We begin with last night’s CNN Town Hall which had Donald Trump spewing out a torrent of lies steamrolling the valiant moderator trying to fact check him before a Republican audience that applauded his crude and cruel remarks. Joining us to discuss a problem that goes beyond Trump’s unstable unfitness for office as our country appears to be falling into the grip of madness is Dr. Bandy Lee, a medical doctor, forensic psychiatrist and a world expert on violence who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before transferring recently to Columbia and Harvard. She became known to the public by leading a group of mental health professional colleagues in breaking the silence about Donald Trump’s dangerous psychology and publishing the New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She is currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition and her latest book is Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul.
Then with the Covid era Title 42 rules for asylum ending at midnight tonight, we examine the fate of at least 60,000 desperate and destitute migrants stuck across the border in Mexico with another 11,000 deported yesterday and thousands more in the pipeline seeking asylum but facing more law enforcement and military deployments than humanitarian assistance. Joining us is Michelle García, a journalist, essayist and a former Soros Equality Fellow at the Open Society Foundations. A former Texas correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review and a former columnist for the Texas Observer, she is the Director of the PBS documentary “Against Mexico-the making of heroes and enemies,” and is currently working on a book about borders and their powerful influence on U.S. identity, politics and culture of violence.
Then finally we look into the unrest in a politically unstable and economically fragile Pakistan where a former Prime Minister was just arrested after his followers had attacked military posts in response to Imran Khan having been built up by the powerful military then cut down to size as like Trump, he thought he was above the law or in this case the real power in the country. Joining us is Christine Fair who is a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She previously served as a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and she is the author of Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War and In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and she speaks and reads Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.