26/01/2017 Outside Source

Welcome back and welcome to Outside Source. Theresa May will be meeting

Donald Trump tomorrow, and she has already addressed his Republican

colleagues. We have the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to renew

the special relationship for this new age. A few hours before, on the

same stage, the president addressed the same Republican gathering after

a diplomatic spat on Twitter. He spoke about a meeting with the

Mexican president, that's off. Unless Mexico is going to treat the

United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless,

and I want to go a different route. He also touched on Obamacare, which

millions of Americans rely on for health coverage. We will have a

report from Nick Bryant on what might happen if it is scrapped. I

have to have health in order to survive. If I don't have that health

care, if he gets rid of it, I'm dead in the water. Actually and we will

be live at the State Department, where the entire senior management

team has resigned. Barbara Plett will explain that one for our

struggle -- for us. How about this for a headline from the Washington

Post - when it was put on nine, it was shared thousands of times every

minute. The entire senior management team has resigned. Barbara

Plett-Usher can explain. What is the story? Well, yes, senior members of

the management team have resigned. Actually, Ros, it is not so unusual,

whenever there is a change of administration, fulfilling these

kinds of postings, which are appointed for term limits, have to

offer their letter of resignation. It is not unusual, especially for

senior people, to be kept on for a to smooth the transition in the

State Department. But in this case, all of these people were apparently

told, we don't need you, and so they are leaving. It means that the

incoming Secretary of State will have quite a void at the top, and

these are jobs that are needed to manage the State Department building

and the State Department overseas, the foreign missions, complete

experience receives, something that will have to be done fairly quickly.

And the labour union that represents these four service officers said,

yes, this is a regular rotation, but it is a large number of people

leaving in a short period of time, and they have rare skills which you

cannot really find outside of the foreign service. So they expect the

Secretary of State to be able to find other people within the State

Department to fill these positions, strongly suggesting that that is

where he should look, rather than trying to bring somebody in from the

outside. It is all about how this place is run and how effective it

can be. We do not actually have the Secretary of State yet, he has not

been confirmed yet. The latest we have heard is that that process will

start on the Senate floor on Monday evening. I want to ask you know

about this increasingly tense relationship between Mexico and the

US. And what Donald Trump said earlier, here is some of it... The

president of Mexico and myself have agreed to cancel a planned meeting

scheduled for next week. Unless Mexico is going to treat the United

States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless, and I

want to go a different route. I have no choice. Barbara, I guess there is

an inevitability to this meeting being cancelled, given the rhetoric

from both sides? Yes. It is amazing, really. Mr Trump has barely finished

his first week in office and already he is involved in this foreign

policy spat with a key neighbour. And it was being played out on

Twitter. In the morning, Mr Trump tweeted, if Mexico is not going to

pay for the wall, then perhaps we should cancel the meeting. And the

Mexican President tweeted back, all right, I will not come - not those

words exactly, but that was the effect. And then Mr Trump spoke

about slapping a 20% tariff on Mexican goods coming in to pay for

the war. There is no sense of diplomacy here, which is really very

strange. His framing it all in this big issue of economic fairness,

saying it is unfair for the Mexicans not to pay for the war, and going on

to say, they're treating us unfairly with the North American Free Trade

Agreement, which is the thing which has the Mexicans really worried,

because their whole economy has been organised along the lines of that

treaty, with 80% of their products coming here. It is really

extraordinary to watch. Are we seeing a parallel to what we saw

during the political campaigns, where clearly Mr Trump thrives on

opposition, whether it is creating opposition in the media, opposition

to Hillary Clinton, whatever it might be, it seems he's taking a

similar approach to diplomacy, that through opposition, he will achieve

his goals? That may be the case. But it needs all the parties, including

the other country, including his own diplomatic staff, including I expect

congresspeople, wondering what the game plan is and where this will

lead. It's really quite uncharted territory. One more story to ask you

about, and we spoke about this last night, Donald Trump has hinted that

he would support the idea of safe zones for civilians who are being

displaced in Syria. It is a huge suggestion, because it would involve

the Syrian government agreeing to it, and secondly, you would have to

put troops on the ground to protect those safe owns, and whose troops

with baby? The Kremlin spokesperson has responded to say...

