I was saved by God to make America great again.

Buckle up. He's back. Donald Trump is in the White House again, and with the eyes of the world on him, what did we learn about what this presidency could mean? That's what we'll be hearing on this episode of the BBC's Daily News Podcast, Newscast. Hello, it's James in the Studio.

Hello, it's Victoria in the Studio from Crime Cast.

And Johnny in the studio from the Global Story.

It's Mariana in Washington, DC, from Americast.

It's Anthony, also from Americas, here next to Mariana.

Chris Mason will be here. Hopefully, he's late, but never mind. Right, quickly, from each of you, first of all, we've heard Donald Trump speaking. He's President again. He's back. What is the headline for you all from his speech, Victoria?

Well, he said he wanted to be a pacemaker in his second term, but he didn't mention the war in Ukraine.

Tony. I think once again, the President Trump cast the rest of the world as America's enemies out to exploit the US.

Mariana. I think more than what was said, who was there, but the social media bosses, including Elon Musk, who continue to be and feel very prominent to Trump's presidency.

Anthony.

Donald Trump, again, making a lot of promises like he did on the campaign trail. But now that he's President, he's going to have deliver on them.

Chris was late, so he doesn't get to contribute. Now, Anthony and Mariana, before we get into the specifics then from the speech, you're obviously in Washington. What's it been like? How's it been today?

What's the atmosphere? Actually, the city is a little emptier than I thought it was going to be. I've been to a lot of these inaugurations, outdoor inaugurations, and there have been huge crowds of people, and it's been really hard to get around. The metros have been crowded, the streets have been crowded. I drove in here this morning, and it was pretty dead. So the indoor cold weather inauguration seems a lot less expansive than I think we're used to in this town.

One thing that I've really noticed is that the Mager hat dotted It's not like you'll be in a cafe and someone will have just put their MAGA hat down. There's a whole range of different people, particularly younger people, actually, who seem to be here, excited about Donald Trump, were perhaps attending the rally yesterday or just want to be in town. And that perhaps speaks to this feeling that certainly during the election campaign itself, Donald Trump succeeded in reaching a whole range of different demographics, including younger people and younger men in particular. And you can feel their presence out and about, perhaps in a way that was different to the last inauguration.

Yeah, and this is the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, with these red and white hats that have become such a symbol of Donald Trump and what he stands for, and what he says he stands for, and what he says he's put back on Earth or kept on Earth by God to do is to make America great again. Let's hear a little bit from him about how he plans to do that in his second term as the 47th President of the United States.

My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed, their freedom. From this moment on, America's decline is over.

Vic, what did you make of it more generally then when you heard that rhetoric and you heard the old Donald Trump is back, what was your takeaway?

Well, I thought his delivery was quite low energy, but what he was saying, some of what he was saying was absolute dynamite. Take the Panama Canal back, tariffs on foreign countries, signing these executive orders that declare this emergency at the border with Mexico, all illegal entry will be halted. I mean, it was line after line that was really substantive, meaty stuff, which will cause, well, diplomatic rouse in so many places. But on the other hand, there was also significant messages in between what he was saying to countries like China, perhaps to President Putin in Russia. So it delivered in a lot of areas.

It's no shortage of news, Johnny. We're in the business of looking for news, aren't we? You would find plenty of news in there.

Yeah, there was a lot. I thought actually, echoing the point I think Anthony made, which was it felt quite low key. If you remember back in 2016, was all that talk about American carnage. Now, obviously, to some degree, Donald Trump has become, fashionable word, normalized. That stuff now we expect. But I didn't get the sense of energy. The words felt quite revolutionary, but I didn't have the feeling of a new and exciting Trump administration. We'll see, of course, what actually happens.

Anthony, as a political speech, as a piece of rhetoric, how did it come across, do you think? I mean, you were saying there a bit flat. I mean, that seems to be the consensus. I thought it was flat, mostly. I thought at one point he worked himself up a bit more, but then it quickly died away again. What did you think?

