rocks hotel mcconnell. hotel macau emission marco resort hotel sort of the same. with resorts michael beverly closer to home across riviera hotel macaws cintra hotel macau. this is our table costing around the world from a studio thanks for being with us tonight the top story world's main terrorist is down with some of bin laden killed in a u.s. special operations questions are already being ousted his demise will make a difference and it will inevitably become the next face of global terror with. libyan state t.v. shows the bodies of colonel gadhafi son and grandchildren killed in a nato bombing in tripoli outraged government supporters responded by storming western embassies forcing the u.n.

to pull it stopped from the capital. with nuclear safety get in the spotlight following the events of the anniversary of chernobyl russian power plants are to skew levels of safety precautions to avoid disastrous for the. next intense debate about the upcoming presidential election in the u.s. and some controversial candidates possibly entering to in crossed. we keep. talking. we welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle is he for real he's got a name 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. if. you cross trump as a presidential candidate i'm joined by cliff schecter in columbus he's an author pundit and president of us 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 is 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 obvious frontrunner among republicans there is clearly an opening it is almost time to grab also the sluggish economy this is always the one of the reasons american billionaire make a run for the white house he says he will make his intentions known. real estate

mogul and owner of golf courses and a t.v. star knows how to team his audience some scripture says of the current president speaks volumes to this particularly when jumping on the brother's train claiming it was non-sport on american soil is known as bellicose in his foreign policy positions united states is becoming the laughing stock of the world. trump 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 all fields and profits with u.s. allies old fashioned you know when you win a war it's like to the very people on this world the latest gallup poll shows trump one of the leaders and monster like the republican voters living sarah paling in the dust some has already shown some of his campaign cards but it's hard to say where they think as a realtor to play the billionaire may capitalize on the current political malays

but even this american supposed to put him in doesn't mean that they want to become moral philosophy and stuck in a super trouble for crosstalk r.t. . ok cliff i'd like to start now if you are 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 sort of built himself first of all he spun a false resume he's somebody that knew that image in the united states and frankly in politics and business in many areas has become more important in 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 a abysmal failure so this guy 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 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 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 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 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 slater 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 even outside our 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 you know the sort of media culture that we live in 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 trump alex if i go to you in washington how did 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 wait after this these are these so-called deadline i guess is 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 me might be alone in his own particular brand of media fascination

but what out 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 they are you going to get up on the 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 and make all the other candidates look ridiculous if it was ok because they're serious because for me to sit it out right because there's just how do you keep right or 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 seeing 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 of 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 the 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 a 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 legitimate republic. can field come out well and i looked at the pseudo press conference today and i wouldn't i was going to say i saw the 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 were driven crazy by so i mean this is such inconsistency here from a substantive standpoint 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 want to take watching that press conference that it seemed to me that the media was just having a ball 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 it 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 that doesn't matter because he's now said he's going to announce whether 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 eye candy 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 has its will start 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 who 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. like you can't wait to get back after the break after the break we'll continue our discussion on candidate trying to stay with or treat. is. twenty years ago largest country in the. disappearance of. flight. what had been a tremendous. challenge and. where did it take to.

the moment when the world has changed forever. thousands passed to nothing its. thousands wounded. and doomed to suffer a condition of the land. that was the first but probably not the last unitary uses of this weapon. well many more will be come. children come and get on in the future. millions died. and millions will look forward to be held to and say. the pain and suffering will never be

forgotten. as well as the joy of not a racial. era spring of nineteen forty five on our t.v. . thank you for. the fifty. sixth. ok. welcome back to crossfire i'm curious about too much you were talking about government trumps

a potential presidential run. q. 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 ring here we have arnold schwarzenegger i mean he was he was elected in real active in california we have jesse ventura which the you know still makes the 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 u.s. cetera et cetera 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 when 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 they're into the 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 between the fame and politics gets only

more intense now if i'm not mistaken wasn't wasn't good i said go for from love boat wasn't he didn't make it into congress too young was a and go as far as he was it is really a row you guys all know good. luck we really have no explanation 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 was the entertainment world or the military whatever their their national prominence was i mean look eisenhower was certainly helped by the fact that he had one hundred percent name i.d. for his war career the difference here with trump is even show and the gentleman who was on m.t.v.'s real world who's now a member of congress of congress mr duffy went home and became a prosecutor fred thompson who had a legitimate career as a prosecutor before you decided to run for office then cooter jones who better to do except i. 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 brain being the trump name and somehow implying that you know he put gold letters up in a building it says trump there is some kind of cheesy pun ash there that's the difference he's only famous for being famous so with these other posts we're at least leveraging that payment into something else so cliff if he did run he could have paris hilton is v.p. right i mean that then you would really wrap it doesn't say. that's the show you know i mean the treasury secretary i'm sorry go ahead we 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 be so much or around name recognition and money then it's inevitable especially with entertainment and political media becoming one in the same it's inevitable when you go this direction and what was just pointed out was very astute and exactly right on which is at least most of these other guys are 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.e. i mean he was involved in politics he ran the screen actors guild you know that's 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 running 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 really because it strikes me as i am now i'm going to add. yeah it seems to me that sarah 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 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 it there's some very serious doubts by some very serious people that trump isn't nearly as affluent as he likes to claim to be as a matter of fact one reaches a researcher point out rhetorical says you your net value may be higher then he is he cause he's so terribly in debt. 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 a no if he well and if he was in any way put through the real root of a 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 you get a lot now 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 that's what we're going to see in the tax returns so i think this question about his net worth which he claims to be between two and three million 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 of 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 good question. well they're saying along those lines i think that's already now 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 see i saw a report in the huffington post that his 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 his guy's history his marriages his behavioral problems i mean you got kicked out of high school basically because he couldn't get to because it gave you 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 what is 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 overall 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 a victory lap 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 taking the part it would actually hurt him because i'm sure they would find things that even donald trump would find verisign hard to imagine but but even by what they dug up 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 at some 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 really 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 and we're all having a good laugh right here but the country doesn't really need a good laugh and needs a really serious good margin call person to be at the helm and irrespective of what you think about mr obama you can see i think most you could say obama and trump are not the same. yeah i mean it's a good points and you know it's just the trump is i think there is a downside in there is that his ratings on the apprentice have started to decline and i think that you know his currency is as a as someone who can command the media if he becomes such a joke and if he if he sort of you know. the way 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 then he risks irrelevance ultimately any risks getting a show cancelled and people get that 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 there may be less downside but right now i mean it's important to note that his ratings as alan has said 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 accutane 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 started this campaign called dump truck which is to get people to advertisers not to to advertise on 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 there in 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 a little bit of time here we'll see what mr trump's plans are in a few weeks many thanks my guest in washington boston and in columbus and thanks to our viewers for watching us here arche see you next time remember a prostitute. all

. in the united kingdom and is available in soon to house the land.