Donald Trump wants to advance his business interests in Russia - and Vladimir Putin couldn't be happier. Putin's geopolitical interests rely on weakening the West. To that end, he has supported right-wing populists in Europe for more than a decade.
Donald Trump may be the perfect tool to help Putin destroy the West. He supports many of the goals of Putin and has openly admired him. He's cultivated ties to Russia for a long time, including with a Russian gangster once jailed for slashing a man's face with a broken margarita glass. To make it worse, Trump has surrounded himself with advisors with shady ties to Russia.
The disturbing public life of Donald Trump is matched by an equally disturbing private side. Mark Singer, who profiled Donald Trump twenty years ago forThe New Yorker, concluded after the interview that he was a man who has "achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. "
He included that interview in his new book, Trump and Me, to show that Donald Trump wasn't fit to be president in 1996 any more than he's fit for the job today.
Colin notes we are in desperate need for a leader to unite our country. Can we get the leader we need from this election?
GUESTS:
- Mark Singer - Staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Funny Money, Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed, and most recently Trump and Me
- Franklin Foer - Fellow at New America and a contributing editor at Slate.com; author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization; writing a book about the dark side of Silicon Valley
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Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Greg Hill contributed to this show.
