more news today violence has once again flared up. these are the images from world has been seeing from the streets of kandahar. operations around the day. and bringing you the top news and the stories from around the world this is our t.v. we bring the breaking news of for you at this hour media reports say u.s. president barack obama is about to announce that the world's most wanted terrorist osama bin laden has been killed he was reportedly killed by a u.s. drone outside the pakistani capital islamabad the president is expected to make a live t.v. broadcast from the white house and announce the killing and the positive identification

of the body of osama bin ladin course we'll bring you more on this breaking news story as it develops once more from just joined us u.s. president bill lockyer obama expected to announce that the world's most wanted terrorist osama bin laden has been killed. on to the latest from libya now the u.n. is pulling out of the capital tripoli after angry mobs attacked its offices in retaliation for a nato airstrike that killed four members of colonel gadhafi his family including his youngest son the bombing has once again raised questions about whether the alliance is exceeding the u.n. mandate in these targeting the libyan leader. and in our week of the preview of the top stories russia says a foreign meddling in syria will only make it a civil war more likely as moscow blocks u.n. condemnation of the crackdown on anti-government protests in the country of china india and eleven on also expressed reservations saying diplomacy must be the first choice about. the world march twenty five years since the turn of the nuclear

tragedy and international fund to gathers over seven hundred million dollars for a new dome to contain the still deadly radiation speaking out to commemorate the ceremony president may get a call for new rules of major atomic energy say for. carrie johnson i'll be here in thirty minutes but first it's the latest edition of cross talk peter lavelle and his panel of guests discuss if property nominate and television host donald trump could become america's next president. for the full story we've got it first hand the biggest issues get the human voice face to face with the news makers on r.t. .

ok you can. see. the. following welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle is he for real he's got a name for a t.v. show claims to be rich and has a signature hairstyle of course it is the donald donald trump he says he may or may not run for the u.s. presidency irrespective of the final answer what does all this trump mania say about america and its politics lead to kick. start. cross-tab trump as a presidential candidate i'm joined by cliff schecter in columbus he's an author pundit and president of the tasks in boston we have alan schroeder he's an associate professor in the school of journalism at northeastern university and in

washington we cross to alex vogel he's a partner at mehlman vogel castagnetti all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want but first let's look at the man who wants to say you're fired to president obama. as the next year's presidential election approaches the two main parties are thinking ahead with no all this fun time among republicans there is clearly an opening it is almost time to grab also the sluggish economy this is a risk the one of the reasons american billionaire may make a run for the white house he says he will make his intentions no. real estate's. mogul and owner of the golf courses and a t.v. star trump knows how to team his audience folks criticism of the current president speaks volumes to this particularly when jumping on the brother's train claiming a bomber was not born on american soil trump is no less bellicose in his foreign policy positions united states is becoming the laughing stock of the world

something also chimes in the china should be punished with a twenty five percent tariff on its imports and opec should be told to cut oil prices if the man known for his has told the president now he must have taken over leave in oil fields and profits with u.s. allies. should you know when you win a war it's like to the victor belong the spoils the latest gallup poll shows trump one of the leaders and wants to likely republican voters living sarah palin in the dust trump has already shown some of his campaign cards but it's hard to say where they think has any real trumps to play the billionaire mayor capitalized on the current political malays but even this american supposed for it doesn't mean that the u.s. want to become more of her loving stock in their super travel across stark r.t. . ok cliff i'd like to start now with you you wrote in your weekly column about donald trump he is living in body image of every degrading aspect of american

culture what do you mean by that. i love it but what do you mean really look. i appreciate that thank you i mean for thirty years now this guy has been you know whatever it takes to get to get attention he's sort of built himself first of all he spun a false resume and somebody that knew that image in the united states and in politics and business in many areas has become more important than reality which is he talks a big game you know he promotes himself analysts lee but the truth is is that look he inherited money from from his daddy he had to declare bankruptcy twice he tried to run a football league it was an abysmal failure so this guy who really has not been a very successful businessman at all has has used. you know and i'll give him credit there brilliantly you know in a shameless fashion to make himself turn into this icon of business which he's absolutely not so that was a main point of mine about how image trumps reality you know when we're living in

a reality t.v. culture of versus reality and so he's gone down to reality t.v. and everything else about american culture that isn't real and he's used that to get himself in a position where he's first in the polls and so that's i mean right now that is sort of a classic. approach a problem frankly with it with american political culture which is taking on entertainment culture values and you know if you've got the crazy hair like he does in the big mouth then that often but by having the biggest mouth in the room you paid the most attention to it so he can ask where obama's birth certificate is from even though we have no clue where his hair is from. is a good one to you alan if i go to you in boston you know george w. bush was a failure in business before he became president and nobody held out against him here you know what is this i mean is this is just really just a reality t.v. show the extension of the trump pseudo reality i mean is he really fusing the two

