Transcript of Trump 100 Day 27: What does Trump want from Germany’s far right?

It's a nice home studio set up you've got, though, Mark.

Thank you very much, James.

Thank you. Martha, I think we're going to have to off our game, do you think? I think so. Personally, I miss your tequila bottles in the background, Martha.

Have you drunk them all? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Hello and welcome today, 27 of Trump 100, with me, James Matthews.

Me, Martha Kellner.

And me, Mark Stone.

Coming up, how Donald Trump, the mayor of New York City, and pop star, Sabrina Carpenter, are connected.

At first, JD Vance, the vice President is making waves in Europe.

The Munich Security Conference kicked off on Friday. It's an annual gathering of heads of state, security officials, high-ranking military, and the like from around the world. It's been around since the 1960s, but has gained real prominence in recent years, especially amidst the war in Europe, in Ukraine.

Yeah, they call it the Davos of defense, dialog among Western Allied Nations, a transatlantic family meeting, you I say.

And Mark, this year, much focus on the US delegation, yeah?

Yeah. Honestly, it is a transatlantic family meeting, it feels like a family in disarray right now. President Trump back in the White House, everything he has said about NATO over so many years in the run up to this election as well, there was always going to be plenty of angst, I think, on what the Americans would say at this conference. Remember, the US has the world's most powerful military, 1. 3 million active service personnel, a budget of $850 billion, and obviously cutting-edge military technology. And so what the US says about defense and what commitments it gives and doesn't give really matters. Then, of course, add to that what happened over the course of the past week, the way in which Donald Trump is attempting to broke a peace between Russia and Ukraine and his proposed US takeover of the Gaza Strip as a solution to the Middle East crisis. There's so much going on, and it feels as though even in the run up to this all-important Munich moment, that things have been turned on their heads.

It's also one of the first times, isn't it, since the inauguration that we've got to see the vice president JD Vance. There's been a lot of joking, or perhaps not joking, that Elon Musk is the real vice President in Trump's White House because we've seen so little of Vance. This was his opportunity on a big stage to make a mark, make a statement.

Very much so. He has been, if not sidelined, then working behind the scenes. The star of the show seems to be Elon Musk, who's been doing an awful lot of work. But there are reports, certainly the JD Vance has been working behind the scenes, trying to make sure that Donald Trump's cabinet picks get through the Senate. I guess you could say, relatively speaking, that he is a slightly more traditional politician than Donald Trump.

He's been user friendly Vance. I interviewed him about nine months ago, something like that before. Actually, Trump chose him to be his running mate. It was a day in Washington, actually quite fraught, lots of senators and representatives coming out of a meeting. The police were making a bit of a hash brown of it. Everyone was getting in everybody's way. Across the road, this Philly suave just sauntered past. Hi, Sky News. Did you get Donald Trump's endorsement?

Well, he endorsed me in my a race. I don't have a race in the next couple of years.

Very urbane. Everybody's friend, really, that day. And I suppose in Munich, he's rather pulled back the mask if he hadn't before.

And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be hateful content. Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of combating misogyny on the internet. Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular in the crosshairs.

I guess it was the speech you might expect him to make, but it wasn't the speech you would expect any other vice president to make in Munich. You might expect that he would talk all about Ukraine and about the threat from Europe's borders. But no, it was the threat from within that he chose to focus on. Throughout this Ukraine crisis, there has been a singular objective of the West, and Biden, President Biden, led led that, and that was unity, stick together. What J. D. Vance and Donald Trump appear to be doing, certainly this is how I think it will be seen in Moscow with some glee, is sticking a wedge right through Europe by pointing out differences within other European governments. Remember, the fact that he went to meet the leader of the AFD, Alice Vidal, and then said I think that they can work together. I mean, that's extraordinary for an American vice president to openly say, We can work with the opposition party in another country, especially when Germany has got their elections coming up around the corner. It was remarkable stuff.

Yeah, the election just a week or so away, isn't it, in Germany? It is, like you say, Mark, astonishing that they're courting the far-right AFD Party. People may remember that Elon Musk has also been a vocal backer of the AFD Party. He hosted a live question and answer on X a few weeks ago with Alice Vidal. He's now been accused of interfering in foreign elections by Friedrich Merz, who is the man that's likely to be Germany's next Chancellor. It's, like you say, astonishing.

