Background Briefing: September 6, 2018

On By gram

Full Briefing

 

The Warning from Inside Trump’s Inner Circle

We begin with the anonymously authored op-ed in The New York Times by a senior Trump Administration official “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” which has the president lashing out in a fury as a flurry of denials are issued from his senior White House staff in an ominous atmosphere of threatened purges. Dr. Michael Carpenter,the former foreign policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and director for Russia on the National Security Council who has an article at Foreign Affairs co-authored with Joe Biden, “How to Stand up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies”, joins us. We discuss the op-ed’s charge that Trump fought against sanctioning Russia for the nerve agent attack in Britain and how the unnamed author describes the resistance inside the administration as not the work of the “deep state” but “the work of the steady state”. We examine the possibility that the few adults in the room could be purged by a paranoid president who could install Ivanka and Jared to run the show. And on top of what both the op-ed and Bob Woodward’s book make clear that our president himself is a danger to America’s national security, we explore the even grimmer possibility that Trump is a compromised tool of a malign foreign power.

 

What Will It Take for Trump’s Enablers to Abandon Him?

Then, with the November elections fast approaching, we assess the likely political impact of the charges against their leader on the supine and craven House and Senate GOP enablers of Trump by a Republican official on the inside of Trump’s administration who is sounding the alarm about a dangerous and dysfunctional presidency. David Rothkopf, a visiting professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the former editor of Foreign Policy and author of “The Great Questions of Tomorrow”, joins us to discuss the anonymous author’s invocation of John McCain at a time when there is an ugly partisan determination by GOP senators to seat Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court.

 

Russian Assassins Behind Nerve Agent Attack in UK Identified

Then finally we go to the U.K. to speak withNico Hines, the London editor of The Daily Beast who previously was a reporter for the Times of London and their Washington correspondent. He joins us to discuss his article at The Daily Beast “How Russian Spies Used a Fake Nina Ricci Perfume Bottle to Smuggle Novichok Nerve Agent Into England” and what steps the unpopular British government can take to retaliate against Russia to deter future attacks.