together he's still on t.v. quite literally. oh yeah he sure is well we don't really know what his objective is here is this really about a run for the presidency i mean he's certainly making a lot of noise and them to rection but the alternative explanation would be that he's simply furthering his own ego and you know there is a tradition in this country about cider candidates and i don't think that in general it's a bad idea to bring new blood into the mix the problem here is he's starting at the very top i mean either that one side or candidates like ronald reagan was governor of california before he ever became president or thought about running for president so it's this weird mix of of you know the sort of media culture that we live in this this eagle maniacal guy and one other thing i would throw in which is that the republican field right now is extremely ambiguous there is not a clear front runner which leaves this opening for somebody like. alex if i go to you in washington how do you and it's really really early days and he hasn't even

declared ok. but how is this going to start shaping the campaign how much of an impact will trump's being there threatening to run if you waits after these these these so-called deadline or i guess it's before june i mean how does it start shaping the republican debate before we go much further into the election. and i think it does really start to shape it for this reason i look i don't take them seriously as a candidate i think the entire thing is a testament to maim ideal loan in his own particular brand of media fascination but what i what it does is this kind of trump theater of the absurd takes an already scrambled wide open field and starts to tell people look this is not the year to run because if this is what we're talking about this shows you can get up on a stage as a real candidate with donald trump and talk a lot and say i'm a outrageous things will get a lot of coverage he'll make all of the other candidates look ridiculous if there's

a real case this is serious because the media said it out right because there's just how do you keep right but how do you compete with crazy anybody. that makes michele bachmann look sane ok i would say anything anybody that needs to show bachmann look sane is. anybody that makes michele bachmann look sane is that an amazing service for the republican party in that way but no i mean it's true for most people on that stage the ones that are the real contenders romney in poland yeah he can only diminish them by his presence because they're going to have to answer all these early ridiculous questions and listen to him bragging about his wealth and all you know his hot wife and all the other unbelievably silly things he says but you know who knows maybe as i said michele bachmann or a couple to crazier ones will be made a little bit saying so it will benefit i have to say the real winner here is president obama and the democrats they've been engaging with you know everyone said

why is the president actually releasing this person to get now the answer is look if they can engage with the donald trump if they can make that look like that's that's a legitimate republican contender for them then that that's the counterpoint to them they're like look i'm president of the united states i'm a real person no matter what you think of my policies and this is what i have to deal with on the other side it makes it a real challenge for the for the legitimate republic. in-field to come out now and i looked at the pseudo press conference today and i wouldn't know i was going to say i saw the pseudo press conference that day they trump gave right after his he's boasting of victory finally got to be the birth certificate but you know it's very interesting and looks to me that he just was recycling a lot of ideas from a variety of candidates during the midterm elections china was there the gas price of gasoline there opec's there and now he's thrown in this little bit about libya which could have been iraq ok didn't make any difference is he i didn't have any nuance i mean it really looked like to me joe six-pack packaged idea is that

a lot of people sitting on the couch unemployed or whatever saying yeah i mean you know he made a lot of money maybe we had to give him a shot i mean what i'm saying is he really goes for the base. yeah except you know the interesting thing about his positions is this is not the first time he's made noise about running for president he tried to become the reform party candidate i think it was in two thousand and back then he had a whole different. political priorities including he was for universal health care the thing that obama's opponents are driven crazy by so i mean there is such inconsistency here from a substantive standpoint that you have no idea what the guy stands for or whether he stands for anything you know cliff if i go back to you i wasn't watching that press conference it seemed to me that the media was just having a ball they were just like kids in a candy shop they baited him they want him to say these outrageous things i mean they're part of his feeder and you know this is the both sides are enabling each

other it's really amazing to watch because everyone's part of the show. right and that's what i was trying to get at my column which is you know the media loves that because you know they don't care i mean i think they ended it saying you know is this reality is this is the show business who knows but doesn't matter because he's now cities that are announced with or when he's not going to know if he's running on his reality the last edition of his reality show he's going to now and whether he's going to announce whether he's run so this is him just sort of taking it to the absolute absurd and for the media it's like i can see it's perfect for american political media because they need stories and this guy is going to give him a ton of them i mean he he's already picked fights this past week with jerry seinfeld and robert de niro you know he he i mean you can expect he'll say nasty things about people across the board and again you know. as was just said i mean he was for universal health care eight years ago he gave tons of money to nancy pelosi and supported all sorts of democrats he was pro-choice he was for gay rights he was