I'll tell you why it was flat. And I've seen this time and time again with Donald Trump's speech, is that he feeds off the rally energy, the crowd energy. And it was a much smaller audience because it was inside the rotenda of the Capitol. So there wasn't that energy. When he's in front of a big crowd, you can tell he gets worked up and he gets really excited. When he has to deliver these set piece speeches, ones that don't have something to bounce off of, a crowd to bounce off of, he does tend to come out flat. I thought it was a dark speech in the beginning. I mean, he was railing against a radical and corrupt establishment. Ironically enough, as Mariana noted, they're the pinnacle of the establishment. All these tech leaders right behind him, literally in the shot over his shoulder. But he's railing against the establishment. And then he turned it into what's more like a State of the Union address, which was a laundry list of things he was going to do. He ticked off executive actions on immigration, on energy, on recognizing that there are only two genders, men and women.

He made into what he was going to do. And then he ended on a a triumphant, upbeat measure. And one of the things I found particularly interesting was he said that United States was going to be a growing nation again. And he talked about growing wealth, but he also talked about expanding territory. I mean, an American President talking about expanding the territory of the United States, as we already mentioned, the Panama Canal, but obviously he's talking about Greenland and even Canada in the past. I mean, that was, I mean, at least my ears perked up, and I imagine a lot of people around the world, when they hear territorial expansionism from a US President, would be struck by that.

Well, well, especially a US President who on one hand is saying, I will take back territory and on the other hand is saying, I will retreat from the world to a certain degree and not get involved in any more wars. Be a pacemaker. Be a pacemaker. So it seems like a curious contradiction. Mariana, just quickly, because you were saying it's been moved indoors, do they not have hats and gloves in Washington? I mean, it's cold.

It is actually quite cold. It's survivably cold, but if you're not outside for a prolonged period of time.

They are very old, these American politicians, aren't they?

You're very cruel, James.

The tech bros are all young.

He's really cold in Washington at this time of year. And the wind.

I've been in colder inaugurations. I know there was a big forecast of it being bitterly cold, and it did snow here yesterday, and it was in the 20s Fahrenheit, so low freezing here. But I was at the Clinton inauguration in '92, and that was really, really bone-chilling cold. They could have done it outside. So it's funny, the Trump's campaign on rugged masculinity, and now he's moved his inauguration indoors because it's too chilly out.

Good point. Right. Let's get into some of the substance. Let's start on the border, front and center. Not really any surprise there, Anthony. A series of policy announcements. What should we take note of what mattered most?

Well, declaring a national emergency at the border. That means he's going to be able to use US military to put them on the border. The talk about reinstating remain in Mexico, which is people who are applying for asylum, can't to come to the United States and wait for those claims to be processed. They have to stay in Mexico. Actually, something that happened really, really quickly, almost as soon as Donald Trump became President, they turned off this app that people have on their phones to apply for asylum from wherever they are, and then they get an appointment and can come into the country or come to a border checkpoint and get that appointment process. About 30,000 people had appointments over the next few weeks. All of those appointments now are canceled. And they were covered in things. Those were a way for people to of asylum and come here. And they must have felt like they won the lottery getting an appointment. And now all of that is up in smoke with the new administration.

And Mariana, related to that, there's this talk of mass deportations for people who are in the country illegally. There's various estimates. Some estimates I've seen put that number at about 11 million people in the country illegally. Donald Trump says he's going to deport millions and millions of people at the same time as trying to grow the economy. Lots of these people work in the American economy. I just wonder how divisive and how practical Americans see that promise as being. Some obviously very, very fervently supportive of it, some concerned.

