Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with how comedians are leading the resistance against Trump and the right-wing

oligarchic takeover of the United States as billionaires like Larry Ellison buy up the media

and fire Stephen Colbert at Donald Trump's behest. What emerges is that the majority of the American people like jokes

and don't like Trump, who, as Bruce Springsteen says, quote, we have a president who can't take a joke.

Joining us is Jonathan Alter, a former analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News and

MSNBC and a former senior editor and columnist

for Newsweek, who is the author of The Defining Moment, FDR's 100 Days and Triumph of Hope,

a New York Times bestseller and his very best Jimmy Carter, A Life.

His latest book is American Reckning, Inside Trump's Trial in My Own, and he runs a sub-stack

newsletter, All Goats, where he has an article that is also at the Washington

Monthly Inside Colbert's Success.

Then we'll examine the exit of the fourth woman to quit or be fired in the Trump administration,

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence,

and speak with the former top intelligence official whose security clearance was taken away by

Donald Trump on his first day back in office.

Joining us is Gregory Trebitton, a senior advisor with the Transnational Threat Project at the

Center for Strategic International Studies and a former professor with the Transnational Threat Project at the Center for Strategic and International

Studies and a former professor of the practice of international relations at the University

of Southern California. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and was chairman of the National

...