And now we'll turn to talking to Dan Balz, who's the chief correspondent of the Washington Post, a long time political correspondent and observer, not just of United States politics, but also of British politics. Welcome, Dan.

Thank you, Raymond. You wrote a terrific article this week, and the headline was that the

crisis exposes how America has hollowed out its government, which caught my attention,

because it took us straight into, if you like, Institute for Government Territory. And I want to

begin by reading out your first sentence, which really, to me, grabbed the whole of your argument in one.

And you said, which I'm sure you remember, that the government's halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust,

conditions compounded by President Trump's open hostility to a federal

bureaucracy that has been called upon to manage the crisis. I wonder if you could just take us into

this and the point about this having been going on for years, as you see it. Well, I mean, you can trace

this back decades. One of the people I interviewed for this said, you could go back all the way to Barry

Goldwater's 64 campaign in which he was obviously arguing for a much different approach to government

than Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society. But the real turn, I think, took place in 1980 with

the arrival of Ronald Reagan and his presidency. Reagan's first inaugural was memorable

in part for one line in which he said government is not the solution. Government is the problem.

And that's stuck, didn't it? People have quoted that down the decades now.

That has been, you know, an iconic statement, particularly for advocates of limited government. And

there has been an argument both about government big or small that we have watched over many,

many years. But there's also a question about whether government is or can be a force for good

or is in fact an impediment. And I think that the Reagan rhetoric, contrary to some of the Reagan

policies, but the Reagan rhetoric turned that debate in a direction in which it became much more

common for politicians, certainly conservative politicians, but sometimes moderate or liberal

politicians, to run against the federal government, to denigrate the federal government as

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