Gilda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Donald Trump has made it through his one hundred days back in office and people are not thrilled with his performance. His approval ratings at the one hundred day mark are the lowest in seventy years, with only a forty four percent approval for a man who won the popular vote
only seven months ago. It comes as his tenure has so far been dominated by tariffs and trade wars, cutting public services, gender mass deportations, and hitting out at his enemies. And the Trump bump has even taken on a new meaning, with Canada and Australia's left leaning political parties reversing polls from the start of the year to stay in government. But with roughly fourteen hundred days left in his presidency,
what does the future for Trump two point zero? We're working through that today on the Front Page with University of Otago professor of International Relations Robert Patman. Robert, how would you rate Donald Trump's performance as US presidents so far?
Well, I think even from the point of view supporters, it's been a rocky ride. It's been chaotic and shambolic, And that's not really surprising given the fact that mister Trump has put so much emphasis with his senior appointments on loyalty rather than competence. So what we've witnessed is a very ambitious agenda, both domestically in the United States and internationally. But there is a suspicion that the implementation of that agenda is in hands which are not particularly steady.
Yeah, there have just been so many fit things that have happened in just one hundred days. Most notably has been the cuts to the public service and the me of course, so let's focus on Doge first. This desire to save billions by cutting services seems to have riled up the public a lot more than probably anticipated. There's been multiple reports of constituents confronting leaders at public meetings,
reports of infighting between Trump's cabinet and Elon Musk. Is it a surprise that this has proved so toxic with the public.
There, No, not really, because partly because there's a perception that some of the people like Elon Musk and his team of youngish software engineers who are overseeing as sort of taking a chainsaw to the public service. They're not particularly competent or experienced in the running of governance. Mister musk background is not in that area. Also, there is mounting indignation that mister Musk seems to be cutting everything except his own government contracts, which are extremely big with
the government. So he is a contractor of the government. But there is a complict of interest here, and I think that's causing some concern. But yes, over one hundred and twenty thousand federal workers have been fired. We've seen important fassets of American soft power, like us AID, which is responsible for dispensing America's development aid around that that's been disestablished. With the loss of ten thousand jobs. That's going to have a long term effect on how the
world perceives America to some degree. First of all, there is a sense that the expectation of DOGE it's been working for three months. They claim they initially claimed they'd saved two trillion. They then downlaid that claim to one trillion, and now it's down to one hundred and fifty billion. So I think they found all the waste and fraud
that they claim. There has been very little evidence produced to back up claims that they have discovered such waste and fraud, and it's not very impressive making claims and not be aund to back them up. So I think that's contributed to a sense of uneasy. You know, people are losing their jobs and that is a concern.
The economy has also been a big issue. Trump was voted in with a promise to lower the price of groceries. Instead is actually making everything more expensive while also tanking the economy. So why did he even choose to do this in the first place.
Well, that's a very good question. Mister Trump and his supporters seem to have got it in their heads that the American economy was in an appalling state, when in fact it was the best economy in the world by every objective or impartial economic measure. So he inherited a very strong economy, but he now seems to be in the process of undermining that. And of course some economies are warning that America could be entering a recession, its
economy could be going to recession. You only have to look at the stock market to see its cumulative hemorrhaging to realize the scale of how America's gone in the wrong direction economically, and that is you know, more than eleven trillion has been lost from the US stock market since mister Trump came to power. In general, yes, it's rallying a bit now, but it's lost the you know, it's lost a lot of ground, and the overall trend
has been downwards. So it's having good and bad days, but the bad days tend to out and number the good ones.
When does it become the Trump economy?
It partially is right now, and I really mean this. I think the good parts of the Trump economy and the bad parts of the Baden economy because he's done a terrible job. He did a terrible job on everything.
But sir, you acknowledge when you announced your tariffs, for example, the stock market dropped, it's been volatile. It has since gone up. Do you take responsibility that?
Yeah?
Do you take responsibility?
Ultimately? I take responsibility for everything. But I've only just been here for a little more than three months. Yeah.
Well, a lot of people who did support Trump seem to have turned on him over his handling of the economy. I've seen lots of commentary online from people saying that they didn't vote for this from Trump. They voted for him because they wanted to shake up the establishment. They wanted inflation to come down, they wanted immigration under control. But has he betrayed voters or is this kind of what we have come to expect from him.
