Transcript: What will Donald Trump's second term in office look like?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

88% : Even so, the scale of the victory was pretty stunning, with Trump winning every one of the seven swing states.
64% : So in the case of the generals who turned on Trump, that would be the extraordinary sanction that he would be looking to pursue.
60% : And one of the more extraordinary moments towards the end when he said, oh Trump's told me I'm gonna be in charge of healthcare policy.
59% : It isn't worried by that side of Trump, and some of it wants it.
59% : So Trump is capable of being very malleable on China.
57% : I think arguably, I mean, as Susan has reported brilliantly, I think arguably he's been his biggest donor because I'd say he gave $44bn in kind to Trump.
55% : Trump will be a drill-baby-drill president.
54% : So what do you think, Ed, that Trump might deliver in a positive way or you know that his supporters will be looking for?
54% : This is literally the template for Musk's role in a Trump administration, that, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal this summer was discussed at a meeting that Trump was present at, that Musk was present at, that Perlmutter was present at.
51% : And what we heard very powerfully from them is that a second-term Trump would be far more reckless, radical, unconstrained and very focused on transforming the apparatus of the US federal government, both into an instrument of his personal and political loyalty, and also to carry out an agenda in a way that the first-term Trump was simply unequipped to do.
50% : A year ago, when Ed, Susan and I last recorded an episode of this podcast in November 2023, it was headlined "Trump closes in on a second term in office".
50% : I think that's why many foreign leaders, including many of America's adversaries, have concluded that Trump is highly manipulable.
49% : Well, I think it's also a standout aspect of this Trump election, even compared with the previous two, is the extent to which it represents almost a fusion between Trump and a small handful of the country's wealthiest men, in particular, Musk, the world's richest man.
49% : Gideon RachmanDo you think Trump's capable of doing the same thing, or do you think the oligarchs will get the better of him?Susan GlasserTrump is a very different character, as we know, than Putin.
48% : And Trump has promised, now repeatedly, Elon Musk the role as cost-cutter-in-chief.
48% : Even as we're talking, RFK Jr has given a couple of interviews just in the hours since Trump won the election in which he has confirmed that he says that he spent two days with Donald Trump over the last week, that Trump really has asked him to be something like a tsar over all health policy and health bureaucracies.
46% : And I would not be surprised, given that the deepest through line in Trump throughout his life has not been all these sort of protectionist instincts, although they're very distinct and clear and it's not been his sort of iconoclastic sort of view of political correctness, which has been there through his life, to put it very politely.
45% : One of the big stories is likely to be the further age-related diminution of Trump.
43% : And he was very clear that their takeaway from Trump I was that we had not managed to get a staff of loyalists who would do what we want and that that would be paramount going to Trump II.
43% : Gideon RachmanBut, Susan, I mean, you've actually written quite a lot about the billionaires behind Trump.
41% : So I began our conversation by asking Ed Luce if America now clearly wants what Trump is selling.
41% : And that was the point in the New Yorker piece on Trump and the billionaires that Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, revealed to me that this is something really even materially different from, say, the age of the robber barons that we saw a century ago in the Gilded Age.
39% : He shocked people right in the immediate run-up to the election by saying he plans to order the government to take the fluoride out of America's water as soon as Trump comes into office.
35% : But I think that the Trump derangement syndrome, which is that people sort of get radicalised in really odd ways that are actually quite useful to Trump is a danger now as it was in his first term.
34% : Bill Barr, an extreme rightwing conservative, had a real ideological agenda, you know, was a key part of wanting to transform and move America's judicial system far, far to the right, came in to serve Trump willingly, broke with him as so many people have, including very ideologically conservative people.
33% : And I think, as we saw with his U-turn on TikTok, because the guy who owns a large chunk of ByteDance started giving him money, Trump went from saying it should be banned to saying TikTok's the best thing since sliced bread, or something to that effect.
31% : Gideon RachmanMass deportation of what, 11mn?Edward LuceWell, Trump mentioned numbers of up to 25mn.
29% : I mean, maybe one shouldn't speculate, but Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is somebody that I think Trump has said should be put on trial for treason.
28% : You know, the testimony against Trump has always been coming from inside the room.
28% : Trump is a sort of pretty flippant, capricious figure on China.
21% : The person who used the word fascist about Trump during this campaign was not a campus radical.
21% : The failure to take Trump sufficiently seriously these last few years, we all, I think, can understand now was a terrible mistake on the part of his Democratic opponents.
20% : Well, I think Trump has explicitly articulated it as revenge.
20% : And also, Trump has often sort of slagged off EVs as woke nonsense
11% : But the hope is -- and we've been talking about this, RFK, you know, ruining your teeth in your own inoculations or Elon Musk gutting the federal state -- the hope is that Trump totally overreaches.
5% : Trump was demanding that Barr open investigations and prosecute Joe Biden in the fall of 2020.

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