Background Briefing: April 4, 2023

 

With Today’s Indictment Securing Trump’s Domination of the GOP, is the Monster Right Wing Plutocrats Created Now Out of Their Control?

We begin with today’s arraignment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courthouse where he pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges which taken together carry a maximum sentence of more than 100 years in prison under New York law. We will discuss how Rupert Murdoch and the Koch network and the right wing plutocrats now know the monster they created is out of control since Trump has turned the table on them as the GOP’s base flock to their cult leader they see as a martyr together with with the evangelicals who venerate him. Joining us is Sidney Blumenthal, the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post, Washington editor and staff writer for The New Yorker and his books include the bestsellers The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment and The Permanent Campaign. His latest book is All the Powers on Earth, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln 1856-1860, and we discuss his article at The Guardian, “Every indictment will make Trump stronger – and Republicans wilder.”

 

With So Many Americans Seeing Trump as a Hero and Martyr, What Explains the Failure to Communicate Who He Really Is?

Then we venture from the political into the psychological to try to understand why so many Americans see this cheesy vulgarian and tawdry con man as a hero and why the press have failed to communicate to the American people who this serial criminal and liar is after four ruinous years of a presidency that will surely be judged as among the most reckless and incompetent in American history. Joining us is Dr. Allen Frances, a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University. He is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Saving Normal and the reference work Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis and his latest book is Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, now out in an updated paperback version

 

Why Today’s Supreme Court Election in Wisconsin Has Critical National Implications

Then finally we look into today’s important election in the outrageously gerrymandered state of Wisconsin for the state’s Supreme Court which has critical national implications if Dan Kelly, the Republican right wing activist and former state Supreme Court Judge who tried to overturn the 2020 election with fake electors, wins. Joining us is Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research. She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts.