Background Briefing: June 29, 2020
Is Trump’s Incitement of his Armed Followers to Confront Demonstrators his Reelection Strategy?
We begin with Trump’s retweet of a video of one of his supporters at a retirement community in Florida shouting at a protester “White Power, White Power” to which Trump commented thanking his supporters in golf carts adding that “The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats Will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!” With AM radio advertising a product to oil your guns with called “Liberal Tears”, the line between political dissent and violent confrontation is tenuous at best as Trump inflames the tinderbox firing up his base with hatred and almost issuing a license to kill encouraging confrontations between his armed followers and peaceful demonstrators. Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, who is the host and producer of the six-part podcast series on white-power terrorism in Charlottesville in 2017, joins us. We discuss today’s tweet from Trump of a white couple in an affluent area of St. Louis pointing guns at protesters and look into the possibility that Trump wants violent confrontations in the streets of America as a campaign strategy so, acting as the arsonist and the fire brigade, he can crack down as the “law and order” president and perhaps declare martial law and suspend the November election.
In Afghanistan Russia Holds a Grudge But the Taliban Hardly Need to be Bribed to Kill Americans
Then we investigate the U.S. intelligence report which Trump ignored back in March warning that a unit of Russia’s GRU paid the Taliban to murder U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and speak with an expert on the area Christine Fair who is a Professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University who was a a political officer with the the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. She joins us to point out that the Taliban hardly need to be bribed to kill Americans but that the Russians do hold a grudge because of our arming and financing of the Mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and Putin is bitter that the U.S. military wiped out his friend Prigozhin’s Wagner Brigade mercenaries who attacked an American base in Syria in 2018.