for gun control i mean he's he's honestly is getting to a point where he literally makes mitt romney look like a steadfast man of principle who hasn't switched on any positions this is a guy is like doing court wheels ok alledge go to you know we're going to you before we go to the break. the real issue here is you know once we get past this flush of reality television piece assume trumps going to try and get himself on the stage for the debates and the real question is going to be whether the media outlets who are sponsoring the debates at that point your credibility is really on the line do you let this guy on the stage or do you call the question and say you're not a legitimate candidate but frankly on what basis do you say that i mean how do you carve at what point do you draw the line how do you carve him out i think they start to look really silly if they put him up there the moderators who were for the most part legitimate broadcasters don't want to have donald trump on the stage notwithstanding it would be great for the ratings because they look like fools ok how. can we get back after the break after the break we'll continue our discussion

on candidate trump state with our two. comes. to the kitchen. and. twenty years ago the largest country in. the sorts of places. if. one had been. much began to journey. where did it take go. hungry for the full story we've got it firsthand the biggest issues get the human voice face to face with the news makers.

we'll. bring you the latest in science and technology from around russia. we've got the future of coverage. keep. welcome back to france i'm curious about remind you we're talking about donald trump's potential presidential run. ok alan i'd like to go back to you i mean this isn't the first time we've seen celebrities coming out throwing their hat or potentially throwing their hat into the rain here we have arnold schwarzenegger i mean he was he was elected in real active in california we have jesse ventura which to you know still makes the scene

as a former politician but he still listen to fred thompson maybe not the greatest campaigner but he did make a bid and we have other people that you know they they really are new incarnation and ronald reagan is the greatest one that is his point on this program he was elected governor of california before he became president are we moving ever steadily into the age of celebrities fusing in with politics is this just a trend that's going to get continue. yes i think so and you know the names that you mentioned are really only scratching the surface there really are two categories that these people come from one would be the entertainment world the other would be the sports world there are tons of former athletes that are now filling the halls of congress the state houses of of the fifty states of the us sort of etc in addition to a number of entertainers that have made the transition what's so interesting about trump in all of this is that you know he's coming in supposedly as a business celebrity but he really is an entertainer and it was pointed out earlier i mean his business career if you really scrutinize it is nothing to write home

about so i mean you know he's coming at this from the standpoint not even of an actor but a reality television star and that's a whole new sort of category of celebrity in this country i have a feeling that we're going to see more of those people there's a member of congress from wisconsin right now that in to started out as an m.t.v. real world. cast member so you know unfortunately the way that celebrity works in this country i think that this fusion but tween the fame and politics gets only more intense you know if i'm not mistaken wasn't it was it go i said go for from love boat wasn't he didn't make it into congress to you know i was a and go as far as he was i use it is really you guys all know go to burger king you look we're going to go explosion and you know you've got to go now it's going to addition of celebrity politics in this country and politicians have long understood whether it's the entertainment world or the military whatever their

their national prominence was i mean look eisenhower was certainly helped by just fact that he had one hundred percent name i.d. for his war career the difference here with trump is even sean duffy the gentleman who was on m.t.v.'s real world who's now a member of con of congress mr duffy went home and became a prosecutor fred thompson had a legitimate career as a prosecutor before he decided to run for office then cooter jones who better to do except. hazard actually had a public policy career sonny bono had been a mayor so the difference is trump is famous for being trump i mean as was pointed out his his real business ak human is branding the trump name and somehow implying that you know you put gold letters up in a building that says trump there is some kind of cheesy point ash there that's the difference he's only famous for being the famous so these other posts were at least leveraging that pain into something else a cliff if he did run he could have paris hilton is v.p. right i mean that then you would really wrap it up doesn't say. that's really sure

you know i mean the treasury secretary i'm sorry go ahead we've got charlie sheen we get kim kardashian for treasury secretary i mean no i mean i i want to answer the serious point which is being that these days politics is based so much around name recognition and money that it's inevitable especially with entertainment and political media becoming one in the same internet already going to stretch and what was just pointed out was very astute and exactly right on which is at least most of these other guys were talked about i mean ronald reagan was like him or hate him for you know not only was governor but for years he was a pitchman you know out for for what for g. i mean he was involved in politics he ran the screen actors guild you know that a lot of these guys were involved in some way in serious careers related to politics for years but we're now getting to a point where really so i mean you hear people every day now famous people just throwing out the idea that they may run for the senate or they may run i mean you know we're we're really going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel with vanilla

ice you know run for her and for senate i mean that's that's kind of the point we're getting so i mean you know i mean that's one of the things you wrote this story just. ahead. yeah it seems to me that a pale and whose name has not been mentioned so far has something to do with this because i think when she was put forward as a clearly unqualified candidate for the vice presidency four years ago it made a lot of people suddenly think well wait a minute if she can do it why can't i and so i see a lot of sarah palin influence in this donald trump run for the presidency and that's what it is alex you know and doing research for this program and there's so many tabloidy things about trump out there now it's not you know it's easy to come across it but some of the more serious stuff that i look at is that there are some very serious doubts by some very serious people the trump isn't nearly as ass fluent as he likes to claim to be as a matter of fact one reach researcher pointed out rhetorical because you your net