Yeah, European leaders are deciphering Donald Trump, and they're looking for the certainty of American support that has underpinned world peace since the Second World War. Interestingly, I spoke to a senior Democrat in the past couple of hours following JD Vancy's speech. He was very concerned. He called this a policy of shaking down the allies and not standing up to adversaries. I asked him, Do you think there's a naivety in Trump's approach? And he said, No. His view, and this is a Democrat, his view, and this is a Democrat. His view was that it was all part of an overall effort to to impose that ideology being white Christian nationalism. That's a Democrat view, a senior Democrat.

Clearly, it's not gone down very well at all in Europe. Our defense and security editor, Deborah Haynes was at the conference, and she's been reporting through the day the reaction of European ministers to this Trump-Vance insert into their own politics. The German defense minister, Boris Pessourius, has hit out the comments, calling them unacceptable. But as we have been pointing out many times before, Europe needs American support. It needs to keep America on side for so many reasons. And There is such an acute awareness of what happens if you criticize Trump. How does Trump respond? It's delicate, to say the least.

Back in the US, an interesting story has been unfolding in New York, but there is still, of course, a link to Donald Trump. On Thursday, three top US prosecutors resigned after being ordered to drop a corruption case against the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. Martha, can you fill us in for people who might not know or have forgotten? What's the story with this guy, Eric Adams.

First of all, he's the Democrat mayor of New York City. Back in September 2024, he was hit with a series of federal charges for things like bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud. He is accused of taking over $100,000 in luxury perks from Turkish nationals before he became mayor. In return, he allegedly helped fast track the opening of a Turkish consulate without proper safety checks. On top of that, he was accused of hiding illegal foreign donations to his mayoral campaign, so fairly serious charges.

Yeah, it's a big case, Martha. Made lots of headlines, particularly this week, yeah.

Yeah, on On Monday, the Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to drop the case. This was a memo sent by the second most senior figure at the DOJ saying the charges were politically motivated. We're getting in the way of Adams doing his job, especially with immigration enforcement, and that's the key bit.

Yeah, it is. That's the key bit that's caused uproar and the resignation of several high-ranking legal figures, including the acting US attorney for New York, Danielle Sassoon. She accused the Department of engaging in a quid pro quo, essentially dropping the case in return for Adam's assistance with Trump's deportation policies in New York City. Yeah, and certainly in a recent interview alongside Trump's border Tsar Tom Homan, Adam said that he would cooperate on immigration enforcement, including reestablishing an ICE office, an immigration office, a Rikers Island, that infamous jail just off the island of Manhattan. Now, that is a pretty dramatic shift in policy for a Democrat mayor in New York It's worth saying that Eric Adams has always been on the right flank of the Democratic Party.

Yeah, and he was previously a registered Republican as well. But New York City is a sanctuary city. So these are essentially cities that are friendlier to undocumented migrants. They don't cooperate with immigration officials, for example, in the same way as some of the Republican cities. Trump and his administration obviously don't like this. They're trying to put pressure on the leaders of sanctuary cities like New York to cooperate, really, with his shock and/or deportation plans.

Yeah, Donald Trump, he's denied having instructed the Department of Justice to drop this case, but it has led to allegations that his administration is indeed leaning on the DOJ, and that's compromising the independence of the justice system.

I think there are two things to say. The first is that maybe Trump didn't know anything about this, but there is a sense maybe that he has enabled and emboldened people within within his orbit who may feel that they can lean on people, do things that might not be necessarily the right thing to do or even the legal thing to do. The other point is that through the first Trump presidency, we'll talk about checks and balances, about three branches of government, and that there were always guardrails that would ensure that America stayed on the right track. The question, I guess now, is whether those checks and balances are being genuinely eroded, and that certainly is the real concern from the Neft, the idea that the US Constitution is built and designed to keep these three branches of government separate. No one of them can become more powerful than the other. I don't know about you, but it does feel at the moment as though the executive branch, Trump's branch, is very powerful indeed.

