Background Briefing: October 28, 2019
Trump Trashes the Kurds and the CIA Who Made Him Look like a Hero
We begin with after action reports of the Delta Force raid on the compound in which the leader of ISIS Al-Baghdadi was killed, an operation which the president described at length and in detail and with some apparent embellishment when Trump claimed Al-Baghdadi was “whimpering, crying and screaming all the way”, an account which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs could not confirm. Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst and author of “The United States of Jihad” whose forthcoming book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos”, joins us to discuss his latest article at CNN “Trump deserves to take a victory lap” and the extent to which Trump’s recent actions in selling out the Kurds made the operation more complicated and urgent. And since the Special Forces’ operation was named after Kayla Mueller, a young American aid worker who was captured by ISIS and held as Al-Baghdadi’s personal sex slave suffering routine and brutal rapes until he decided to kill her, we will assess how this depraved pedophile could claim Islamic religious credentials as the next caliph. And since the tip-off and the DNA proof of where Baghdadi was hiding came from a source deep inside the ISIS leader’s inner circle who was reporting to the Kurdish leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces General Mazloum Abdi, and this information was used by the CIA to plan and execute the operation, the irony is not lost that the people Trump sold out, the Kurds, and the people he trashes the most, our intelligence community, were the ones who made him look like a hero.
Did Trump Get a Dose of Reality When Baseball Fans Chanted “Lock Him Up”?
Then, since Trump only talks to friendly media like Fox & Friends and is surrounded by sycophants like his press secretary who touts the genius of her great president North Korean style, we will examine whether the president got a dose of reality at Game Five of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros. Robert Lipsyte, a long-time sports columnist for The New York Times and author of the memoir “An Accidental Sportswriter, and “SportsWorld: An American Dreamland”, joins us to discuss how, when Trump’s picture appeared on the Jumbotron together with his cheer squad of Republican politicians including fanboys Lindsey Graham and Matt Gaetz, the sold-out crowd booed thunderously with fans chanting “lock him up”.
When It Comes to Impeachment Courage Is Not the Norm, It’s the Exception
Then finally we speak with William Galston a Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program who served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy, about how Republican senators who normalized Trump’s behavior, will soon be the judges of the extent to which the president’s abnormal conduct warrants impeachment. And while it has been suggested that more than enough Republicans would vote to impeach Trump if it were a secret ballot, we will explore the notion that courage in politics is not the norm, it’s the exception.