Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Laura Pitel, Alex Hobson and Danny Postel
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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Are we misunderstanding the optics and ideas behind how U.S. President Donald Trump and his team operate? New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai sets out to test that question on this episode of The Lede.
Considering first the optics surrounding the president, Al Yafai brings historian Alex Hobson on to the podcast to discuss his widely read New Lines essay, “The Humiliation Is the Point.” Reflecting on Trump’s recent White House spat with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, Hobson suggests, “That’s part of the Trump style. The personal grievances are completely linked together with larger national interest and grand strategy concerns.”
“There’s an expression of emotional sovereignty and power that Trump embodies himself.”
Emotion, Hobson elaborates, is key to the way Trump does business. “There’s an expression of emotional sovereignty and power that Trump embodies himself. He sees his ability to feel strong and powerful as inseparable from the United States as an autonomous and powerful nation.”
Much of this comes down to Trump’s background in reality television. “His comfort zone is there,” says Hobson. “He claimed that he let it go on because this was salutary for the audience to see this on live television. I think this is how he imagines the exercise of power in its most condensed form. You express it through these performative moments.”
As to how Trump’s policies are received by other policymakers, Financial Times correspondent Laura Pitel offers the view from Berlin. “I think at the beginning there was a wait and see [attitude],” Pitel says. “Now that it’s happening, people are responding very, very fast.”
That means major strategy and policy changes from Europe’s top politicians, Pitel suggests, with Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor-to-be, offering “some very strong comments about how Germany and Europe need to make itself independent from the U.S., which is language that is pretty out there for somebody who deeply values the U.S.-Germany and U.S.-Europe relationship.”
As a result, Germans are having to completely redefine their attitudes to defense and security, Pitel says. “There’s been a fundamental breach in the trust,” she says. “For decades their whole security architecture was built on the idea that it was backed up by the U.S.” With Germany now worried that Washington might withdraw its nuclear deterrent, many are thinking, “maybe Germany has to take the next step and get its own nukes, which would again be another huge reversal of the entire postwar European order.”
Considering the conflicting ideologies among the senior figures in the Trump administration, New Lines’ Politics Editor Danny Postel notes that Trump himself “likes the aesthetics and the personality of the ‘strongman.’ He identifies with strongmen who don’t have to worry about messy things like civil liberties and elections and things like that. With [Vice President JD] Vance, it goes much, much deeper. There’s a whole history of pro-Putin sentiment among the currents of right-wing ideology that Vance identifies with.”
Postel also highlights the economic contradictions at the heart of Trump’s movements. Considering Trump ally Elon Musk’s drive to cut federal spending, “This appeals to traditional business class, country club Republicans,” Postel says. However, Postel draws attention to the criticism this drive received from former Trump ally Steve Bannon. “There’s a lot of MAGA on Medicaid,” Postel notes. “They’re going after veterans’ benefits. These are a lot of Trump’s constituents. A lot of these people voted for Trump. And Elon Musk is taking a chainsaw to their benefits.”