We begin with Trump appearing increasingly mentally ill when announcing a trade deal with the EU and reducing his ultimatum to Putin from 50 days down to 10 or 12 as he went on a fact-free rant about windmills and whales. We discuss how Trump’s more and more likely successor J.D. Vance is putting an intellectual gloss on the administration’s racist and cruel immigration pogrom while it pursues racist gerrymandering to hold onto the House. Joining us is Katherine Stewart, a journalist and author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism upon which the feature documentary God and Country by Rob Reiner is based. Her latest book is Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy and we discuss her article at The New Republic, “JD Vance’s “Intellectual” Spin on the Racist Great Replacement Theory.”
Then we speak with Aziz Huq, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is the co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror and How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, and his latest book is The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies. We discuss his article at The Atlantic, “The Court’s Liberals Are Trying to Tell Americans Something” and another at Jacobin “Zohran Mamdani vs. Trump.”
Then finally we examine how the most powerful man in the world is so pathetically thin-skinned that he is at war with media outlets that do not praise the “dear leader” like Fox, Newsmax and AON do while he sues newspapers and networks that dare to tell the truth about him. Joining us is Peter Loge, a Professor and the Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs and Director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University. He has more than 30 years of experience in politics and communications, including a presidential appointment at the Food and Drug Administration and senior positions working for Sen. Edward Kennedy and three members of the U.S.House of Representatives.
Background Briefing offers an educational approach to providing information in an era of “fake news.”