00:00David Dunn is Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
00:05David, welcome back. Good to see you.
00:07Mr Trump, of course, promising to avoid costly foreign wars in his campaign before this presidency.
00:15I wonder how damaging the gap between that promise is and where the US finds itself today.
00:23I think what that is, is it's a hugely damaging gap.
00:26Trump built a very fragile and disparate coalition of voters, a large section of whom believed that he was the
00:36peace candidate as he sold himself.
00:39Only I can save you from foreign wars. And of course, he's gone completely back on that.
00:45Not only has he got America enrolled in a foreign war with no end in sight, he hasn't achieved his
00:51foreign policy objectives.
00:52And that's clear. And the impact of that war, far from being isolated, has had a major impact on the
00:59cost of living crisis in America.
01:02So the war has been a huge whammy for him on a whole range of different parts of that coalition.
01:08And on every measure, he has lost support on the war, on the impact on the war of the economy,
01:15on his handling of the economy.
01:17Add into that his tariffs and other chaos.
01:20And what you have is a candidate who has lost credibility on the economy.
01:26I think it was President Clinton's former strategist said of winning elections, it's all about the economy, stupid.
01:35Democrats have edged ahead of Republicans in polling on the economy for the first time in a decade.
01:41How significant is that, given President Trump is saying what matters is the security of the United States and making
01:48sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon?
01:52Well, Trump's attempt to frame it all about nuclear weapons misses the fact that actually America is no nearer to
02:01actually preventing Iran getting a nuclear weapon than it was before this war started back in February.
02:06So even by his own measure, he has failed to achieve the objectives.
02:11And of course, he set things back by giving control of the state of Hormuz to Iran.
02:16But back to the point about the economy, it's crucial that actually Trump's whole message was that as a businessman,
02:25as a successful millionaire or billionaire,
02:27that he actually is someone who understood how to run an economy, how to run a business.
02:32And what the experience of every American voter at the gas pump, at the store or paying their mortgages is
02:40that actually things have got more costly, have got materially worse under his tenure.
02:46So in that regard, the thing that he sold himself on, he has failed materially to deliver.
02:52David, we shall no doubt chew the fat again over the coming hundred days.
02:56In the meantime, thank you.
02:57David Dunn, Professor of International Politics at Birmingham University.
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