Donald Trump’s mid-year review

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1:15hello americasters i've got a question for you what do you really think about americast the team at the worldwide headquarters are doing some research to find out what you like and indeed what you don't like so if you want to help shape the future of the podcast you can answer some questions the link is in the description and if you want to type it into your browser you can do that as well it's bit.ly that is bit.ly and then forward slash americastfeedback or one word bit.ly forward slash americastfeedback or one word but now though time for another episode bbc sounds music radio podcasts it's been six months folks feels like more doesn't it donald trump's second term in the white house is well underway and as is common in many workplaces employees are subject to an appraisal every half year.

2:07So today, with the help of a man who knows the US president well, we are conducting President Trump's mid-year review. How has he done in the last six months? Has he achieved many of his campaign promises, as he certainly claims he has? And what could he improve on? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III. President Trump's message is very simple. We are done being taken advantage of. Mr. President, in the name of our God, have mercy upon the people. We're scared now. Are you supportive of these onesies?

2:45I'm supportive of vaccines. What is happening? Like, this is not America. This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like. Yeah!

3:05Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. I can't believe it's been only six months, Justin. I mean, you said time flies and of course it has quipped by. But how many stories have we covered in that time? How much has he done? This is like more than one full term's worth of agenda Donald Trump has already run through in these first six months. You can't fault him for energy, can you? I mean, right from the word go, and we were both there, this has been an energetic presidency. And you can say anything you like about what he's achieved and what he hasn't achieved.

3:39And I think it is going to be, obviously, it's going to be a mixed picture. But we've got a guest who's going to be very particularly interesting on what he thinks from his perspective has happened. But I just think from our perspective as journalists and everyone's perspective as onlookers, every AmeriCaster who has been an onlooker into this, you can't fault him for energy. And frankly, I thought the energy would lapse a little bit after that initial frenzied, slightly performative first couple of days and nights, Sarah. Don't you reckon? I just felt that maybe in week two he'll go off and play golf, which he has done, but he hasn't stopped doing other things as well.

4:17No, exactly. And he posts on social media new policies and new ideas and things, even from the golf course all the time. He always made it very clearly a lot of things he wanted to achieve in the first 100 days. So that's roughly the first three months. I thought it might wane a little bit after that, that even as journalists, we might get a little bit of a break. But no, he has pushed on, not just with the things he said he would do, like introducing trade tariffs and cracking down on immigration, but a whole bunch of things we did not expect him to do. Who thought he was going to be bombing Iran, for heaven's sake?

4:46I mean, that is not something that we saw on the horizon. And it's been incredibly broad, what he's done at home and abroad, whilst all the while gathering more and more power to the presidency. I think that's the story that underlies all of this, the way in which the executive branch is doing almost all of the governing, cutting out Congress, trying to bypass the courts, making the president more powerful than he's ever been before. Yeah, we should add that the man himself, in fact, we should really kick off with this, shouldn't we? Let's listen to the man himself being typically modest. And we've got Mike from Shrewsbury.

5:21Finally, we've caught up again with Mike, who captures the essential Donald Trump in a way that I don't think anyone else in the world really can. So Mike from Shrewsbury has voiced up for us Donald Trump's words on his take on the first six months. Wow, time flies. Today is that sixth month anniversary of my second term. Importantly, it's being hailed as one of the most consequential periods of any president. In other words, we got a lot of good and great things done, including ending numerous wars of countries not related to us, other than through trade and or, in certain cases, friendship. Six months is not a long time to have totally revived a major country.

6:02One year ago, our country was dead, with almost no hope of revival. Today, the USA is the hottest and most respected country anywhere in the world. Happy anniversary. The hottest, Sarah. Yes, he says that all the time. It's the hottest. And I mean, it's July in Washington, D.C. Justin, you remember what it was like here. It's very, very hot. It's humid. It's steamy. It's sticky. Hot's not necessarily a good thing in this context. Yeah, I remember Obama. Well, actually, you were there as well, Sarah, I think. When Obama, and I was thinking of this with sort of braggadocio, you always assume that Trump is kind of the most crazily self-promoting of all presidents.

