Hello and welcome to the Centre for European Reform podcast.

My name is Lutius Gatsieri and I'm a senior fellow at the CR.

Today we're going to be discussing

Donald Trump's inauguration as 47th President of the United States. To discuss the speech

and its implications, I'm very happy to have two excellent guests with me on the podcast,

Costanza Selzenmuller, who's director of the Centre for the United States and Europe and senior

fellow at the Brookings Institute and Ian Bond, the Centre for European Reforms Deputy Director.

So welcome to both of you. It's great to have you on the podcast. We're going to start by discussing

sort of the general tenor of the speech and then its implications, if any, for foreign policy

and then also turn

to the meaning for Europe specifically, in particular if we look at the guest list of who was

in attendance. So in 2017, in his first inauguration speech, Trump made a rather fiery set of

remarks centred on the theme of American carnage.

It was a very downbeat speech.

And this time, it was also downbeat, but arguably a little less so he spoke of the beginning

of a golden age and of sunlight beaming over the whole world.

But I would struggle to define it in any way as an optimistic or upbeat speech.

But over to you and Costanza, maybe you want to go first in terms of what did you make of it?

I would say that the speech itself, unlike the first American Carnage speech,

was just the culmination of a carefully and deliberately laid drip, drip, drip of plans and intentions that Trump

has been putting out for the better part of two months now since the election, which is interesting

because he had did no such thing the first time around when clearly he hadn't expected to be elected.

...