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

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

We begin with a disastrously delusional American president making up stories about negotiating

with the enemy as he tries to get out of a trap he set for himself by going to war against Iran

without considering the consequences. Joining us to discuss how our reality TV president is unable to deal with reality

while profiting from manipulating the markets is Asla Bali, a professor of law at the Yale Law School,

past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and a non-resident fellow

with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Stakecraft. Previously she served as a

founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law and is

the former director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. She has an

article at Equator magazine, Killing Diplomacy.

Then we'd examine how Trump and Putin are working together to help re-elect Hungary's kleptocratic despot Orban and speak with Kim Lane Shepley, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University.

She lived in Budapest, doing research at the Constitutional Court of Hungary and teaching at both the University of Budapest and at Central European University, and studied the emergence of constitutional law in Russia and Hungary, living in both places for extended periods.

She's the author of 9-11, The Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law.

Then finally, as Trump-friendly billionaires buy up our media,

we will speak with the former CEO of a company now owned by the Ellison's, which is joining with

Fox, Sinclair, Tegner and X-Star to create the equivalent of state media as a mouthpiece for an American dictator.

Joining us is Tom Freston, a co-founder of MTV and the former CEO of Viacom, which includes

CBS Paramount Pictures and many media and publishing properties. After launching a successful

clothing export company out of Afghanistan and India in the 1970s,

Fresden transitioned into the media landscape, helping found MTV,

bringing it to international fame in more than 150 countries.

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