully competent as confusing, obfuscation, misdirection, propaganda promotion and downright lying. They are ironic entertainment, for me at least. This BBC R4 PM so called flagship news programme was up there with the high standard of dumb. I met, albeit briefly, Jonny Dymond at my art exhibition at the British Consulate in 2005.
It was interesting to observe ex-pats fawn over this BBC celebrity. Today he sits in on BBC R4 PM as well as being the new BBC Royal Correspondent. He is like the Matt Handycock of politics; an empty vessel climbing his greasy pole; at least as a member of the layman listening public, this is my perception.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/jonnydymond
His guest on this occasion was Tony Schwarz, author of Donald Trump: The Art Of The Deal.
Keep in mind that Schwarz dislikes Trump so much that he joined the media circuit to campaign for Hillary Clinton against the dreaded Trump. Even if you do not like Trump, anyone with a bit of initiative to research the background of the Clinton’s must at least suspect their ill-gotten credentials for any post within government. Just the Clinton Foundation and abuse accusations against Bill are enough to start with.
I felt impelled to transcribe this interview for the record. It was tedious having to go back over this tripe, but it does illustrate the low standard of information dissemination served up by our UK £3.74 billion funded national news service.
BBC R4 PM news programme
BBC host Tony Schwarz moaning about President Trump for near on 15 mins of an hour show.
I guess you cannot access this unless you are a BBC license payer…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0000qm5
37 mins in….
‘2 years ago in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Tony Schwarz spoke to PM. Author of Art Of The Deal.
Schwarz wrote the book with little help from Trump, but had hours of intimate contact.
In 2016 he regretted having written the book. He campaigned for Hillary Clinton.
He described Trump as a child, thin skinned, desperate need to show his toughness, immensely dangerous were he to be in charge of the nuclear button.
2 years ago with Eddie NightMair…’
“Yes, he could win and if he does, I’m getting out of Dodge… I’ve already made the plans to move to €urope. Partly because I don’t want to live in a country where he’s President, partly because I expect him to go after his enemies with a literal vengeance…”
“He’ll come after you?”
“Oh, without question in my mind… Richard Nixon was pretty good at it and was nowhere near as crazy as Donald Trump.”
‘Now, 2 years on with Jonny Dymond’
TS: “I was at Hillary Clinton’s victory party till 7.30pm. It was before any evidence that Trump was going to win, but I felt uneasy. I said to my daughter, we gotta get out of here. At home my wife was watching the returns. It was may be a state Trump was expected to win. I got even a worse feeling. I went into another room and went to sleep. Next morning I went down, stepped into the room and my wife burst into tears. I felt a deep sense of shock and despair.”
JD: “You have described him as a grifter, charlatan, huckster, he has attention deficit disorder, behavioural issues, a sociopath. He won against the assessment of many experts. Does part of you respect him for the win, doff your hat to him?”
TS: “Not in the slightest. He’s a man deeply unfit to be president. He won, I strongly suspect with the help of the Russians. He lost the popular vote. He only won an electoral victory by 70,000 votes. He ran against a candidate that was very damaged. He ran in the midst of fear which he spent many months stoking and I respect him no more than I would respect any criminal or authoritarian who was, quote ‘victorious’, but at such a severe cost and by using strategies that were so illegal, or even if not illegal, unethical and questionable, that admiration is the farthest thing from my mind.”
JD: “You’ve said of him, there is no inner life; nothing is going on inside. Do you think that any depth has been added in any way by his presidency?”
TS: “I’d like to think that I’m a person who is capable of seeing the full range of a human being and I really do believe that the work I do is very focused on this. His development got arrested at a very early age, almost surely in reaction to what we might call traumatic circumstances even though he grew up in great economic privilege, he grew up with a very brutal father, a brother who responded to his father’s brutality by becoming an alcoholic and dying at the age of 41; a grandfather who was much of a grifter as Trump himself became; and a mother who was incredibly neglectful; not only couldn’t protect the young Trump from his father, but barely spent any time with him and that’s a formula for absence of both maternal care, but even parental care; that’s formula for really bad stuff to happen, because you become desperate to find somewhere the affirmation, the love, the care that you didn’t get as a child and in Trump’s case, in order to defend himself, in order to make himself feel safe, he cut himself off from the kinds of things we associate with a healthy or relatively mature adult, empathy, subtlety, rationality and above all, conscious, an ability to distinguish and to care about to difference between right and wrong. You know the sociopath is a person who cannot feel a sense of shame or whose shame is so over whelming Jonny, that they have to push it away because the feeling is just too intolerable; to feel that shame is to feel obliterated and that I believe is at the heart of Trump’s, both his character or lack of character and his behaviour.