6:40And in a sense, he is. But Obama, not even his inauguration, at the moment when he won the nomination. So this must be June 2008. I think we were both there. And he made that speech where he said something like the oceans are going to stop rising and the climate is going to begin to heal and all the rest of it. And you thought even then you thought, he certainly is a confident, confident chap. And of course, you could argue nothing that he claimed in those terms, at least ever, ever actually happened. So it's not unusual for a president to be to make grand claims. But yeah, Trump is possibly just out there ahead, but only by a nose, as I say, because other people have said fancy things as well about what they're going to do.

7:22So he's clearly giving himself full marks for his first six months. And that's not a surprise. So to try and actually pin this down a little bit more where the successes and the failures have been, let's bring in somebody who knows. Mark Short was White House Legislative Affairs Director and Chief of Staff to Mike Pence during the first Trump administration. So he was inside the White House seeing what was going on then. He's now the board chair at Advancing American Freedom, a conservative action group. Mark Short, thank you so much for joining us. Hello. Sarah, thank you so much for having me.

7:54And Mark, we've brought you on because we're scoring Donald Trump and how he's done in his first six months in office. If you were to compare Trump 1.0 with Trump 2.0 at the beginning of their term, how would you do it? Well, I think that Trump has had a very successful first six months. If you look at, I think, the two issues that motivated many Americans to vote for him, and those being the border and the economy. I think that obviously the number of border crossings are significantly down. And I think that the border had become pretty overrun in the previous administration. So I think the president gets very good marks on that.

8:34On the economy, there's obviously concern in America about the heightened inflation during the Biden years. And, you know, we have markets hitting all time highs. You have basically good jobs reports. You have pretty tame inflation. And so I think economically as well, he would get good marks. I think on the foreign policy front, I think taking decisive action with Iran was a big victory for the Trump administration, too. And I think compared to the first administration, you know, our first big legislative priority coming out of the gate was repealing Obamacare. And we failed on that. And so I think you'd have to give him pretty strong marks.

9:17Having said that, Sarah, I do think there's a lot of warning signs ahead, in particular on the president's trade policy and some other elements that are happening now inside the administration. But to answer your first question, I think after the first six months, compared to the first administration, I think you'd have to give him pretty high marks. Yeah, he's come in clearly not just knowing what he wants to do, but knowing how he's going to get it done and able to hit the ground running in a way he didn't the first time around. I want to ask you more about immigration. The first thing that you brought up, and of course, is signature policy.

9:49There has been a huge reduction, I mean, to practically nothing of people crossing the border illegally in the South. So that's a big score for what Trump wanted to do. But there's been a very kind of performative way of trying to get rid of undocumented migrants who were already in the country with very high profile raids on workplaces, with people being dragged off, with fights in the courts about whether or not people can be deported to third countries. It's as though the administration is deliberately making this look harsh and cruel. Is that a good idea, do you think? I mean, presumably it's supposed to deter people, but at some point it's going to put people off, isn't it, when they see folk who've been living in this country for years and years and years being treated like this?

10:31I think, Sarah, you've begun to see that already, that some of the president's approval ratings on immigration have begun to drop. I think it's likely for the very reasons you state. Having said that, I don't think that the performative nature of it is accidental. I think the president is a very visual person and he understands the power of what those news stories do as far as a deterrence for other people to come to the southern border. So in many cases, they're not separate and attached. In many cases, the actual visuals that he wants out there helps to serve a purpose of helping to deter more crossings of the border and drive those numbers down.

11:11Now, long term, I would concur with you. I think it's even putting aside the notion in my mind that many of these people came here illegally in the first place. The bottom line is that our economy needs to have a working guest worker program. And right now, neither party has provided a solution for that. And that is going to become a bigger and bigger challenge when the labor force gets more and more tight and they're not Americans willing to do those jobs. And so I do see an economic consequence to many of these policies down the road. But right now, the very nature of the harshness of the visuals that you cite, I think in many ways are intended because it helps with the first purpose of actually lowering crossings of the southern border.

