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Briefings

Background Briefing: July 30, 2020

On By gram

 

On the Day John Lewis is Buried, Trump Attacks Voting Rights To Delay the Election

We begin with the stark contrast today with Trump tweeting out a fabricated attack on mail-in ballots calling for a delay in the election while former Democratic and Republican presidents eulogized the hero of civil rights and voting rights Congressman John Lewis, with President Obama urging the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act pointing out that “John Lewis devoted his time on this Earth to fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we’re seeing circulate right now.” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security, joins us. Having worked on bringing democracy and the rule of law to fragile states, she is now turning her attention to the transition after the November election where with today’s tweet, Trump is clearly signaling to his base that the vote will be rigged and that he will not accept the results which he has already made clear. We assess whether since we have norms in our transition, not laws, and Trump does not obey the law, that this impasse expected by many former government and military officials, will end up with violence in the streets.

Members of the Military, Does the Commander-in-Chief Have Your Back?

Then we look into Trump’s extraordinary remarks to Axios that the Russians paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers is justified by the U.S. having aided the Mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and Trump’s claim that widely reported concerns by our military leaders that the Russians were arming the Taliban “never got to my desk”. Rudy deLeon, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense who served as chief operating officer at the Pentagon and was a member of the Deputies Committee on the National Security Council, joins us to discuss how the rank and file in the military wonder whether their Commander-in-Chief has their back and Trump’s plan to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany which is seen as a gift to Putin.

 

Congress Finally Addresses Monopoly Power

Then finally, following yesterday’s grilling by the House Antitrust Subcommittee of the four titans of tech, the heads of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, we speak with David Dayen, the Executive Editor of The American Prospect and the author of the new book, just out, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power. He joins us to discuss his latest article at The American Prospect “The Triumphant Return of Congress: At Wednesday’s Big Tech hearings, the House Antitrust Subcommittee showed what informed politicians and a real investigation can do.”