Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
a listener production.
Hello, welcome to The Briefing. Sasha Barbagab with you. Political violence, while abhorrent, is nothing new. But it does feel unprecedented that we've seen a third attempt made on the US president's life in less than two years. And behind the scenes, there's an entire hidden architecture of government that starts moving even before a shot is fired.
Chapter 2: What historical significance does King Charles's address to US Congress hold?
One person in that presidential line of succession is designated the survivor and that they are actually kept out of Washington itself. They might go to one of the underground bunkers that the U.S. government maintains.
A chat about the U.S. government's succession plan is coming up in the second half of this episode. First, it is time for the headlines with Chris Spirou on Wednesday, the 29th of April.
Standing here today, it is hard not to feel the weight of history on my shoulder because the modern relationship between our two nations and our own peoples spans not merely 250 years, but over four centuries.
Morning, Sash. And like you heard, we're starting in the US this morning where King Charles is, as we record, making a historic address to US Congress. He started his speech by acknowledging the US's upcoming independence anniversary, getting a standing ovation.
On behalf of the Queen and myself, to thank the American people for welcoming us to the United States to mark this semi-quincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence. And for all of that time...
Yeah, well, all right, get your thesauruses out. But he also spoke about, in serious news, he also did speak about the latest assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
We meet too in the aftermath of the incident not far from this great building that sought to harm the leadership of your nation and to ferment wider fear and discord. Let me say with unshakable resolve, such acts of violence will never succeed.
Now, this is all part of the monarch's diplomatic visit to the US with Queen Camilla. Now, it is a bit of soft diplomacy, but it's all been very cordial, very maybe even jovial at times. They've all seemed to be having a good time so far with Melania Trump and Donald Trump there to welcome them to the White House. But the Queen and King will be there for four days all up.
Back home and US tech giants have come out to slam the Australian government's new laws designed to get them paying for local news. Yesterday, Anthony Albanese announced details of the new media bargaining incentive, which would see platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Google pay for Australian news content on their sites.
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Chapter 3: How are tech giants reacting to Australia's new media laws?
Let's say we woke up tomorrow to news that Trump had been killed. What does that first hour behind the scenes actually look like? So under the US presidential system of succession, the presidency automatically passes to the next survivor in the line of presidential succession. In normal circumstances, that would be Vice President J.D. Vance, who
would sort of symbolically take the oath of office, but under the Constitution, the power actually automatically transfers to him at the time of the death of the president.
The challenge of the presidential line of succession is that after the president and vice president, the next person in the line of succession is actually the speaker of the House of Representatives and then followed by the president pro tem of the U.S. Senate. And then it's all of the U.S. cabinet officials in descending order of when their departments were actually created by Congress.
So it actually has nothing to do with the – theoretical importance of one cabinet versus another. So in fact, you actually have the Secretary of Agriculture much higher in that presidential line of succession than the Secretary of Homeland Security. So what we know from this weekend is that actually the highest ranking person who
who was in the presidential line of succession, who was not attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner where that incident occurred, was the president pro tem of the U.S. Senate, Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa. So the president pro tem is actually the oldest, longest-ranking, longest-serving U.S. senator of the majority party
So in many cases, that president pro tem is not someone who is particularly spry, particularly with it, or even all that politically important in the U.S. system by the time they reach that president pro tem status.
In all of this, I know that questions were put to Caroline Leavitt whether or not the designated survivor protocol was enacted or was discussed in the lead up to that White House dinner, given that there were so many high profile members of the Trump administration part of it.
And she said that it kind of was a discussion, but they didn't really have to do much about it because there were a lot of cabinet members that weren't at that dinner anyway. Just generally, though, what can you tell us about the designated survivor protocol?
I mean, some of us might have seen it on a particular Netflix series, but where does it come from and how seriously does the government take it day to day? The designated survivor system dates back to the... sort of late Jimmy Carter, early Ronald Reagan presidencies at the height of the Cold War, when there was a real threat of global thermonuclear war between the U.S.
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