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'll begin with the similarities between Trump and Musk tearing the American system apart

and what Mao Zedong did to China in the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

Not only did Mao dismantled the government and purge its expertise

using young Red Guard fanatics,

not unlike Musk's teenage techies, during the Cultural Revolution,

Mao promoted a semi-literate peasant as his vice-premier and a low-level factory worker

at a textile mill to be his deputy, which has echoes of Trump's fools' galleries

of Hegset, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Cash Patel, and Dan Bongino.

Joining us is Orville Shell, who was formerly the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism

at the University of California at Berkeley, and currently as the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations.

His books include Mandate of Heaven, the legacy of Tiananmen Square, and the next generation

of China's leaders, and wealth and power China's long march to the 21st century.

We will discuss his article at Projects Indicate, China's long march to the 21st century.

We'll discuss his article at Projects Indicate, Trump's Cultural Revolution.

Trump may lack Mao's skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents

and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness.

Then we'll assess how much the musk assault on the government is performative,

given that we have a reality TV president performing government by stunt,

which can turn on a dime if the reviews are bad, as happened today,

with the tariffs against Mexico and the US auto industry being reversed.

...