Hello and welcome to background briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masterson. Today we're looking into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Trump appearing increasingly mentally ill

when announcing a trade deal with the EU and reducing his ultimatum to Putin from 50 days down to 10 or 12

as he went on a fact-free rant about windmills and Wales.

We will discuss Trump's more and more likely successor, J.D. Vance, and how Vance is putting

an intellectual gloss on the administration's racist and cruel immigration program while

it pursues racist gerrymandering to hold onto the House.

Joining us is Catherine Stewart, a journalist and author of the Good News Club,

the Christian rights stealth assault on America's children,

the power worshippers inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism,

upon which the feature documentary God and Country by Rob Reiner is based.

Her latest book is Money, Lies and God inside the movement to destroy American democracy,

and we will discuss her article at the New Republic, J.D. Vance's intellectual spin on the racist

great replacement theory. Then we'll speak with Aziz Huck, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

He's a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and is the co-author of

unchecked and unbalanced presidential power in a time of terror and how to save a constitutional

democracy. And his latest book is The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.

We'll discuss his article at the Atlantic, the court's liberals are trying to tell American something,

and another a Jacobin, Zorhan Memdani's versus Trump. Then finally we'll examine how the most

powerful man in the world is so pathetically

thin-skinned that he is at war with media outlets that do not praise the dear leader

...