My guest is Steve Elanger.

Steve Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe of the New York My guest is Steve Alanga.

Steve Elanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe of the New York Times.

And welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Thank you, Paul.

Lovely to be with you.

Welcome back, actually, because we had a chat actually about three years ago,

I think when COVID was still ravaging Europe.

And it's great to have you back.

We're obviously going to talk about the Trump election victory now a month ago, just exactly a month ago.

Before we could drill down into too much detail, let's first of all go big picture stuff. Did you,

with the benefit of hindsight, or without the benefit of hindsight, did you see his victory coming?

I wouldn't say I saw it coming, but I saw it certainly is possible. I mean, the polls are incredibly close.

I think Kamala Harris ran a pretty good campaign, but from a very late start, I think the

Democrats have been in power quite a long time.

This would have been yet another Democratic administration. And I think given the economy, which is what everybody

votes on really, they don't really care about, you know, European politics very much in America.

I thought it was very risky. She could have won with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

So I was paying my attention only to those three states.

In the end, she lost them all, but she lost all of them by a total of 250,000 votes,

which in America is not a big margin.

So it was closer in the the electoral college than it looked, right?

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