A year of Trump: terror, territory and tariffs

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. There's two main things that have really got me really upset over the last couple of months when this has been going on. The first time was when I saw them dragging the shackles and the chains around out of the backs of the airplanes. There are these big shackle apparatus that's going to connect your wrist to your waist. A pair of chains that are maybe a meter and a half long going to go between your legs and your hands and your waist. it's so profoundly upsetting to me. These people are working so hard. They're learning a new language. They're working one or two jobs trying to support their family.

0:39Who knows where the rest of their family is? Maybe they're thousands of miles away in another country. They're doing their best. And our government is coming and just taking them and terrorizing them for no good reason. They're not criminals. They're Americans just like me, or they're working on becoming Americans just like me. They're doing things the right way. And the government is just ripping them out of our community. And it's so profoundly upsetting. That is Nick Benson. He's a self-confessed plane spotter. And right now, he's making it his life's mission to document for public record every single dark flight that's taking off from Minnesota.

1:16Those flights don't officially exist. But as you'll see, they're carrying manacled, shackled deportees, many of them here legally, who have not seen due process as they're snatched off the streets and bundled out of this country. He and his team count each flight and every person who has disappeared without trace. Welcome to the News Agents.

1:40The News Agents. It's John in an air-conditioned studio of 21 degrees. It's Emily and we're feeling quite breezy up here at what, minus one? It's Lewis. Emily and I are in Washington. Honestly, compared to the Arctic tundra of Minnesota, Washington this morning feels almost tropical. So we're absolutely fine. Don't you worry about us, John. We're very happy. They're so hardcore. All of Emily's report still to come. But we've got to start because it is the first anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration. And he's marked that great occasion with giving Keir Starmer an absolute battering on his truth social.

2:16A handsome reward for the year of painstaking sycophancy on the part of the British Prime Minister. The subject was, of course, Keir Starmer yesterday saying Donald Trump was totally wrong over his desire to take control of Greenland if the Danish and the Greenlanders don't want it. And Donald Trump has responded by saying, shockingly, our brilliant inverted commas, NATO ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital US military base to Mauritius, and to do so for no reason whatsoever. And he calls this an act of great stupidity on the part of the British government.

2:59So yesterday you had Keir Starmer thinking, well, that news conference seemed to go all right. I was quite nice to Donald Trump. I was quite nice to the Europeans. I didn't offend anybody. Wrong. You've offended Donald Trump. And in the middle of the night when he was on his way to Davos, he lambasts Keir Starmer. And Starmer must be thinking, what the hell do I do now? And that isn't all, because, of course, some presidents perhaps on the first anniversary of their second term or the beginning of their second time in office, might treat themselves to a bottle of champagne or a nice three-course meal.

3:32Donald Trump is deciding to dismantle an 80-year security alliance between two continents because it's not just with the UK. Overnight, basically, we woke up to this in Washington this morning and Europe experienced it overnight. Donald Trump decided, while he was in Miami, to invite Vladimir Putin to his board of peace in Gaza. Irony isn't just dead. It's about 500 feet beneath the ground. And Lukashenko, I think, of Belarus. Of Lukashenko of Belarus. He was also a great peace-loving figure. By 1 a.m., he decided to tweet a picture of himself with J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio depicting a U.S. flag on the island of Greenland.

4:07He had decided to publish texts between himself and Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General, and Emmanuel Macron, the French president. He threatened to slap 200 % tariffs on French wine. And then by the end of the evening, John, as you say, to top it off, he decided to do a complete 180 on his previous agreement with the Chagos Islands deal that he'd previously given his support to and decided instead to ruin Keir Starmer's day. And I think for that reason, it is not actually particularly a Keir Starmer problem. I do think it's probably time we stopped wanging on about the Monroe Doctrine or the Donroe Doctrine or whichever US foreign policy doctrine history feels it should be throwing at us right now and start thinking that maybe we will look back in years and come to realise with some sympathy that we are actually witnessing the first stages of mental decline.

