Background Briefing: November 23, 2020

On By gram

 

As Trump Tears the Country Apart, Republicans Prefer Partisan Warfare to Patriotic Cooperation

We begin with the extraordinary attack on American democracy underway, not from some malign foreign power but from within as Trump tears up every notion of the rule of law, political precedents, public norms, American traditions, civil discourse and patriotic values. Sadly Trump will continue to rile up the 77% of the 73 million who voted for him to ensure they will never accept Biden as their president and instead will be a festering and seething disloyal opposition which Trump will manipulate and inflame for the next four years. Worse still the Republicans will collude in this sabotage as they pin their reelection hopes on blaming Biden for getting nothing done. Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior associate in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who focuses on issues of rule of law, security and governance in fragile states and is the author of A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security, joins us. We look at how Trump is tearing our own country apart aided and abetted by Republicans who have decided partisan advantage is preferable to patriotic cooperation.

 

An Assessment of Biden’s New National Security Team

Then we speak with David Rothkopf, producer of the podcasts “National Security Radio” and “Deep State Radio” which he hosts. A former senior official in the Clinton Administration and editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, his latest book is Traitor: A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump and he joins us to discuss his article at The Daily Beast, “Joe Biden’s National Security Picks Are the Best in Decades.”

 

Janet Yellen as Biden’s Likely Secretary of The Treasury

Then finally we assess the expectation that former Fed Chair Janet Yellen will become Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury and discuss the other front-runners, Lael Brainard and Sarah Bloom Raskin with Robert Hockett who has worked at the IMF and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University as well as an economic policy advisor to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The co-author of Money From Nothing Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve, he joins us to discuss the daunting challenges ahead for Biden’s economic team.