The Last Word on the US: 25 Years Since 9/11

0:00The last word on today is them. Marry me, Kowloon and Kyle Thomas. With us, Kyle, we haven't said anything in recent months about it on air, but I have been aware that you've been getting treatment for cancer. And I know you want to talk about it now. How are you? Well, I'm fine, Matt. Thank you. I spent half my summer 38 radiation treatments for a prostate tumor. But fortunately, they caught it early. And I wrote a column about it. And I think this is very important, especially for men and so many men are in denial about these things. Women are much better when it comes to getting examined for breast cancer and another thing. So my PSA was high during a physical exam and the doctor recommended I have a biopsy. Did that? And it just showed that it was advancing and that I should have treatment. So I had radiation treatment. The other option was to have the prostate removed. But so the purpose of the column was to urge men who are 50 and over during your annual physical exam,

1:06which I hope you get anyway, to make sure you get a PSA test, Ketsus thing early. Mine was caught early, so I'm happy to be able to say I'll be around a little longer to annoy you and Marion. Very good for utilizing to have you. How did you find the treatment? How was the treatment for you, Kyle? Was it difficult? Because you did come on here every week, during us. Well, I'm a professional after all. Well, it was about 15 minutes in this tube and the radiation is targeted. Very sophisticated machinery. I'm living in the Miami area now, as you know. And this Baptist Health Hospital Miami Cancer Institute is one of the best in the world. They have some of the most sophisticated machinery. And so you have a few side effects, which I won't go into, but they're manageable. And I stopped the treatment a week and a half ago, but I still have to be on a hormone pill for two years, because the testosterone is what feeds the tumor. And so once the tumor is gone, which apparently it is, taking the hormone pill for another two years,

2:08pretty much guarantees it won't come back. But very important for men. And men don't like to talk about these things and think about them. But you owe it to your spouse, your loved ones, and yourself, and to get it checked regularly. Indeed. Well, I'm delighted that the treatment is working out very well for you. As happens to something else that you wrote about this week for 9-11, 25 years on, was something that I don't think I was aware of. And if I had been, I've forgotten it, but your son and the work that he did on 9-11, which he says something that he doesn't talk about much because of what he saw that day, not in New York, but in his work at the Pentagon. Tell us about that. Well, he was a firefighter for many years, and a very good one. And he was assigned and went immediately to the Pentagon to pull out bodies. And I tried to get him to talk about him, but he didn't want to talk about it. I think the horror of it was something that really damaged his heart, not literally, but figuratively.

3:10And there's a lot of people during World War II. I mean, my father didn't want to talk about it except to other veterans. So it was, I was living near the Pentagon at the time. And I could see the smoke. I went up to the roof of the house to look at it. I saw where the plane had hit, and I knew one of the people who was on the plane. So, you know, it was, it was a bad time all around. A very shaky time for America, but I do want to say one other thing. Because among the images we saw that day, and that meant a lot to me, was the number of people, especially in Ireland, but also in other parts of Europe, going to church to pray for America and to pray for the victims' families. We don't get much praise in America from anybody anymore, but that meant a lot to me as an American. And my love for Ireland, of course, to see that. And I knew some people who were, in fact, not regular, shall we say, church attenders who went that day. And I think not only did it mean a lot to me, it meant a lot to a lot of other Americans.

4:10I think, Al, I'll go to Marion in a second, but I think the support you got at the time from Europe in particular, from Ireland was enormous. We had a day of warning here in Ireland, where we shut down for a day because of it. And I think that's why an awful lot of Europeans are angry, even better at the way that Donald Trump has been behaving in recent times, pretending that Europe somehow is not supportive enough of America. He has a short memory, doesn't he? Yeah, well, that's true. And, you know, he just had a little ceremony on the ellipse, the south lawn of the White House today. And set, set, set, honoring one of the persons who died in one of the twin towers. He was known as the man with a red bandana. He was on the hundred, he was a firefighter on the 104th floor and managed to get down to floor number, I think 75, to console people who had been injured and who had inhaled all this black smoke. Everybody knew they were going to die.

5:10And he just consoled them. And the president gave his mother, I think it was, a presidential medal of freedom, which is our highest civilian honor than any president could give them. But, yeah, he still makes things about himself. We'll probably talk about that later in the program. It's the rundown. As it happens, we have to speak from earlier this afternoon, in which he spoke about his personal experience of 9-11. And I'm told, this is a complete fabrication. Now, I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened and they were, they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn't too much we could do. I'll be honest, it was, it was raw. Nobody seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, and really creaking. Now, we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down.

