Hello and welcome to Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop.

Saul is away this week, so standing in for him is podcast friend and stalwart Julius Strauss,

who our listeners will know well.

The maelstrom whipped up by Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk,

aka Leon Scum, I'll explain that later,

means it's very hard to discern any pattern in the avalanche of events.

Happenings that would once have fed the new cycle for a week

are coming at a rate of two or three a day.

Well, our job is to try and make sense of what often apparently seems senseless,

so here goes.

Yeah, Patrick, I mean, things are really moving quite a clip, aren't they? And you have to

wonder, is this part of some kind of coherent philosophy, or is it just disruption? And is there

any sort of roadmap behind all this? I mean, personally, I have my suspicions, but I don't want

to pass judgment on everything Trump does quite yet. One thing I would say that I've been

trying to write about Trump, and I find it extremely difficult. And there's a couple of reasons.

The first thing is he's incredibly mendacious. He just doesn't, you know, facts seem to mean so

little to him. And that sort of throws out these two twin dangers where one is that you don't take him seriously enough, but you only have to sort of ask millions of federal workers in the US whether they should have taken him seriously or not.

And you realize they were right to or thousands of aid workers in Africa.

But the other is that you take him too seriously.

And that way you sort of get into this thing of

frustration and probably ultimately madness, to be honest. And, you know, on Ukraine in the last several

weeks, he simply said so many things that are obviously and demonstrably false that as a journalist,

...