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 a clear and present danger of a commander-in-chief prosecuting a war of his choice,

who is clearly mentally impaired and entirely only concerned about himself,

not the country, not the American people, not the people of the Middle East, and certainly not the rest of the world. We'll discuss the alarming evidence of Trump's accelerating dementia on display at Thursday's

North Korean-style cabinet meeting and the urgent need for Vice President Vance to invoke

the 25th Amendment. Joining us is Lance Daudes, a training and supervising analyst emeritus with the Boston

Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, who was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Dodus is a contributor to the book assessing President Trump, the more dangerous case of Donald

Trump. Forty psychiatrists and mental health experts warn anew, updated and expanded with new essays.

Then we get an assessment of the political impact of Saturday's 3,100 plus No King's

rallies across the country in what was the largest demonstration of political opposition to a sitting president in the

history of the United States. Joining us is Richard Parker, who teaches economics and public policy

at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is a senior fellow at the Schoenstein Center.

He's a former managing editor of Ramparts, was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, and serves on the editorial board of the nation.

His books include The Myth of the Middle Class and John Kenneth Galbraith, his life, his politics, his economics.

Then finally, with Trump not endorsing Senator Cornyn in the Texas Senate race, making it almost certain that the corrupt and sleazy

MAGA favorite Texas Attorney General Paxton will run against James Tellerico.

We will speak with Matt Engel, who directs the Texas Democratic Trust and the Lone Star Project,

a political action committee that aims to be an aggressive fact-checker on the Republican Party,

both at the state and national levels.

Matt Engle has served as executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,

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