6:13And I'll never forget, too far from it. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and too far from it. Big, strong guys. And I'm not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms. They got to get out of here. And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. They got a little bit of a bump. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, fellas, I can run myself. But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down. It didn't come down. US Steel. Gosh, Mary McHown, who knew that Donald Trump was on the scene, helping the firefighters on the day of 9-11? I thought he was watching it all from New Jersey, and going on television, boasting that he now wants the tallest building in New York. Well, he certainly did that. And I do remember that very clearly. And he also said falsely that he had seen Muslim people dancing on roofs and celebrating, which didn't happen either. I do think, however, there may be some truth. I seem to recall, Matt, that he was interviewed at some point around then. And he said, I think he said he had about 100 workers working down there.

7:16And that they would help if necessary. I assume he meant they're working on a building or whatever. So I don't know if there is a tiny shred of truth in there, somewhere that he did have workers nearby. He certainly wasn't there himself. That's my recollection. I do remember seeing him being interviewed outside the Javits Center in the days afterwards. But I think that Donald Trump, so many people around that time, New Yorkers, I remember it so clearly, we're so generous. They donated everything, blood, money, anything that they could. And I remember chefs, like very prominent chefs, opening up, like spending fortunes on feeding the firemen and the first responders. And I don't remember Donald Trump being at the fore in any charitable endeavours to be quite honest. That is just my own recollection. OK. And of course, then the recovery of New Yorkers, the New York Times call is saying that in the months after the attack on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breed. But apparently it wasn't. There was best dose as much as half a mile away for the following 10 months.

8:20Right. Well, to his credit, and I don't say this very often, the Miriam M. Donney of New York is just ordered today the release of all of these documents over 17,000 pages, I think it is. Look, politicians lie. I don't know what benefit there was in covering all of this up. The New York Post had a story yesterday about another firefighter, 25 years later, now still suffering from the aftermath of breeding in some of that air. How could you not believe that? I mean, I was there. I had a friend who knew the chief firefighter at Ground Zero and managed to get in there and see some of this stuff. And I had to put handkerchiefs over my face to keep from breeding it. It was awful. The debris, the air was still foul several days after the incident. And I just think it's disgusting that this was covered up, especially when a lot of people suffered who didn't have to, and some died after the fact. I see, Mandami is irritating Rudy Giuliani, Mariam,

9:21who says that Mandami shouldn't be at the 9-11 ceremony this week, one which Trump is missing, I believe. And also the Israeli ambassador wants Mandami to be arrested. Tell us all about this, Mariam. Yeah, you know, it's very dispiriting and depressing. Giuliani came out in a rant, which was pretty incoherent on television demanding that he not attend and that he stay away. And over 100,000 people have signed a petition. Now, these are not New Yorkers. Some of them are, these some of the families of the victims have signed it. But it was incorrectly claimed that it was all of the families and victims and New Yorkers who had signed this saying they did in Montmandami to be there. He is the mayor of New York. And there's no reason that he shouldn't be there. This is certainly where the names are read out. It's attributed to the families and the first responders, which he has said in response to this sort of divisiveness and this nonsense that Giuliani is stirring up. And you know, it's a real measure for me, one of the art sticks of, you know, I remember the hours and the days after N911 when Giuliani had become a national hero

10:22in America because of the leadership he provided on that day. He made a lot of mistakes that we said before that, including relocating the emergency services into one of the twin towers. But there you go. But you know, he was on the in the days after he provided very decisive leadership. And he became a hero. And now you look to him. He's been disbarred. He's been discredited. He's been bankrupted. He's have to pay out defamation claims all because of his really appalling behavior and helping Donald Trump to find over trod the results of 2020 elections. So he's a spend force. And I think he's more to be pity that this stage is anything else. And the UN ambassador from Israel is claiming that because Madame Dami said that New Yorkers have a right to protest. Netanyahu's appearance at the UN next week outside the UN General Assembly that he's inciting violence against. And I am paraphrasing that but that that he is peaceful protest has always been a right of Americans and of New Yorkers. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with that provided. Of course, it is peaceful. And if people want to protest Netanyahu's presence at the UN in light of the way he has

11:25prosecuted the Warren Gaza. And now what's going on? And I think they're perfectly entitled to do so. And we've been talking about Michael Moore's right to free speech at the age here in concert during the last word of music in the final hour. Cal, what do you make of Trump's continuing social media output? Usually in the dead of nice. Putting up mad stuff such as labeling New Mexico as New America following on changing Lake Ontario to Lake America. Maps with the American flag in blazoned over Canada, Greenland, Mexico. Iceland, no. He's actually turned to Iceland as well. Adding in putting out this video where he's basically beating up Mark Carney on a nice drink. Well, you better be careful, Matt. He's coming to Ireland in a few days and he think it happened. Well, first of all, the business about New Mexico was some phony social media thing. And then he just took it over and did that. I think he does a lot of this stuff just to irritate people.

