This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Steve Erlanger.

Steve Erlanger is the Chief Diplomatic correspondent in Europe for the New York Times.

Steve, we're obviously going to talk about the new Biden administration and what it means for

EU-US relations going forward.

But I do have to start with Trump.

You've actually met the gentleman quite a while back when you're in

New York. So have we seen the last of Trump? Is he going to be around for a while? What's happening?

Well, I think we have not seen the last of Trump. You can see in the Republican Party even now that he

holds a lot of power. People are afraid of him and they're afraid of him because

many base Republicans are very loyal to him and he is threatening to try to influence primaries,

to hold primaries against people who voted against him or voted for his impeachment.

So I think it will fade.

What changed matters to a great degree, I think, was the violence in the Capitol on January 6th.

Had Trump simply lost the election and said he'd never lost it, which created the myth of

the stab in the back, that would have been one thing. But when people saw the logical connection

between this denial of the democratic vote and this populism and this appeal to extremes and violence,

violence in the heart of the nation's capital, violence that seemed to be from one branch of government

against another branch of government. I think that shook people. It certainly shook people like Mitch McConnell,

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