Welcome to Sharp Talk, the regular podcast of E-Sharp Magazine.

Go to e-sharp.E.sharp.E.U for free access to all our podcast to date. This is Paul

Adamson. I'm in conversation with Karen Donfrey. Karen Donfrey is the president of the German

Marshall Fund of the United States,

GMF for short. Karen, we're obviously going to talk about things transatlantic. At the moment,

it's challenging, to say the least, for people who care about are committed to the transatlantic

relationship to find out how to keep that relationship alive and well in the current political

circumstances. As we speak, Mr. Trump was

just announced basically a trade war, declared a trade war in effect, and inevitably the European

Union has also announced kind of retaliatory measures. Is this the sign of things to come,

or is this a temporary blip that can be sorted out in relatively short order?

It's a great question, Paul, and I don't know the answer.

It's interesting in Washington, and I did not coin this phrase, but there's another analyst

who said, when you think about President Trump, are we talking about teleprompter Trump or

Twitter Trump? We saw teleprompter Trump or Twitter Trump?

We saw teleprompter Trump at Davos, for example,

and certainly we've seen Twitter Trump in many instances,

but he's doubled down on this trade war primarily through Twitter.

It's exposed an important cleavage in the Republican Party. You have the

leaders of the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, the Republican leader of the U.S. House,

both asking that he stand down and not put these tariffs in place on steel and aluminum,

but it's not at all clear what President Trump will do. And if he does

...