The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News my name is Doug Henwood. The usual two

guests today prefaced with some of me. First in a few minutes we'll hear

from V.J. Parshad on Syria, Trump, and the state of the global left.

And just after the half hour mark, Jennifer Cohen will talk about gender and economics.

Before getting to the outside talent, I've got a few things to say. First, here's a piece I wrote for the Jacobin magazine website the other day, part of a round

table on Trump after one year in office.

In his book on television, Pierre Bordeux warns against the twin temptations of historical analysis.

Everything has totally changed and unlike anything that went before, and nothing has changed over

the last thousand years.

Nowhere are those temptations as visible as they are in Trump studies.

You've got a large set of critics screaming that he's our Hitler,

or for the Russophobes are Stalin, a violator of all the ethical norms of high office.

And there's a hearty band of Facebook Ultras, less numerous in the alarmists,

to assure us that Trump is little different from Obama.

The deportation numbers are down, for example,

though there are some technicalities involved.

Is it too distressingly moderate to say that there's more continuity in Trump than the

screamers say but that he does mark a turn for the worse? People who talk about the dignity of the presidency

mustn't think much about Richard Nixon, a far more interestingly twisted

character than the one-dimensional Trump. Nixon ran a private spying

operation in bombed Cambodia and total secrecy.

His drunken ravings caused to frighten Henry Kissinger, co-architect to those secret bombings,

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