Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
Background Briefing has a new home at BackgroundBriefing.org.
Please visit and bookmark the new site. You can search show archives here.
| LISTEN TO FULL PROGRAM | ||
|
We begin with two important new and revealing studies assessing the first year of the Trump Administration, the first “Trump’s National Security and Foreign Policy Failures: Year One” and the second “What Internet search data reveal about Donald Trump’s first year in office”. Daniel Benaim, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as a Middle East policy adviser and foreign policy speechwriter at the White House, the Department of State, and the U.S. Senate, joins us to discuss his report on the first year of Trump’s abysmal foreign policy record which has left America more isolated and less respected, and the extraordinary speech in the senate today by Republican Senator Jeff Flake who likened Trump to Joseph Stalin and other despots warning “The president has it precisely backwards – despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy” and in terms of Trump’s lasting damage to our foreign policy, “Mr. President, so powerful is the presidency that the damage done by the sustained attack on the truth will not be confined to the president’s time in office.”
|
![]() |
|
|
Then we speak with Darrell West, the vice president and Director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the Founding Director of the Center for Technological Innovation. He is the author of “Billionaires; Reflections on the Upper Crust” and the author of a new report “What Internet search data reveal about Donald Trump’s first year in office” which finds that over the year the public’s interest in Trump has dropped dramatically while interest in his impeachment has spiked. |
![]() |
|
|
Then finally we examine the arrest of an ex-CIA officer charged with spying for China who is suspected of exposing the CIA’s spy network in China causing the murder or capture of around 20 undercover U.S. agents. June Dreyer, a professor of Political Science at the University of Miami specializing in Chinese government and foreign policy who was the Asia Advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations, joins us to discuss the pervasive nature of China’s spying activity in the U.S. and the tensions between and the CIA and FBI counterintelligence over their mole hunt inside the CIA.
|
![]() |
Taking listeners deep into the underlying issues and forces that shape our world.
Listen Live on KPFK FM-90.7 - Los Angeles (98.7 FM Santa Barbara, 99.5 FM China Lake, 93.7 FM San Diego)
Listen on Itunes
LA: Background Briefing Monday-Thursday 5pm-6pm and Sundays 11am-12pm
NY: on WBAI 99.5 FM Monday-Friday 5am-6am and rebroadcast at 10am
Also heard on:
