Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray. I'm deputy editor of The Spectator. I'm joined today by Jacob Heilbrun, who is editor of the national interest and a regular contributor to Spectator USA.

And we're going to be discussing, is Trump saving America or wrecking it?

Jacob, you've got a very interesting piece in the Washington Post today.

And the headline is Trump isn't fighting American

decline. He's speeding it up. Now, this sort of goes against a narrative that we've heard quite a lot,

not just in the sort of Trumpist press, but also much more in the, let's say, the Wall Street Journal

and more mainstream media institutions,

that Trump might actually be sort of saving America from terminal decline.

And you think the events of recent days especially have shown that he's not saving America.

He's actually destroying it faster than ever.

Is that a fair summation of your piece?

It is indeed.

The question is, Trump promised to make America great again, but is he, in fact, destroying

its greatness?

What prompted me to conclude this most recently was the collapse of the negotiations with North Koreans over the summit.

Trump accepted the invitation impetuously, tweeted out Jeune statements such as that world peace could be in the offing, and then just as impulsively abandon the summit.

And he also did the same thing with the embassy in Jerusalem.

He has threatened trade war with China.

Then the next day he tries to rescue ZTE, a sell company in China. And so it just

doesn't end. There just seems to be a constant flip-flopping in Trump policy.

But a lot of people call Trump's policy transactional, that he approached it like he might

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