Hello and welcome to a special edition of Americano.

I'm Kate Andrews, the Spectator's Economics Editor, and I've put your Americano host, Freddie Gray, in the hot seat to talk about his cover for the magazine this week, Trump Vision.

Trump refused to take part in the first Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, appearing on Tucker Carlson Show on X, formerly known as Twitter, instead.

Freddie says it doesn't matter that Trump doesn't show up to these TV debates. He stole the story

regardless. He joins me now, alongside Devin Nunes, former Republican congressman, former chair of the

House Intelligence Committee, and now chief at Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.

Freddie and Devin, thanks for joining me.

Freddie, you say Trump is the only story in town, regardless of whether he shows up or not.

Talk us through your piece. Well, I think what happened in 2015, and particularly in the Republican candidate debates in 2015, is that Trump sort of set fire to the nomination process

in many ways and particularly the media side of it because these debates, admittedly, they

don't draw in the same kind of numbers as the big final two showdown presidential one just

before the election. But they were always considered very important sort of starting blocks

for candidates to lay out their stall, to say who they

were, and more importantly, to sort of pay fealty to the huge TV networks and that were then

honour that fealty by projecting them into the national consciousness. Trump in 2015 took over

the national and to some extent the global consciousness, certainly the media, this year,

something similar but different is happening in that he is now shunning the networks to some

extent, the TV debates, he's not going to do them. And it doesn't really seem to matter

because the power relationship has changed and the power of news TV has changed because to some extent

the Trump's story is the story of how the media misunderstood their role in politics and

thought that they could stop this political phenomenon and they couldn't.

And now as we approach 2024, we're seeing just quite dearly how little

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