Trump’s first year back   

0:03It has been one whole year since President Trump took office for the second time. So how much did he change the world in a year? And what could the rest of his term look like? Hi, I'm Tamara Kormornyk and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up, Trump's first year back. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

0:45So help me God. Congratulations.

0:50On the 20th of January, 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated into the White House again. So how has he fared in office this time around? Is he fulfilling his campaign promises? and, if so, is this a good thing for the US and the world? In this episode, the London Standards political editor Nicholas Cecil sits down for a reflective conversation with Chatham House's director of the US and North America programme, Laurel Rapp, who, until recently, served as deputy director of the Secretary of State's policy planning staff and has worked on US grand strategy under President Obama, Biden and Trump twice.

1:36Laurel, thank you for doing the London Standard podcast on the year of Donald Trump. And wow, what a roller coaster. Indeed. We are now in one year of a very volatile, very norm-shifting, very unpredictable year where we are seeing now Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, things that we were not thinking of a year ago this time. Well, it's been such an incredible time, so much turmoil, economic, political. Let's start with Greenland. This is the most extraordinary events going on at the moment. So Donald Trump has threatened eight European nations, including Britain, with tariffs of 10 % in February, rising to 25 % in June, unless they agree to allow America to buy Greenland.

2:31But he does seem to have overreached on this occasion. What's your view? There have been a lot of different military confrontations and provocations during the second Trump presidency. But in my view, what we're seeing in Greenland is very damaging. It is very damaging for the long term U.S. national security interests to say nothing of the interests of NATO and Denmark and Greenland. this is an alliance network that the United States helped forge in the Atlantic Charter. There is no provision in the Atlantic Charter that talks about one NATO country attacking another, seeking to appropriate land from the other.

3:12And when we look longer term, we wonder if this is these norms, these rules that territory should not be violated, that sovereignty must be protected. What kind of a world will we be moving into if we cannot base sort of the fundamental way countries interact with each other on these norms? Right now, we're at an impasse in Greenland where President Trump is not seeking to back down. He has said that the national security of Greenland is a U.S. very critical national security priority with China and Russia encircling Greenland. I think there are disputes about whether that is actually the case.

3:56And now the question for the Europeans and for the UK is, do you make an accommodation? Do you make a deal? Or do you say this is a red line? We are not going to let you cross. Trump is clearly unpredictable. But in terms of this risk and unpredictability, certainly if you look at Iran, for example, he bombed their nuclear facilities last summer. And now he's threatened further military strikes if the Tehran regime starts executing the protesters who took part in the widespread demonstration. So is risk-taking a winner or a loser for Trump? I think you're exactly right to focus on the risk-taking and risk-loving attitude in the second administration compared to the first.

4:41This is really risky behavior from a military perspective to seek to embroil U.S. forces potentially across multiple military theaters, which despite having the biggest, strongest military in the world, cannot fight multiple wars on all fronts. So that's one area of risk. The second is on the military risk that he's taking with these operations, right? The operation in Venezuela to bring Maduro from Caracas to New York was incredibly risky. And President Trump and the U.S. military were able to pull off a pretty flawless operation militarily, but reports that that was a near miss as well as certain equipment malfunctioned.

5:27And so that could have been disastrous. The same goes on the Iran strikes last summer, using hugely risky capabilities that hadn't really been tested significantly before in hostile territory. What, however, is maybe happening is a sense of feeling emboldened to do more, to try more. that he was right and the naysayers were wrong who were warning about the risk and the harm and the danger to U.S. national interest and to U.S. military prestige. And so that the sort of worst case scenario that others may have been warning him of did not come to pass. And that may now be feeding into a sense that more is possible and Greenland can be ours.