Barbra, to get this off the ground would take a huge amount of

diplomatic work, wouldn't it? It would be of huge project, yes. Let's

just say that the outset, that safe zone is mentioned in a draft

executive order that's been circulating, it has not yet been

signed. But the draft is out there. It is related to an order that

Syrian refugee admissions should stop. The Americans would stop

accepting Syrian refugees for an indefinite time, and instead they

would try to set up a safe some in the region, says the draft, for

those people to stay instead. But there is nothing about what it would

look like. But we know as you said, that any plan would have to involve

some kind of military commitment, especially if it was set up against

the wishes of the Syrian government. It is really an unknown. The Qataris

have already said, yes, it is a good idea. Also we will have a no-fly

zone to enforce it. That is not something that has been mentioned.

The Turks have been the strongest proponents of a safe zone, and they

have said, we would like to see what they come up with in detail. The

Russians in the past have specifically warned the US not to

take on the Syrian government militarily and have said that if the

Syrian government is targeted, that the Russians will use their own air

defence weapons against them. There is all of this in the background,

and Mr Trump has just thrown this suggestion into the midst of it all.

I guess we will be speaking to you around this time on Outside Source a

lot. As we are waiting for Rex Tillerson to come in and to get his

team in place below him. Theresa May, should this be seen, what she

said, as a conflict with Trump's ideals, says one viewer. I think it

is fair to say that she wants a strong nation state for the UK that

but that it must be internationalist in its view of the world. We cannot

really speak for what Donald Trump wants, in terms of how America will

be positioned. Forget what he said today was that he did want to deal

with the rest of the world, he wants to cut of bilateral trade deals, but

it was always be from the position of putting America's interests

first. If you can do that and be an internationalist, we will have to

see if he manages to pull that off. Next, the issue of health policy.

Donald Trump today launched another stinging attack on Obama. Obamacare

is a disaster. The Democrats are saying, they're putting up signs

like it's wonderful. It's a disaster. I actually talked with

Paul and the group about just doing nothing for two years, and then we

would have them coming begging to do something. Because 2017 is going to

be catastrophic price increases, your deductibles are through the

rich, you can't use it. Who can't use it. And they would come to us,

except we have one problem is that we have to take care of the American

people immediately. It looks like Obamacare will be scrapped by

Congress, possibly as soon as March or April. But no-one is that clear

on what is going to replace it, and that's causing concern. Here is Nick

Bryant with his report from New York. In New York City, it is

estimated that one in five of the city's population could lose their

health care, if it is repealed. Among them, Donna Leslie. She does

not know what she would do if she lost her Obamacare coverage. It

would be a disaster for me. I have to have health care in order to

survive. If I don't have that health care, if he gets rid of it, I'm dead

in the water, no doubt. No doubt. It's not just adults that could lose

their coverage, but as many as 4 million children. And doctors are

also worried about the impact of existing treatments being

interrupted. We're talking about millions of people... This doctor

says the human consequences across America of repealing Obamacare would

be dire. We are talking about people dying, people suffering as well. A

patient with high blood pressure who goes without their medicine for a

few months is at higher risk of a stroke a heart attack. And a patient

with cancer who has started treatment, an interruption in care

would mean that they're no longer able to get the chemotherapy or the

radiation therapy or the surgery that they might need. So from that

aspect of, I'm very worried about the real consequences of what's

playing out on a national level. -- from that perspective. The problem

for the Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill is, what

do you replace Obamacare with? Within hours of taking office, with

a flourish of his presidential pen, Donald Trump started rolling back

his predecessor's signature achievement. Without a clear

administration plan yet on the table of what to replace it with. But on

Capitol Hill, Republicans claim they can draft an alternative that gives

more access to more affordable coverage. I don't even like the use

of the word replace. I would like to think that we are just repealing the

bad that is out there now and fixing what's left over and putting new

ideas in place, putting some market-driven ideas in place, and

putting patients first. For decades, health care has been a polarising

issue between progressives and Conservatives. Many in the

Republican ace have been campaigning for years for the end of Obamacare.

