Jonathan Swan

speaker

222 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Jonathan Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 198. How Trump’s Imperial Presidency Really Works · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

US being a sort of regional power.

The interesting thing about the whole Trump era, this Trump era, is he talks in such grand terms, you know, wants to be Alexander the Great.

It's actually a fundamentally small vision, really.

The US has sort of given up this position as the leader of the free world, you know, NATO, whatever, to be essentially a regional power, controlling the Western Hemisphere, menacing

you know, Venezuela as the 51st state and Cuba and what have you, bringing the Navy back in.

It's just, it's very interesting.

And then, you know, we have a scene in the book of Trump holding up a little teaspoon to represent Taiwan, basically saying, who gives a fuck about Taiwan?

Despite not formally changing US policy there, he's made very clear that he's quite comfortable with the concept of China being

controlling its sphere of influence, and to some extent, Russia as well.

So I think we lay that out in the book.

We just don't have original, unique reporting, I think, that will deepen people like your understanding.

I was going to say, can you even imagine Colin Powell goes to the UN?

Can you even imagine?

It's such a preposterous notion that they would feel the need to justify something in front of the United Nations.

I found that fascinating.

What's interesting actually is the postscript to that, which comes after our book is closed, which is they're now in the process of reversing.

They're now like, oh crap, mythos is kind of dangerous and maybe actually we need to regulate this thing.

It speaks to what I was talking about to you before.

If you're dealing with Trump, there are no permanent victories.

you can have short-term success until the next compelling... Like, he's not a long-range thinker.

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