Yeah, and I think it's one of those messages, one of those topics that in the social media world I spend far too much of my time hanging out in, it tends to cut through either because you feel very strongly that you are supportive of the idea of these kinds of deportation organizations or because you very strongly feel as though you don't like them. And it's for that reason that if you look on a site like X, which is owned by Elon Musk, but actually it's been the case on other social media platforms, too, this messaging around immigration as perhaps a solution to other issues that people are experiencing is something that has really succeeded for Donald Trump's campaign in cutting through to people. And so you can imagine, as I've certainly seen already online, people are very praising of what he said so far, both yesterday and in the speech today as well about immigration. But I think what's interesting is to think about how that plays out going forward, because exactly like you say, James, there's this question of, well, why do people care about immigration in this way? And there are some people who this is about jobs, this is about money, this is about feeling like they're being treated fairly in their own nation and so on.

How much will the things Donald Trump is proposing succeed in delivering the things that they would feel in their day to day lives that would make them think, oh, this works. And so you wonder to what extent some of this might end up playing out online as you see these videos clips of people being deported, you see the moments often that some people find very distressing, other people think is a deterrent. You see those unfold and you think, That's done then. And then there are other things that Donald Trump might turn to to try and deal with issues like how expensive food is or getting jobs and stuff like that. And you wonder, to what extent he'll really follow through with these things because they could include trade offs that affect people in ways that he might not want.

Can I ask Mariana and Anthony, do Do you think we are going to see enforcement officers going into towns and cities and literally yanking people out and, I don't know, taking them back to the border? Are we going to see images of that?

It seemed like that was a very likely possibility. The word leaked out that there were already raids being planned, where in cities like Chicago and here in DC and New York, that immigration enforcement would go into neighborhoods, go places where the government knows there are large numbers of undocumented migrants, particularly ones maybe who have some criminal record, and they would not only deport those people, but anyone else they found who was undocumented as well, round them up in these big nets. Now, the latest word was that these planned raids that were supposed to start maybe even today, they've been put off a little bit. But just last week there was a raid in California, in the central Valley of California, which was viewed as a test case. And they went into a and they rounded a bunch of people up. I think we could see that going forward.

Now, there was a link early in the speech between spending money, as he put it, spending unlimited sums, I think he said, protecting foreign borders, but not protecting American borders. Vik, obviously, you've talked a lot on Ukrainecast about what a Trump presidency might mean for Ukraine, for Russia, for the region in general. Do you think that that was Ukraine that he was referring to there?

I mean, it could easily have been, couldn't it? On the face of it, that could lead people in Ukraine to think, okay, yeah, he really is going to pull the plug when it comes to continuing support in terms of dollars, in terms of weapons. But then we have spoken to enough people who have worked with him in the past who just cannot see it happening. For example, the former head of NATO, Yens Stotlenberg, told us on Ukrainecast, look, it It was Trump in his first term who first delivered lethal aid to Ukraine when Russia invaded Crimea. It was Trump in his first term, under that first term, that we saw more NATO allies upping their defense spending. They just can't see Trump walking away, and it may be wishful thinking, because he wouldn't want to be seen as a loser. If Ukraine is seen to have lost, that's just not Trump. He wants to be a winner.

I wonder if there's an extent to which Vladimir Putin is in a different position now than he was previously as well. If you look at what's happened in the wider world, if you look at the Middle East, if you look at the weakening of his allies in the Middle East, the collapse of the regime in Syria, the weakening of Iran as well related, I suppose. That maybe what people thought Donald Trump might have done to a Putin who appeared to be strong and winning, you can have an argument about whether he nonetheless is winning the war there. I don't know if that plays into this about whether who is weak and who is strong, which does seem, as you rightly say, to be so central to how Trump sees the world.

If you look at the Middle East, you might have argued Israel was in a stronger position than Hamas after 50 months of this war. Yet Trump's Middle East envoy went, by all accounts, to Netanyahu on the Sabbath and read the riot act to him, and effectively banged heads together and said, You need to sort this by the 20th. It is possible He could do the same with Ukraine and Russia, is it not?