12:28But the point is it's so unnecessary. We got this longer than predicted war going with Iran. We've got a $40 trillion deficit. We've a debt. We've got the elections coming up, the so-called off-year elections in November. And he's playing like some kid in school doing this stuff. It's one of the reasons, I think, among many, that his approval ratings are now in the high 30s, depending on the poll you look at. And that's a real problem for the coming election. He says, pretend that he's on the ballot and vote as if he is on the ballot. Well, for some people, that may be a negative and might not even turn out. We've had low turnouts in American elections for several years, including for presidential elections. And the 2014 off-year election, only 36.4% of voters turned out. So I think he's doing this thing in Dallas this coming weekend or Thursday it is bad timing because it's the opening of our national football league season to try to rally the voters

13:29and get people out to vote. Because turnout is always key. I mean, both sides have roughly the same number of people who are Republicans, Democrats, and turnout is the key. So we'll see. Okay, this is Trump Apalooza. Is that what they're calling it, Narion? Is he going to go there? Because isn't he busy doing a 9-11 ceremony in Washington? Not going to New York because he's thrown his toys out of the prom, about not being allowed to speak. And then overnight, from the 11th, flies off to Compton, Washington, Dublin. Yeah, he's going to be in a good mood for New York. I mean, that's an exhausting schedule by Annie Sanders. You know, you've, like the Pentagon, as you said, and then he's doing two speeches now in Dallas. He's not just doing one. He was supposed to give the opening speech and then he's doing all these events where people will pay, I think, about $88,000 to have their picture taken. It was about $250,000 to sit at a table that he drops by. All this kind of money grifting, you know, a turbocharged grifting. And then, but JD Vance was supposed to give the keynote speech at the end of this ridiculous

14:30two-day event. Look, you know, a midterm convention. It's laughable. Anybody I know, Karl knows this as well. We've boasted so many conventions over the years, even having to go to the ones that take place every four years when the president is being, you know, the candidate is being declared and all the rest coronated. And they're even tedious enough. A midterm one serves no purpose whatsoever, but it's a love bath for Trump because I think he's feeling a little bit unloved at the moment and a little bit neglected. And so he's giving a speech at the beginning. JD Vance was then supposed to give the keynote. Now, Trump is supposed to say he's going to give another speech after JD Vance is at the end because God forbid anyone would have to last for it besides him. So it'll be two days of, well, we'll see what there's a real concern that a lot of people turn up because he's demanding $25,000 per Republican who are busy trying to save themselves from a violation in the midterms for them to come to Dallas and show up with them there and love them just don't want to be seen, especially in close races, that near Trump, but they certainly don't want to take a name to out and spend 25 grand on the privilege

15:32of standing next to him. Okay. I suppose they need to be a towards them, but one thing, Karl, I mean, how humiliating is it to see Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkopf turning up in Moscow, sucking up to Vladimir Putin at the weekend and then taking a tougher line with Ukraine. And of course, the minute they leave, Kiev, the Russian stop bombing Kiev again. Yeah. And of course, the director of the CIA made a visit to Moscow a couple of weeks ago, didn't meet with Putin, but met with some other officials. I don't know what the point of this is. Putin is not going to change his goal and desire to capture as much of Ukraine as he can. He appears now to be on the losing side as the drones are wrapped up in Baisolinsky. But we said this before on the program, Trump praises more of our enemies and criticizes more of our friends, would it ought to be the other way around.

16:33This is the danger, as I've said before, of foreign policy by personality. You can't do that, whether it's Kim Jong Un, whether it's President Xi of China who's coming to Washington in a few days or whether it's Putin. These people are committed to their ideology and are not going to be swayed. They're going to use Trump's idea of personality in foreign policy against him. It's not going to work out to America's advantage. Karl Thomas, Marion McCone, thank you both.