Trump’s Not in Charge. This Is Who Really Is.

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Daily Beast’s brilliant columnist David Rothkopf tells Joanna Coles what’s really going on in the Oval Office. From dumbed-down intelligence briefings to the truth about why he backed off tariffs, Rothkopf spells out who’s really calling the shots—and why the answer should worry every American.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Fever tree Mediterranean tonic water.
0:03.9	Made with zesty lemon thyme from a small family farm in Provence and essential oils from herbs that grow in the Mediterranean sunshine.
0:14.2	So, if three quarters of your G&T is a fever tree tonic, maybe it's time to call it a TNG. Fever tree. Mix with the best.
0:27.4	That takes me straight to the med.
0:35.6	Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Joanna Coles. I'm the chief content officer. And I wanted to start by thanking you for the incredible engagement we got last week after Michael Wolfe appeared on the podcast on YouTube. We had over 3,000 of you writing, talking largely about Trump craving attention and that really being his motivating
0:56.3	factor and over half a million of you watched it. So today we're talking to David Rothkopf,
1:02.3	one of the Daily Beast contributors who wrote an excellent piece this week arguing that the first
1:07.0	four months of Donald Trump's second administration have seen the country, America,
1:12.3	drop significantly in the international rankings. And Trump himself, having gone from
1:18.0	leader of the free world, has severely dropped down the rankings of the world's most important
1:24.0	people. And when David speaks or writes, we listen because he's the former editor
1:29.4	of Foreign Policy magazine. He was a senior official in the Clinton administration. And his
1:34.8	concern and anxiety about Trump and his foreign policy is off the charts in terms of what this means for America and what it means for
1:47.6	America in the world. So David, can we, I have so many questions, but I guess the first one is
1:54.4	I want to talk to you about Trump. No longer bothering really with his intelligence briefings.
2:01.7	He's done 12 since he started, and he's down to two a month, whereas even President Biden managed to a week.
2:10.2	Some presidents love this kind of stuff.
2:12.1	Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, they like to immerse themselves in these briefings and saw them as an important part of their
2:21.9	daily intake and doing their jobs. Trump is the antithesis of that. He always has been. In fact,
2:28.3	they dumbed down intelligence briefings. They put more pictures and diagrams in them because he
2:33.4	didn't really like words,
2:36.2	which is kind of trouble.
	...

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