Category: Briefings

Foreign Policy in Tonight’s Harris/Trump Debate and Whose Finger Would You Rather Have on the Nuclear Button

We begin, a few hours ahead of the Harris/Trump presidential debate, and assess the role that foreign policy is likely to play since it appears to be a low priority for most voters but one that could come down to whose finger do you want on the nuclear button, given how unstable Trump is according to his own top military officials who were concerned he could trigger World War III. Joining us is Jon Hoffman, a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute and a professor at George Mason University specializing in Middle East geopolitics and political Islam. He was recently awarded the “40 under 40” award from the Middle East Policy Council for his work on U.S. foreign policy in the region, and his work has been featured in Middle East Policy, Open Democracy, The Cipher Brief and Foreign Policy Magazine. He is the lead researcher of the YouGov/Cato Institute’s 2024 Foreign Policy Swing State Survey.

Democratic “Irrational Exuberance” With the Polls and “Sane-Washing” by the Mainstream Media

Then we examine whether Democrats are engaged in “irrational exuberance” from polls that have Harris slightly ahead of Trump and assess the degree to which the mainstream media is guilty of “sane-washing” by treating the race in a “fair and balanced” way when one of the candidates is increasingly unbalanced and incoherent. Joining us is Greg Sargent, a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the TNR podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.

We Should Take Trump at His Word That He Wants to be a Dictator and Jail His Opponents and the Press

Then finally we speak with Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. His latest book, just out, is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and we discuss how we should take Trump at his word that he wants to be a dictator like his idol Putin and that he’ll put his opponents and the press in gulags as promised and open up the treasury to Jared and Ivanka, not ot mention Don Jr., Eric and Lara etc.