Yeah. Johnny, the global story, you will be talking, I imagine, a lot about all of this, about everything Vick is laying out there. There was just a lot of foreign policy in the speech, wasn't there? What would you pick out?

I mean, look, the fun stuff is Panama, obviously.

Funny, the inverted comment.

It depends who you are. Well, yes. I mean, if you're Panamanian, clearly, it's not that much fun, but fun in the terms of news.

I think that we're throwing their hats in the air.

Quite possibly not. I should say, I think I'm the only one on this podcast who's gone from one end of the Panama Canal to the other.

But everything I own has done that.

No, that's not the same. Does that count? It's not the same. Anyway, I recommend it. It's very beautiful. Look, and there was this, we are taking it back because we didn't give it to China. We gave it to Panama and China is running it. Look, everyone will be jumping up and down and saying, Hey, look, it's crazy Dawn all over again, no doubt about it. There are significant things significant concerns for the US vis-a-vis Panama. The Canal was built by America. It was run by the Americans until it was given up as a result of a treaty signed in '77, enacted in 1999. Now, there are guarantees in those treaties of neutrality. There are guarantees on fair transit fees. The transit fees have shot up. They've shot up for everyone, but it's hugely important to America that the transit fees are kept under control because America uses it much more than any other nation. Hong Kong, special administrative region of China, has ports now on either side of the Panama Canal. Is Donald Trump going to invade Panama? My feeling, and I suspect quite a fair number of people are thinking, no, he is not.

But it's a classic piece of President Trump where he is starting negotiations on transit fees and on dealing with those Chinese ports.

I'm going to come back to Panama drama, because I want to hear about what it was like. But before that, Anthony doesn't have a long with us. So I'm going to ask Anthony, related to that, Anthony, that takes us straight in, sails us along, if you will, towards tariffs, that is to say taxes, on imports from other countries. A really big part of Trump 2.0 that, isn't it? Tell us, what do we know about what he plans? What might that mean for the United States and the wider world?

A really big part of Trump 2.0, but not a very big part of this inaugural address. He talked about creating an external revenue service that would collect the terrorist that he has proposed, but he really didn't go into a whole lot of detail, didn't outline any executive orders he was going to be issuing.

Tell you what, Anthony, I tell you what, we can hear it. Let's have a quick listen to Donald Trump talking about that. There's a little bit of the speech we have here. Let's have a listen.

I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.

Sorry, Anthony, I interrupted you to play the President of the United States. Yeah.

No, I mean, and that's about all he said about it. Actually, we've gotten word from administration officials who say there's not going to be any a major tariff announcement today that terrorists could come further down the line. But for something that Donald Trump talked about incessantly on the campaign trail, about a 10 to 20 % across the board tariff on our closest allies, like Mexico and Canada, an additional tariff on China, were that not to be part of these early actions for him to focus more on energy and on immigration. I think that tells you there may be a little reluctance to mess with the economy that much because there is a very real concern that terrorists will drive up prices, and high prices were one of the things that got the Democrats out of office and got Joe, got Donald Trump swept back into office.

Nice of you to join us, Chris.

Hello. Sorry.

I saw Chris, I saw Chris yarning just now. Are you bored, Chris?

He has long days.

We all have long days. Maybe he's tired.

Oh, dear. Johnny, you're in terror.

Sorry. We're not yarning at Anthony. I'm sure of that. I should hope not.

He certainly wasn't. Chris. I certainly wasn't, Anthony.

Hello. Hello. How worried is the UK government about this trade stuff, about tariffs?