JD: “You warned about him having access to the nuclear codes, his ability to order a nuclear launch unconstrained by other arms of the US government. Does that still concern you?”
TS: “Deeply. Why wouldn’t it? This is a man who is not in control of his emotions. Whose erratic nature the world has seen over and over again.”
JD: “You don’t think he has grown in office?”
TS: “Again, given the nature of his pathology, given the nature of his early deprivation, given the time I’ve spent talking to psychiatrists and people in the field of mental health, it’s simply not what happens to a sociopath; to what might be called a malignant narcissist. It really doesn’t matter by the way whether you diagnose him; a psychiatrist is, according to the cannons of the profession, not supposed diagnose him. I’m not a psychiatrist, so you could say I shouldn’t be diagnosing him because I don’t have those credentials, but the actual diagnosis isn’t important; you know who Trump is by watching him, and if you spend even a few hours with him, it is incredibly clear, that this is not a man you want with his hand anywhere near a nuclear button.”
JD: “Do you think the Presidency satisfies what you’ve previously identified as his need,
his desire, for an audience. Is this the ultimate stage for him?”
TS: “Well, that’s what’s scary, is that by virtually any standard you could imagine, if what you wanted in life was power and attention and respect, or at least the appearance of respect, how could you get more than by being President of the United States? And all you have to do is look at his comments to know it is not working for him; that he feels aggrieved in every moment and that he feels a kind of paranoid sense that the world is out to get him, that he’s being treated unfairly, that he’s not getting what he deserves, and this is his life time sentence; he never will feel like he gets what he needs. He is as I’ve said before, a black hole and this I’ve observed up very close countless times, that no matter how much you put into this man, no matter how much adulation, money, power, it seems to drain out of him as fast as it comes into him and he ends up feeling empty, needy and he’s in a kind of classic addictive mode which is that you give the heroin addict an infinite amount of heroin and all it does is prompt them to keep upping the ante because the initial high you get from the drug begins to wane and in order to get that same high you keep upping the dose. Well, Trumps way of upping the dose was to run for President and win, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to keep upping the dose. There is no external set of things that could happen for Trump that would make him feel OK. It’s broken inside. It’s not how much he gets or doesn’t get from outside.”
JD: “You have always been clear about your hostility to his politics, all aspects of his politics, whether his sexual politics or his traditional left right politics or how he talks about immigrants. There are those of course who think that certainly aspects, in fact perhaps great swathes of his Presidency have been a success and you look at the economy where wages are rising, unemployment is very low, the boom times are effectively in America. There are people who say America has much more swagger on the world stage than it did under Barak Obama. Has he done anything right in this Presidency? Some of this must be down to him.
TS: “Listen. I suspect of course there must be something that he’s done that have had some, that I would perceive as having some value. I honestly can’t think of them off hand. For example, the state of economy is a fierce mortgage against the future because our debt, the idea that we oughtn’t live in debt, that is a core conservative principle, and what they’ve done with this tax reduction for the very very wealthy, is they have vastly expanded the debt which will come home to roost for certain. It’s not clear at what moment, but they themselves, meaning conservative thinkers, because Trump is not a thinker, have railed against the idea of putting ourselves in debt of mortgaging our future and now Trump is doing it, they’re accepting it. So, I don’t think that simply because you flood wealthy people with more money and corporations in particular with more money by virtue of tax cuts and the economy gets temporarily expanded and the unemployment rate therefore goes down, is any evidence that that’s serving our future well. Let me give you an even better example: I just came from the US where as you know we’ve been experiencing the next in line of this extraordinary weather in the form of category 4 hurricane which hit the South East part of Florida, the South West part of Florida, both, and it’s clearly a function of what’s happening with global warming and we have this week seen 40 eminent scientists say that the future of the planet is so threatened that we’re going to see catastrophic consequences within the next 20 years unless and probably, I shouldn’t say probably, but may be even we totally focus on it as something we need to address, the likelihood is we’re going to see huge consequences. Well, Trump along with the people who support him, refuse to even acknowledge that global warming is occurring. It’s a kind of suicide mission. So, if you’re expanding the economy by pouring toxins into the environment, which is one thing which continues to happen, that’s hardly evidence of a successful move that you’ve made.
