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PBS News Hour - Segments

Brooks and Capehart on Trump forcing allies to reevaluate ties with U.S.

PBS News Hour - Segments

PBS NewsHour

News, Daily News

4.11K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW join Geoff Bennett to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump's remarks in Davos forcing Western leaders to reevaluate their relationship with the U.S. and escalating tensions over the ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0

President Trump's remarks in Davos, Switzerland this week, forced Western leaders to reevaluate their relationship with the U.S.

0:07.3

That's as tensions escalated here at home over the ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota.

0:14.2

For more, we turn tonight to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.

0:17.6

That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MS Now. Good evening,

0:22.3

gentlemen. Good evening. So David, what did we learn this week from President Trump's climb down

0:27.1

on acquiring Greenland about his instincts, his sense of leverage, and the limits of his approach?

0:33.7

Well, he does have a method that he uses over and over again, which is to overreach, to offend

0:38.2

everybody, and then back off.

0:40.1

And he sort of did that, and that would be the benign explanation of what happened this week.

0:44.0

The serious explanation is that this, I think, was probably the final break in the post-war

0:49.1

international order, that we have taken it for granted, that we in the West, as we call it,

0:53.8

are democracies aligned and friends with each other.

0:57.3

And what really struck me this week was how many European leaders, Mark Carney from Canada, how much pleasure they took in being bitterly breaking, divorcing with America.

1:10.7

And that we're never going back to that.

1:12.6

And I asked Europeans like, is it like that Taylor Swift song?

1:15.6

We are never getting back together?

1:17.6

And they said, yes, that's what it's like.

1:19.6

We are never getting back together because they say,

1:21.6

you might elect a sane person in 2028,

1:24.6

but you're always four years away from another one of these.

1:28.2

And so they are really rethinking the whole global architecture.

1:31.1

And it should be concerning to Americans, as Robert Kagan wrote in the Atlantic this week,

...

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