Background Briefing: October 20, 2024

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43 States Are Mere Spectators to a Most Consequential Election That Could be Decided by a Few Counties 

We begin with 43 states being mere spectators to the most consequential election in recent history as money and campaigning bombard 7 swing states in the closing weeks before November 5 and the real possibility the election could be decided by a few counties in southern Pennsylvania and by the vote in Omaha, Nebraska. Joining us is Lawrence Douglas, the James Grosfeld Chair in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College and a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US. His latest book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020 and his forthcoming book is The Criminal State: Aggressive War, Atrocity and the Mystique of Sovereignty. We discuss his article at The Guardian, “The electoral college has become a gun held to the head of US democracy.”

 

One Third of Americans Agree With Trump That “Immigrants Poison the Blood of America,” His Claims of Bad Genes Echo the Nazi’s “Criminal Biology”

Then, with the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs describing Trump as being “fascist to the core”, we look into how Trump has embraced the Nazi policy of having the military round up millions into concentration camps and possibly the “eradication of life unworthy of life” because of what he calls bad genes invading our country based on what the Nazis called “criminal biology.” Joining us is Benjamin Carter Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, and Death in the Tiergarten, and The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. His latest book is The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War and we discuss his article at The Los Angeles Times “Trump says criminal activity is genetic. Nazis showed where such talk can lead.”

 

“Competitive Coexistence” With China as an Alternative to Cold War Containment and Confrontation

Then finally with the US and China on a Cold War trajectory of confrontation and containment, we explore an alternative of “competitive coexistence” where the two dominant powers could solve global problems together. Joining us is Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II and we discuss his report with Christopher Chivvis at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “US-China Relations for the 2030’s: Towards a Realistic Scenario for Coexistence.”