No, I think mister Trump, there were some things which he have you pulled out of a hat, so to speak. He's threat to annex Canada and also Greenland, as well as takeover Gaza. As far as I can see, there was nothing in his campaign that suggested he might do that, although he made threatening noises immediately after he was elected with respect to Canada. But on the other matters, Doge was certainly something that Musk and mister Trump had agreed even before the election. Musk was a key player for
mister Trump's election victory. He pumped in about two hundred and seventy seven million dollars into supporting Trump, and of course was rewarded with a very good job. But this is very much a government by billionaires. I mean, thirteen heads of government agencies are now billionaires, and that's prompted people on the left of the political spectrum, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez known as AOC. They've been
launching a nationwide anti oligarchy campaign. With respect to the question you asked, I think mister Trump indicated he was always going for tariffs, so that was no surprise. He often said, it's a beautiful thing, tariffs. There's two things that have troubled mister Trump for a long time. The first of all the perception that Americans being ripped off. All I can say, if America's being ripped off, the
people respond deemed to be responsible for that. The rest of the world have done a remarkably competent job, because America, by the time mister Trump came to power, remained head and shoulders the most powerful country in the world. And the second thing was tariff's He believed that tariffs could correct the situation, and I think many of his voters did not seem to realize that tariffs are actually internal
tax on American consumers. And there was a very interesting development where Amazon attempted to point out to their consumers the actual price of the tariffs that the American government has imposed on certain products coming from overseas, and that met from a very angry response from mister Trump and his press spokesperson Caroline leave It And as a result of that pressure, Amazon removed the explanation to their consumers in detailing the actual costs of the tariffs being imposed.
So it is a sensitive issue. But yeah, I mean, I think many people took at face value his claimed that he could reduce costs, while in the next breath he was saying, I'll be adding some tariffs as well. They probably didn't make the connection between the imposition of tariffs and the increase in their cost of doing.
It's funny that you bring up Amazon, actually, because I was going to as well. I know that there's some talk about Elon Musk not being particularly happy with how things are going. And now when I saw Amazon in the headlines, I thought, oh, Jeff Bezos was in what the front row of the inauguration as well. Do you think that he will continue to have the support from the likes of Musk and Jeff Bezos or will that linger for the next few years.
It's difficult to predict. But what we do know in the first three months, those high tech bros, people like Bezos, Musk, Suckerberg from Facebook all strong supporters of Trump going for the White House. They have been all of them have been quite hit quite hard by the losses on the stock exchange. It's been high tech companies that have borne the brunt of that. Give you an example, when mister
Trump introduced his tariffs on the second of April. Within the next two days, there were six trillion in losses in the stock exchange for trially of those affected high tech digital companies. That may be part of the reason why Musk is unhappy. I suspect also he's unhappy about what's happening to Tesla, one of the five companies under
his control, which has gone through. I mean it's external sales, particularly in Europe, have collapsed, and people have been very angry about what Musk has been saying about many countries, including Germany. People do have real clout and they can exercise it by simply stopping buying products, which they have done in some cases. But yes, it's going to be interesting to see how this sort of constellation of high tech leaders in very big businesses whether they are going
to stick with mister Trump through thick and thin. I suspect some may peel off, but others may believe on balance, the advantage is to be in a position where they can influence the White House or at least have a channel of communication. But yes, there's a lot of unknowns at this stage, Chelsea. We're only three months in the administration, or one hundred days or so, and so you know, a lot could happen in the next three months.
Just after the one hundred day mark, there was the first administration official shakeup, with Mike Waltz losing his post as National Secretary Advisor in the wake of that signal chat leak and other scandals. Are you surprised it took so long after that scandal broke for a head to roll over this.
Yeah.
I think the circumstances relating to his remove. Obviously the signal gate episode did not help, but he is perhaps one of the more combatant and experienced people working in the national security field. Mister Trump, as one insiders said, likes his officials to act as staff rather than principles. There is a bit of a sus that mister Waltz, who came to the job with some i say solid credentials in the national security area, had quite distinct views.
