after tonight i think that it's pretty across the and she what is lacking is leadership should actually paralyzed the country. and that was jonathan's of seanie president of the economic future group and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we cover go to r.t. dot com slash usa i'm christine for that on. issues that so much as i can which of course i did for you 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. hey tom are in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

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market dynamics. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cars are there are no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our feet. the end of the campaign taking a. lead . a low aim welcome. crosstalk 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. and. crossed our trump as a presidential candidate i'm joined by cliff schecter in columbus he's an author pundit and president of her class 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 yeah three 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 part is i'm thinking ahead with no obvious frontrunner among republicans there is clearly an opening it is almost time to grapples with a sluggish economy this is always the one of the reasons american. may make

a run for the white house he says he will make his intentions known in real estate mogul and owner of the gulf courses and a t.v. star from knows how to entertain his audience comes criticism of the current president speaks volumes to this particularly when jumping on the brothers train claiming obama was not on american soil is known as bellicose in his foreign policy positions united states is becoming the laughing stock of the world from. the china should be punished with a twenty five percent tariff on its inputs 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 fields and profits with us. old fashioned you know when you would awards like to the victor along the spoils the latest gallup poll shows trump one of the leaders and last like the republican voters living sarah paling in the dust trump has already shown some of his campaign cards but it's hard to say what they think

has no real trumps to plait the billionaire may capitalized on the current political no ladies but even this american civility it doesn't mean that they give this one to become more of a laughingstock and that's a patrol for crosstalk r.t. . ok cliff i'd like to start out with you are you wrote in your weekly column about donald trump he is the living embodiment of every degrading aspect of american cultural you mean by that. i love it but do you really look. well i appreciate that thank you look 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 he's somebody that knew that image in the united states and particularly 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 and lessly but the truth 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 it 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. 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 and the big mouth and 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 i want to thank 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 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 in them direction but the 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 though it's lighter 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 donald 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 waits after this these are the 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 shave it for this reason i look i don't take them seriously as a candidate i think the entire thing is a testament to name i.d. alone 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 they are you going to get up on the stage as a real candidate with donald trump and talk a lot more say i'm a outrageous things will get a lot of coverage will make all the other candidates look ridiculous if there's a real case this is serious because media sit it out right because there's just how do you can write well 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 are romney and paul and

yeah he can only diminish them by his presence because they're going to have to answer all of these are really ridiculous questions and listen to him bragging about his wealth and all that 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 of the crazier ones will be made a little bit sane so you know they'll benefit i have to say the go ahead and 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 his birth certificate now the answer is look if they can engage with the donald trump if they can make that look like that sort of 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. in-field to come out well and i looked at the pseudo press conference today and i wouldn't i was going to say i saw the pseudo press conference that they're trying to cave right after his he's

boasting of victory finally got to be the birth certificate but you know it's very interesting and looked 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 i gave him a shot i mean what i'm saying is he really goes for the base. yeah except you know there's something 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

consistency 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 want to take 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 are now it's where they're 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 it's 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's 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 but again you know. as was just said and 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 to in court we'll see ok alex go to you 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 i'm i assume trump 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 them out there the moderators who were for the most part legitimate broadcasters don't want to have donald trump on the stage notwithstanding it will be great for the ratings because they look like fools how. can we get back after the break after the break we'll continue our discussion on candidate trump stay with orgies. twenty years ago this country subsistence elizabeth.

one hundred. of them speak on a journey. where it's taken. me it is easy to. see. kick.

your little remind you we're talking about god trumps 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 ring here we have arnold schwarzenegger i mean he was he was elected in real life in california we have just eventual which the 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 they a new incarnation in ronald reagan is the greatest one that is this point on this program he was elected da 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 it's going to get continue. yes i think so and you know the names that you mentioned are really only scratching the surface that 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 etc 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 what he really is an entertainer and as 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 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 fame and politics gets only more intense you know 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 cause or as he was using it as are you. guys all know goes even to the first rock we go to isolation and you know you've got to go now it's time for addition of celebrity politics in this country and politicians have long understood whether it's me 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 sean duffy the gentleman who was on m.t.v.'s real world who's now a member of congress of congress and mr duffy went home and became a prosecutor fred thompson had a legitimate career as

a prosecutor before he decided to run for office ben jones who better to do is have . 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 accu man is branding the trump name and somehow implying that you know you put those letters up in the building it says trump there's some kind of cheesy pun ash there that's the difference he's only famous for being famous so when these other folks were at least leveraging that fame into something else cliff if he did run he could have paris hilton is b.p. right i mean that then you would really wrap it up i was going to say. that's going to be really sure you know i mean for a treasury secretary i'm sorry go ahead we got charlie sheen when it came cardassian for a treasury secretary i mean i mean i i want to answer the serious point which is being that these days politics is based so much or around name recognition and money that it's inevitable especially with entertainment and political media

becoming one in the same and it's inevitable we're going to actually have what was just pointed out was very astute and exactly right which is at least most of these other guys are talking 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 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 i mean you hear people every day now famous people just throwing out the idea that they need to run for the senate or they were i mean you know we're we're really going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel with soon we'll have like vanilla ice you know run for we're in for senate and that's that's kind of the point we're getting so i mean you know i mean that's we're going to think this strike is going to go ahead now and go ahead. yeah it seems to me the pale and whose name has not been mentioned so for 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. run for the presidency and that's what it is alex you know and doing research for this program and there are 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's some very serious doubts by some very serious people the trump is it merely is affluent as he likes to claim to be as a modified one reach researcher pointed out rhetorical says you your net value may be higher than he is he because 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 ridiculous so yeah there is you know if he well 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 you get in a lot now and you want to jump in there going oh i was just going to make the point that one of the things that donald trump said when he was demanding that the president produce his birth certificate if this birth certificate will produce the truth 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 his net 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 the journalistically we move beyond just the kind of the laugh value of this in sort scrutinizing you know 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 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 in 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 marriages his behavioral problems i mean you get kicked out of high school basically because he couldn't get in because he had behavioral problems i think there's been a lot of other things you know he's now open this door to looking into this guy's a very very demented like 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 ego. you know i mean the end of his program you just kind of you know the gallery of it all ok getting all of the attention because this may be

the last time that he really can do it is it is maybe just a very 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 take a look part it would actually hurt him because i'm sure they would find things that even donald trump which i'm embarrassing hard to imagine but even from 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 it's 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's 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 it's a really serious good logical person to be at the helm and the respective of what you think about mr obama you can see i mean most you could 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 opposite 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 come in the media if he becomes such a joke and if he if he 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 the show canceled the people 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 and maybe less downside but right now i mean it's important that his ratings analyst 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 on the business of majority of those who are watching were democrats and he's lost a lot of these people with the birth are nonsense so even his business active 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 into really some subtle if not so subtle racism with some of these comments and so

a group of people i just saw on twitter start of this campaign called dump truck which is to get people that 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 you could end up losing sponsors for a show so there is now way certainly in the short term there is a downside it may not be the downside to him running for president and basically being the 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 after this that they go after him and it looks like that's going to hurt a show ok gentlemen that's the time here we'll see what mr trump's plans are in a few weeks 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 crosstalk.

twenty years ago this country. says it.

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