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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

We are honoured today to be joined by Gerard Baker,

who is editor-at-large of the Wall Street Journal,

and he writes a column, a free-expression column for the Wall Street Journal and a column for the Times newspaper here in England.

Gerald is in New York at the moment and we're going to be talking

or asking the question why do Trump's enemies always overreach? Jerry, I thought about asking

this question because of your most recent Times column which dealt with this story that has been

talked about a fair bit, but it really

is indicative of what happens to Trump in politics, which is this speech he made about the car

industry, or he was talking about the car industry in a speech, and he used the word bloodbath,

and he was obviously talking about bloodbath in relation to the car industry, but the media inevitably took it as him threatening a bloodbath if he wasn't elected.

And it just seems to me that we have been experiencing this with Donald Trump for such a long time.

And yet it keeps happening.

And why is that, I suppose it's my first question.

Yeah, it is a good question. As you say, it's a very, very familiar phenomenon. We've seen it

...