5:01And delusions like the madness of our own imperial King George are what will actually surface throughout all this. And I think it sort of makes it very easy for Keir Starmer. And I was listening to Darren Jones this morning, who just remained extraordinarily calm. there is nothing that he needs to do. There is nothing he can do. Because, frankly, in what world could he stop Trump invading Greenland and Venezuela and Canada and Cuba and Mexico? In what world could he sort of start imagining how he would respond to the dismantling of NATO? And I think truthfully, it's up for those around Donald Trump, who are his allies, who are his team, who are part of his party, who could actually see their own seats, their own electoral battles being lost if they don't stand up to him.

5:56That's what we're looking for now. We're looking for people around Donald Trump who are ready just to put him back in a noise proof room for a while. But I think that the chances of that happening seem to be absolutely remote when you have got snarling attack dogs around Donald Trump who are threatening to destroy anyone who criticises Donald Trump. And Stephen Miller plays that role as the deputy chief of staff for policy, does that role perfectly well when he kind of attacks anyone who dares to go near Donald Trump. People have joked about the 25th Amendment, which is that amendment in the US Constitution where you can say someone is mentally unfit to carry out the role.

6:40And if the cabinet vote for it and it's approved by Congress, then off he goes. I just don't see it happening yet. And I think that Donald Trump is threatening the alliances. I think Donald Trump is doing all these things where you're talking about the end of NATO. And as Louis, you say, the idea of Lukashenko and Putin being on the Gaza Board of Peace is just extraordinary. And it looks like Donald Trump is actually trying to remake the United Nations in his name. Maybe call it the Trump United Nations or something along those lines, because it seems surely that's the role of the UN to try to do this sort of stuff.

7:17I think what we're dealing with here, what European leaders, including Kistama, are dealing with is trying to grapple with how you dismantle and move on from an 80 year old security alliance that has been the pillar of our European security and trying to work out how to do that basically in a matter of days. Now, I think that that is a mistake because I think, you know, frankly, many, many people have seen this coming. We should have seen it coming. I'm old enough to remember, by the way, just in terms of our own domestic political position. I'm old enough to remember when we were being told that Joe Biden and Barack Obama were anti-British and that Donald Trump was going to be a great boon for British security.

7:58I'm old enough to remember when we were being told that Donald Trump was going to restore order on the global stage. I'm old enough to remember when we were being told that Brexit was a great idea because it would allow us to deepen the transatlantic alliance. And all of those same people aren't turning around now and saying, you know what, fellas, we got this one wrong. We must call this one big time. Half of these people are so shameless that they're actually praising Trump, some of these people, for slapping Starmer around the room and saying that, you know, that he's really shown him, you know, who's who and what's what.

8:29These are the sort of plastic patriots that we're dealing with. And Keir Starmer, look, I've got criticism. I think Keir Starmer was always going to run out of road with his approach to Trump because Trump is becoming, I think, Emily, you're right, more increasingly addled. I mean, we've always, I think there's always been a danger of over-intellectualising Trump. He's basically a wriggling bag of political urges and sort of instincts. That is more true today than it has ever been before. It's somewhere between a toddler and a dictator, isn't it? Oh, yeah. And I can see why Starmer has tried to do and tried to keep him on side.

9:00And they will, of course, be trying to defuse this because the consequences of an actual move on Greenland are so appalling and unimaginable. Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin is rubbing his hands with glee. But the truth is, is that if we defuse him today, that set of urges, that unpredictability will be back tomorrow. And I think there's one other thing as well. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is in London today. basically giving first ever sitting US House Speaker to be giving an address to Parliament basically saying, look, don't worry. Basically, the US sort of state, the rest of the Republican Party is here.

9:35We will try and calm this down. There have been moments in the past when Donald Trump has been receptive to other bits of the American state, the Republican Party and so on. I don't think he's receptive to any of that anymore. And I say that partly because I think the one thing that Donald Trump has always been receptive to has actually been US public opinion. He's been quite alive to that in the past. He has had a raw political instinct. Everything that we are seeing now, whether it's what's going on in Minneapolis, whether it is what is going on in terms of using economic warfare against allies, threats against allies, potential military invasion of Greenland, this actually unites American voters on the left and right.

