Day: December 14, 2025

Briefings

Background Briefing: December 14, 2025

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An Assessment of Trump’s New National Security Strategy

We begin with Trump and Vance complaining that Europeans aren’t racist enough, wanting them to expel all the Muslims just as he is expelling all the brown skinned immigrants and minorities as fast as Stephen Miller can push ICE to meet his quotas. We assess Trump’s National Security Strategy that accuses Europe of “civilizational erasure” while here at home Trump is pursuing democratic erasure and speak with Charles Kupchan, who was director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He is now a professor of International Affairs in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and spent the last 3 years of the Obama administration as Special Assistant to President Obama for National Security. He is the author of Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order, and How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, and his latest book, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.

 

Why Democrats Lost the Last Election and What They Must Do to Win the Next One

Then we look into why the Democrats lost the last election and what they must do to win the next one and speak with Sam Rosenthal, the political director at RootsAction who serves on the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Electoral Committee. He was formerly the political director at Our Revolution and he has a new report at RootsAction, “How Democrats Lost the White House.”

 

A Gen Z Union Organizer on Standing Up For a Better Workplace

Then finally we speak with a Gen Z union organizer Jaz Brisack, the organizing director of the Inside Organizer School, which they co-founded in 2018 to train non-union workers and “salts” to unionize their workplaces. They first started organizing in Mississippi, working on the UAW campaign at the Nissan factory and volunteering as a Pink House Defender at the state’s last abortion clinic. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Jaz got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United in Upstate New York and Vermont, they subsequently worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to Tesla. Jaz is the author of the new book, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.