Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the gulf between rhetoric and reality as the Trump-Vance campaign

goes to desperate lengths to distance themselves from their own plans and platform

laid out in the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025.

Joining us to discuss the rhetorical gymnastics underway as Trump talks of unity and the billionaire back advance reaches out to workers while sucking up to Trump he once called an American

Hitler and cultural heroine is Jennifer Machia, a professor in the Department of Communications at Texas A&M University,

where she teaches courses on political communication and presidential rhetoric.

An historian of American political discourse, she's the co-editor of the rhetoric of heroic expectations,

establishing the Obama presidency, and author of founding

fictions, as well as demagogue for president, the rhetorical genius of Donald Trump.

Then we'll get a recap of last week's Republican National Convention from Will Bunch,

an award-winning national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer,

who covered the convention in Milwaukee, and blogs at Attitude.com, that's spelled at t-T-Y-T-O-D.com.

He's the author of the Byrne Identity, a search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream,

and most recently, after the Ivory Tower falls,

how college broke the American Dream and blew up our politics and how to fix it.

We will discuss his latest article at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Unity at the RNC looks a lot like Jones Town.

Then finally, we will look into how a handful of tech pro billionaires in Silicon Valley

have bought an ambitious senator, then leveraged him into the Oval Office, a heartbeat away

from a fading reality TV star with no interest in governing to enact the techno-fascist fantasies

of the dark enlightenment in alignment

...