They are worried. They are worried without question. It's back to the point that's a cliché because it's true that the most predictable thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he is wildly unpredictable, and therefore, who knows what might happen. We heard those words there about tariffs. Why is the government in the UK worried? Well, its central mission is getting the economy going again. How might tariffs have an impact on that? Well, it wouldn't be great. Now, it may be, of course, if there's also an argument that goes on where President Trump says that allies ought to be spending a whole lot more on defense, that the argument can be made to the White House that says, Well, if to make our economic picture worse, that's going to make it harder to spend more money on defense. But yeah, there is a real worry about that. Then the other challenge that the Prime Minister here is going to have to wrestle with is that he has Brexit freedoms now in terms of he doesn't have to act in the same way as those countries in the European Union choose to. But at the same time, that creates a bit more political jeopardy because there's more room for maneuver.

How close does he tack to the European Union? He's got this, quote, unquote, reset planned with the EU. He's going to Brussels in a few weeks time, versus his stance, his posture towards Washington. We expect the Prime Minister to head to the White House in the in the coming weeks or so as and when that invitation comes. So, yeah, there is a concern, no doubt about it, about that. And then there's a whole host of other issues as well, as well as, to put it gently, considerable character differences between the new US President and the UK Prime Minister.

That is gentle. Anthony, you've got to run. What time is it? They're half past 2:00 in the afternoon in Washington, DC. And what's your final thought?

Well, we could spend all this time unpacking Donald Trump's inaugural address, the 30-minute Inaugural address. After he finished that speech, he went to a different part of the Capitol and began speaking extemporaneously with Mike Johnson and JD Vance standing behind him. And this was the Donald Trump that's not scripted. This is the Donald Trump that we're going to have to deal with for the next four years. He was talking about how the 2020 election was stolen, how Nancy Pelosi was guilty as hell for the January sixth Capitol riot. He was talking about his election win and all the states that he last year. It just shows that we can look at Donald Trump and what's coming down officially. But the real Donald Trump, the one who can change things on a dime, as you mentioned, who can be unpredictable, that was the Donald Trump on display at that part of the the the capital. And that is going to be someone who does things much more by a whim and less by setting things out with careful policy ahead of time.

Yeah, and you'll be talking about it all on a metacast in the coming months and years a lot.

Anthony, thank you. My pleasure.

Now, another thing which became, well, it was already apparent, wasn't it, in the speech was a rolling back of Bidenomics, if you want to call it that, of green policies. Victoria, there's a big shift here as well, isn't there, in terms of the direction of travel of the most powerful country in the world in a time of a global climate emergency?

Well, he said it on the campaign trail. He repeated it tonight. Drill, baby, drill. It's going to start now. He said, We are going to exploit the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. It's going to bring down energy prices for Americans. He also said, And we're going to export US energy all over the world. Liquid gold, he said, would make us wealthy. Revoking the Green New deal, revoking EU mandates. I mean, it couldn't It's going to be more in contrast to, for example, the UK government's approach and a lot of European government's approach. But it's a sovereign nation. He can do what he wants.

It couldn't be more different, Chris, could it? In fact, did labor, really, to a certain extent, did they not build their economic policy and their plans for growth and essentially model them on President Biden's shift to a greener economy?

Yeah, they did.

So where does that leave them now?

Well, quite. So Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, talked about secure anomics, this idea that in a- I never knew what that meant. Well, in essence, it was about in a dangerous world, but also in a world where there is going to be a challenge over the next generation around switching away from fossil fuels, that you put a huge amount of state spending, borrowing, into turbocharging those industries of the future, with the aim being that you become a world leader in those industries industries, and over time it pays economic as well as environmental and other dividends. Now, that was at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States under now former President Biden. You heard a modeling of that on a smaller scale from the then-shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. But two things have changed. President Biden has gone and the era of low interest rates for government borrowing has gone. Then also with the departure of President Biden and the arrival of President Trump, the fashions, if you like, the global fashions around these, to put it gently, again, have changed massively. Yeah, it's tricky. It's much trickier that without question.

Mariana, the voters that you monitor on social media for America and others, what bits of the speech are popping up there? What are you seeing? What's standing out?

