Background Briefing: July 6, 2026
Crypto Don Makes a Deal With the Head of the Notoriously Corrupt FIFA Which Will Stain a U.S. Victory If There Is To Be One This Evening
We begin with our wannabe Mafia boss making a deal the head of the notoriously corrupt FIFA could not refuse, resulting in a furious backlash in the world of soccer just ahead of the U.S. team’s game with Belgium, which if the U.S. wins this evening there will be a Trump stain forever on that victory just as there is on everything Trump touches. Joining us is David Hirshey, the former executive editor of HarperCollins Publishers and was a longtime editor at Esquire magazine. A former college soccer player, he has been covering soccer for nearly 50 years. He is the co-author of two books, Pele’s New World and The Education of an American Soccer Player. He played himself in the soccer documentary Once in a Lifetime.
Will Trump’s Revival of His Mentor Roy Cohn’s Red Scare Work?
Then we look into whether Trump’s revival of the Red Scare will work as the ghost of Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, reemerges with Trump’s vow to cut out the “cancer” of the communist menace as Democratic Socialists make gains in Democratic primaries. Joining us is Timothy Shenk, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. A senior editor at Dissent magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications and is the author of Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.
The Religious Underpinning of the Iranian Theocracy
Then finally we explore the religious underpinning of the Iranian theocracy which claims 15 million mourned their martyred Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei today. Joining us is Kian Tajbakhsh, a Visiting Professor of International Relations at NYU and a Fellow at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. An Iranian-American scholar of Middle East geopolitics and Iranian politics, he previously worked as a democracy and human rights advocate inside Iran. He spent nearly 13 months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including 8 months in solitary confinement in a high-security IRGC wing, followed by 6 years under house arrest as a political prisoner, before being released as part of Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He is the author of Creating Local Democracy in Iran and is the author of The Iran Crisis Notebook on Substack.