Category: Briefings

Trump’s Reality TV Reshuffle of His National Security Team

We begin with Trump shuffling the deck today by sending his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to the UN to be the US ambassador and replacing him on an interim basis with Marco Rubio who will be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Joining us to discuss how Rubio’s proximity to Trump inside the Oval Office might allow him to be more assertive since Rubio has taken a back seat as the pro-Putin clique of Vance, Hegseth, Gabbard and Lutnik dominate foreign policy with Trump’s real estate buddy Witkoff leading the charge to sell out Ukraine. Joining us is Jacob Heilbrunn, the Editor at the National Interest, a non-resident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a columnist for The Spectator. His books include They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons and America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

SCOTUS Appears Poised to Smash Through the Wall Separating Church and State to Force Taxpayers to Subsidize Religious Indoctrination

Then we get an assessment of yesterday’s arguments before the Supreme Court on a case that could smash a giant hole in the wall between Church and State forcing taxpayers to subsidize religious indoctrination in the name of education and resegregating schools along religious lines. Joining us is an expert who offered an Amicus Brief in the case, James Liebman, the Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Law at Columbia University and an expert on institutional design and change in public education and criminal justice. He is the founder of the Columbia Center for Public Research and Leadership and we discuss his article at Bloomberg Law, “Supreme Court Could Put New Face on Public-School Segregation.”

On This May Day, How Unions Would Be the Only Way Reindustrialized American Factory Workers Could Make a Living Wage to Support a Family

Then finally on this May Day we speak with Eric Blanc, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, and director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative. We discuss Trump’s call for reindustrialization, which if it ever happens, will not include unions which is the only way to restore a living wage for American factory workers and their families as well as Eric’s latest book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.