value may be higher than he is he because he's so terribly into it. right he is horribly in debt i mean he's built a quote career i put quotes around that again branding and leverage and a lot of it hasn't worked out terribly well he'll build some gigantic complex it will go bust some little buy it for pennies on the share and trump points to it and says oh yeah i built this masterpiece well from a business perspective that's frankly ridiculous so yeah there is if he will and if he was in any way put through the real rubicon of the presidential campaign i think he would be eaten alive just on the business stuff that's before you get to the personal stuff or you know past statements or you know any of that just on the business stuff he did eat a lot and you want to jump in there go ahead i was just going to make the point that one of the things the donald trump said when he was demanding that the president produce his birth certificate if this birth certificate were produced that trump would release his tax returns were all of a sudden guess what we're not seeing the tax returns so i think this question about

he's now worth which he claims to be between two and three billion dollars is a really good one and i hope that we you know if this persists that journalistically we move beyond just the kind of the laugh value of this in sort scrutinizing in a way that legitimate candidates have to be scrutinized what he is actual you know what he brings to the table as a businessman radcliff. well they're saying along those lines i think that's already starting to happen you know he's used to kind of being able to say whatever he wants and sound off and attack people and people didn't really pay attention but now these kind of saying i may run for office i mean i just saw a report the huffington post that is original business partners had mob ties yes that's something that is a big investigative piece that's now out there i mean when you look at this guy's history his marriage is behavioral problems i mean you get kicked out of high school basically because he couldn't because because it gave you a problem i think there's going to a lot of other things you know he's now open this door to looking into this guy's

a very very demented life and you know i think the media's going to have a field day alex with this what is the upside for for trump and doing this is it just just the ultimate ego. you know i mean the end of his program you just kind of you know gary over it all ok getting all of the attention because this may be the last time that he really can do it is it just maybe just a very there is no there is virtually no downside for him i mean the reality is what could happen to him i you know he's not widely respected as a businessman he's he does not have a reputation in that sense to defend if he actually stayed long enough to get out of the press take them apart it would actually hurt him because i'm sure they would find things that even donald trump would find it verisign hard to imagine but even might be embarrassed by what they've got so i really there is very little downside for him which is why he's doing it and he will stay in right up until that becomes

the case i mean it's one point the network will decide ok we can actually have you on television anymore he will use that to get even more press he will have some sort of charlie charlie sheen like split with the network over his political ambitions which will lead to yet another show you know trump and charlie plus eight whatever it is but i really i don't think there's a downside howie what do you think is this is absolutely no downside for this kind of behavior which is really. degrading to american politics and we were talking before we went on air you know one of the phrases i like to use when i look at american politics is that everybody is having this huge argument about the seating arrangement on the titanic and you know we're all having a good laugh right here but the country doesn't really need a good laugh it needs a really serious good margin call person to be at the helm and irrespective of what you think about mr obama because i think most people say obama and trump are not the same. yeah i mean it's a it's a good point and you know it's just the trump is i think there is

a downside in there is that his ratings on the apprentice has started to decline and i think that you know his currency is a someone who can come in the media if he becomes such a joke and if he if he's sort of you know. fritters away all of this all of this fame that he's built up over the years by making such stupid statements that people just start to ignore him then he risks irrelevance ultimately any risks getting a show cancelled or people kept up with him and stop watching what you think about that clip there is downside then. no i agree with outlook i think there's mostly a long term to maybe less downside but right now i mean it's important to know that his ratings alan are said to have gone way down and there's a reason there and i saw a study yesterday that showed that a majority of those i don't know how they do these studies but i'm not in that business the majority of those who are watching were democrats and he's lost a lot of these people with the birth and odd sense so even his business acting in

fails once again because what he did this largely to raise the the ratings in the ratings are falling and you know i'll give you another example now you've got people who are so angry because he also said to me about obama not being smart enough to go to an ivy league school playing it is really some subtle if not so subtle racism with some of these comments and so a group of people i just saw on twitter is sort of this this campaign called dump truck which is to get people to advertisers not to advertise in his final of the apprentice and groupon just pulled out and now they're going after other major companies so he could end up losing sponsors for a show so then that way certainly in the short term there is a downside i mean to me the downside to him running for president and basically being the idiot that he is pardon the expression my french but the but there is a downside to when he starts playing with this racist nonsense because that's the kind of thing that can get people angry enough activists they go after him and it

looks like that's going to hurt a show ok gentlemen that's what we're going to run out of time here we'll see what mr trump's plans are in a few weeks many thanks my guest today in washington boston and in columbus and thanks to our viewers for watching us here arche see you next time remember across top rules. ok. you can. m. m.

m m. m. m m. m .