Background Briefing: November 13, 2024
It Looks Like Trump is No Longer Afraid of Being Blackmailed By Putin
We begin with an apparent falling out between Trump and Putin following a contentious phone call last Thursday after which the Kremlin’s main propaganda outlet TV1 published naked pictures of Melania and Putin’s National Security Advisor Patruchev warned Trump of the blackmail they appear to have over him, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Joining us to assess whether Putin has lost his leverage over Trump who may feel strong enough to take the hit from whatever blackmail Putin could expose, is Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum. A professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and a former senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, he is a member of the Russian academy of Natural Sciences and worked as a Swedish Diplomat in Moscow and served as an economic advisor to the governments of Russia and Ukraine. His books include Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It and Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path From Market Economy to Kleptocracy. We discuss his article at The Kyiv Post, “What Did the Biden Administration Really Want in Ukraine?”
Trump Shows Up at the Congress Today With His New Playmate Elon Musk
Then, with Elon Musk showing up at the Congress today with his new playmate Donald Trump, we examine the role of the new co-president who Trump is making his head of the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, the acronym for a cryptocurrency Musk has been promoting. 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 most recently, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. His forthcoming book is Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He also blogs at jacobsilverman.com and has an article at The Intercept we discuss, “Elon Musk Is His Own Rogue Nation.”
The Outsized Role the Crypto Industry Played in Electing Trump and Republicans
Then finally with cryptocurrencies soaring over 30% since Trump’s election, with Bitcoin at over $92,000, we look into the outsized role the cryptocurrency industry played in financing Trump and the Republican’s election and speak with Molly White, a software engineer and cryptocurrency critic. In addition to her longer-form critical writing about the topic, she maintains the website Web3IsGoingGreat.com, where she catalogs only some of the many disasters happening in cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, NFTs, and other blockchain-based projects. She is also the author of the Citations Needed newsletter.