11:58Yeah. And I do wonder, Mark, whether he might then kind of slightly change his tune if he sees it not being popular in the longer term future. You've sort of already seen it, haven't you, when he seemed to suggest, actually, we don't want to chase people off farms if the farmers like them being there, et cetera, et cetera. And so my question to you is this, a sort of global question about everything that he's done. Do you think he's politically been more subtle than you expected, than we all expected in a way and i'm thinking of of immigration but more widely and certainly a lot of cultural issues like abortion like trans rights where he's sort of plucked on something that he knows he's got a big majority with particularly women biological males in women's sports these kind of issues that he's picked from around the place an abortion much more moderate in a way than some on the right of his party would like to be and certainly much more moderate than some democrats said he was going to be.

12:55He's actually, you know, I've described it on the podcast as a moderate, and you get all sorts of grief from people. And I don't mean that he's middle of the road, but he plucks issues, doesn't he, from across the spectrum in a way that is quite politically clever. Justin, yeah, I think he's a phenomenal marketer, and he's often beta testing issues. And so, you know, even on the trans issue, he beta tested that and saw the power of it and decided to double down on it. But, you know, let's not forget that when he was running beauty contests, he had trans contestants. Yes, there is something just fundamentally kind of malleable about Trump.

13:34In fact, that's a nice way of putting it, isn't it? Politically, there's not much there except the ability to win. Justin, you're right. He's extremely malleable on pretty much every issue. There's very few core convictions. And I think he looks at that and recognizes that because he delivered victories for the life community and overturning Roe v. Wade, he feels like that gives him a lot more flexibility now to veer away from that topic. And so he thinks it gives him the leverage to appoint RFK to run Health and Human Services. And for your listeners there who may not know, there is no agency that has more responsibility in the issue of abortion than Health and Human Services.

14:14And yet Donald Trump has appointed the most pro-abortion secretary ever to hold that position. And so he has an ability to earn favor and trust among an audience and then use that as leverage to walk away and gain a broader support. I'd say the one issue that I think he's been core to him throughout his time when he actually was supporting financially many Democrats politically in America at the time becoming president is his consistent view on trade. But outside of that, I think he's been very flexible on most all other issues. On the trade issue, it's interesting, isn't it? Inside the state, Sarah, when you go and buy your eggs or whatever it is, are we seeing this inflation that we were talking about a lot, I don't know, a month or two ago, in quite grave terms, this is going to hit Donald Trump and it's going to be going to be less politically popular and the tariffs are a mistake, etc., etc.

15:12etc. Is that the way it looks at the moment? Absolutely not. The complete opposite. In fact, there's been almost no inflation as a result of the tariffs that have been brought in. You're not seeing it in the grocery store. You're not really seeing it in the price of a new car, anything like that. Now, that's in part because some firms have been swallowing the costs. And we've got a report from carmakers today saying it has actually cost them billions, I think they're saying, but they haven't passed it on to consumers yet. But don't forget, I mean, you're right, Mark, of course, that he's been utterly consistent about wanting to introduce trade tariffs.

15:48He's been talking about it since the 1980s. What he hasn't done is consistently implement them yet. We're still waiting for an August 1st deadline for a whole lot of them to come into force, the odd trade deals being announced. But the full weight of, say, whatever he wants to put on the European Union, whether it's 25 % or 30%, that's not been implemented yet. So when I go and buy a bottle of French wine, nobody's having to swallow that tariff yet. It may have an impact later on. But Mark, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, he's absolutely and completely committed to the idea that tariffs can remake trade and make it fairer for America.

16:27And yet we still don't really know whether he wants to use them to get rid of barriers to trade in, say, Japan, where he's just announced a deal, make it easier to get American goods in there, or whether he wants to use the tariffs to bring in lots and lots of money to the American exchequer, because he can't do both at the same time. I think it's one of the most marked differences between the first administration and the second. I think that President Trump has always held these views in which he views in many ways America as a real estate property. And when we would have conversations in the Oval Office trying to explain that it's Americans who pay the tariff and it's in essence a tax on American consumers, he would look at it and say, but look, we have the greatest marketplace in the world, and we're suckers for not charging people to have access to those markets.

