25/03/2017 Dateline London

Hello and welcome to Dateline London.

Donald Trump cannot manage to persuade enough Republicans

in Congress on his first big leadership test ? health care.

Plus, the European Union at 60 - comfortable middle age

Our top team of guests today - on what will be my last

Dateline London before I leave the BBC - are Abdel Bari Atwan, who

Jef McAllister, who is an American commentator.

Donald Trump - the self-described great deal-maker, whose ghost

written biography was The Art of the Deal - has failed to convince

even Republicans in Congress that he knows what he is doing

In what polls say is the most unpopular presidency ever at this

stage, can he convince Americans he knows what he is

How much trouble is he in? He starts in trouble because he is unpopular.

It was an election which Hillary Clinton won by 3 million popular

votes. He said health care was easy, Republicans can do this because we

have been saying for seven years that we can do health care better,

quickly. It turns out their ideas cannot even pass their own caucus.

They were unworkable. He is not a deal-maker. He thought he could do

his fairy tale thing. He disappoints his base. It makes him look and

competent. It is a mess. Does it give him a chance to pivot? It is

interesting. In many ways he is not a Republican. He is not a classic

small government Republican. This was Paul Ryan's health care bill.

Trump probably doesn't know most of the content. The freedom caucus, the

very right-wing, that is not Donald Trump. He is a nationalist, he

believes in infrastructure. He was pro-choice before he anti-choice. I

was thought he had an opportunity to pivot to the centre and go with

Democrats. He could get Democrats are lots of issues if he wanted to.

Most Republicans are right wing. And his chief strategist, there is

talkie wanted the outcome on health care because he hates Paul Ryan so

badly. As you both know, anyway you go in America you will hear people

saying, big government is terrible but no government appears to be the

implication of this. In other words, they won't do a deal on anything?

This is a form of gridlock. An eccentric former gridlock. He has

discovered he wasn't elected emperor. He really thought he could

run the country the way he runs his business, in a not aquatic way. He

doesn't seem to understand the most basic institutional truths,

constitutional truths, about how American government works. He

thought he could sack the legislator, I think. -- legislature.

Politically, he can recover from this. A lot of people have rocky

start. George Bush, Ronald Reagan. But it is his personality that is

the problem. I don't think psychologically he will find it easy

to recover. We know what he thinks about losers and winners. If these

wounds him in a way that it is impossible for his narcissistic

personality to recover from, that will be the real crux. Let's stick

to the constitution before the psychotherapy! We may get back to

that. In terms of the pillars of the Constitution, you have the

legislative Branch saying, thank you very much. We have already had on

immigration the courts saying something similar. These are two

huge setbacks on two of the biggest things he said he would do? I can't

understand it. He doesn't understand his own constitutional setup. When

you become a correspondent in Washington, the first thing you

learn is that Congress is the other arm of government. That is the

statutory description. He has no idea what happens when he over

promises that he can do magical things and then he runs foul of the

other arm of government. It damages his credibility terribly. Managing

Congress is really an art. It is not like decision-making in an executive

environment. It is an art of compromise. Ronald Reagan did it.

Bill Clinton did it. One wonders if he can forge compromises in the

first place because he is so full of his own importance and his own

magnetism. This particular incident will undermine him terribly. It is

an old Ade Azeez Washington that you can't be strong abroad if you are a

week at home. -- it is an old saying in Washington. If you are North

Korea, you might perhaps be kind of careful about how you go through the

next few months in terms of missiles. Do you agree?

LAUGHTER. Just a suggestion. Do you know what I'm talking about?! Where

are the advisers? Does he listen to anybody? The wrong people. He

doesn't listen to advisers. He couldn't fix it inside. How is he

going to fix it outside? How can he have a foreign policy which could

actually be very influential? The problem is he wants to make America

great, or the greatest, as he promises people. But if he cannot

tackle the internal problems, and if he is actually motivated by hatred

towards Obama and the Democrats, how is he going to run the country? The

statement he made when it went down, the statement he made was

interesting. There were two guys standing over him, his vice

president and health secretary. They had obviously given him a script.

