Day: March 10, 2021

Briefings

Background Briefing: March 10, 2021

On By gram

 

Trump Owns the GOP But Now Wants to Turn it Into his Personal Piggy Bank

We begin with Trump’s cease and desist threats to the RNC, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Senatorial Committee which appears to be an effort by Trump’s Save America PAC to capture small-money donors who have given him up to half a billion dollars so far based on the “Stop the Steal” lies he has been spreading. Now he wants the GOP out of the way to have Republican voters directly fund Trump’s ill-defined America First program which is a mixture of martyrdom over a lost election he claims was stolen, vengeance against Republicans who voted to impeach him, and personal greed since the money he is raising goes into his pocket and he has sole discretion over how it is spent. Brendan Fischer, Director of Federal Reform at the Campaign Legal Center where he leads their work before federal regulatory agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, joins us to discuss how Trump not only owns the GOP but wants to turn it into his personal piggy bank.

 

States Turn Back the Clock to Stop Blacks and Progressive Whites From Voting

Then, with President Jimmy Carter expressing how he is “disheartened, saddened and angry” by Republican legislators in Georgia who are “turning back the clock” on access to the ballot, we speak with Peniel Joseph, the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He joins us to discuss the GOP’s revival of old-fashioned anti-Black racism whose origin goes back to Reconstruction.

 

How Biden Might Sell the Stimulus in Thursday’s Address to the Nation

Then finally, with President Biden making a major address on Thursday on the one year anniversary of the Covid pandemic, we speak with Paul Glastris, the editor in chief of The Washington Monthly who was a senior speechwriter to President Bill Clinton, about the extent to which Biden has learned from the 2009 mistakes made by Obama in not taking credit for rescuing the economy. And although Biden has no intention to put his name on the $1,400 checks as Trump tried to do, we will discuss how Biden might sell the stimulus.