Background Briefing: July 27, 2020

On By gram

 

The Continuation of the Republican War on Strong Women by Weak and Insecure Men

We begin with Michael D’Antonio, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Donald Trump and author of The Shadow President: The Truth About Trump and the forthcoming High Crimes who joins us to discuss his new book The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton. We examine how the recent crude and misogynistic attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the Capitol by an angry white male Republican Congressman is the continuation of the war by weak and insecure men who are afraid of strong women. The book looks into how an entire industry of hate, lies, and fear was created to persecute Hillary Clinton for decades and profit from it, exposing the network of hate-filled operatives from Brett Kavanaugh to Roger Stone, Ken Starr to George Conway and Newt Gingrich to David Bossie. All of whom have risen high in Republican ranks creating a stigma of criminality and corruption that has been entirely manufactured but sadly successful.  Now that the decades-long Republican campaign has culminated with a truly corrupt and criminal president in the White House, we assess what can be done to defeat the campaign of lies and hate Trump is unleashing and as his poll numbers decline, will surely mean he will resort to even more outlandish attacks and desperate measures.

 

How the 2020 Election Meltdown Could be a Repeat of 1876

Then with Trump making it clear that he will not accept the results of the next election, we explore a scenario of an electoral meltdown in November which could be a repeat of what happened in 1876. Lawrence Douglas, the Chair in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College whose latest book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020, joins us to discuss his article at The Guardian “What if Trump loses but refuses to leave office? Here’s the worst-case scenario.”

 

The Danger of Vaccine Nationalism Making the Pandemic Worse

Then finally we speak with Thomas Bollyky, Director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations about his article in Foreign Affairs “Vaccine Nationalism Threatens to Extend the Global Spread of COVID-19″. With forecasts predicting the pandemic could kill 40 million people and reduce global economic output by $12.5 trillion, once proven safe and effective, vaccines should be allocated on the basis of public health need, not the size of any individual country’s treasury.