00:00Since returning to the White House last year, Donald Trump has moved quickly to reshape foreign policy,
00:07redirect funding and wield tariffs as a political tool.
00:11Axios Deputy Managing Editor David Lawler breaks down what's driving the U.S. president's agenda in his second year.
00:20So he's giving a lot of speeches about the fact that he's going to bring prices under control,
00:27but honestly, that doesn't seem to be his primary focus.
00:31That's not the thing that is energizing him.
00:33That's kind of what his advisors want him to talk about.
00:36The things that he is focused on, obviously, he loves the flexibility and the leverage that tariffs give him.
00:43This is a playbook he's used over and over again.
00:45If somebody disagrees with him, gives him a slight of any kind, he will come out and say,
00:51okay, we're going to put tariffs on you.
00:53And whether or not he follows through on that depends on how the country responds and on his mood, right?
00:58But that's a tool that I think we're likely to see him continue to use as long as the courts allow him to continue to use it.
01:04That is another battle that he has going on here on the legal front.
01:09So tariffs, I think, are not necessarily going away,
01:12although we've seen this pattern of him continually backing down before actually imposing the tariffs, right?
01:17Warning that he's going to do it and then settling somewhere in the middle.
01:20Well, similarly, on foreign policy, we're seeing a much more muscular and aggressive Trump than we saw the first time around.
01:29Another issue shaping Trump's political strategy is immigration.
01:33And then I think the immigration issue is the other big one that at the moment is maybe number one in the news here in the U.S.
01:44is his very aggressive immigration enforcement.
01:47Right now, he's signaling that he's backing off on that.
01:51But his impulse over the period of time is to use that issue to his political advantage.
01:57Paint the Democrats as weak on immigration himself as strong.
02:00So ahead of the midterms, I think that issue is not going away and we won't see him fully in retreat on that over the course of the year.
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