Is Trump Serious About Taking Greenland, Panama Canal?

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Bloomberg Jan 8 06:18 · 9963 Views

Bloomberg's David Gura talks about President-elect Trump’s press conference where Trump spoke about not ruling out using military or economic force to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal. Gura also talks about the memorial service on Capitol Hill for President Jimmy Carter. He speaks with Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg's "Balance of Power.."

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Transcript

  • 00:00 With some of these ideas, like taking over
  • 00:02 sovereign countries,
  • 00:04 what should be
  • 00:05 people's approach to understand what he's talking about?
  • 00:07 Well, Hadrian is talking about how lawmakers don't know what move he wants to make or wants them to make.
  • 00:11 And I think you can kind of translate that to what we saw at that press conference today.
  • 00:14 It was supposed to be a press conference
  • 00:16 with just a major economic announcement, of course, ballooned into this hour long digression into all of these different things.
  • 00:21 But I was struck by
  • 00:22 the way that he brought these up was with an element of seriousness.
  • 00:25 He wasn't joking about it.
  • 00:26 And there are things that have bubbled up over the course of these last few weeks.
  • 00:29 He's talked an awful lot about the Panama Canal.
  • 00:31 He continues to talk about Greenland.
  • 00:33 So
  • 00:34 I guess 1 wonders how seriously he's taking in terms of what practically he could do.
  • 00:37 You joke about
  • 00:38 how he could change the name of the the Gulf of Mexico, aside from getting a Rand McNally Atlas and changing it himself with a with a Sharpie.
  • 00:45 But but it does seem to set some markers for
  • 00:48 certainly his colleagues in the Republican Party and others to sort of fall and wonder where he intends to take it.
  • 00:52 There's a
  • 00:53 thing called promises kept when we cover campaigns here.
  • 00:56 We're kind of in this weird
  • 00:57 zone between campaign promises and actual governing.
  • 01:02 As he gets closer to the White House,
  • 01:04 do these ideas begin to soften?
  • 01:07 Is this the opening salvo in a negotiation?
  • 01:09 As we always hear, it's an opening salvo.
  • 01:10 And I'm not saying anything novel here, but he is able to speak
  • 01:14 and ramble and expound on all of this without really any kind of compliment from the current
  • 01:18 president in the White House.
  • 01:19 It seems like he's taking up a lot of oxygen and being able to advance a lot of these ideas.
  • 01:23 So
  • 01:24 they take on weight and import as a result of that.
  • 01:26 There's nothing really coming up against them.
  • 01:28 And so you're right here we are
  • 01:29 13 days out, he's going to be the president.
  • 01:31 I, I, I guess I'm reluctant to say that it's kind of being distilled into any kind of clear policy agenda for him when he gets there.
  • 01:37 But
  • 01:37 it, it is the thing that we are talking about.
  • 01:39 We
  • 01:40 broadly.
  • 01:40 And I think that he's relishing that.
  • 01:41 And there's a, a degree of familiarity that we recognize from the first time he was in office.
  • 01:45 He's able to set and scuttle the agenda as he wants.
  • 01:48 And here we are again, drive the news cycle that seems to thrive
  • 01:52 on this style
  • 01:53 of communicating.
  • 01:55 As I mentioned, David Guri, you're here in part to to help us cover
  • 01:59 the funeral of Jimmy Carter.
  • 02:00 You're going to Co anchor our special coverage.
  • 02:02 He'll be, of course,
  • 02:04 at the National Cathedral.
  • 02:05 He's going to be lying in state beginning tonight in the US Capitol where his remains
  • 02:09 have just arrived.
  • 02:11 This is a special moment for our capital and for our country.
  • 02:14 Donald Trump actually referred to Jimmy Carter several times, not always in the most flattering light today
  • 02:18 there there is this odd historical resonance.
  • 02:20 So we're joking about the Panama Canal, but this was a signal, signal achievement of the Carter president.
  • 02:24 He was able to broker this treaty with Panama
  • 02:27 that by 1999 it would be handed over officially to Panama and the US could continue to use it in in perpetuity.
  • 02:32 So
  • 02:33 it it is eerie in a way that it's coming up in in this fashion at this moment in time.
  • 02:37 I was thinking too just about
  • 02:38 Carter's legacy and what he was able to do.
  • 02:40 I mean, he pride proud.
  • 02:41 He was very proud of the fact that when he was governor and president of the United States, he did a lot to streamline government in both the state of Georgia and the United States as well.
  • 02:49 So I'm not
  • 02:50 drawing a direct analogy to to doge in the work that
  • 02:52 Elon Musk and Vivek Ramazwaran are doing now, but he did
  • 02:55 bring corporate leaders
  • 02:57 to the governor's mansion in Georgia, tasked them with over the course of his governorship,
  • 03:02 making the government of Georgia much, much smaller and work more effectively.
  • 03:05 He did that when he was in the White House as well.
  • 03:07 So there, there is an element of historical resonance there.
  • 03:08 But as you say,
  • 03:09 this is such a special moment.
  • 03:11 It's rare that you get a funeral like this in the United States.
  • 03:14 And I echo what you say completely.
  • 03:16 This city, this country does it very well.
  • 03:18 There's a lot of pomp and circumstance and tradition here.
  • 03:20 That's that's very hard to look away from.