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
It felt very different than a normal inaugural.
Rather than pulling back, it's about America expanding in a way, not in a new war in the Middle East, not Iraq, Afghanistan kind of way, but in a territorial way, a very 19th century way of looking at the world.
He did talk about the Panama Canal, which is an issue that nobody had been thinking about for 40-some years. And he said it was a mistake to give it away. And we're taking it back. And we're taking it back. Not just we're going to renegotiate this or that. We're taking it back. Right.
Well, that's right. He hasn't ruled it out. And the other one, of course, was saying he had signed or was signing a proclamation.
Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which again is a very nationalist thing to do. And you're forgetting something, Peter.
And there in the back row was Elon Musk pumping his fists in the air and giving thumbs up. He loves that, of course, because SpaceX is his company and he was always talking about going to Mars. Right.
and what it means. Well, it's an aggressive speech, right? And it presages an aggressive term. This is not a president coming into office for the first time having never spent a day in public office with the military. Remember, in 2017, he was the only president. Who is that inexperienced? And he didn't know what he was doing by his own later admission. Right. This time he knows what he's doing.
He's not going to let, you know, mealy-mouthed establishment Republicans or military officers, any of these lawyers or any of these other people tell him no. He's not going to let them tell him, sorry, that's illegal. Sorry, that's unconstitutional. Sorry, that's unwise. No way he's going to listen to that anymore.
They're all intertwined in there, right? He says, I have been tested over these last eight years and I've learned, right? What he's saying is the country has also been tested and it's learned that it wants him. I think that makes him feel very powerful in this moment, right? That he's got validation of the voters and there's for him this sort of sense of destiny and he is now tied in
to the country. His identity is tied in, as he presents it, with the identity of the country. If he was down, the country was down. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And he is succeeding right now. He is succeeding right now. He is the most dominant force in American society today. He drives our conversation. He drives our debate. He even forces the opposition to respond to him on his terms.
That may not last, but for the moment, he's got a lot of momentum going. Well, Peter, thank you very much. Thank you. Great to see you here in Washington.
Well, Biden's legacy is a little complicated in the sense that he came to office intending more than anything to rid the country of Trump. Right. He defeated him. He was very proud of that. And he talked about his goal of moving the country back to some sort of normality. But instead, he's leaving office now, turning the White House back over to the same person he
that he considers to be a fascist and a threat to democracy. But the state of the country is actually probably better than it has been for a new president going back for quite a number of years. There are no American troops in a war overseas. You know, inflation is now back down to relatively normal levels. Unemployment is near historic lows. The Economy's growing. The stock market is soaring.
Border crossings, which was such a big bane of Biden's tenure, down even below where it was when Trump left office. Crime down. So he's got a lot of good things he can talk about, but he's leaving office as a one-term president. I think that this is a tough day for him.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think people who told themselves that Trump was an aberration and he was an asterisk in the history books, that he was a fluke president who only got in because of the circumstances of 2016 in the Electoral College, that's all proven not to be the case. Now, he did not win a massive landslide no matter how many times he says that.
It was a very narrow victory, 1.5 percentage points in the popular vote. one of the smallest margins of victory since the 19th century. But he did win. And right now he has the wind in his back politically. The Republicans are deferring to him on his nominations, no matter how controversial, no matter how scandal-tard they might be. Democrats have not figured out an effective counter to him.
And I think that right now it's a high moment for Trump. And he recognizes that he has a short amount of time, that the window will close quickly before lame duck period begins to set in and people begin to think about the next presidency. So he's looking at the next two years as being a very important time for him to make the kind of changes he wants to make.
It does, yes, in the sense that obviously we have shattered a precedent here. We have shattered norms. We've never knowingly elected a felon to be president. Now, some presidents have done things in office that might have qualified them, but nobody was ever actually charged or convicted before, much less elected after being convicted.
But I think that the assumption was that, yeah, he was done politically. And that was a wrong assumption. He proved that a lot of the country, his supporters, his backers, see the world through the lens that he sees it.
Well, he's promising a lot of action, as many as 100 executive orders in the first day alone. And he's going to try to push the boundaries on all sorts of issues, on immigration with the mass deportations he's talking about, on restructuring the federal government to get rid of as many nonpartisan federal workers as possible and replace them with his own partisan loyalists who will answer to him.
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