But its abolition carries political risks, especially with poor,

working-class Americans, who helped Donald Trump reach Washington. I

have been asking for your questions. Lots of you have been getting in

touch with what I would call regular questions about the Trump

administration. One of you saying, will Theresa May and Donald Trump

dance at any point tomorrow? I have no idea. Another one says, is your

tie from Somerset cricket club? No, it's not but thanks for asking. And

the message from Peter Stringfellow, a very well-known nightclub owner in

London. He says, Ros, please stop pretending that you're controlling

this screen, it's really embarrassing. I prod, this is not me

pretending. If I press that button, this comes up. If I press this, the

map comes up. And if I pressed the wrong button, I promise you, the

wrong thing will happen. Honestly, it's real. And if I get it wrong it

doesn't work. Thank you very much for those questions should we will

get to slightly more pressing questions about the Trump

presidency. Anthony will be explaining that in a while.

Particularly, we will focus on Mr Trump's complex relationship with

the cable news networks in the US. There has been a rise in suicides,

assaults and self harm inside prisons in England and Wales. A

number of those taking their own lives is the highest since records

began in 1978. The rise in assaults, suicides

and self harming is relentless. The sense of crisis in the system

was underlined by a riot in Birmingham prison,

where inmates posed Just one of a string of jail

disturbances in recent months. Amid the volatile atmosphere,

today's figures show that in the past year, a record

number of prisoners have It's very hard when you've got

members of your family who... Sarah is a long-serving

prison officer whose She describes having to deal

with a teenage suicide. I came on duty, and I went

to perform a roll check. I lifted the flap, and this young

man was suspended in his cell. and I saw it was his birthday,

and I thought, what a waste. Just describe the thoughts in your

head as you're going into work. When you open a door,

you don't know what you're Prisons are awash with drugs

and psychoactive substances that All adding to the underlying

problems of staff shortages Vulnerable prisoners are suffering

in the increasingly threatening I am very clear that the levels

of violence in our prisons are too high, and the levels of self-harm

are too high. Since I became Justice Secretary,

I've focused on dealing That's why we are investing

an extra ?100 million. 2,500 extra prison officers across

the estate, so that we are able to have a caseload of one prison

officer for every six prisoners. But Sarah says the challenge

is not recruiting staff, And on top of that,

you've got the fear. I've never been in fear

of my life until now, and we just don't get paid enough

to have that fear everyday. Welcome back to Outside Source. Our

lead story is that Theresa May has urged America to engage with, and

beware of, Russia. The comments came in a speech to senior Republicans in

Philadelphia. She will meet resident Trump tomorrow. Coming up after

Outside Source, its world news America next, if you're watching

outside the UK, with a report from a survivor of Auschwitz. Here in the

UK, the News at Ten is next. I'm going to bring in Anthony in a

moment. But first of all, a couple of tweets which people have been

highlighting. This is one where Mr Trump says, ungrateful traitor

Chelsea Manning... These are important issues in their

own right, but the reason I have highlighted those two tweets is the

language and the statistics used in them. Exactly matching those used in

stories which ran on Fox news units before the president tweeted. We

cannot know if that is just a coincidence. We do know that the

president watches a lot of network TV news. His relationship with these

networks really matters. Anthony joins me now to talk about this.