And he actually stuck to it. And it was surprisingly diplomatic. He was

saying, Obamacare is bloody collapse and when it goes, the Democrats can

come to us and we will be open to negotiation. It almost seems as if

the shock of this has made him say something. I was ready for him to

throw an absolute tantrum, to be completely irrational. In fact what

he said under the circumstances was about as rational as it could be.

Why would Obamacare necessarily collapse unless Congress denies

funding? The difficulty is it is this funny hybrid of a government

programme and an insurance market, an idea put forward by the Heritage

foundation, a Republican think tank. It is a very Republican idea to

begin with. It requires insurance companies to set premiums and get

subsidies from the government. In some states, some insurance

companies have withdrawn because they don't like the particular risk

pools they have got. In some states, for the first couple of years

premiums went down. This year they increased by 22% on average. In some

markets, 100%. If they go so far, people don't sign up. Young people

who are healthy $ up. -- sign up. It is not that hard to do. We have made

health care more complicated in America then we need to. The problem

is, in the Ronald Reagan days, the Republicans believed in smaller

government but they believed in making government work. Richard

Nixon imposed wage increase controls. They believed the gunmen

had imported things to do. People in the House Republican Party now are

so anti-government, they can't figure out how to make it work. That

bill would have been chaos for the insurance parties -- companies. How

much does it matter to those people who voted for Donald Trump anyway,

given that he said he needs to drain the swamp because Washington doesn't

work... He doesn't work. As an executive he has no prizes -- he's

had no previous experience. Reagan did have. There was more cohesion

among the politicians who were the big shots of the day. There was a

sense of responsibility to come together. I think they are all in

for a big fight. Fur Trump to say he wants to clean the swamp, his

mindset is a swamp of contradictions that people can't quite make out. I

agree. We are going through a perilous phase in international

politics where some people might take advantage of this weakened

position. Do you think there could be a foreign policy crisis that

someone will Manufacturer? Maybe somebody in the White House. Wagging

your dog is always possible. When you get to making war and other

countries, the sober people tend to show up at the table. And the

president himself, even one as feckless and strange as this man is,

will get the picture that he's not supposed to be ordering people to

their deaths without some good reason. There are lots of

opportunities to do funny things in Ukraine and to take advantage on the

edges, which I think will tie him in knots.

When you look at the foreign policy, for example, until now we haven't

seen any. He said a few days ago we should not withdraw troops from

Iraq. We should occupy the oilfields, control the oil fields of

Iraq. Just imagine. In Syria, for example, we don't know what he is

going to do. When it comes to the Palestinian question, he says there

is no two state solution, there is no one state solution. It's chaos.

It's chaos. It's completely incoherent. There is also another

question in terms of foreign policy, the Russia connection. If it is true

that there are real connections between his people and Putin's

Russia, we are in big trouble. That is very, very serious.

Let's move it on. The security services in Britain

and the United States have advised that laptops and similar devices

should no longer be allowed on certain flights, to counter

the threat from sophisticated bombs. But in London this week -

as we have seen in France and Germany in the past year ? low

tech terrorism is also deadly I mean, in some ways many people

have said it's not surprising this happened because we know big open

democracies will always be a target. Big open democracy is what we have

and what we want. We don't want to do anything to mitigate the

freedoms. This is what it's all about. If we destroy the social

values and the political values the country stands for in the name of

stamping out any conceivable possibility of any misfit, any

hanger on, any lunatic going over the edge and doing something on a

one-off basis, what is the point? Clearly, this particular action

might have been preventable in the sense that had there been armed

guards on that date at Westminster, possibly. But those are technical

questions. The idea that you can actually control the behaviour of

every conceivable person who might get hung up on this obsessive thing

for his own private pathological reasons, no, it isn't possible to

prevent it. Did any of you think in some ways this was a very good week

for British democracy? It was horrible to watch, but politicians

rose to the occasion. They kept going. They made statements which

were very statesman-like. The Prime Minister and others. It was a good

week for Theresa May. Incidentally, I was in the Parliament when the

attack took place. I was actually detained for six hours. What I

noticed, honestly, the confidence, the crisis management impressed me.

