Background Briefing: April 9, 2026
In Desperation, Our Self-Serving and Imbecilic President Has Strengthened a Brutal Regime and Elevated Its Global Position
We begin with reports that for weeks Trump has been desperate to make a deal with Iranian officials because he only cares about himself, not the country, and is eagerly accepting Iran’s terms to get out of the mess he has made without any regard to the consequences for the US, the region and the world. Joining us to discuss how there are no specialists on Iran left in the government to inform a White House which has no interest in facts that the theocrats running Iran see the preservation of the Islamic Republic as their highest religious duty and instead of freeing the Iranian people, Trump has strengthened this brutal repressive government and elevated its position in the world. Joining us is Hussein Banai, an Iranian American scholar and Professor of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington who teaches Iran’s political development as well as US-Iran relations. He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran and he has an article at Foreign Affairs we discuss, “America and Israel Have Different Endgames in Iran.”
Will America’s Defeat Liberate It From a Broken Imperial Model?
Then we look into how Trump’s defeat in his war of choice, in spite of American military power, could be the beginning of liberating the US from a broken imperial model. We speak with James Galbraith, Professor and Chair in Government and Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress and before that, an economist for the House Banking Committee. He chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security and directs the Inequality Project at the University of Texas and is the author of a number of books including Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too and, most recently, Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production. We discuss his article at The Nation, “The Ceasefire Just Showed the World That US Military Power Is Obsolete.”
The Pentagon and Trump’s War on Pope Leo
Then finally we speak with Anthea Butler, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of a number of books including The Rise of the New Religious Right and, most recently, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. She has an article at MSNOW we discuss, “The men who needed to hear Pope Leo’s Easter message the most,” and we examine the Pentagon and Trump’s war on Pope Leo.