SUMMARY: In a country fractured by political polarization, an Illinois program is hoping college students can help mend the rift. The University of Chicago and Eureka College created Bridging the Divide to address the harsh rhetoric that emerged from the 2016 election and inspire a generation of leaders by encouraging urban and rural college students to discuss their differences. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY:New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including President Trump's tough words for North Korea over its nuclear threat, as well as his thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling hundreds of U.S. diplomats, plus his attacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus. Mark Shields is away.
And we welcome both of you.
So, you just heard two very different views from our earlier expert guests on North Korea.
You heard the President again commenting, David, and now Senator Risch. How do you assess the President's management of this North Korea situation?
DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Unusual, I guess.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS:It will come after the war in Venezuela, apparently, we just learned. I don't know what that was all about.
Listen, there's been a consensus of how to deal with this extremely knotty problem. And that is, at least on the rhetorical level, the North Korean regime is extremely fiery, extremely insecure, sometimes hysterical.
And when you're around somebody who's screaming and unstable, the last thing you want to do is add to the instability with your own unstable, hysterical rhetoric.
And so most administrations, Republican and Democrats, when the North Koreans say they're going to Seoul into a lake of fire, whatever their rhetoric is, have just ignored it and relied on some underlying sense that the North Koreans don't want to commit national suicide.
Donald Trump has gone the other way. Now, I think that is still — that sense that neither party wants to go into a war is still there. But the psychological probabilities that you're going to enter into some August 1914 miscalculation certainly go up when both people are screaming at the top of their lungs.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Ruth, you Justice Department heard Senator Risch, who says he talks to the White House. And he said: I have talked to the President, and we think being very clear with North Korea is the best way to go.
RUTH MARCUS, The Washington Post: Yes.
Well, David used the term unusual. I think it's just absolutely scary. And I didn't feel calmed down listening to Senator Risch, I have to say.
But there's a couple of positive things to say about President Trump here, just to surprise people for a second. One is that this situation with North Korea is not his fault. In other words, we were going to get to this. Some President was going to end up in the terrible situation we have with the progress that North Korea has made with nuclear weapons. He [Trump] just happens to be the President.
Number two, they were doing a very good job, until this latest eruptions of kind of bullying testosterone this week, in terms of pursuing what needs to be done, which is the diplomatic sanctions. Senator Risch is right about the achievement in the Security Council.
But, all of a sudden, we saw this week these statements, and you would have thought Tuesday that maybe it was an eruption and they'd tamp it down. And, instead, day after day after day, he's coming out saying more scary and dangerous things.
And I do not understand how that is anything but destabilizing, and with a very already unstable ally [enemy?].
DAVID BROOKS: Yes.
Well, it could be that he thinks the North Koreans are undeterrable, and that this is not a usual regime, maybe because they have this new leader, and that you actually do have to take action. He could be — he believes that.
It could be he just likes to blunder. It’s always dangerous to overinterpret what Donald Trump says at any one moment. And it could be he thinks the 'madman theory' is right theory here. And the madman…
JUDY WOODRUFF: Remind everybody what the madman — because it sounds scary.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS:The 'madman theory' is that you can be a successful deterrer if you — if they think you could be crazy.
And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you’re not actually crazy. And so we have a North Korean, we’re not really sure. We have a President who has his moments.
And so the 'madman theory,' when both people could actually be crazy, is actually a very dangerous situation.
[ 😲 ]
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including President Obama’s groundbreaking visit to Hiroshima and subsequent call for nuclear disarmament, Donald Trump’s rapidly-normalizing relations with the GOP and how Hillary Clinton can use Elizabeth Warren to counter Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric.
It is beyond contempt that a politician would use a family tragedy to further his candidacy, but such is the character of Donald Trump displayed in his recent comments to The Washington Post. In this interview, Trump cynically, crassly and recklessly insinuated that my brother, Vincent W. Foster Jr., may have been murdered because “he had intimate knowledge of what was going on” and that Hillary Clinton may have somehow played a role in Vince's death.
How wrong. How irresponsible. How cruel.
“There are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder,” Trump said in response to a question about Vince's death.
Trump was canny enough to hedge — he's not the one raising questions, he said, but others have. He noted that Vince “knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.” The circumstances of Vince's death, he observed, were “very fishy” and the theories about possible foul play “very serious.”
This is scurrilous enough coming from right-wing political operatives who have peddled conspiracy theories about Vince's death for more than two decades. How could this be coming from the presumptive Republican nominee for president?
Five investigations, including by independent counsels Robert B. Fiske Jr. and Kenneth Starr, concluded that Vince suffered from severe depression that caused him to be unable to sleep, unable to work, unable to think straight, and finally to take his own life.
I know this to be true because Vince lived with me when he came to Washington to serve as deputy counsel to the president. This is a grueling job in any administration, especially so at the start, and in the case of the Clinton White House, the counsel's office — and Vince — were consumed with problems, including over the firing of employees in the White House travel office.
Vince and I were very close siblings — I was the older, by four years and two months — and there was not much we didn't share with one another. After about three months, his family rented out their Little Rock home and Vince moved with them to a small Georgetown house.
Vince called me at my office in the Justice Department a few days before he died. He told me he was battling depression and knew he needed help. But he was worried that such an admission would adversely affect his top-level security clearance and prevent him from doing his job.
I told him I would try to find a psychiatrist who could help him and protect his privacy. After a few phone calls, I gave him three names. That list was found in his wallet with his body at Fort Marcy Park in McLean. I did not see a suicide coming, yet when I was told that Vince was dead I knew that he had killed himself. Never for a minute have I doubted that was what happened.
I think Vince felt he was a failure, this brilliant man who had so many talents, had achieved so many honors and was so well-respected by his peers. He must have felt that he couldn't stay in his job at the White House, and he couldn't go back to Little Rock. He was so ill, he couldn't see a way out.
few months after Vince's death, I began to see alarming reports in the news articles distributed throughout the Justice Department each day. These clips, which began appearing in newspapers across the country, were similar, as though written by a single source.
This was the beginning of the countless conspiracy theories spun by those who claimed that the Clintons had Vince murdered because he knew something about Whitewater, the real estate transaction that became the subject of the Fiske and Starr investigations. Repeat something enough times and in enough venues, I guess, and people begin to question their own good sense.
These outrageous suggestions have caused our family untold pain because this issue went on for so long and these reports were so painful to read. For years, our family had to wage a court fight to prevent release of photographs of Vince's dead body. My heartbroken mother was plagued by harassing phone calls from a reporter.
Through all this time I have not spoken publicly about this matter, out of an effort to maintain our family's privacy. I am now, because The Post sought my reaction. I have donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign but have not had contact with anyone at the campaign about my decision to go public.
For Trump to raise these theories again for political advantage is wrong. I cannot let such craven behavior pass without a response.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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