I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven ams. In just one year, Donald Trump has transformed America's government and its institutions. His actions and agenda reflect the far more involved in president in his second term, and the guardrails designed to keep a president in check from the courts to Congress are buckling. Trump's success and reshaping the system raises deeper questions about exactly what kind of country the
United States will become. Today. Director of the Australian Institutes International and Security Affairs Program, Doctor Emma shortis on how Trump is remaking American politics and whether there is any way back from here. It's Friday, January second. We're almost a year into Donald Trump's second term. When you look at the United States, now, what strikes you most about how he's actually governing?
I think the most striking thing, Daniel, is that Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do. You know, he in Project twenty twenty five gave us all the plans, They wrote it all down.
And set it out loud, and now they're doing it, you know.
And I think the best description of how they're doing it is to move fast and break things.
Since he's swearing in, Trump has been pursuing plans laid out in Project twenty twenty five to dramatically expand presidential power and reduce the size of the federal.
Trump Administration's been getting mass layoffs of federal workers, impacting multiple agency.
Big tremendous saving. We want to downsize government, but make it better.
And Donald Trump's administration is dismantling the US Agency for International Development or USA.
Administration is stepping up its pushed to break up the Department of Education, transferring much of the agency's workload, including six offices.
So I think for me that's the most striking thing.
But I guess perhaps the most prizing thing about that is how quickly that has happened. I think that has taken a lot of people, including myself, by surprise. Just how I guess easily Trump has been able to implement that agenda, and how easily the guardrails have fallen.
Tell me more about the idea of guardrails giving away. Where have you sent examples of the system changing to accommodate Trump rather than restraining him.
We're seeing them fall just across the board.
The demolition of the White House, or the East wing of the White House, I think is a small example of how that is happening.
Nobody's actually seen anything quite like it. I think it'll be one of the great borums anywhere in the world. It's about three hundred million dollars.
So the Trump administration has engaged in that demolition against all legal, normative, congressional political processes.
Trust for Historic Preservation has filed a lawsuit to stop in Trump's White House ballroom construction. The group says, no president.
And there's apparently no way to resist that. You know, by the time legal proceedings are initiated, it's already been destroyed.
And again that's a.
Small but important symbol of how that's happening across the board, and how Trump is being aided by a legal system, including the Supreme Court, which he effectively owns and which continually is helping him to destroy those guardrails by saying effectively that he has a king like immunity.
The US Supreme Court has rule that Donald Trump has some immunity from prosecution for official actions taken while he was in the White House.
By basically being on the verge of gutting the Voting Rights Act, which it's expected they will do.
So the broad picture there is pretty grim. Really, Can you.
Just tell us a little bit more about the Voting Rights Act? What is it that he's planning to do there.
So, this is a case from Louisiana that aims to completely gut the parts of the Voting Rights Act that ensure that discrimination doesn't occur on the basis of race. And this is again has been a long term project of the conservative movement, aided and are vetted by Trump, and key justices on the Supreme Court are already signaling that they are at least amenable to making that decision.
So for the Voting Rights Act, that will mean that that key piece of legislation, civil rights movement legislation will be effectively rendered powerless. And I think we have to see that alongside the Trump administration's other attacks against voting rights, you know, his threat to gut mail in voting as well, the redistricting of states like Texas. All of that, again, at risk of my repeating myself, paints a pretty grim picture for the future of American democracy.
And let's talk about it immigration, because that's central to Donald Trump's agenda. He's promised to deport millions of people. What has he actually done. Do we have an idea of what sort of numbers we're talking about.
We do have an idea of numbers, although it is difficult to get credible information from the agencies that are enforcing these policies. You know, certainly Trump the Trump administration hasn't fulfilled its promise to deport ten million people. The numbers we have suggest ICE is deporting somewhere between ten to fifteen thousand people a month, so not near those numbers. But it also has around, as far as we know, sixty thousand people in arbitrary detention, and is disappearing people
and deporting people arbitrarily without recourse to due process. I think we can't underestimate the damage that that is inflicting, not just on individual lives, but on American society more broadly.
I mean, with that lack of process, is they're a feeling in America that if it can happen to immigrants, it can happen to US citizens as well. If there is no process, well.
I mean it is happening to American citizens.
You know, the agents on the ground who are enforcing these policies have already arbitrarily detained American citizens, and I think that is reflected or that general sense of fear and discussed at what the administration is doing is reflected
in opinion polling that we have. So a recent Gallup poll suggests that somewhere around thirty five percent of Americans approve of the Trump administration's immigration policies, so a pretty low number, very high net disapproval rating, and we can see that in opinion polling, not just in the United States, but outside it as well.
Coming up, what does Donald trump ree making of us democracy mean for future elections?
When you look at the costs of groceries, the costs of bacon went up four and five times bacon.
I don't order bacon anymore. It's still expensive, Emma. There is one big promise that Donald Trump hasn't lived on, and that's affordability. He was elected on the platform of making life cheaper.
One of my top priorities will be to quickly defeat inflation and make America affordable again.
We will quickly defeat him.
So do you think that failure is going to hurt him as well?
It's a really difficult question to answer.
I think because Trump is so extraordinarily good at reframing narratives and a redirecting blame. So it's been really interesting to see a lot of the coverage of a rally that Trump held in Pennsylvania, which was supposed to be, or was billed as the affordability Rally where Trump would address these concerns and public opinion shifting against him when it comes to affordability because exactly as you said, you know, he hasn't fulfilled those promises.
