Today on The BradCast': We momentarily take Donald Trump's delusional bait on Gaza, before spitting it out to take on his and Elon Musk's very real, horrifying, unlawful breakdown of the American Constitutional order and all that it means (or used to) around the globe. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

After air last night --- as usual these days --- a number of troubling Trump-related stories broke. Among them, news that the Administration has notified all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) workers across the globe that they are immediately off the job and must return to the U.S. within 30 days. Decades-old programs in about 120 countries are now stopped dead in their tracks, including life-saving food for starving children that will now be left at the ports; HIV medicine on shelves that won't be delivered to AIDS victims; hundreds of other programs supporting clean water, independent media, education, including for girls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan; tracking and preventing polio, smallpox, tuberculosis and Ebola outbreaks; and much more.

American foreign aid "soft power" initiatives that foster goodwill around the globe and make up less than one-percent of the annual U.S. budget are apparently all now out of business. Foreign strongmen from Russia to Hungary to Iran to China and beyond are rejoicing today and openly expressing their public thanks to Musk and Trump for doing their bidding.

Also last night, Trump announced during a presser in D.C. with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the U.S. will relocate (forcibly, I guess?) nearly 2 million Palestinians from Gaza to somewhere or another, "take over the Gaza Strip", raze the entire territory and claim "ownership" of it for the U.S., before filling it with beautiful new seaside resorts, turning it into the "Riviera of the Middle East". What could possibly go wrong?

Here to explain what is definitely wrong about that and so much more today, are two of our favorite BradCast panelists, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, of Salon and Digby's Hullabaloo blog, and the notorious 'DRIFTGLASS', longtime blogger and co-host of his weekly Professional Left Podcast.

In addition to Trump's delusional "ethnic cleansing" dreams for Gaza, we also discuss how he is "a powerful useful idiot" for Netanyahu and his rightwing allies. But Parton isn't buying the idea that his new scheme is meant to distract from Trump's lawlessness elsewhere. "The idea that he's got some strategy to distract from all the terrible things that Elon Musk is doing, I don't think that's true. I think they've just divided up the work."

"I'd say this is tossing a match onto a pile of oily rags," Driftglass chimes in. "But the fire is already burning. This is adding napalm to napalm. And everybody knows it. I think Trump is narcissistic enough and stupid enough and willing to listen to his real estate friends enough to say, 'Sure, why not?'"

Meanwhile, back on the home front (Fatherland?), where "Elon Musk bought his way into the Treasury [and] bought this 60% share in this President," the richest man in the world is "getting what he paid for," says Driftglass, in personally shutting down one federal agency after another, all unlawfully. But who's gonna stop him? Drifty argues Trump will simply ignore any adverse court rulings that may come down the road, if they come at all. "You can't undo the damage I've done, therefore I win!," he quips, before noting: "Trump is perfectly willing to change his mind on a dime and lie about everything and say 'I never authorized anything.' But it's going to take public outrage in the streets, by the right people." Who are those "right people"? Tune in.

Digby joins me in dismissing Trump's largely toothless Executive Orders but agrees that what Musk is doing is of another order. "The DOGE thing is a genuine constitutional crisis," she warns. "The Republicans have absolutely laid down and said [to Trump], 'Please give me your boots so I can lick them.' So they are completely useless, and that's a big part of the problem. I'm terrified about how far this can go."

For much more terror and how we might, collectively, put a stop to it, please tune in for today's often terrifying --- if still occasionally humorous --- BradCast...

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We went to air on today's BradCast prior to Joe Biden's several-hours-delayed post-NATO Summit press conference, allowing us to catch up on an item or two that we've otherwise been trying to get to all week. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• Yet another poll is out today, in this case from WaPo/ABC, finding President Biden and Donald Trump tied nationally. (It also shows Vice President Kamala Harris actually leading Trump by 2 points.) That said, the survey also finds some 67% of Americans, including more than half of Democrats, currently believe Biden should end his re-election bid. What should we take from that? And is there reason to believe that Biden can outlast the seemingly never-ending drip-drip-drip of former supporters calling for him to step aside? We discuss.

• While Biden was busy completing the NATO Summit he has been hosting this week in D.C., Donald Trump was planning a previously unannounced meeting with Hungarian strongman and Christian Nationalist Victor Orban down at his Florida resort. The meeting between the autocrats comes just days after Orban's surprise meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Chinese strongman Xi Jingping in Beijing.