Yeah, so the undercover voters, for anyone who's not heard me explain it gazillion times, are fictional characters. They're based on data from different think tanks, and they have social media profiles across all of the main sites. My undercover voters, my American ones, have been very busy scrolling away, which means I've been scrolling away. I think the main takeaway from looking at their feed, certainly straight after the speech, was actually how much of it is not about the speech, but all of the other stuff around it. Particularly the rally last night, there's this very viral clip of Trump dancing to YMCA when it was performed at the end of the rally. That's one that's It's cut through across the board, really, whether the undercover voters like or don't like Donald Trump. Some of the things that he said yesterday as well, talking about stuff like TikTok, talking about immigration, some of which he then repeated in the inauguration speech, those have cut through, too. Again, with people who feel quite polarized on those issues, they either agree with them very strongly or they disagree with them. It's just all the... You've obviously had quite a lot of younger people responding, either saying, Yay, it's back.

Tiktok is come back, which is what Donald Trump has promised to sort out because TikTok was ordered to sell the company in so much as it no longer could be affiliated with ByteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok and There were allegations it was connected to the Chinese government, which they strongly denied TikTok and ByteDance. But nonetheless, the Supreme Court upheld this decision. So that's all been unfolding, and that stuff has been popping up lots. And in terms of the inauguration itself, I mean, it's all the memes and all the pictures There's everything from the tech bros who you could see in the background, those like Elon Musk and the faces he was making. He was sitting behind baron Trump. There have been a lot of clips of Elon Musk certainly going around on a X. Lots of thumbs up, looking happy. Then also, loved it. He was loving it. Then also, I was going to say the kiss. I was going to say Melania's Milania's hat. Melania's hat. Yeah. Yes. You couldn't see her eyes. Navy blue and white. White on the rim. I think it was Navy. Yeah. She managed to get round the edge.

No, that's one of the things that people are loving. There's all kinds of conspiracy theories and stuff that spreads about Melania Trump all the time and things like this. I mean, people also, some people really don't like her, some people really like her, and all this stuff, people analyseising what she's wearing and how she's behaving and guessing why she's worn the hat. I think what it tells you, as I often say, that actually the nuanced or not so nuanced political discussion often doesn't really feature on social media, not nearly as much as all the other clues that tell us a bit about the person and the people involved in this, Donald Trump and the people around him.

But we're all mentioning these tech pros because Elon Musk wasn't the only leader of a massively influential, enormously wealthy American technology company there as well. What the heads of Apple.

Google. You've had Apple, Google, Zuckerberg, everyone, all of the big... Yeah.

And Johnny, that's interesting, isn't Because one of the things that the outgoing President Biden warned about, as he would have it, was this idea of the tech takeover, of billionaires taking over democracy, the tech industrial complex, he said in a reference to the White Eisenhower speech.

It was the equivalent of the Eisenhower's speech.

Exactly, military industrial complex.

He warned on that. Can I commit a news crime at the moment and look back? Because we talked about normalization. Unmentioned anywhere here is we have just seen the swearing in of the man who tried to steal the 2020 election, the man who tried to overthrow the Constitution of the United States without any basis. His endless claims that that election was stolen by Joe Biden. It is an extraordinary moment. Yet, such is the power of office, such is the power, of course, of the election that he won, pretty convincingly, that that is now forgotten, and it just walks on.

Maybe such is the power of inflation. We've seen an era of authoritarian populists getting into office or succeeding in office, you could argue, as a result of inflationary pressure, of hardship that people have suffered as a result of that.

Is that all of it or not? Whatever it is. Whatever you think of his policies, and everyone has different opinions, it is without doubt that he tried to steal the election and that he tried to overthrough the Constitution.