That's why you see people suggesting that there's a constitutional crisis underway in the United States at the at the moment. People on the left also suggesting that Eric Adams should now resign because his positions compromised, that he's no longer capable of making decisions in the interests of the people of New York City. He is instead making decisions in his own self-interest.

Yeah, and the case has been dropped without prejudice, hasn't it? Which means that they can reengage or trigger that indictment whenever they like. So it's almost as if Eric Adams is now on Donald Trump's leash.

This is all obviously very serious, but there is also a slightly bizarre celebrity connection to all of this. I don't know whether you've heard of Sabrina Carpenter.

No.

That doesn't surprise me that much. She's a massive pop star, and I bet you have heard some of her songs. She's famous for her biggest hits Espresso. How does that go?

Oh, God. Come on. You are not a player.

Say you can't sleep, Baby, I know.

That's Espresso. Don't tell me that's a hit. Who writes that stuff?

It's one of her other songs that has prompted the link to Eric Adams, a song called Feathers. She filmed the music video to Feathers in a church in Brooklyn. It was controversial at the time because it showed her dancing around an altar in a short black dress. The priest, bear with me, the priest who allowed her to film there was fired by the diocese. When that happened, they also looked into his accounts as part of that investigation and found that he's been embezzling money from the church. In fact, he transferred nearly $2 million in church funds to counts affiliated with a former staff member of Eric Adams. It's not clear if Adams was already been investigated or if this revelation led investigators to Adams. But Sabrina Carpenter was joking on her tour stop in New York that she was responsible for getting her indicted. It's an intriguing story Sorry.

All publicity is good publicity. Exactly.

Maybe not for Eric Adams.

Martha, we were talking about him yesterday, RFK Jr, the new Health Secretary here, and he's hit the ground running.

Yeah, he was only sworn in on Thursday afternoon, but he's working quickly. He's already signed what is a controversial order for his Department, the Department of Health Services, to look into, and I quote here, the prevalence of and threat posed by drugs including antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and weight loss drugs. There was a post on X by Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota who called this an astonishing denial of science. She said it's going to cause so much pain to the 45 million Americans facing mental health challenges. I was speaking to a professor who studies addiction at Stanford University. He was saying to me, there are already hundreds of data analytic studies about antidepressants that took place outside the antidepressant industry. So the idea that the government hasn't been looking at this previously simply isn't true. He was also mentioning RFK Junior's suggestion that heroine isn't as addictive as antidepressant drugs. He said that's completely ludicrous, and that while withdrawing from antidepressants is unpleasant, people are not abandoning their families or ripping scenarios from cars like they are when they're trying to withdraw from opioids. And he reckons that a lot of what RFK Jr. Does around health is based on his own biographical experience.

So RFK Jr, for people who don't know, has recovered from a heroine addiction, and that informs the way he's executing policy, according to this professor. And his point was, some people beat alcoholism by doing Taibo, the martial arts, but you wouldn't suddenly suggest that that becomes part of national policy to do Thaibaut.

Also, this is linked to the health thing and to vaccines. Trump signed an executive order, another one in the oval office, which effectively seems to ban federal funding for schools who mandate the COVID vaccine. If schools decide that they want all their pupils to have the COVID vaccine, as many, most, I think, do, then they're going to lose their federal funding. That's a stark change.

But for now, Donald Trump's off to Manalago for President's Weekend, and we're off to lie down in a darkened room. But before we go, I'm going to ask both of you, have you seen the the White House Valentine posting on X? Yes. It's pink. It's got pictures of Donald Trump and Tom Homan, Bordasar, with a little poem. Roses are red, violets are blue. Come here illegally and we'll deport you. Which leads me to my next question. Let's each do a Roses are red poem and see who's the winner. Who wants to go first?

Roses are red, violets are blue. I can't believe it's only day 27. How about you?

Hard agree. Okay, that's it for today. If you're enjoying listening to us every day, why not give the Trump 100 feed a follow so that you never miss an episode?

And remember, you can email us on trump100@ sky. Uk.

Right, that's it for day 27 of Trump 100. See you tomorrow for day 28.

See you then. All the best.