17:13And that's just his fundamental view. But in the first administration, I think the tariffs were used pretty selectively in an attempt to isolate China. The biggest difference here in the first six months of this administration is basically assessing tariffs on friends, allies, and foes alike. And it's universally. And as you said, the justification for them has changed. In many cases, you've heard the administration say, we have a trade deficit that we need to fix. Well, economically, a trade deficit is not in and of itself necessarily a bad thing because you have a deficit because we're the richest nation in the world and we can afford goods from other countries.

17:50One way to get rid of a trade deficit is just to bankrupt the country. And so in and of itself, that is a bad barometer. But even with the U.K., when we strike allegedly the framework of a new deal, we have a surplus with the U.K. So is it really for trade deficit? Or as you've said, is the issue now that the sense that we actually have money rolling into the Treasury, as the president says. But again, that money rolling into the Treasury is paid by Americans. It's not paid by foreign governments. So it's a tax on the American people. And even though the first six months, I think the president has seen economic numbers hold up, I think that gives him a false sense of security to double down on this.

18:30And so you're right that in many cases, he's threatened higher tariffs and then has settled it much lower. And I think that comforts markets. But today, we have an effective tariff rate that's in the mid-teens. That is multiple times higher than America has sustained for decades, when prior to this administration, it was 3 % to 4%. Now, the average across that we're paying is 14%, 15 % across the globe. And it does seem to be the one thing that he will not listen to people on, even when they, for instance, warn that he's driving friends into the hands of adversaries that China will end up winning new alliances around the world as a result of people being driven away from the United States.

19:11But is that why he is so obsessed with Greenland, with Canada, with the Panama Canal? We still don't know what to make of the fact that he says that he wants to take over Canada and Greenland. How do you read his statements about that? I think they're all a little bit different, to be honest. I struggle to paint with a broad brush there. I do think that, you know, one of the things we've seen is the enormous investment from China and Russia into the Arctic Circle. And I think there's a legitimate national security concern and interest, whether or not you could argue the president's going about it the right way with Greenland.

19:48But I think there's a legitimate national interest. I think at other times, like some of his conversations about Trudeau becoming governor of the 51st state, I think that's just trolling and he knows it gets a lot of media attention. And so I think it's hard to, in this case, generalize that he has the same incentive on each of these. I think some of these have legitimate national security interests. In other cases, I think it's just him trolling. What about when you talk about relations with others and you think of the prickly relationship with some allies? could you say of NATO that he has chalked up a solid agreement, which is that NATO, even if they don't follow through and they don't eventually come up with the money, and there are big questions about whether they do, but he has at that NATO summit, which was held in the Netherlands, wasn't it, recently, that he has really got NATO to sign up to contributing, other NATO countries, to contributing to the alliance in a way that no other president has managed to do in spite of them all really in at least the last decade or two wanting to.

20:56Justin, I would agree with that. I think that is one of his other foreign policy successes is believing that in many cases there was an expectation in NATO nations that America would help out, but they had to do their own contributions as well. And I think that he has, you know, used his leverage in ways to increase the amount of support. Now, I think that in many cases, those alliances are enduring and in ways that he often does not appreciate. But factually, I think you have to give him credit for the fact that he has pushed NATO allies into contributing more toward their own defense budget and not relying upon the United States entirely.

21:34He hasn't stopped the war, though, has he? The war on Ukraine. And that is something he promised to do. I just wonder, I mean, not only has he not stopped it, but I think it's fair to say at the moment that the plan that he has to bring Putin to heel, as it were, looks a bit vague? Is that actually a rather kindly way of putting it, I suppose? Well, I confess to you that I'm heartened to see a change of position recently there. I do think, again, that the first Trump administration was pretty strong against Russia and support of Ukraine. And I think there's a lot in the media that look at the president's rhetoric from the first administration and feel like there was always some sort of inexplicable favoritism toward Putin.

