Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American

politics and the Trump presidency in 2017. I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator.

I'm joined today by Quinn Meacham, who is a specialist in US policy in the Middle East. And we're going to be

talking about Trump's first foreign trip and how it went. Quinn, from perhaps a superficial point of

view, it looks as though Trump, after a very bad few weeks at home domestically, he has had,

his first big foreign trip abroad, his first foreign trip abroad has been rather a big success. Is that a fair assessment?

Well, that of course depends on how you define success. I think at one level it has been tightly

choreographed, which his last couple of weeks at home have not been. He has been to a lot of places.

He's talked with a lot of important people.

No one is calling out really major faux pas,

which, of course, the president has been known to produce.

And so in that sense, I think it could be deemed successful in that he, the president

appears happy with it. He appears to have produced a trip that's gone rather smoothly. Just

a reminder, though, that this is the kind of trip that has planned months in advance is extremely carefully choreographed.

Yes.

It's quite hard to mess them up.

Well, you know, for people who like President Trump who are used to going off script a lot, it's possible to do so.

I mean, he's meeting a range of leaders in areas where he has little expertise and areas where he's been

controversial. I mean, it's really quite audacious for him to fly to Saudi Arabia and to address

leaders in the Islamic world on the topic of Islam. He's been quite anti-Islam in his campaign rhetoric. You know, waiting into

Israeli-Palestinian peace is very tricky. It's a minefield in terms of symbolism and in terms of,

you know, what's possible and not. And so in that sense, you know, this is kind of an audacious

...