World Leaders Forced to meet Trump
The Bugle
The episode covers world leaders being forced to meet Donald Trump, including Andy Burnham and Xi Jinping, while satirizing Trump's erratic diplomacy,
Key takeaways
- Donald Trump met with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, with hosts mocking the diplomatic awkwardness and lack of substantive progress.
- Trump threatened to annihilate Iran and announced plans to rename the Strait of Hormuz as the 'Trump Strait' on Truth Social.
Main topics
- Trump-Xi diplomatic summit
- Iran threats and Strait of Hormuz renaming
Notable quotes
Cricket is f***ing great.
Conclusion
The episode blends sharp political satire with cultural commentary, highlighting the
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:10) The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world. Speaker 3 (0:13) Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4,392 of The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world, with me, Andy Zaltzman, recording on the 28th of September, 2026. And firstly, a huge thank you, Buglers, for listening to this show, because I know how tempting it must be for you all to watch the new 24-hour-a-day Trump TV channel for 24 hours a day, so we are beyond grateful. You've cut down to somewhere between 23 and 23 and a half hours to give us the rest of your time. Much obliged. You won't regret it. I'm delighted to be joined for this edition of the Bugle. And let me preface this by saying that the cricket season ended yesterday. As we record, it's Monday today. I worked on my last cricket game of the season. The professional season has ended. The club scene has basically ended. It's a difficult time of year for me, and so I have hand-selected my two co-hosts today, from all eight billion-odd people in the world, to find two people who just don't give a shit about cricket. Weed me on to the bleakly cricket-less months ahead. Firstly, from New York City, it's Josh Godelman. Hello, Josh. Speaker 2 (1:27) Hello, Andy. I am happy to welcome you into my... cricket-less part of the year which lasts 12 months. Speaker 3 (1:37) And also, Jordius, for the first time on The Bugle, a huge welcome to Catherine Bohart. Hello, Catherine. Hi, Speaker 1 (1:42) thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I have to say, I don't give a shit about cricket, that's correct, but as a gay woman with straight female friends, I can lament with you over a summer fling that I'm not interested in. Speaker 3 (1:55) Of Speaker 1 (1:55) course I can. I'm sorry to hear about your heartbreak. That sounds important. Am I doing it right? Speaker 3 (2:00) You're doing very well, Catherine. Speaker 2 (2:03) Cricket didn't deserve you, Andy. Speaker 2 (2:10) And Speaker 1 (2:10) I thought it was weird that he always wore white. I was like, I get it. It's the summer, but how are we keeping it clean? It feels like his mom does his laundry. There, I said it. Speaker 3 (2:21) Lovely to have you on the Bugle, Catherine. Buglers who listen to the news quiz would have heard you many times on that. So welcome. Welcome to the Bugle stable. Speaker 1 (2:33) I'm thrilled to be here on this sort of sexy version of the news quiz where you can curse and say anything. It's so exciting. Speaker 3 (2:40) We are recording, as I said, on the 28th of September, 2026, which means it is exactly 960 years since William the Conqueror. The renowned tapestry model and conquering specialist landed in England, kicking off the Norman Conquest, from which, to be honest, England is still struggling to recover. Billy the Sea landed on the Sussex coast on the 28th of September 1066, which gave him two and a half weeks of press and promotional opportunities to build up excitement ahead of the big Battle of Hastings showdown on the 14th of September, at which Anglo-Saxon boss King Harold copped his career-ending arrow-in-the-eye injury. And on this day in 1928, 98 short years ago, a dark day for the bacteria rights movement as science dweeb Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. And I'm not sure the bacterial community has ever fully recovered, to be honest, and I'm not sure it ever will. As always, a section of the Bugle is going straight in the bin. This week, we have for you an emergency sports bulletin. Now, this follows the harrowing news here. that the BBC is set to cut back on sports bulletins on its news channel. And we know this is a very difficult time for BBC watching sports fans. So we at the Bugle, aware of the cosmic importance of knowing what is happening in the world of sport at all times, have created an AI-generated... emergency sports bulletin that will never go out of date. You simply need to ask your smart speaker to play the Bugle's never-ending sports news update whenever you need a hit of sports news to distract you from, for example, everything else in the world between now and the end of time. So here is our Speaker 2 (4:16) Bugle Speaker 3 (4:16) emergency timeless sports bulletin. Speaker 2 (4:18) Here is the sport. A footballer might move from his current club to another Speaker 3 (4:25) club, but also might not. A tennis player did not win Wimbledon. A golfer hit a golf ball into the golfer with a golf shot. Cricket is f***ing great. In an emotional press conference, a racehorse was very sad to have been commercially exploited for its ability to jump over a hedge. And finally, a cyclist said France is big. Speaker 1 (4:52) Now is the weather or travel. Speaker 3 (4:56) So there you go, buglers. You can live the rest of your life safe in the knowledge that you will always have sport with you. That really Speaker 2 (5:03) put me at ease. Speaker 1 (5:05) I don't have a constant news bulletin, but I do have a little brother, which is basically the same thing. It's so nice. That was very reassuring. I felt like I was home. Speaker 3 (5:15) Well, we live in an age of uncertainty, Catherine. Anything that can give us those anchor points, we must cling to. Speaker 3 (5:28) Top story this week, world leaders have to do meetings with Donald Trump, whether they liked it or not. And look, I mean, I guess there's some perks to being a world