6:16And that is something that I think, is going to inform the weeks ahead and how this White House is calculating how much risk it really wants to take on right now. And could the midterm elections be another factor? We've got these elections coming up in November, where hundreds of House seats and dozens of seats in the Senate are up for grabs. And it only takes the Republicans to lose a handful of seats in the House and Trump has lost control of at least part of Congress. And at the moment, he's got kind of a complete control over the American system with the executive as president, the legislature, the House and the Senate, and a Republican-leaning Supreme Court.

7:07So if he suddenly loses the House, Can he continue with his style of presidency? If he suddenly loses the House, then is his style of presidency, can he continue with that or is it suddenly shackled? We've seen very few checks on presidential power in the last couple of months and it's more likely the House would flip and not the Senate. This was the play we saw in 2018 when Trump, in his first term, took a huge beating in the midterm elections. This is the traditional way that presidents are met by the American people to say, let's make a change. Let's take back one of the houses of Congress.

7:51Let's have more oversight. Let's have more accountability. So the first term of the Trump administration, he was chastened by this reversal because he was impeached twice. There There were powers put on his ability to wage wars around the world. Investigations, subpoenas, public documents were released into the public. And so this is not a easy moment for any president when you face a divided Congress and a divided government. But I think one difference that we're going to see, even if there is a switch from the Republicans to the Democrats in the House, is this House is not the same House that we had six and seven and eight years ago.

8:33We have seen a steady erosion of power from the legislative to the executive branches that the U.S. administration has sought to slowly chip away at by pulling in more of the authorities on tariffs, on war powers, on sort of executive ability to wage war and use the military around the world, which has been in some ways voluntarily given by the Republicans in the House and the Senate. And so now you're going to see a weakened, probably House, Democrat-held House, if that's the way the winds go in November. So questions are now lingering whether this flip is actually as meaningful as some may believe and Democrats may hope.

9:22But whatever happens, it will complicate the president's ability to execute the last two years of his agenda. You served in the State Department during the first Trump administration. What was it like then? And how different do you think things are now? I was a career diplomat for 14 years, and I started under Obama, served under President Trump, President Biden, and then some of this most recent Trump term. And there are big differences that I'm seeing already between the first Trump and the second in Trump terms. Of course, even bigger differences between the Obama and Biden years. But I think one area that I see is the decision-making process.

10:08So in the first Trump term, there was a set process to have an interagency coordination, a regular set of meetings where political appointees and career officers to meet regularly and hash out a policy strategy on how the United States is going to navigate economic diplomacy. We are not seeing those meetings anymore in a sustained way, which speaks to kind of a lack of interagency coordination, as well as a mistrust of the career teams that would be supporting the political appointees. So as you narrow that circle of decision makers, you will have a less diverse set of voices to potentially warn of risks or dangers, as well as to offer alternative options.

10:58And I think this time around, the cabinet is much more homogenous in the ideological bent, but even more than ideology, the willingness to to serve as a faithful implementer of the president's vision versus a willingness to see their role as hashing out or restraining sort of impulses that may be detrimental to U.S. national interest. Coming up, what are some of the hurdles that Donald Trump will face in this coming year? And what do Americans really make of his presidency this time around? We'll see you back here in just a moment.

11:45welcome back let's get straight back to the interview and in terms of dealing with trump how do you deal with him keir starmer has clearly taken the approach to try to not criticize him to flatter him and that stands in contrast to a certain extent with other world leaders for example french president emmanuel macron so does flattery gets you anywhere with Trump? So this is the million dollar million pound question. How do you navigate? How do you protect your interests? How do you advance both an affirmative agenda with the United States right now, but also ensure that the ties that you have with the United States will not be detrimental or be used as leverage against you.

12:33And so I think that Prime Minister Starmer has navigated this quite deftly. On the one hand, he did have President Trump to the UK for the state visit in September, which by all measures was quite successful in terms of showing that historic special relationship of inking some pretty major tech and trade deals. The UK was the first trade deal out of the gate in the second Trump administration. So there were tangible gains to be had here. But at the same time, the UK is not putting all of its eggs in the US basket anymore. And so right as a delegation was in Washington, negotiating with the Trump administration, they flew right from Washington to Beijing to open up trade talks for the first time in seven years.

