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Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. In each episode, an expert panel

will be exploring the 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 Ron Amitter. I'm Estee 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 buying 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.

Rana, 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. I'm sure that there'll be an awful lot, for instance,

...