State-Sanctioned Killers: As Trump Expedites Executions at Home, Biden Builds Team for Wars Abroad

Donald Trump is now in the dying days of his presidency and is spending those days promoting the myth that he actually won the November election in a landslide. This week on Intercepted: As the clock ticks toward Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been on a grotesque killing spree, green-lighting executions of federal prisoners at breakneck pace. The Intercept’s Senior Reporter Liliana Segura reports on how Trump is on pace to authorize more federal executions than in the past 67 years combined. She discusses several specific cases, including that of Brandon Bernard who is scheduled to die on Thursday.

As Biden builds his Cabinet, his national security team is looking a lot like a replay of the Obama-Biden militarist coterie. Biden’s nominees include notorious hawks who were central to the genocidal war in Yemen, the weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, the regime-change war in Libya, the war in Syria, the assassination and drone programs, and the use of economic sanctions as a deadly weapon. Several of Biden’s nominees, including his pick for defense secretary, have spent years on boards of defense corporations, profiting from military contractors and peddling influence in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the war industry. Kelley Vlahos of the American Conservative and the transpartisan Quincy Institute discusses Biden’s national security team and the largely continuous arc of U.S. policy through Republican and Democratic administrations.

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