Background Briefing: July 25, 2018
Trump’s Orwellian Move from Alternative Facts to Rewriting History
We begin with the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 in which war is peace, love is hate and lies are truth, a world the United States has now entered as our “Big Brother” Donald Trump moves from creating alternative facts to rewriting history. Historian Allan Lichtman, who teaches at American University and has studied both the American right and the presidency joins us. Against all odds, Allan predicted a Trump victory in 2016 and his latest national best-seller is “The Case for Impeachment” and we will discuss Trump’s call yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening”. But even more Orwellian is what The Atlantic discovered that the White House had altered and censored the official transcript of the recent press conference in Helsinki erasing the question by Jeff Mason of Reuters who asked President Putin “Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” To which the Russian leader responded, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal”. And although millions around the world saw the exchange, it has now been purged from the official record by Donald Trump who after telling his supporters to only believe him and not the press, claimed that Russia was going to meddle in the November elections to help the Democrats.
Pakistan Is Likely to Elect an Anti-Corruption Crusader Secretly Backed by the Army
Then with elections in Pakistan marred by deadly suicide bombings, we will get an analysis of today’s elections in which the Pakistani people had to choose between a former playboy and cricket star Imran Khan and the brother of a former disgraced Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Shuja Nawaz, the former Director of the South Asia Center at The Atlantic Council and author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, it’s Army, and the Wars Within”, joins us to discuss how already the incumbent party has rejected the results claiming vote rigging by the military who are rumored to be behind the likely winner, Imran Khan.