00:00Well, let's delve then a little deeper into Donald Trump's first year back in office.
00:03Joined here on set now by Oliver Ferry from our International Affairs desk.
00:07Oliver, Donald Trump promised no new wars before he was re-elected to the White House.
00:11Now, though, he's saying he no longer feels an obligation to think purely of peace.
00:17I mean, alienating long-standing allies, tariffs, threats of annexation.
00:22What do you think...
00:24Where are we, I suppose, really,
00:28one year into Donald Trump's second term?
00:30Well, we're seeing quite a different world,
00:33and not least because Donald Trump has really upended the post-war international order.
00:39Trump alienating his allies, as you said, with punitive tariffs.
00:43His apparent sympathies were Russia in the war on Ukraine,
00:47and now is escalating threats to annex Greenland.
00:49And Trump's national security strategy, which was rolled out in November last,
00:53explicitly said that the United States' days of propping up the international order were over.
01:00And the harshest criticisms were reserved for Europe,
01:03which it said was in danger of civilizational erasure,
01:06while noting that the rise of far-right parties were calls for optimism.
01:10Now, the relationship between Europe and Washington is changed forever,
01:14regardless of who succeeds Donald Trump,
01:17if indeed anybody succeeds Donald Trump at all.
01:19People are saying that he might try and keep office indefinitely.
01:23Donald Trump, as you said, promised no new wars,
01:26but he's now explicitly saying he thinks not only of peace.
01:29Of course, he hasn't been particularly peaceful in the last 12 months.
01:32He's bombed a number of countries in his first year in office,
01:35Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Venezuela,
01:40and he's threatened others, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and most notably Greenland.
01:44Now, this is not out of the ordinary for U.S. presidents,
01:48but it's a little bit different for somebody to be, you know,
01:52to have actually said that he's going to withdraw from future wars
01:56and then to actually do the very opposite.
01:58Europe is still dallying over how to respond.
02:02You know, they've been very timid in their criticism thus far.
02:05Even if you look at the abduction of Nicolas Maduro,
02:08there wasn't an awful lot of criticism coming from Europe for that.
02:11That's because they want to keep Trump on side for support of Ukraine.
02:16But this is beginning to turn a little bit,
02:19even though we see today that the Europeans are still trying to be
02:23a little bit conciliatory,
02:25but Donald Trump sees diplomacy as weakness.
02:28He even said it in that report we saw just there.
02:32He has posted this private text message that Emmanuel Macron sent to me.
02:36He posted it on his Truth Social page
02:39and also an AI-generated image of EU leaders sitting in the Oval Office
02:44as Trump shows them a map with Canada and Greenland as U.S. territories.
02:49That's internationally. What about domestically?
02:52Well, in the second term, Trump has taken the gloves off.
02:55He's gutted public spending with the help of Elon Musk.
02:58He's intimidated critics in media, academia and business.
03:02And he's effectively declared war on Democratic-run cities,
03:06deploying the National Guard on usually spurious grounds of security,
03:11in a number of them, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
03:15And his deployment of ICE, which has carried out raids on migrants
03:19with little regard for the law or judicial oversight,
03:22has angered even Americans concerned about immigration.
03:26Now, Trump is not acting alone here.
03:27He's basically carrying out a wish list of a broad coalition
03:31of Republican and Conservative interests.
03:34Everyone gets something that they wanted,
03:36particularly the Heritage Foundation,
03:39the right-wing think tank's Project 2025,
03:42who more or less pleaded for the filleting of the federal government,
03:47which we're now seeing take place.
03:49At the moment, there's little opposition, really, from Congress, isn't there?
03:52I mean, Republicans, rather, seem to be doing his bidding.
03:55Democrats' little appetite at the moment for impeachment.
04:00Midterms, though, that's the crucial thing.
04:01It's coming up very, very closely.
04:03Yeah.
04:03I mean, senior Democrats have been severely criticised
04:06by those on the left for their perceived ineffectiveness.
04:09And there's a sense that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
04:12and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries
04:14are still doing politics the old way,
04:16as if they're dealing with a classic Republican president.
04:20Donald Trump is clearly not that.
04:22Now, they're understandably wary of launching impeachment proceedings.
04:24that won't succeed.
04:26But the messaging alone could be more forceful.
04:29The Democrats are probably being a little bit one-note
04:32in their messaging on affordability.
04:35They want to make the midterm elections all about affordability.
04:38But there's a lot more than that at stake.
04:40There's actually civil liberties, as we can see,
04:44in Minnesota at the moment, and also foreign policy,
04:46which will in the long run be very, very detrimental to US interests.
04:51Trump is underwater pretty much in all of the polls.
04:53He's got a net unpopularity rating, which varies between 12% and 22%.
04:59He still, however, has his core support, which is about 38% to 40%.
05:04So the November 2025 elections featured a number of very, very strong successes for the Democrats.
05:12That shows that they might be a bellwether of sorts.
05:15But we still have to look at who will potential candidates be,
05:19particularly for 2028, when somebody will actually be, hopefully, you know, succeeding Trump.
05:27But in November 2025, we really, really don't see an awful lot of people emerging as possible leaders.
05:36The Democrats are really a headless chicken at the moment, so to speak.
05:39But, you know, it's theirs to lose.
05:41Ten months to go.
05:42Oliver, thanks very much.
05:43Oliver Ferry from my international affairs desk there.
