Gary O'Donoghue
speaker
1,144 appearances
20 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 7 Sep
Gary O'Donoghue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
I mean, he promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one. That hasn't happened, obviously. He believes there has to be a negotiated settlement, as I think most people do. What that looks like and how it's brought about, we're not yet clear on. And he's not yet made it clear how he plans to do that. His oil obsession is interesting, I think, because
Wanting to bring the price of oil down and putting pressure on OPEC, it's difficult to see how that would influence the outcome in Ukraine. But what it would definitely do is make drilling in the U.S. in certain places less viable. He wants people to drill, baby, drill.
Well, if the oil price is cheaper, then it becomes less economic to do it in difficult places in West Texas or Alaska or wherever. So I'm not quite sure whether he's thought that one absolutely through. But the question of ending the war in Ukraine is we still just don't know what his plan is on that.
The one thing about the EU is also worth bearing in mind is the EU is a market of 450 million people. It's a big old market. It's not going to be as easy as he would like to push Europe around as it was to push Colombia around. And so I'm sure they will come to some accommodation because American companies do want access to 450 million people with pretty high average incomes.
Well, he could end up being someone living in the 51st state, couldn't he, of America if he moves to Canada, according to Donald Trump anyway.
Says the Irish woman.
Well, Panama is the other option, of course.
I mean, I don't think there's much evidence that there was a lot of switches in this election. I mean, it's one of these bizarre things about American elections that the sort of voting demographics, you have to wait for ages to see the real detail, the real analysis done of those. We'll get a much more clearer idea of that in sort of April and May of this year.
But no, I think, you know, it wasn't the turnout of 2020, but it was still a very high turnout. So I think he was turning out people that probably didn't vote. It turned out more younger people who started to vote for him more, although not his majority, as we've mentioned already. So I don't think a lot of Democrats deserted, you know, went over in that sense.
But he just managed to turn out more.
I mean there is evidence that people like strong leadership and that even they – some surveys have shown quite a strong support in various places for things that verge on the autocratic because they think stuff gets done. The problem with it, of course, is that people love autocracy until it knocks on their front door.
And they like to see it being done to other people, particularly people they think have been overly favored previously. But it doesn't generally stop there. So not for me to say what kind of – I think your question was from South Africa. Yeah, fine. I wouldn't presume to say what kind of government they should have or any other country should have.
But I think the idea that strongman government is the future – I mean Africa suffered from the big man leader type post-independence in all sorts of places and stuff ended up being very corrupt and people got a lot poorer. infrastructure wasn't built. So strongman leadership doesn't always work.
Your question also mentioned populism and I suppose one's got to be careful because you might say what's wrong with populism? Isn't that the way it should be? But I think what the accusation is against Donald Trump and other populists is that
There isn't an empathy with the grievances that propel them to power but there's an exploitation of those grievances that they are used as a means to pursue the leader's agenda. So I think that's something that we'll have to watch. You know, certainly the president is trying to reshape not just the federal government. He's trying to reshape society.
He's trying to make huge changes in American life. And he seems to have four years to do that. He did raise the possibility at the weekend that he might have longer. But constitutionally, he has four years to do that. That's not very long. But it is a huge ambition. He doesn't necessarily have to worry about the voters now. He did.
He's got a Congress that's on his side, just about, by a very narrow margin in the House, certainly, for the next two years. And so he has, in many ways, all the tools at his disposal with the experience of his first term and a lot of people who have learned a lot from that first term to get things done in a much more efficient way than the chaos we saw in his first term.
Thanks, Oliver.
It's going to be very frigid on Monday. We're expecting temperatures of minus six Celsius and with the wind chill could be even minus 12 or beyond. So that is really very cold. And of course, these things go on for a long time. There's a lot of standing around, a lot of people standing around and there could be easily some sort of medical situation. So it's not the first time it's ever happened.
It did happen back in 85 in London. for Ronald Reagan's second inaugural. So it does happen occasionally and that's one of the facts of life of January in Washington.
Showing 1121–1140 of 1,144 · page 57 of 58
← Previous
Next →