Month: July 2020

Briefings

Background Briefing: July 19, 2020

On By gram

Citizens of Portland Continue Their Stand Against Brutal Police Now Aided by Trump’s Stormtroopers

We begin with the trial run underway in Portland for Trump’s reelection plan after having invented the specter of Antifa as a threat to America, to use an executive order to protect statues and government buildings as an excuse to deploy his private federal militia led by rabid Trumpsters DHS acting head Chad Wolfe and CBP Deputy Director Ken Cuccinelli to create chaos in the streets to be shown with hysterical commentary on Fox intended to rile up his base. All this to try again to distract the public from the real crisis, a pandemic Trump has let loose on the land, which our absentee leader is incapable of dealing with and is trying to wish away.  Robert Evans, an investigative reporter for Bellingcat who has been covering the protests in Portland for months and has worked as a conflict journalist in Iraq and Ukraine and has reported on far-right extremists in the U.S., joins us. The host of the podcast behind the Bastards for iHeartMedia, he has documented clashes between protesters and police including Trump’s fascistic kidnapping of protesters by federal officers without insignia in unmarked cars and protests in response to these police-state tactics. We assess whether the outrage expressed by Portland’s mayor, the state’s congressional representatives and its two U.S. Senators along with the governor, will deter Trump’s stormtroopers from continuing their phony war against a couple of hundred leaderless anarchists while ignoring the growing threat of right wing neo-Nazis and Boogaloo radicals who are actually intent on killing police to start a civil war.

 

How Trump and Barr Are Planning to Overturn the Election

Then, as Trump and AG Barr lay the groundwork for how Trump can lose the popular vote, and even those key swing states necessary for an Electoral College victory, but still remain president, we will examine this possibility that is becoming a probability with Senator Tim Wirth, a former Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado. We discuss his article at Newsweek, “How Trump Could Lose the Election – And Still Remain President” and the alarmingly credible scenarios he outlines of how between the November vote and the December 14 Electoral College vote, Trump could blame Biden’s victory on Chinese ballots, hold up the certification while declaring a national emergency and have the election thrown to the House of Representatives. There, pursuant to the Constitution, the 26 states with a majority Republican House delegation will be given the victory over the 23 states that have a majority Democratic delegation, thus handing Trump a second term.

 

A Psychiatrist Examines Mary Trump’s Book on Her Uncle

The finally, with the book by Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, about her uncle Donald now a runaway best-seller, we speak with Dr. Allen Frances, a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Psychiatry at Duke University who in his reference work, “Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis”, wrote the textbook definitions of the nine criteria of clinical narcissism. The author of Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Examines the Age of Trump, we assess the level of sanity in the country and ponder the likelihood that Trump’s base will recognize that bringing back incandescent light bulbs is not a sufficient reason to re elect a president, particularly as members of their family and people they know are dying from Covid 19.