Down rapidly, lower prices, bigger paychecks. You're getting lower prices.
And you know, Trump did talk a bit about affordability. He called it a hoax. He called it all hoax.
Unsurprisingly, you're coming down very substantially.
But they have a new word.
You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.
And spent most of the time in an appallingly, even for Trump, an appallingly racist tirade against as he describes them, shit whole country where.
Prisons are emptied into our country, right where where people from all over the world being dumped into our country, the people that aren't wanted in their countries. By the way, I think that's a great like Somalia, welcome, and.
A lot of a lot of the coverage of that rally describes Trump as you know, being unable to stay on message when it comes to affordability or being distracted, And I don't think that's necessarily what's going on. I think what Trump is doing is what he always does, which is redirecting blain to others. And I think that was a very effective example of how Trump does that, and how so much coverage is still unable to grapple
with how effectively he does that. So affordability, of course, is a huge issue for Americans, and the Trump administration is actively making the problem worse through tariffs, through the failure or the refusal, I should say, to renew those tax credits that made health insurance more affordable for people. You know, Americans are looking at enormous increases in their monthly health insurance cost on top of the cost of
living crisis. So Americans are deeply economically insecure. But what the political consequences of that are and whether it comes back to bite Trump, I think is far from settled.
Looking ahead, we've got the midterms in November of next year. In a normal cycle, with this level of discontent, you'd expect the president's party to take a political hit. Is that what we're looking at you?
I don't think so. I mean, you use the word normal.
This is not normal, and we can't treat it like it's normal. You're absolutely right that in a normal political cycle, we would expect Republicans to be absolutely wiped out at the midterms. You know, we would expect to see a blue wave and for Republicans to lose control of the House. And now look that may still happen. There was an election in Miami where a Democrat won comprehensively for the
first time in something like thirty years. Miami is now run by a Democrat, and that's an indication, I think of how things are going nationally. I think we saw that in the latest round of elections, where of course
famously Mamdani was elected as Mayor of New York. But having said that, Republicans are reading the writing on the wall, and Trump is reading the writing on the wall, and they are engaged in very effective efforts to engineer American democratic institutions and processes so that they can hold onto power. You know, they're gerrymandering in states like Texas, they likely will in states like Louisiana. They are not the slightest
bit interested in giving up power. They want to keep the power to decide who is American and who gets to have a say in what America is.
And so do the Democrats have any kind of counter strategy that matches the scale of what's happening.
No, in a word, they don't.
I mean, there are signs of it, absolutely, you know, I mentioned New York earlier, I mentioned Miami Democrats one comprehensively in a series of elections not that long ago. But there is not a broader strategy I think to oppose Trump. The Democratic Party is still engaged in a war with itself about not only you know, how to
oppose Trump, but what it even stands for. And I think we could see that in the results in New York, where you know, the progressive wing of the party mobilized a base, won a comprehensive victory and was met with you know, indifference and sometimes discussed by the leadership of the party. Senator Chuck Schumer couldn't even bring himself to say that he had or hadn't voted for Mamdani. And in the face of such an onslaught against American democracy
from Republicans and the Trump administration. That is I think an egregious failure on the part of democrats.
If we take a look beyond just the United States, where do you see Trump's influence most clearly on the world stage.
I think I would start by saying that we can't draw arbitrary lines between domestic US domestic politics and what the United States does abroad. You know, what the United States does abroad is a projection of domestic politics, and it always has been. Trump, I think, just makes that
more obvious. And so the influence is everywhere, but most of you at the moment, of course, it's happening in Venezuela, where the United States is engaged in effectively a war against the Maduro regime, where it is throwing out all the rules of conflict and the international rule of law and behaving really like a rogue state. And that is I think going to extreme lengths in Venezuela. But we're
also seeing it in other areas. The Trump administration has just released a new national security strategy where it effectively commits to interfering in the domestic democratic politics of European nations to its own ends, where it's effectively said it will support the far right in Europe in order to quote unquote rescue Western democracy. And really what that is, what that national security strategy is, is a foreign policy of white supremacy. That's I think how we have to
understand it. And so the Trump administration is quite openly seeking to spread its influence and its power across the world, with a particular focus on the Western hemisphere and places like Venezuela, but it isn't limited to that.
So these changes that Donald Trump is making to the way politics works in the United States, is there any coming back from that?
I think my first question, I suppose, in response to that is back to what, you know, what could the United States want to go back to?
You know, what?
Meaning can we make out of American history? I think there's a way out. There are multiple ways out, and certainly if you look at American history, the United States does have an extraordinary ability to reinvent and revitalize itself out of crisis, and it is in a deep crisis now. So where it goes from here, I think he's almost anyone's guess. You know, American politics is continually surprising in
that sense, but in a way. I think where it goes from here is really dependent on how effective Donald Trump in his administration is in its project to radically reshape the United States an American society and in those decisions about who gets to be American. And at the moment they seem to be implementing that radical agenda with very little resistance. That may change, but at the moment it's not clear where that resistance will come from and how united it could be.
Emer It's always great to speak with you. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.
It's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Tomorrow on the show, we're tracing the origins of the eye that gave us the tech industry as we know it today. Back in the nineties, a small group of men in Silicon Valley imagined a world without governments or rules, a world run by code. They wanted technology to replace politics all together. Now their dreams have come true, beyond their wildest imaginations, and we're all living with the consequences. Tomorrow, how democracy is being reshaped by the tech world's most
dangerous philosophy. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. See you tomorrow.