Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics.

And this week we're going to take a step back and try and look at the big question that

I think is probably at the back of a lot of people's minds at the moment, which is basically

is democracy in trouble, I mean in real trouble.

And not just in the United States, probably it's in more trouble if it is in trouble in other

places and we'll come onto that in a second.

But we are going to talk about Trump and we're going to talk about one of the big stories

of this week, which is his fight, his ongoing fight with the American judiciary.

This partly comes out of the conversation I had with Jill Lapour a couple of weeks ago.

I spoke to her on the day that Trump was inaugurated as president.

And we were discussing the question about how you understand Trump's presidency and what

you compare it to.

And one possibility is you look to American history and very broadly, although I know what

Helen will say here, there was a civil war.

We know there was a civil war, but very broadly, if you do that, you tend to come down on

the more optimistic side in the sense that American democracy and the American constitution,

if we bracket the civil war, has survived a lot.

And in Jill Lapour's terms, a lot worse than this.

The really bleak view is you take the comparison with the 1930s European outcomes, which obviously

are very bad.

So that's when people start talking about fascism, miscellenian, then when they get really

wound up Hitler.

...