Background Briefing: July 21, 2024
The Gulf Between Rhetoric and Reality As One Presidential Candidate Drones on Disavowing his Plans While the Other is in a Bunker Not Listening
We begin with the gulf between rhetoric and reality as the Trump/Vance campaign goes to desperate lengths to distance themselves from their own plans and platform laid out in the Heritage foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025. Joining us to discuss the rhetorical gymnastics underway as Trump talks of unity and the billionaire-backed Vance reaches out to workers while sucking up to Trump he once called an “American Hitler and “cultural heroin” is Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in the Department of Communications at Texas A&M University where she teaches courses on Political Communication and Presidential Rhetoric. An historian of American political discourse, she is the co-editor of The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency and author of Founding Fictions as well as Demagogue for President:The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.
A Recap of the Republican Convention and What it Tells Us About a Future Trump Presidency
Then we get a recap of last week’s Republican National Convention from Will Bunch, an award-winning national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who covered the convention in Milwaukee and blogs at attytood.com. He is the author of The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream and, most recently, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. We discuss his latest article at the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Unity at the RNC Looks a lot Like Jonestown.”
How a Handful of Tech Billionaires Are Poised to Enact Their Techno-Fascist Fantasies with Their Bro in the Oval Office
Then finally we look into how a handful of tech bro billionaires in Silicon Valley have bought an ambitious senator then leveraged him into the Oval Office a heartbeat away from a fading reality TV star with no interest in governing to enact the techno-fascist fantasies of the “Dark Enlightenment” in alignment with Project 2025. Joining us is Jacob Silverman, a contributing writer for The New Republic and a contributing editor for The Baffler, covering tech and national security. He is the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, and his latest book, an instant New York TImes bestseller, co-authored with Ben MacKenzie, is Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. He also blogs at jacobsilverman.com and we discuss his article at The Nation, “It’s Official: Silicon Valley Is Fully MAGA-Pilled.”
And just after we went to air we learned that President Biden will be stepping down from his candidacy for reelection. So we’ll have more details on this developing story on Monday.