10:13They are all against it by massive margins. Donald Trump is showing no sign whatsoever of caring. And I think that that is a massive difference between Donald Trump at this stage of his presidency, in this presidency and his first term. There is one person who is calling this out at Davos this morning, and that is Gavin Newsom, who talks about complicity. And I think that's a really important word to try and understand how most of the world leaders are responding at the moment. I can't take this complicity. People rolling over. I should have brought a bunch of knee pads for all the world leaders.

10:50I mean, handing out crowns and handing. I mean, this is pathetic. Nobel Prizes, they are being given away. I mean, it's just pathetic. And I hope people understand how pathetic they look on the world stage. I mean, at least from an American perspective, it's embarrassing. It's time to buck up. It's time to get serious and stop being complicit. It's time to stand tall and firm, have a backbone. I've seen this in the United States, the supine Congress playing both sides, saying one thing on a text or a tweet and another publicly. It's time to have principles. It's time to stand tall and strong. It's time to stand united.

11:35You make that determination. I don't make that determination. Collectively. Oh, this is diplomacy with Donald Trump? He's a T-Rex. You mate with him or he devours you. One or the other. And Europe's paid about it? I mean, people need to stand... No, the Europeans could be if they continue down this path and process. They need to stand tall, stand firm, stand united. Don't want that. Look, a year ago we should have been having this conversation and they didn't. Okay? And now you're paying the price. exactly what anyone objective observer would have anticipated we'd be where we are today well that's gavin newsom talking about how supine everyone is being and lewis the point you were making about this he is a bag of urges i watched a piece last night on the bbc talking about the intellectual underpinning for why donald trump wants greenland and nowhere did it talk about he wants it because he wants it because he can have it because i will take what i want to take And none of that was present.

12:33And I just thought that is something that is so absent from all of this. But, you know, as you saying about Keir Starmer, look, this is the lowest point for the special relationship since the Suez crisis. I can't think of another occasion when relations had felt so fraught between the UK and the US. and then you could say well the Suez crisis it was ridiculous imperial overreach by the government of the day and of course Eden would have to go and America threatened to bankrupt the Bank of England unless it halted this kind of action that it was conducting with the French and the Israelis I mean today what can you say that Keir Starmer has done wrong what other cards did he have to play and I just think that there is an inevitability that even if we get over this crisis even if the Supreme Court might save us and say you can't impose these sanctions another thing will come along and do the damage and a rethinking of that whole relationship has to be going on right now.

13:37The Suez crisis looks like a wordle by comparison today doesn't it really? It almost doesn't do to be too parochial about this because we're looking at the the reordering of the global order and certainly the Western order. It makes no sense now, I think, after this week, to talk about the West in a way that we might have done for the previous decades. What on earth can that possibly mean when the United States is effectively, under its president, acting like a rogue state with a rogue leader? I don't think in any way, if we just think about the sort of pillars of our foreign policy, right, what we used to talk about in the UK, we used to talk about the three pillars.

14:07We used to talk about our transatlantic relationship. We used to talk about our European relationship, our member of the European Union, and the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was always the sort of weakest bit of that. But the transatlantic relationship, as we've known it, I think it's basically gone, at least for the time being. And the European relationship, as we used to talk about it at that time, has gone. Britain now feels a complete bit player all of this. We've got to try and reorder and reassemble what is left of our foreign policy. Because right now, you know, if we think about the United States as an ally, it's not an ally politically, because we saw in the national security strategy that they literally think that European governments are decadent, weak and facing civilisational erasure.

14:42And they want to back far right parties to displace mainstream European parties. They are not an ally militarily because they're threatening to invade Greenland. They're not an ally strategically because they're increasingly aligned with Russia over us and Ukraine. And they're not an ally economically because they're whacking us with tariffs. It does not make any sense at this point for the time being. And it pains me to say this as someone who's always valued and believed in that transatlantic alliance. But it doesn't, I think, make any sense. And Trump too, for at least the coming years, for us to talk about the United States as the ally that we have known it to be.