Suddenly, in a few minutes, the Terror squad was there in the

Parliament with their arms, with their masks. Everybody was quiet,

everybody was calm. Everybody wanted like to go on as if nothing

happened. The British are inherently calm! It was well orchestrated calm.

Which is very, very impressive. The message of this terrorist attack, it

did not actually affect people. It did not reach its destination. One

is the calmness and that a big democracy, an ancient democracy like

Britain does not allow itself to be forced its knees because one maniac.

And the second is, as Janet says, you can add 100% safeguard yourself

against that kind of attack. We have already 3000 or so presumed

terrorists who are being watched night and day. Then suddenly someone

comes in who is not on the radar screen. We have two ask ourselves,

why do we spend so much time covering an individual like this on

the news? It gives him extra fame, as it were. We accept the

inevitability that such acts occur and we have to continue with our

inner strength. I think sang fraud is really the only way. --

sangfroid. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise. If you are not

terrified, it makes a big difference. If you look at how

people really die in the world, toddlers killed more people in

America last year through handguns left around the house, than

terrorists did. But we don't get rid of toddlers. There are so many road

accidents on the roads in Britain. People are using their mobile phones

when they are driving. I you going to get rid of mobile phones? No, you

figure out a solution. In this way, better policing, better security

work is the only way to go. Otherwise we give up society. I

would question whether society is cohesive enough to contain this. You

have to talk in terms of prevention, telling the Mohsin -- Muslim

community to reporters going on early on. Is our society performing

properly? How we creating little ghettos? The enclaves of Islamist

indoctrination have to be dealt with. There is good evidence to show

there is considerable intelligence being received from the Muslim

community. The security services tell us they have forestalled any

number of incidents. I think you have to think of it like the cold

War. It took a long time to win the Cold War. There were Communists in

our midst. There were lots of ways this video that you worked. 20 years

ago there were not Muslim men driving their cars down streets to

kill people. We hope in 20 years from now they want again. Cold War

was an argument. You can persuade people communism was not the answer.

This was not an argument. This was a confrontation with insanity. For

some of the people, yes, they may be insane. But it is an ideology. There

is an infrastructure and a belief. It is just the extremist you're

getting. Talking about the Muslim community, in this country

particularly, they were extremely cooperative. They rejected this kind

of terrorism immediately. They were or operating with the security

services. That is why, for ten years, this country never witnessed

anything like this since the 7th of July 2000 and five. It tells first

the efficiency of the security forces, the cooperation of the

people with the security forces to prevent these kinds of things.

The European Union is celebrating - if that is the right word -

the 60th birthday of the great project which has help ensure

democracy has spread across Europe, from former Soviet satellites

in the Baltic, to former fascist-style dictatorships

But as Britain begins to leave, is the European project now

running out of steam, out of ideas, and out

The ever closer union we hoped would emerge is a more fractious union

now. We don't seem to be able to deal with the problems, starting

with external borders, the refugee problem, the euro, which hasn't been

solved. And also, importantly, the imbalances between peoples lives in

union. The Pope made a great point yesterday. The unemployment and the

austerity consequences of one size fits all currency is a dramatic

damage to people's hopes, young people's hopes for the future. That

has to be tackled. The refugee crisis, also, will now come down to

Turkey and all countries to solve. Turkey used to be a pillar of

stability. Now look at the 3 million refugees in Turkey, and look at

President Erdogan threatening Europe. We find building sites all

over the place. It doesn't look as if it is in very stable condition.

