Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Sharp magazine.

Go to e-sharp.e.U for free access to all our podcasts to date.

This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with Benjamin Haddad.

Benjamin Haddad is the director of the Europe program at the Atlantic Council based in Washington,

DC, and the author of a new book, The Paradis Perdu, L'Amerique of Trump and the

Fin of Illusions European, which will or should certainly be translated into English and in

German in the not-so-distant future.

My opening question to you, Ben, is what inspired you to

write this book and to take the angle you took? Well, hi Paul. Thanks for having me. Well, you know,

I've been in the United States now for a little more than four years. I moved to D.C. to work in a

think tank community in late 2014 and uh Trump declared

his candidacy a few months later and what was fascinating to me for a year and a half as a

foreigner in the US and Washington is every expert I talked to every commentator

Republican and like Democrats told me don't worry it's going to be done in a week you

know he's going to implode, he has no chance, etc.

And then you won.

And I think the conversation in the last couple of years have focused so much on himself, his

personalities, the antics, his tweets, the scandals.

And I was mostly interested in going beyond this and thinking, you know, what's going on in the United States, what's going on in our liberal democracies,

What did he tap into? What is this anger in America that he looked at and more importantly

You know, what are the continuities you could see also with President Obama. I'm sure we're going to get into this.

But if you're European, you can see that there's something broader going on when it comes

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