15:15It is at the very best a strategic competitor to us in Europe, if not an outright foe. I think your caveat was right, though, for now, because everything he's doing at the moment is taking him to a place where he will not look forward to the midterm elections, I imagine. And that doesn't necessarily spell success for a future Republican, or should I say a future MAGA form of government in the years to come. It may be that this all self-combust to a place where, I don't know, the world reshapes itself, not in the same way, but in the way that does re-include us and many others as allies again. In a moment, we'll be looking at those dark deportation flights that we have witnessed ourselves taking off from the airport in Minnesota, and the thousands of people that are now being disappeared without name, number or trace.

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16:45The News Agents. In yesterday's show, we talked about the moment that the ICE patrols confront people, mainly of immigrant communities, on the streets in Minneapolis, and what happens to them after they are detained, many of them without the chance to even go back and tell their families what's happened to them. Today, we're going to bring you the story of those people deported in shackles, in manacles, often in their work clothes, in an Amazon uniform or in a construction worker's high-vis vest. It leaves families wondering where they've gone and not knowing how they'll ever get them back. This is the story of Nick Benson's work.

17:29He took us with him as he documented publicly, for the record, every single flight that is taking off now. We've just been picked up in the car from downtown Minneapolis by Nick Benson. And I'm going to let Nick explain to you now what he does, because it is honestly quite jaw-dropping. So I am a plane spotter, and that's kind of morphed into keeping track of the ice flights that are operating here at Minneapolis-St. Paul International. airport now. So right now we're on our way to terminal one at MSP, the main terminal here, and we're going to go up in the parking ramp to get an elevated view of the private jet terminal here in Minneapolis where these deportation flights load.

18:15And what we'll see on the other side of the runway will be an airplane that'll come in, a convoy with some buses and a few vans, and we'll see several dozen shackled deportees hobbling up the stairs and onto the airplane and are shipped off to detention centers, probably in Texas. El Paso seems to be where most of them have been going. How do you know about these flights? Deportation flights have been operating here in Minnesota for years. You could look and you could see the charter airline that was coming in and operating these flights. And this spring, in April, they stopped showing up on the schedule and I got interested in why that transparency had gone away.

18:56And the number of flights started increasing. And the way we know about these flights now in most cases is we just have to look on these independent flight tracker that doesn't censor their data and doesn't follow the FAA's privacy list program. And we can see where those airplanes are in real time. Once they're up in the air, this morning we had a hunch that just from looking at what historically had been doing that we were probably going to get an airplane out of El Paso this morning is what we were expecting. And so we were keeping a close eye on that flight, and sure enough, it was pointed towards us here in the Twin Cities.

19:30We've been doing this long enough now that I know that it takes two hours and 20 minutes for a 737 from El Paso to fly into Minneapolis, so we could see when it took off. From that, we can figure out an estimated time of arrival. I think this is going to be like the 27th flight this month, and so far this January I think 1 ,787 people have been deported out of Minneapolis so far and plus whoever we see today. You said that these people are shackled as they get on the plane. These are criminals presumably. These are people that have been rounded up and found to have criminal convictions and they're being deported.

20:06The government would say that they're the worst of the worst. In my experience doing community observation in my town these are grandmas and grandpas. Women as well. Women. And from the statistics that DHS has sent out, most of them do not have any criminal conviction. And we also know of instances even at the airport where airport employees who are here working behind security, you know, so they've been vetted thoroughly by TSA because they're working on in the secure portion of the airport. Even those people are subject to being snatched up and deported. If you are not a citizen, that seems to be the only distinction right now is even if you're doing things the right way and have a legal status, even if it's pending, they're taking people away.

20:53And it's really frustrating and abhorrent. And it's un-American. We're a nation built on, largely on immigration. And the fact that they're just rounding people up and terrorizing our communities is gut-wrenching. A couple of days ago, we saw someone who was still wearing their Amazon uniform as they were boarding the plane. Presumably was just out making deliveries and is now on his way to a detention facility somewhere. It's terrible. In my extended network here in the Twin Cities right now, we have friends who are working on the legal side of all of this. And they say they've had cases where they've had a client who's been picked up in the morning and are in El Paso that evening.