leader, particularly in a country like China, where you can sort of do whatever you want. But having to meet Donald Trump is emphatically not one of them. But they've been having to suck it up in the past week or so. Andy Burnham, the UK's current, let me just check that. Yep, still current prime minister. Speaker 3 (5:57) And China's grown from our Xi Jinping. I've had to meet with Trumpel Steltskin, who's taken a little bit of time off from his hectic schedule of posting slop on social media and renaming bits of water to meet other world leaders. Josh, you are the Bugle's American-Chinese relations correspondent. How has the Trump-Xi Speaker 2 (6:17) summit gone down? It is. I, you know, I wish I could be a fly on the wall in whatever stairwell or conference room. All the world leaders who had to meet with Trump that day congregate afterwards through their translators to all in the various languages of the world go, this f***ing Speaker 1 (6:35) guy. Speaker 2 (6:38) It is really, this is a tough situation, right? The UN meets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And I hate going there. for what turns out to just be like a can I pick your brain meeting. And I don't even have to commute to China or meet Donald Trump there. The big kind of headline from these meetings with Xi and Trump is that they may have squandered. an opportunity to make progress on issues like artificial intelligence that are big global issues that the U.S. and China could really collaborate on. And honestly, I think their failure to move the needle at all is best case scenario. There were three ways that these meetings could have gone. One, exactly as they did. Fine. Two, Xi tricks Trump into trading him California for a laptop loaded with every episode of The Apprentice as an MP4. Or it goes so badly that Trump declares war on the entire Eastern Hemisphere using geopolitical concepts from the 1970s and racial slurs from the 1870s. Speaker 1 (7:39) He doesn't have that level of vocabulary. Come on. Speaker 2 (7:43) I Speaker 1 (7:44) mean, I have to agree. It's funny that you think that they all stand out there going this f***ing guy. I wonder if part of it's like going to visit Trump is a bit like getting your bridesmaids to wear really ugly dresses or actually being in a photograph with him. you look better like you Speaker 2 (7:58) know Speaker 1 (7:59) especially if you were a chinese sort of um autocrat i think there's something in being like okay so you think you want democracy but here's what it looks like Speaker 3 (8:08) that Speaker 1 (8:08) to me feels like quite a good pr swing uh but yes it it is to a to a large degree actually maybe best they achieved absolutely zippo for fear they might have achieved something bad Speaker 3 (8:20) um there were uh reports that, well, from the US ambassador, that Trump might have offered, and when I say might have offered, this is the 2020s, you can interpret it as definitely did offer, to sell weapons to China. Now, this would be A, against US law, B, strategically insane, C, not wildly popular in, for example, Taiwan, but D, most importantly, absolutely on brand for Donald Trump. You know, maybe nothing concrete might have come out of it. But if it's opened up the possibility of Trump basically selling under the counter weapons of mass destruction to China, I feel at least it would all make some sort of coherent sense for this world we live in. He also compared America's history, Josh, with China's. And he said, our history goes back 250 years, which is great. And we're proud of it. Theirs goes back 6,000 years. So there's a little difference between 6,000 and 250. Well, when he says a little difference, it's that kind of math that might explain his repeated bankruptcies. But also, I mean, a couple of things here. 250, that's nothing to be proud of in terms of a country. So he barely started. And also bad luck to anyone who thought there were people in North America before the Europeans helped themselves to it. I mean, you might go back a little further than 250 years, but it might explain the way Trump sees the world. Also, the 6,000-year history of China has been quite different since, for example, 1949 or 1976, when Mao Zedong had to finish his attempt to obliterate most of Chinese history, ideas, culture and tradition to make some more time in his diary for his new hobby of being dead. So I guess we don't turn to Trump for historical accuracy, Josh, but I thought that was, you know. Quite nice of him to chuck a bit of maths in for the stats fans. Speaker 2 (10:16) Andy, I think it's, you really put your finger on it when you said, obviously there were people in the United States, or it wasn't called that then, but there were people in this continent before white people got there. But that is when Trump starts thinking history begins, is when white people arrive. So honestly, I'm not sure he thinks China exists yet. Speaker 2 (10:40) So it's nice to give him credit for 6,000 years. Speaker 1 (10:45) Yeah, it's a fascinating one, isn't it? Because it's like, listen, I'm from a younger country than that even. And I do respect thinking of your origins as throwing the yoke off. But I think like a complete delusion about where you live is, it's funny from him because I'm. He must have been in between a rock and a hard place, right? Like on the one hand, he acknowledges anything that came before those 250 years and he gets to have a bigger number, which, you know, beside China's big number, big boys, big competition, big good. Speaker 2 (11:15) But Speaker 1 (11:15) if he does concede it, oh, he might be the bad guy and that's too much information to process all at the same time. So let's just minimize the difference. Good for you, man. Speaker 3 (11:25) In terms of sweetening any potential deal between China and the USA, Obviously, the most obvious thing to do from a Chinese point of view is to give pandas a gift, a lease, a loan. It's not entirely sure. Two pandas have been donated as part of this meeting to Atlanta Zoo. Ping Ping and Fu Shuang are being used as pawns in the grand geopolitical game. And I mean, a couple of things I thought of when I read this