Après-Midi Recap

“The Second Coming of Trump: Bracing for Impact”

“President Donald J. Trump: The End.”

I’d been watching Douglas Herbert’s reporting on France 24 since its inception on December 6, 2006, and became a huge fan of his no-nonsense reporting and rational opinions on world news. As an American, he covers American news like an insider. I have avidly watched his newscasts and reports, then had the lucky chance of meeting him and becoming friends through a mutual colleague. He has spoken at Après-Midi on several occasions and always wows the audience. This time was no different, speaking about the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election and what that might mean to the U.S. We had a full house and a lot of questions—very enlightening viewpoint of a journalist who is ferreting out the truth!

When The New York Times ran that headline above an opinion piece by columnist Thomas Friedman on January 19, 2021—a day before Joe Biden’s inauguration—it echoed a collective sigh of relief across much of America, and the world, that “the terrible experiment is over.” Four years later, however, history has roared back with a vengeance. President-elect Donald Trump 2.0, emboldened and empowered by a compliant Congress and a Supreme Court supermajority, has pledged a sweeping transformation of the federal government, unprecedented in modern times. This has reignited a fierce debate over how far the next administration will go in dismantling established policies on healthcare, climate change, the economy, foreign policy, and immigration. While some view it as a refreshing break from a stagnant status quo, others fear a far darker shift—an “America First” approach, on steroids. With few remaining checks to curb the ambitions of a twice-impeached, criminally convicted president focused on revenge against “the enemy within,” the country faces an uncertain and contentious road ahead.

About Douglas Herbert

Douglas Herbert, a New York-born, Paris-based TV commentator with France 24, parlayed his early love for languages, literature and travel into a journalism career that has taken him from New York and Philadelphia to Estonia, Russia, the UK and, for the past 17 years, France. As a freelance writer in the Moscow Bureau of The New York Times in the mid-90s, Douglas reported on a catastrophic oil spill in Russia’s Far North. Back in the US, he segued from covering Kremlin intrigue, to the Philly suburbs, as a reporter for a large metropolitan daily, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Douglas subsequently covered business and markets for CNN’s financial news website in New York, before crossing the Pond to work at CNN International in London, as a multimedia feature reporter focused on European issues. At France 24, a Paris-based news channel that he joined at its launch in 2006, Douglas gives his take on breaking international stories, in both English and French. He has covered numerous G7 and G20 summits, from Mexico to Québec to Northern Ireland, along with four US presidential elections. In 2021, Douglas helped lead France 24’s coverage of the Biden-Harris inauguration, from Washington, DC. He received his Masters Degree in Russian Studies from Harvard University, having studied in Moscow in the late 1980s, in the heyday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Since then, he has reported extensively from Russia and Ukraine, and was live at the scene when Russian troops – the “little green men” – occupied Crimea in February 2014. He is a regular conference speaker on US politics, and French and Russian politics and society. Douglas taught a graduate-level fact-checking course at Paris’s Sciences Po journalism school for seven years.

On France 24

Be sure to watch the entire video from the Après-Midi event.