Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists. I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.

I'm Rana Mitter. I'm S.T. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School,

and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.

So, Hannah and Rana, welcome back to History Bying the Headlines for our first episode of 2025.

We're talking right at the end of January

and it's been a pretty packed month in terms of news stories. We'll get into some of them over the

next 45 minutes or so, starting with President Trump being inaugurated for his second term as

US president. We're obviously not going to talk very much about recent developments,

but it is an opportunity to get into the history behind some of the discussions that have

been going on about constraints on power and the extent to which he seems to be trying to

remove some of those constraints and what the historical parallels might be. Ranah, did you want

to lead with this? Absolutely. And I think we start, as we probably should do, with the American presidency on this. I know that Hannah's going to come in later, and I'm sure that there'll be an awful lot, for instance, on the monarchy in the medieval era, which in the sense have parallels. And people have made comments sometimes joking, perhaps sometimes a bit less joking about whether or not President Trump sees himself as a new kind of Louis the 14th or someone who really does have that kind

of monarchical sense to him. But I think we need to think about this actually as the history of the

American presidency, because when George Washington and the founders of the American Republic

were debating.

They did, you know, at least for a very brief period,

wonder, since they were leaving a monarchy, leaving a kingdom,

maybe they should have a king of their own

and fairly quickly decided to know it was going to be a president.

So the US has decided that the presidential system

is the way in which the Republican ideal would be expressed.

But over the nearly 250 years that the American Republic has existed, is the way in which the Republican ideal would be expressed.

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