• New Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers released on Thursday once again beat expectations and offer still more good news for the American economy and, specifically, inflation in the U.S. Among that good news, the annual inflation rate fell to just 3% as of June with consumer prices actually falling overall from May to June for the first time since May of 2020. The Biden Administration touted its anti-inflationary policies for the good news, including the easing of gas prices and items such as cars, appliances, airfare and groceries.

• On Tuesday, Oklahoma's long-serving U.S. Senator James Mountain Inhofe died at the age of 89 following a stroke he reportedly suffered on July 4th. The five-term Senator --- who notoriously described global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" --- was instrumental in blocking critical climate reforms in Congress over decades, helping to lead the nation and world into the deadly climate crisis we are now facing. He abused his position of power to spread lies and misinformation about climate science for which our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (including his own) will now pay the price for decades to come.

• After Inhofe repeatedly and falsely warned that America could not survive without fossil fuels, California has been steadily proving otherwise. The most populous state in the union has already had nearly 100 days this year when renewable energy, largely from solar and wind, has exceeded 100% of the state's entire electricity demand for at least some part of the day. In fact, CA is now producing more solar energy than it is able to use on many days, thanks largely to rooftop solar and a lack of transmission lines and battery storage. It is now producing so much clean renewable energy, in fact, that, so far this year, the state has had to waste more than enough renewable energy to power every home in San Francisco for a year. Transmission capacity and battery storage is now being furiously added. But, at the same time, the state's Public Utilities Commission has enacted wildly controversial new rules for selling back solar energy to the grid from rooftop solar installations via net-metering. We discuss.

• Finally, as the nation is suffering from the deadly fallout of the record Hurricane Beryl, including massive power outages, flooding and record tornadoes from Texas to Michigan, and suffocates under stifling heat and humidity from the West Coast to the East, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report on all of that and much more, including Republicans in the U.S. House spending their time fighting to ensure that appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers cost Americans much more than they need to...

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We were able to open up the phones today to listeners regarding last week's State of the Union Address, the GOP's stunningly failed Rebuttal, and what has become a seemingly annual debate on The BradCast over Daylight Savings Time --- about which I am right and everyone else, of course, is wrong. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we get to those phones, we review and/or discuss...

• How I hacked Daylight Savings Time over this past weekend --- and how you can (and should!) next year too!
• Joe Biden's new budget proposal for fiscal year 2025 calls for the expansion of social programs and new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for it and to shave $3 trillion off the national debt.
• Biden's new post-SOTU ad: "Look, I'm not a young guy. That's no secret! But, here's the deal..."
• How Donald Trump welcomed, and praised, Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, celebrating the rightwing strongman's rule: "He said this is the way it's gonna be and that's the end of it, right? He's the boss."
• 1,000 protesters against Israel's attack on Gaza marched near the Sunday's Academy Awards at the Dolby Theater here in Hollywood --- whether you heard about them or not.
• A few key points from Biden's rousing, lively, feisty SOTU Address (video | transcript) that drove the GOP crazy, and...
• The outrageous lie, told amidst Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL)'s incredibly bizarre SOTU Rebuttal, regarding a 12-year old girl who was held captive and repeatedly raped by drug traffickers at the U.S. southern border during the Biden Administration which, as we have subsequently learned, didn't actually happen during the Biden Administration nor even in the U.S. at all. (Here's journalist Jonathan Katz' full, well-documented evisceration of Britt's incredible border lie.)

Then, we open up the phones to callers on all of the above, including on the never-ending DST debate and the almost-as-important debate over the importance of re-electing Joe Biden to save democracy and, yes, Gaza...if either can be saved at this point...

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It's been a rough week. So before we get to America's rising 'demons of hell' on today's BradCast and how we might counter their re-emergence against what is left of American democracy, a few slightly more encouraging news items to kick things off. [Audio linnk to full show is posted at end of summary.]

In Georgia, the three white men who were caught on video tape murdering 25-year old black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 after hunting him down in their pick-up trucks, were each sentenced today to life in prison. Two of them, father and son, got life without the possibility of parole. The third, their neighbor, could be paroled after serving 30 years. But he's already 52, so...

In Arizona, or Florida, or wherever "they" preside, the buffoonish, rightwing conspiracy theorists, con-men and theoretical cybersecurity experts calling themselves Cyber Ninjas, declared they exist no more. That, just one day after an AZ state judge said they are to be fined $50,000 for each day that they continued to refuse to hand over public documents regarding the pretend "forensic audit" of Maricopa County (Phoenix), AZ's 2020 Presidential election they were hired by the GOP state Senate to carry out. More on that matter, hopefully, on a not-too-distant BradCast.

