Peter Baker
speaker
291 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Jan
Peter Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The idea that the United States is behind them on this and that Russia ought not to try anything because it would not just be aggravating Europe, but aggravating the United States and taking a real chance there. And it's not clear that Trump wants to do that. He said, I don't really care too much about what the security says.
Situation is after I make peace, he trusts Vladimir Putin to keep the deal. Doesn't believe that there really needs to be any security guarantee because he thinks Putin can be trusted. Well, nobody in Ukraine thinks that and very few people in Europe think that.
Yeah, I think it's really one of the essential questions out of all this. Look, in the immediate aftermath of this meltdown in the Oval Office, he tried to smooth it over first with social media posts and later with an interview on Fox News and in other comments saying, you know, look, thank you, America. Thank you to the president.
And it was him, I think, trying to smooth it over in his own way. But he is a man of pride, too. He's a man struggling to save his country from an aggressor. And there's only so far he was willing to go. He said on Fox News, he didn't think he had anything to apologize for. He regretted it. He was sorry it happened, but he didn't think he had done anything wrong. And you're right.
Trump, if they put this back together, and it's possible that they do, Trump will want him to come back in a supplicant form. And Vladimir Zelensky is a lot of things, but he doesn't really have the flattery gene that some of these other foreign leaders use to suck up to Trump. It's just not his nature.
And we'll see whether or not he can do that, whether he should do that, whether that would be enough, even if he did. This is the new order right now. And the new order is, you know, if you are not deferential to Trump, he will punish you. So for Zelensky, the choice here basically is how far is he willing to defer? How far is he willing to flatter?
How far is he willing to subordinate himself on some level to Trump? And if he did do that, would it even work? Would it even get him what he really thinks he needs?
However way you look back on it, this is a day of history.
Well, we see in the Capitol, inside the Rotunda, this new power map of Washington. You see the outgoing president of the United States, Joe Biden, the outgoing vice president, Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, seated just a few feet away from the victors, from the new power. It felt like inches from the camera. Very close, probably uncomfortably so for both sides, right?
And behind the new president, behind Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are family members, as you would expect, members of their incoming cabinet, as you would expect, congressional leaders, and these billionaires. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And suddenly we see the new dynamics of power in Washington. It's a new crowd, and they're all deferring to him. Thank you very much, everybody.
Who could forget that? But in 2017, of course, at his first inauguration, Donald Trump delivers this speech that becomes...
you know, iconic, infamous, whatever word you want to use, describing an America that was very dystopian at the time, very grim, very dark, and unlike what most presidents do in their inaugural addresses, so much so that George W. Bush, who was sitting there, turns to Hillary Clinton and says, well, that was some weird shit.
He's describing an America in decline, an America that is weak on the international stage, whose economy is weak at home.
What was different in this inaugural address compared to eight years ago was how central he makes himself as the solution to all these problems.
He was a central character in this speech in a way we don't often necessarily hear by new presidents.
He talks about, in fact, the assassination attempt against him last summer.
And he says that God saved him to make America great again, which really takes that formulation, which he's played with over the months, even further than before. He is the savior now of the country.
But you wouldn't have heard it a lot in the rest of the speech, right? He didn't say anything nice about his outgoing predecessor, Joe Biden, even though that's the tradition when a new president comes in to at least thank you for your service. Didn't do that. Didn't talk about bipartisanship.
And he even said that he would reinstate military service members who were discharged for refusing to have a vaccine during the COVID pandemic, even pay them back pay.
This is my seventh presidential inauguration. And this is not the way inauguration speeches are supposed to go, right? They're supposed to be the lofty speech. They're supposed to be the large theme speech, broad strokes. And here he makes this more like a State of the Union address. And he outlines one idea, one proposal after another, many of them divisive.
Showing 141–160 of 291 · page 8 of 15
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