He was a hard liner on Russia, so he disagreed with the administration's softly, softly approached towards Vladimir Putin, and also he had views on other foreign policy questions. So he apparently was the subject of considerable pushback from other members of the administration, and that was why he was effectively demoted and given the job of US Ambassador to the UN, which is a high profile job, but clearly that was not what he was appointed for. So yes,
he's one of the first casualties. I think the first of many. I think some people, I mean a lot of people are speculating how long can the sectory of defense last? Pete Hegseth. He was also involved in a second signal chat, which again contravene government regulations about classified communication. I don't think Waltz will be the end of it. Mister Trump has always had a bit of an uncomfortable
relationship with his national security advisors. In his first administration, he got through about three or four, and there is a you know, mister Trump, I think is uncomfortable with independent people around him who challenge him. Of course, you need that for good decision making, and that's why one is feeling slightly uneasy that if mister Trump continues to surround himself with cronies or echoes, then we're going to have some disastrous decisions made.
And remember this, this is Baiden's word. This was a war that was never going to happen if our president. This is a horrible, horrible war. And I get to see shots of soldiers through you know satellite that are so just so terrible. Five thousand soldiers a week on average are dying. They're not American soldiers. But I want to solve the problem Russian soldiers and the Ukrainian soldiers. And if I can save five thousand souls, I just love doing it.
How long do you give both countries before you're going to walk away?
Well, there'll be a time when I will say, Okay, keep going, keep being stupid.
Well, of course, the other big thing with the US at the moment is how it is handling international relations. Hey, notably, there's been a lot of back and forth on Ukraine and Russia. You know, one minute he's berating Voladimir Zelensky in the Oval Office, the next is criticizing Putin for holding up peace talks. I mean, how destabilizing is this kind of flip flopping and lack of clarity.
It is destabilizing, but it's actually showing the administration to be very weak, and that is the danger for not just the United States, but for countries like New Zealand. The Ukraine conflict, the outcome of that conflict is crucial. It has big implications for the Indo Pacific. Two of the biggest backers of Russia's invasion of Ukraine are China and India. And quite frankly, here we have the most powerful country in the world led by the Trump. Mister Trump,
who sees himself as a strong leader. And what does he do. He coses up to the aggressor that has he legally invaded a liberal democracy and sides with the aggressor against the victim of aggression. Through Chinese non sentimental eyes. That looks like weakness. Yes, he has added, belatedly some criticisms of mister Putin, but the peace settlement deal that he's pushing is basically solving all of mister Putin's problems, and it's based almost it could have been written in
the Kremlin. There does seem to be some reconsideration going on now by mister Trump. He has signed a minerals deal with Selensky's government, and that has, as you indicated, quite rightly, been some disgruntlement picked up on true social mister Trump's media channel of Putin. But I think it's been a very bad start, and he's also split relations between Europe and the United States. And really you could say this about his tariffs as well. But I think
his foreign policy has at times been incoherent. He you know, the official rationale for coosing up to mister Putin's dictatorship is that the United States, what's the form a geopolitical partnership with Putin or something like that. According to mister Rubio, the sector of state in order to peel Russia off
from China. I think that's unrealistic. But putting that to one side, China will see mister Trump's behavior as possibly well almost certainly as weakness, and that will encourage them to become more assertive in our neck of the woods, in the Indo Pacific and possibly in the Pacific Island Nations region. And certainly it could be expected to up the pressure on countries like Taiwan. So that is worrying ineffectively what mister Trump is not, you know, you're quite
right use the term destabilizing. He's upended eighty years of American foreign policy, he's effectively he's dismantling what's called the rules based international order, which most liberal democracies, including our own, depend on rules are there for the week, not for the strong. But mister Trump's vision of international relations is
very different from New Zealand's. He sees the world in top down terms, a world that's run by great powers, with America the greatest power of all, sitting at the top table and negotiating deals with the likes of Putin and China. As for the middle powers and the small powers, well, they will have to go and negotiate bilateral deals with the United States and basically get what they're accept what they're offered. So this is a radical break from the past.
It's the most biggest change in the American foreign policy since nineteen forty six forty seven. And I think New Zealand will have to speak out at some point because what America is doing in its foreign policy is actually directly undermining our national interests. New Zealand, like many small and middle powers, needs rules. It needs institutions because they provide, if you like, a level playing field for small countries
to operate in. And mister Trump seems to be determined to dispense with that, and you know, it does have real consequences for US. We trade with one hundred countries around the world, and I think there's now pressure on our government and other governments to bypass the United States and to protect their interest by upholding the free trade system, the rules based trade system, which many countries believe in, including China as well as the EU as well as
many other countries. So, you know, I think we are witnessing not just destabilization, but perhaps a sort of fork in the road moment where America is parting company with many of its traditional allies and we're seeing an international realignment as a result.
Thanks for joining us, Robert.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.