22:17But if you actually look at the facts of what we did, as far as providing the first Javelin missiles to Ukraine, taking out hundreds of mercenaries of Russia in Syria when we told them we would, if they crossed the red line, the sanctions that we opposed, the opposition to Nord Stream 2, I think that it was a pretty consistent record. I think out of the gate of this administration, there was a lot more comfort provided to Russia and in many ways also making our ally in Ukraine an adversary. And I think that was incredibly troubling when you consider that, you know, that Putin is the same person he's always been as a former KGB agent whose vision is to reunite in the former Soviet Union.

23:00And I think that the president's foreign policy was very misguided. And it's good to see him shift. Having said that, I am still troubled that even in this shift to say we'll allow, you know, our allies to give additional weapons to Ukraine that they purchased from us. By giving a 50-day reprieve, it just gives Putin another 50 days to actually take action. And in essence, delayed further sanctions that Congress was ready to pass. Mark, on that exact point, we've got a question from one of our AmeriCasters from Fleur. This is what she wants to know. Donald Trump is frustrated that Putin is not coming to the table to make a deal.

23:37Does he or do any of his advisors have any insight into Putin's motivations in Ukraine? How does anyone negotiate with that mindset? And what might be Trump's strategy if he has one? Thank you. I think it is hard to square that circle. And I think you look at the last 20 years and frankly, during the Obama administration, Russia obtained Crimea. The only time Russia didn't gain territory was during the first Trump administration. But now it seems the president's willing in order to get a peace deal, willing to give up territory they've already conquered. And so I do think that Putin's incrementalist approach and having a longer term vision and knowing that in many cases, American presidents will look to just strike a deal to to get the conflict over has worked in in Putin's benefit.

24:27And I fear that the second Trump administration is acting more like other American presidencies of this century as opposed to the way he acted during his first administration. Sarah, there is there is a big white elephant, isn't there? Is that the right term? There is a big elephant anywhere in the room, which I think you're going to get to. Yes, it's consuming most of the White House, I think, as the elephant keeps keeps growing and growing. And so despite all of the successes that Donald Trump can claim, the story about the Epstein saga is now in week three here in the United States. It is completely dominating the headlines.

25:07And Donald Trump and the White House just can't change the subject, which is remarkable because one of Donald Trump's superpowers is often being able to move the news cycle on, start talking about something else to control the agenda and what's grabbing everybody's attention. but he cannot, try as he might, move people off the Epstein files and his administration's failure to deliver what they had promised their supporters, which was to reveal the deep, dark secrets of Epstein's connections to rich and powerful people all around the world and the corruption that had been going on underneath. Why is it, Mark, of all the things that Donald Trump just doesn't seem to be able to get a grasp on, and it's his own base, his own supporters that are hounding him, not his opponents on this one?

25:51Well, Sarah, it's a fascinating chapter in current American politics. It's hard for me to say that, you know, if I would have imagined where there would be splinters among the president's coalition, that on my bingo card, it would have been Jeffrey Epstein. I certainly envision that there's deep divisions on things like trade policy and those who are traditionally free traders in our party or on foreign policy and what happens in Ukraine. But I think for a lot of people, the sense is that Jeffrey Epstein got the justice he deserved. And so it's odd to see how this is mushroomed. But I think if you step back for a second and appreciate and recognize that I think part of Donald Trump's appeal in 2016 is he presented himself when he came on the political stage as the outsider.

26:38And he fed into, I think, what is in many cases a healthy distrust a lot of Americans have of the federal government. And he was the outsider who was going to expose all these secrets. And so, you know, years later, you have the Epstein files. And it's it's not just that there's an expectation of transparency. There is reality that his own vice president promised the release, his own attorney general did, his FBI director did all not just promised release, but but it's purred on stories that said we have flight logs. We know who all these nefarious Democrat prominent people were, and we're going to expose them.