21:37I don't know how there's possibly time for the due process that everyone on American soil is supposed to be guaranteed. You're really upset as you're speaking to me now. Oh, yeah. I've also been doing some of the community patrol or observation work where we're out and we're looking at the communities that are at risk. Apartment complexes, mobile home communities that have a high immigrant population. and when you're in those places there's two main things that have really got me really upset over the last couple of months when this has been going on the first time was when I saw them dragging the shackles and the chains around out of the backs of the airplanes there are these big shackle apparatus that's going to connect your wrist to your waist a pair of chains that are maybe a meter and a half long going to go between your legs and your hands and your waist and that bothered me a lot.

22:34The other thing that really bothered me that I've seen when I was doing this community observation was when I was at an apartment complex where there was a family there that was just in a panic and they were driving around in a circle in the parking lot going around their apartment complex over and over again. At first we were concerned that maybe they were ice also because they were acting suspiciously. They were just driving in circles like they were fishing for someone. But we stopped them and asked them what's wrong and it turned out that they were looking for a family member who had been taken.

23:10They found their car was parked in an unusual parking spot. We imagined because ICE detained them and blocked them in and moved the car to that parking spot and they were just in a complete panic because their loved one had been snatched up and they had no idea where they were, what they could do, what resources might exist to help them, and they can't trust anybody because their own government is not helping them at all. And they were just terrified. You know, these were two adults. Think about the kids who are having these same experiences, who they don't know if mom and dad are going to be home tonight when they get home from school.

23:51And it's so profoundly upsetting to me. These people are working so hard. They're learning a new language. They're working one or two jobs trying to support their family. Who knows where the rest of their family is? Maybe they're thousands of miles away in another country. They're doing their best. And our government is coming and just taking them and terrorizing them for no good reason. They're not criminals. They're Americans just like me, or they're working on becoming Americans just like me. They're doing things the right way and the government is just ripping them out of our community and it's so profoundly upsetting.

24:27If the president were here in this car with us, he'd say, I told you I was going to do that and I put it on the campaign trail and Americans told me that's what they wanted and I'm fulfilling what I said I would do. What would be your response to that? Well, Minnesota didn't vote for him. I sure as hell didn't. And it's a damn shame that our society is allowing this to happen again. We are driving by the southern side of Signature Aviation right now as we make our way into the airport. This Signature Aviation is the private jet terminal where they're going to get loaded here pretty soon. The convoy that's going to bring them in isn't here yet.

25:11we're going to sit in a parking spot here and we'll see if we can see the convoy of prison vehicles coming in here and at a bare minimum that will give us a rough expectation of how many people might be getting boarded on this flight. So we just pulled into a lay-by, we parked for about two minutes and then we saw a convoy a couple of minivans, small buses carrying the people that we think we are expecting will now be deported. We are essentially watching a deportation happening in in real time now and nick is trying to work out the numbers from the vehicles we've just seen that you put it at what about 60 given the size of that convoy yeah and we'll we'll actually we'll go and count them now if the snow doesn't get too thick we'll try to get an actual count of how many are on there but yeah probably two dozen on each of the buses maybe nine or so in the large van and then i'm going to guess three or four probably women in the minivan that went by.

26:12I can't do the math and the narration all at the same time while I'm driving here, but that's going to be our rough estimate of what we would expect to see today. So you film every one of these? Yeah, or I take a few pictures at least. These are the only numbers we have on what's actually happening here. There's no accountability otherwise. The federal government won't tell us. The airport isn't telling us. So it's up to us to do this. The local and federal government are failing to serve the people, so we need to do it ourselves. And it is what it is.

26:53The plane that's just landed behind us doesn't have a name or a number. It's a dark plane. It doesn't officially exist. and it's about to take deportees down to El Paso in Texas. We're now waiting for the people on those convoys that we just saw in shackles to board that plane. They don't know where they're going. They don't know if they'll ever come back. And many probably haven't had the chance to even tell family members where they are. One of the things that's upsetting about the shackles, in addition to just how inhumane it is, is when you think about this from a safety perspective. These people have their ankles are chained together and their hands are chained to their waist at their hips.