Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name is Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

Today I'm joined by Michael Brendan Doherty, who's a conservative writer and a columnist at The Week,

and we're going to be talking about Donald Trump's video message about his first 100 days,

which came out last night on YouTube.

So, Michael, before we get onto the substance of Trump's video statement yesterday,

let's talk a little bit about the way the statement came out,

because we know that Trump had a meeting with a lot of high-flying TV executives and producers

and presenters yesterday, and the meeting was apparently a disaster in which Trump shouted

at them and everybody got very cross. And then in a sort of classic Trump one-two punch,

he then, a few hours later, brought out this video a sort of classic trump one two punch he then a few hours later brought out this

video a statement of intent on youtube thereby skipping over the the media and suckering them

once again is that your interpretation of what happened yeah that's basically how it went down

i mean the reports about the meeting were in the New York Post,

and essentially that's a place where Trump likes to leak things, and it was kind of a nasty way to go

about it because the meeting itself was off the record. So in a sense, he had this meeting.

He dressed down figures like Jeff Zucker, who runs CNN,

and then they couldn't say anything about it.

And then he goes to the post and, you know, people close to him narrate the meeting

in which, you know, the story they tell is this story of him kind of smacking them around like children.

Yeah.

And then he's followed that up by canceling a meeting with the New York Times because the New York Times board made it clear that they wanted to the meeting to be on the record.

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