Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator and the editor of its US edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its politics.

There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before. So please keep tuning in.

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I'm joined today by John Rick MacArthur, who is publisher of Harper's Magazine?

And we're going to be asking,

is Donald Trump more left wing than Biden? Now, Rick, you have a fascinating piece in this week's spectator suggesting you sort of flirt, I think, with the idea that Trump is more left

wing than Biden, but you come down on the side of probably not.

But however, I think you do make a better case than you perhaps make out in the piece.

Because as you say, he said this remark last week that cheap labour has turned out to be very

expensive, which is really a sort of argument that was used against the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s.

Do you think Trump means it at all when he says things like that?

Well, it's hard to tell how much he's acting and how much he really believes things because he's so, I mean, frankly, deranged when he talks. He sounds deranged. And he's, he's,

the, the Fox interview that I talk about in the spectator piece is one of his better moments.

If you watch it, the whole thing, there's less self-aggrandizement and more, if if I could I dare say thoughtfulness in at least

its tone but I'm basing my notion of Trump's progressive sounding talk on hard

evidence because I don't think the voters are fools. And we know that in 2016,

between seven and nine million Obama voters voted for Trump. And these are people,

...