Would we expect that to be the case, that the Trump was taking some

information, some policy needs, from a network? I think it certainly

looks that way. And these are not the only examples, either. A few

months ago, Fox news ran a story about flag burning, and then minutes

later, Donald Trump early in the morning tweeted out a condemnation

of flag burning and called for a constitutional amendment. So, his

watching it, and it's influencing the way he views the world and views

US politics and views policy. It is pretty remarkable that a morning TV

programme could adjust the views of the leader of the free world. It

used to be that the New York Times would be what everyone talks about

in this town. But now it seems like Donald Trump is taking his advice,

his insight, a different source. And he seems to be particularly focused

not just on Fox but on CNN and the others, more so than perhaps other

media outlets - is that because of the power of the networks? I think

that has a lot to do with it. You noted CNN, and he talks about CNN

almost as much as he mentions reports from Fox. CNN is the will in

his mind, and he's constantly trashing them, saying that they have

low ratings, but they're fake news. 'S picked a fight with a CNN news

reporter joined that first news conference, before he was sworn in.

Those are obviously two of the more prominent cable networks in the US.

And Donald Trump obviously spends a lot of time watching them and cares

a lot about what they say. Let's pick up this theme to more. Before I

came into the set, I was down in the newsroom, and I saw that the New

York Times had an interview with Stephen Pennant, the chief White

House strategist, who used to be in charge of a right-wing news website.

He gave a very strong quote on the media. He said the media should be

embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a

while. He said, I want you to quote me on this, the media here is the

opposition party, they do not understand this country, they still

do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United

States. What did you make of that, Anthony? Well, it's pretty strong

language. Apparently the interview he gave to the New York Times came

on the heels of Sean Spicer's very aggressive press conference on

Saturday near the he bashed the media and said that they were

misrepresenting the crowds at the inauguration. And Steve Bannon is

someone who Donald Trump listens to, a very close adviser. Along with

Stephen Miller, he calls them the two Steves, both of them firebrands

with an anti-establishment view of politics. In his inaugural address,

he bashed the establishment, bashed Washington, said he was giving power

back to the people, Alec is rhetoric. And they might have been

involved in that speech. You think the media in the US now see

themselves as the opposition? I think they feel that they have a

responsibility to challenge Donald Trump at every turn. I think that

they took to heart some of the accusations that they did not take a

Donald Trump seriously early enough in the presidential campaign. I

think use or later in the campaign, particularly in that press

conference which ended up not being a press conference, at the Donald

Trump H, where he refuse to answer media questions and dismissed the

allegations that he was responsible for questioning Barack Obama's birth

certificate, I think from then on, the media took a much more

adversarial view towards Donald Trump, and that has carried over

into the transition and into his presidency. I don't think they would

like being characterised as the opposition party, but I think they

feel they have a responsibility to challenge him and question him when

he says something that the facts are not bear out. Just a couple of

questions here, firstly from Alex, watching in Manchester - do we know

Mr Trump's thoughts on the European feeling towards his presidency? Be

Pool C Trump as a radical, they disapprove of his attitude towards

the press, they see him as dangerous. That is not

representative of all attitudes in Europe, but I do not see Mr Trump as

someone he does pay attention. He cares a lot about what people think

of him. When he was over in the UK right after the Brexit folk, took

that as a sign for a possible victory for him. So he was obviously

paying attention to the Brexit folk. I think he sees ideological soul

mates in some of the nationalist movements in the UK and in

continental. So I would not be supposed if he is at least somewhat

aware of it. Obviously, he has a close relationship with Nigel

Farage, so there will be some information traded there. But as far

as the average person on the street thinks in Europe, I don't think he

cares that much. Thank you, Anthony. Just very quickly, the timings of

tomorrow's events, please? We don't know a whole lot about what he will

be doing tomorrow. There is talk of executive orders on visas, which we

thought were going to come today. On immigration as well. So I would not

be surprised if we saw something about that tomorrow. Thank you very

much indeed. Just to tick up on that message I got 15 minutes ago from

Peter Stringfellow, well-known nightclub owner here in London,

about my screen. I replied to him, offering for him to come in and try

it, and lots of you have been saying they would rather have a visit to

his place than mine, which I'm frankly offended by! But thank you

very much for all your messages! We'll take a breather now. We will

be back at the same time on Monday. Thanks for your company.

If you were watching this time yesterday, I was explaining