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

Trump's rambling press conference today, where he spent the first half-hour ranting about electric

cars, showerheads, and windmills driving whales crazy, before attacking our closest allies

and wanting to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

Joining us to discuss how the press is dutifully treating the barking mad Trump as a normal president, while the owners of the press and social media like Bezos and Zuckerberg

move to flatter rather than fact-check Trump.

Is Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School,

and a contributing editor at Harper's In Legal Affairs and National Security.

He serves on the American branch of the International Law Association

and has represented a variety of journalists and whistleblowers.

Then we'll examine whether Trump really means it

in not ruling out military force to take back

the Panama Canal and grab Greenland while making Canada the 51st state and speak with Stephen Kinzer,

an award-winning foreign correspondent who served as a New York Times Bureau Chief in Turkey, Germany,

and Nicaragua

and as the Boston Globe's Latin American correspondent.

He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Public Affairs

at Brown University and is the author of All the Shards Men, Overthrow,

and the brothers John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, and their Secret World War.

His latest book is Poisoner-in-Chief, Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

And we'll discuss his article, at the Boston Globe,

Eyeing Greenland and the Panama Canal, Trump dusts off an old American playbook.

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