13:20That really caught my eye. And I'm sure it did for folks in Washington as well. And that is an indication that even with one's closest relationship, building out your leverage by having a wider constellation of partners, especially on the commercial side, especially if it doesn't start touching onto your core national security areas, like the UK seeking to do to mitigate that risk with China. That's a smart thing to do. The Epstein scandal has clearly damaged Donald Trump. What other hurdles does he face this year? So there will be on the foreign policy side, potential areas where conflicts will reemerge.

14:02Gaza has been quieter than it was in recent months. We don't know what that trajectory looks like. So far, Venezuela has not deteriorated from an economic or security standpoint, and that transition has gone better than some may have expected. But this is early days in Venezuela, so we'll see what happens there. On the domestic policy side, there are big questions about the trajectory of the U.S. economy. That's probably the biggest X factor here. And if the weeks and months ahead bring positive jobs reports, manageable inflation, there are going to be big questions about the Federal Reserve independence and interest rates.

14:43So that will be the economic, not only the data, but also how Americans feel about what they are experiencing will be really important for Trump as his party heads off against Democrats in the midterms. The last piece of a hurdle potentially is even within his own party, within an increasingly fractured Republican coalition, where you have the early stages of some defectors within the MAGA movement, which was most dramatic in the form of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an early MAGA supporter of the president almost 10 years ago. She has broken with him very dramatically to say on issues of economic affordability of the Epstein files of transparency, Trump is not delivering.

15:36And so that will be a very interesting strain to follow of the peeling away or the fracturing of the MAGA coalition. In polling, Republicans have said an increasing number, they identify less with the MAGA movement. So there is now, as we start to see questions of who comes next, who is the next leader of the Republican Party, who will be the next candidate facing the Democrat on the ticket in 2028, what that party's vision, agenda, priorities will be. And that is going to be another big hurdle to hash out in this year ahead. And what does success look like for Trump in the second term? Is that the same success for the American people?

16:19I think you're right to ask that question. So there are a couple of ways where they do overlap, where the American people have sought action on the economy, on an improving and growing economy. There are majorities of Americans that do support stronger immigration and border enforcement. Trump has taken very strong action against that. we've seen some pretty dramatic and tragic visuals of that in the past couple of weeks across the United States, including in Minnesota. And so on those broader issues, those would look like potential areas of success for him to deliver on his campaign promises.

16:58I think on the foreign policy side, whether Trump can ink a grand bargain with China, whether he can bring about an end to the war in Ukraine with Russia, these would be seen as successes. But the devil lies in the details here on what those agreements actually look like. Are they ones that are informed by U.S. national interest or are they ones that seek to just get a deal done, get that headline and move on? That is a big and open question that many have as we look on the foreign policy landscape. And finally, looking beyond Trump, in three years time, America and the world will be saying goodbye to Trump, unless he pulls off a trick to stand for a third term.

17:44What will his legacy be? Biggest area I'm seeing is the pulling away of the US from its role as the leader of of institutions, of an international order, of structures defined by economic institutions, of the United Nations, of alliance interconnectedness. These are things that the United States is seeking to break from, sometimes in very dramatic and public ways, other ways more quietly, where we're removing funding from certain organizations. And so So that lattice work of alliances, partnerships, the rule-based order, as some have called it, was already showing great signs of strain. But President Trump has put a nail in that coffin, the final nail.

18:38That appears to be the direction of travel that at least the U.S. is headed. And that also can be sometimes contagious because we are so interconnected. connected. And I think that is going to be an enduring future of this era. Laurel, thank you for doing the London Standard podcast on a year of Donald Trump. Thanks for having me. And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please email us at podcasts at standard.co.uk. We'll be back here tomorrow morning. See you then.