Background Briefing: June 9, 2024

Already Governing, Trump Has His Puppet Mike Johnson Appoint Two Clowns to Cripple the House Intel Committee

We begin with Speaker Johnson, acting on orders from Trump, appointing to the House Select Committee on Intelligence an insurrectionist Congressman Scott Perry and Congressman Ronny Jackson whose drinking and inappropriate behavior led to a scathing report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General which resulted in Trump’s former White House Navy doctor being demoted from Rear Admiral to Captain. Joining us to discuss how Trump is already governing in his second term by having his puppet in charge of the House, cripple the intel committee with MAGA clowns from the Republican pro-Putin caucus, 46 of whom just voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to defund NATO. Joining us is Gregory Treverton, a senior adviser with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor of the practice of international relations at the University of Southern California. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council, and was chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017. His books include Dividing Divided States, Beyond the Great Divide: Relevance and Uncertainty in National Intelligence and Science for Policy.

 

The Inevitability of Trump 250 Years in the Making With the U.S. Captive to Its Contentious Past

Then we look into how much the United States has become captive to its contentious past with division, mistrust and misinformation 250 years in the making, resulting in Donald Trump being simply inevitable. Joining us is Nick Bryant, the author of When America Stopped Being Great, a book that Joe Biden keeps in the Oval Office. He was formerly one of the BBC’s most senior foreign correspondents, with postings in Washington DC, New York, South Asia and Australia. After covering the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, he left the BBC in 2021, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. We discuss his latest book, just out, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.