Next, as our week commemorating the grim, one-year anniversary of Donald Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election by hurling thousands of supporters at the U.S. Capitol last year on January 6th, in hopes of halting the certification of the Electoral College vote with a deadly insurrection, comes to a close, a bit of mopping up and looking ahead to ways to prevent a more successful election coup from happening in the near future.

First, some reflections today from our 39th President, the 97-year old democracy champion Jimmy Carter. He wrote this week in the New York Times that he now "fears" for our democracy, citing last year's insurrection and the politicians in his home state of Georgia and elsewhere, such as Texas and Florida, who have "leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes." Carter sees Americans "being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed." He says the he now fears that what he, his Carter Center and America itself "have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home."

Carter is hardly the only one with a long and broad perspective on history who has become unnerved by what we are now seeing in America. Ronald Reagan's U.S. Solicitor General, Charles Fried, interviewed last month by CNN's Christiane Amanpour, noted his birth in Prague in 1935, when "Czechoslovakia was a real democracy" before "the demons of hell came out and spoiled that for 50 years." The 86-year old longtime Republican and Harvard Law professor now says he sees "those people re-emerging" and he "hears the same tune and it scares me."

So, for those of us paying attention, what can be done? We talk about exactly that today with our guest, DR. NILS GILMAN of the Berggruen Institute, following on his recent L.A. Times op-ed discussing similar nightmares as those cited by Carter and Fried which have continue to emerge throughout 2021 and what we can ALL now do to try and counter them.

Gilman was also the co-founder the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), a bipartisan group of security, military, political and media experts who met during the summer of 2020 to game out what might happen [PDF] in various worst-case scenarios if Trump decided to declare the election results invalid and/or refused to leave office that fall. We begin today with how his TIP group viewed the January 6 Electoral College certification event in advance, which he says they saw as a "moment of Constitutional stress that bad actors could potentially exploit," warning at the time that "there needed to be preparations on the part of law enforcement to be ready for that possibility." Perhaps we'll pay more attention to his group's warnings the next time, if they decide they need to reconvene before 2024 election.

He is now warning, in his piece at L.A. Times, that "the runaway train of illiberalism continues to bear down on American democracy, and the need to act could not be more urgent." Gilman explains today what he means by the term "illiberal democracy," a phrase he cites as being coined by Hungarian strongman President Viktor Orban, who was recently endorsed by Donald Trump. Under Orban, Hungary, in recent years, has seen its media essentially taken over by his rightwing government.

Citing strongman leaders "all over the world, in Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, Poland, "you're seeing the rise of this illiberal democracy, where you still have elections, but the electoral process is so corrupted that it basically ensures that you will get right or far-right victories under any and all circumstances." Sound familiar? That, as nations like Hungary are literally being hailed of late by folks on the American right like Tucker Carlson and Fox "News". "It's being celebrated in rightwing media as a model that America might want to follow," Gilman charges.

He goes on to detail, both in his op-ed and on today's program, what "ordinary citizens" who oppose such fascist takeovers of our democracy can and must do at the state and local level --- as we wait and hope for voting rights and election protection legislation at the federal level --- to otherwise counter such forces. Election officials are now facing threats from Trump's MAGA Mob across the country, even as his supporters are working to take over key election administration positions by both hook and crook.

"People can go out and become pollworkers," urges Gilman. "We have an under-supply. Run as a local election administrator. There are thousands of positions all over the country. Our election system is currently totally decentralized and local administrators have a lot of power, and we need people committed to the democratic process to be in those position, not people who are committed to partisan victory at any and all costs."

As he explains, "there are things that an ordinary citizen can do. But the truth is that the real problem is we need to have elites who are going to be committed to democratic practice. What we have in this country now --- and we're seeing this very much in the current Congress --- you see a split between some elites who are basically complicit with the crimes of the previous administration and then others who are complacent about the likelihood that this could come back. We need elites to take this problem more seriously and really take on the challenge of illiberalism and the anti-democratic tendencies that are becoming more and more legion in this country, particularly on the right."

We also discuss my personal concerns --- my personal nightmares --- about the ability of committed, bad faith Republicans at this point to game the Electoral College in 2024 in a way they were not prepared to do in 2020. If they do so --- at the state legislative and/or Congressional level --- I believe there is nothing currently in federal law or the U.S. Constitution to prevent such a bad-faith exercise from succeeding next time. Please tune in to see if Gilman shares my concern.

Finally today, we're joined by Desi Doyen for our latest, very lively, Green News Report, which we had to postpone until today to make room yesterday for our special coverage of the first anniversary of the GOP's January 6th, 2021 insurrection...

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