You need a face-lift at 60, the European Union! You need innovation,

you need new ideas. Think seriously about this. Look at Europe now after

60 years, they are facing immigration, they are facing

terrorism, they are facing slow growth. I don't believe any of this

was anticipated when this treaty was signed. This is the problem. The new

reality is taking place. You have to look at it from a different

perspective. I'm believe there must be some innovation. -- I believe. We

have had ideas, the Lisbon agenda, where they promised to overtake

America within ten years in terms of growth. We have two owned up to our

on declarations and be truthful to what we set ourselves. You have to

remember the founding philosophy of this. It was built after the Second

World War, after a terrible period in which nation states had disgraced

themselves. The anti-democratic nature of the European Union is not

an accident. The idea was that terrible people had been elected by

the democratic process in Europe and this was a terrible sort of shame

and guilt, and the abolition of the power of the nation state and the

National comment was built in right from the outset. And ironically,

this is now conducive to a new nationalism and the new xenophobia,

which was almost inevitable if you anticipated it properly. The point

is the democratic nation state, with a government elected by the people

for the people, answerable to its own population, was one of the

greatest progressive ideas in human history. They wanted to wipe it out

because of the terrible 20th century crimes. Three lots of no champagne

corks popping! Say something nice about the EU. It has prevented wars.

Has it? I think you have to look at it... It has encouraged democracy.

When you look at the appeal. After the fall of the Soviet Union, so

many eastern European countries wanted to join the EU and lives to

its standards -- live up. Of course they and to be part of the larger

families -- family, but the EU meant something. It was seven democracies

and cultures that had attractive power. I think we really do have to

thank it for a tremendous amount of contribution to peace and security.

It has always been bumpy. Where was the EU during the war in the

Balkans? I agree. But that is still part of the European family. You

have to look at those institutions. Is there any way of separating the

problems of the euro, with the problems of the European Union? In

other words, do you consider now that the euro itself has been such a

big step in the wrong direction for the people of Greece, for the people

of southern Europe? The original idea may have been a good one but we

admitted Sunni countries that should not have been admitted. It was fair

weather decisions when, after the 2000 agenda, when Europe said it was

great to be a growth area, it didn't act on it. A year later, they

accepted Greece. It was a scandalous decision. There was no thought to

what was going to happen. I would disagree. They didn't meet the

economic criteria. Neither did Italy, actually. You have to help

each other. They have made a basket case of Greece. Look at the social

problems. We have to give the European Union a social face, a

caring face. They have created an enormous welfare state. Greece is a

prominent beneficiary. That is terrible for that country. The

freedom of Europe -- movement within Europe means that the optimistic

young will leave those countries and come to the successful northern

countries. The United States has one: -- currency and lots of

different economies. People go from the poorer areas to New York City to

make their fortunes. You could say it is just that Germany wasn't

generous enough to Greece. State governments in the United States

have more power than governments within Europe. The United States

fought civil war over differences of opinion as well. As well as slavery,

of course. There are different economies bound together by the same

currency. The conflict between states to govern our economy and

federal states, causes tremendous damage sometimes. Not nearly as

problematic as you have with 27 nationalistic entities. It is

difficult enough in America. But it is most impossible to bring

everybody under one roof under such rules as Greece had to follow. We

should have done something to help Greece but not by subjecting them to

these rigorous rules of austerity, which they surely could not meet.

What a -- will there be a European Union of 27 countries in ten years?

That is the $100 million question. There is going to be a German

Europe. Please don't tell the Germans. They don't want to be

leaders. Lord Heseltine predicted this would be to the glory of

Germany becoming the dominant power. We don't want to dominate anywhere.

One of the reasons I am optimistic about the outcome of Brexit is

because Germany will not allow Britain to go to the nether world

and be forgotten about. Ironically, although the Germans don't want to

be dominant powers, they do in a sense dominate the ethos. They say

effectively the Greece have to behave more like Germans if they are

to survive economically. That was the creed which was expected by the

other nations. It may have been the original German idea. To be honest,

I believe the European Union will be stronger. They will repair or reform

a lot of mistakes. More countries will join, including Turkey.

Thank you for the optimism. That's it for Dateline

London for this week. And that's it for me on this

wonderful programme which, across the world, has been one

of the most watched BBC News And no doubt the next 20

will be even better. Let's see what happens to the

European Union then.