Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election. My name's Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Edger of The Spectator.

Today we're going to be asking the question, does Donald Trump think he's actually president already?

I'm joined down the line in Washington, D.C. by Paul Wood of the BBC.

So, Paul, looking at the first few weeks of the Trump transition, and particularly, again, Trump's Twitter account, which is what we talked about in the last podcast, but we're going to have to talk about it again. It seems to be that Donald Trump might

actually think he's president, even though, of course, he isn't. He's still president-elect.

But he's behaving, certainly online. He's behaving in a way that suggests he's a sort of great

proto-president already making trade deals, already issuing foreign policy statements, and behaving

in a way that no previous president or president-elect has done. Do you think he's suffering from

a delusion that he's already president? Well, Donald Trump is being Donald Trump. He's being the

Trump that we've always known and loved or hated, and it's just that reality has now rather improbably aligned with his imagination. So he's doing things he's always done, but now they

have rather more effect and rather more importance. The presidency is famously, as Theodore

Roosevelt said, a bully pulpit, and Trump is above all a bully. We've seen that with the Twitter

account. The form of what he does

is unpresidential. He has engaged in Twitter wars since his election with the cast of Saturday Night Live,

with the cast of the musical Hamilton in New York. You really would think he has bigger and better

things to do. He has also, as you say, been announcing trade deals.

He's stepped in to save jobs with the carrier company in Indiana, makers of air conditioning.

But this is standard Trump. He sounds off as just an effect now.

But he doesn't have any of the responsibility of government. So at the moment, it seems like he gets the best of both worlds.

He can announce these amazing things he's doing.

And there's nothing to hold him accountable to.

What's worrying, I think, is that this might be a window into how he will behave when he is in the Oval Office.

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