JD: “What about you? You said that if he won, you’d get out of Dodge. That you would get out of the country and also you said that you were concerned about your own well-being… you haven’t left the country. Why not?”
TS: “Well, there’s two issues there. One is, where, from a selfish perspective do I want to live and I’m an American, I’ve lived my whole life there, my roots, my family live there. My business is there. I’m comfortable in many ways there. So, all things being equal, I would rather stay in the US. Then there is the personal safety issue which I was very concerned…. that I would be at risk. I’m quite sure that I’m on Trump’s enemies list. I don’t know what number I am, but I’m plenty visible in the media, speaking in ways that are may be more triggering to him than others because he knows I know. So, I’m not stupid and realise there is a risk in doing this. There is an argument for my living somewhere else in order to be safer.
JD: “You genuinely believe your well-being, your safety is at risk?”
TS: “I don’t actually feel at risk. I don’t feel the sense of fear in my body. So, that’s the most significant answer I can give you. Rationally I would say I am somewhat at risk. May be I can be once incredibly explicit about this. The moment that Trump feels that he can get away with anything, anything, that serves his power and his cause, he will do it. That’s the only thing that stands in the way. Do I believe that trump would imprison or murder countless people he perceives as enemies, if he thought he could get away with it, do I think he identifies with and even admires people like Kim Jung Yun and Vladimir Putin? Yes I do! So if it were to come to the point where Trump for whatever reason felt free to act on those impulses, I would assume that I and many other people who had spoken out against him, would be at risk of death. For sure.
JD: “There is a horrible, horrible for you, irony here, isn’t there? He has through his victory, his breath taking Presidency, made you immortal to some degree; you will be known as the man who enabled him, in part, to become President through authoring The Art Of The Deal.”
TS: “As you started to say that I felt emotion well up in me. I do feel that for two years now, I have been doing everything I can to atone for that choice I made. But, you are right. In the end I cant. There is no atoning. The decision was made. I’m not so grandiose as to believe that I was responsible for Donald trump’s becoming President. I was not. There had to be a confluence of many many factors and no one will ever know how much of a role The Art Of The Deal played in all of that, but it did play some role and any role was a bigger role than I should have played, than I wished I’d played, than I anticipated would be true when I was 33 years old and he was a middle level real estate developer and I decided to do that book. But, here’s what I did know. I knew that he was bad man. I knew it when I started writing the book. I learned it having a previous journalistic experience with him and there’s no question that the better choice, the more ethical choice would have been not to have write that book.”
JD: “You sold out.”
TS: “I sold out. You know, I’ve said this before. The term was invented to define what I did. There’s just no question.”
This is just part of the never ending BBC onslaught aimed at Trump as it is Brexit and Corbyn. The BBC is little more than a tabloid red top and perhaps not as good. To sit through this self-pitying codswallop was a chore, but when I heard it aired live, I wanted it chronicled as an example of how low our national broadcaster has gone. If nothing else, are the BBC and Tony Schwarz seriously telling me the Clinton’s would have been better? I have not yet come across a single case of Trump raping anyone. The Clinton’s have a long list to be investigated at least.
Trump? Zionist? Corbyn? Socialist? Brexit? UK-€U military unification…. None of them are cut and dry issues, but the BBC present such a bias opinion when a decent and proper national broadcaster could offer so much more from history to health to science to…. the best interests of the nation.