It is entirely unmentionable. Well, you're right to mention it. In historical terms, this is an aberration. This is an extraordinary return for someone who, as you say, did not accept the democratic process or tried not to accept it. Chris, Boris Johnson was one of the people that the team here, the newscast team, all spotted. That's interesting, isn't it? Because people think of Boris Johnson as being the the great friend of Ukraine, the great supporter of Ukraine. Is there some disconnect between his supporting Ukraine fervently and his supporting Donald Trump, who is, some say, planning to end the war on arguably terms that might be more favorable to Putin, or at least give Putin some of Ukraine's territory?

Outwardly, that looks to be, doesn't that? Equally, I sometimes wonder, and we've seen this once or twice in the last few months, that given the the weight that Donald Trump places on personal relations and given the relationship that there is between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and there's no doubt a difference of instinct on Ukraine, and Boris Johnson sees his actions as Prime Minister on Ukraine as a big, big part of his legacy, if you like, as Prime Minister, that potentially, in a rather unorthodox way, given that there isn't any significant difference of opinion on Ukraine between Kyri Stammer and Boris Johnson, there's been a consistency of UK government position on Ukraine going through several prime ministers now in the last few years, that potentially as a point of contact and a trusted exchange between the two of them, that it may take Kyri Starmer some time to build up, may perhaps never be built up to the same extent. That that could actually be quite useful as far as Britain's posture on Ukraine is concerned, even though Boris Johnson is... It's been a while and there's been a few prime ministers since him.

What's your take, Vik, from a Ukraine cast perspective?

I mean, Ukrainians really do love Boris Johnson. They really appreciated the support in terms of moral support, in terms of financial support, in terms of weaponry support that he gave to Ukraine. There are babies He's named Boris in Ukraine. There are streets that have been named after him. I have no idea if Boris Johnson has the ear enough of Donald Trump to persuade him to continue supporting Ukraine with dollars. I literally don't know. But as Chris says, Donald Trump loves those who are loyal to him, and Boris Johnson is loyal, apart from on the Ukraine issue, to Donald Trump.

Now, there's one other thing. We're going to wrap up quite soon, but there's one other thing that was threaded through bits of this speech, and that's what you might call the culture wars. Mariana, whether that was on gender, the issue of gender, he says that from now on, the official US federal government policy is going to be there are only two genders, male and female, or on this idea of ending what you might call positive discrimination, as I think people used to call it anyway, to try to help some people get into jobs from minorities. What did you think of that? There was quite a bit of it, wasn't there? Threaded through?

Yeah, there was. And again, like some of the other stuff we've been talking about, really, it's these culture war issues that have tended to play quite well for Donald Trump, particularly on social media and particularly on X, since Elon Musk bought the issues like the issue of gender, but also then talking about diversity, equality, inclusion, all of those kinds of issues are things that pop up-time and time again and that people seem to feel very strongly about. And all of this actually boils down to the recommendation systems on the social media sites, which ultimately are all about emotions. It's all about how people feel about stuff. And Donald Trump has a pretty good track record of figuring out how people feel about stuff and appealing to that and talking to it. So it came maybe as not that much of a surprise that those things popped up. People might remember that advert during the election campaign where they spoke about Kamala Harris and making fun of the issues of pronouns and saying she's out of touch with the people and I'm not. And it feels as though that's the route that Donald Trump is going down in terms of the, we disagree with this way of looking at the world and you should be able to say what you want to say and people shouldn't be telling you what's what, that thing.

And again, it plays out well online. How much that then actually counts towards other things that people care about, particularly in their day-to-day lives, like we've been talking about the economy, other issues they care about, immigration as well, is a different story. But it certainly captures the attention that I imagine Donald Trump I would be quite happy about.

It's interesting, Mariana, isn't it? Because we talked about Donald Trump's election victory here in terms of, he calls it a landslide victory. It was not a landslide victory, that's not true. It was a more impressive victory than last time. He did win the popular vote this time, but he won it by 1.5%, and fewer than 50% of Americans who voted actually voted for him. While I'm not trying to take away from his victory, clearly, he's done well and he's in the White House. Yet again, we come back to the same thing that is the theme so often in a metacast, isn't it? This is a country divided right down the middle, and we're going to see that for the next four years.

