Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Secretary of Defense Hegg Seth digging the hole deeper as he sat beside a

half-awake Trump in a round-robin exercise in flattery of the dear leader cabinet meeting yesterday,

spouting rapid fire, the dog ate my homework excuses for not committing a war crime.

Joining us to discuss how Trump and Magus policies and politics are driven by sadism,

is Paul Waldman, a journalist and opinion writer whose work has appeared in dozens of

newspapers, magazines and digital outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe,

Chicago Tribune, The Week, MSNBC, and CNN.

He's a former columnist at The Washington Post, and his books include Being Right as Not Enough,

what progressists must learn from conservative success, the press effect, politicians, journalists,

and the stories that shaped the political world, and most recently white rural rage, the threat to American democracy.

He runs the cross-section on Substack, where his latest article we will discuss is A Few Bad Men.

Then we'll examine Putin's warning of going to war with Europe,

after which the Russian dictator

promised there would be no one left to negotiate with and speak with Michael Kimmage, director

of the Canon Institute, who is a professor of history and department chair at the Catholic

University of America. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the United States Department

of State, where he held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio. He's the author of The Abandonment of

the West, a history of an idea in American foreign policy, and collisions the war in Ukraine

and the origins of a new global instability. And he has a recent article at foreign policy.

Europe is at war.

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