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 an assessment of why Trump is selling out to Putin as he throws Ukraine under the bus

while gutting our intelligence agencies with unqualified and even compromised leadership,

as his co-president Musk rips into the U.S. government, destroying its soft power and weakening it across the board.

Joining us to speculate on what hold Putin has over Trump is Alexander Motel, a professor

of political science at Rutgers University, a specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR,

and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory. He's the author of 10 books of

nonfiction, including Imperial Ends, the Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires, and Why Empires Reemerge,

Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective. We'll discuss his article.

At the Hill, was 40-year-old Trump recruited by the KGB?

Then with Trump's head of the FCC going after the so-called liberal media, as he promised

to do in the chapter he wrote in Project 2025, we'll assess how much Trump will succeed in

turning the press into his own propaganda and public relations arm as Putin did in Russia and Orban did in Hungary.

Joining us is Victor Picard, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Media Inequality

and Change Center.

He is the author of America's Battle for Media Democracy, the triumph of corporate libertarianism

and the future of media reform, and his latest book, Democracy Without Journalism, Confronting

the Misinformation Society.

Then finally we'll examine the performative nature of Musk's

evisceration of the US government under the pretext of cutting spending in order to give

massive tax breaks to oligarchs like himself, which so far is saving a pittance, but is crippling

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