Yeah, and I think so much of it is about, like you say, it's not necessarily It's not necessarily that there was this huge avalanche of a victory, which there wasn't, even though Donald Trump pushes that idea a lot of the time. Instead, it feels like there's this culture shift or this mood change, perhaps. It's what I was talking about when you're seeing people with the makeup Make America Great Again Caps and people quite openly and happily supporting Donald Trump, maybe in a way that some of them wouldn't necessarily have been wandering around in DC doing before. I think some of that speaks to just the way that the campaign was run and who they managed to reach and how they managed to get these issues on the radar. We've seen football players doing Trump's dance to celebrate goals. We've seen that mainstreaming of a lot to do with him, almost like it's cool again. I think that is a little bit of what we're feeling, even though it's not, as you say, James, some overwhelming majority of support in the country for Donald Trump. In fact, it's very polarized and divided on all kinds of issues.

Right. I've got one more question. Victoria needs to go in a minute. I'm sorry, Victoria. No, it's fine. She got news night to present.

It's not on for three hours.

Well, nonetheless, very busy, big day. Chris, did you know you missed the start? Well, you missed the-I'm sorry, I did. Never mind. At the start, we all talked about what the headline was from this. For you, what's the headline? What's the big takeaway? What's your big thought, Chris? What's your big thought?

The sentence that struck me was Unifier and Peacemaker from what we heard from the President. The perspective from where I sit at Westminster is how on Earth does any government, and then in this context, this government in the UK, come to deal with someone as different a character and as different in his political radical instincts as Donald Trump is from Keir Starmer. It's not a wildly original thought. Of course it isn't, but it is ultimately the one that matters, I think, in terms of the UK and the forthcoming years. What relationship is built up between the two men? What relationship is built up between the two governments, and how does Keir Starmer deal with this new occupier of the White House whilst at the same time trying to reset the UK's relationship with its nearest members in Europe. That is going to be fascinating to see play out because the world has changed today, let's be clear, and therefore, how the UK deals with that world is going to have to change, and we're going to see that starting straight away.

Would another state visit help?

Yes, it would. I think it'll happen. Oh, do you? Yeah, I do. The question will be when that card is played. Is it played early or is it held on to for a little while? I think it's a near certainty that that will happen. It's a case when it happens. That's definitely a card in the British diplomatic pocket that will be wielded. Good point.

Very interesting. For me, I agree with Johnny. I thought the line an America that expands our territory was really extraordinary and an amazing potentially of what's to come. Certainly an interesting headline. Right. Have we missed anything? This is your last chance. Anyone got anything else to say?

Can I just ask a question? All those billionaires that now have the ear of Trump, does anybody Does anybody really think they are there, they care about the interests of the American people, or is it only about their own business interest?

You can be so cynical.

You don't have to answer it. I just want to put it out there.

It's what we call a rhetorical question. Thank you.

It's interesting, isn't it? Then how does the President square those alliances, at least for as long as they last, with those billionaires, with the central pitch of his election campaign, which was talking to people with less than a billion dollars rattling around in in the back pocket. So that's a fascinating dynamic, isn't it?

Also, to add to what to add to what Vic just said there, but so much of Elon Musk, for example, has built his entire platform on X around this issue of freedom of expression and concerns that the old owners of Twitter were, in his eyes, in bed with the government, were aligned with them, were censoring people. He's now close to the man who is President, so he's very much aligned with the government. How does that all unfold in terms of this anti-establishment perspective he feels he's taking, when now they are the establishment, effectively?

Yeah. And are people angry with the establishment politically, or are they angry with the capitalist establishment? I mean, there's too many questions. That's enough. Yeah. Enough historical questions. The one part. The end. We should have just stuck with yours. Right, everybody, thank you very much.