00:00Welcome back to State of the Nation.
00:02The fallout from President Trump's tariff announcement is still being felt around the
00:06world.
00:07Stock markets plummeted as investors grappled with the President's tariffs, and the market
00:11volatility shows no sign of abating.
00:13President Trump has shown no sign of retreating either.
00:16He has taken to his Truth Social account and urged Americans to keep calm, urging them
00:21not to be weak or stupid, insisting that they do not join Panikin, which the President has
00:26called a new party of weak and stupid people.
00:29Taking good old blighty, the Prime Minister is actually doing the right thing for once,
00:32trying to limit the economic damage.
00:35The Reverend Sakhir Starmer has diluted his Net Zero plans and announced that elite car
00:39makers no longer need to stop selling petrol or diesel cars by 2030.
00:45So we'll push that back to 2035 for all hybrids.
00:50That's a new step that we're taking, a new announcement today.
00:53And because we're not ideological about how we cut carbon emissions, we're also going
00:59to make sure that cleaner, efficient petrol cars sold before 2030 count towards your EV
01:06mandate.
01:07Well, later in the programme, I'll be asking why we don't just scrap these targets completely.
01:13But the tariff issue is the really extraordinary one.
01:16It's had amazing effects on the market.
01:17The oil price has collapsed, which has the effect of undercutting Russia's ability to
01:22finance its war against Ukraine.
01:24So one of the unintended consequences of Trumpism or Trumponomics could be making life harder
01:30for President Putin.
01:31But today, Trump is going to have a news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister
01:37of Israel.
01:38And the Israelis have offered complete free trade with the United States if tariffs are
01:45withdrawn.
01:46And this is really interesting, because if Donald Trump accepts that deal, then it opens
01:50the way for countries like the United Kingdom to do the same, to bring down tariff barriers
01:55and to rejuvenate, to really give a boost to their economies and to show countries a
02:02route out of this tariff morass.
02:05On the other hand, if Israel's offer, generous and full offer of no tariff barriers, is rejected,
02:12we know that we're going to carry on with this terrible tariff policy in a way that
02:16will damage global growth.
02:17It's back to the 1930s if the deal with Israel doesn't happen.
02:22And that's going to be, I would have thought, indicated in the press conference that it's
02:27going to happen, possibly in the middle of this program.
02:29So we live in interesting times, as somebody once said.
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