Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncha and with me are Zezana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about Donald Trump. Donald Trump and us. This is day four of the Trump

administration today and at least at the time of our recording. We have seen a few policy decisions.

He signed a few executive orders, actually a large number of executive

orders, but none that really affect the EU so much. Jack, what do you think is happening?

One of the things that's worried us the most in Europe about the Trump administration coming back

in has been trained. The worry that, you know, Trump and his administration would

impose new tariffs that would badly damage our trade balance with the United States because the

EU as a whole runs a quite sizable trade surplus with the United States. In terms of kind

of maintaining a positive trade balance, it's become increasingly reliant on the United States to do that.

Now, this is one area where I think Trump is, number one, not going to go all out immediately, or at least he hasn't so far.

And number two, he has other targets that are further up his priority list.

The biggest trading partners,

Canada, Mexico, now it's not NAFTA anymore, but the NAFTA countries and China as well.

Some of the stuff might have ancillary kind of knock-on effects for us, and we can talk about

that a little bit later, but directly we will have to wait and see what he

wants to do about Europe. Of course, there's also forum policy. I think we've all been waiting

to see what would happen with Trump's Ukraine policy and with what he would kind of decide about

NATO. So far, it doesn't really seem like there are any firm decisions yet on NATO.

One gets the impression that on Ukraine, he and his team are still basically learning about

what the situation actually is and therefore how they're going to respond to it.

So again, not necessarily too much really substantial movement there for the time being.

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