← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
Iran War heats up again: are the stakes higher than ever?
00:38:42
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- [00:03]
Tina Brown
This is a Global Player original podcast.
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Christiane Amanpour
This is a battle for who can stand the most pain for the longest.
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Tina Brown
21% approval rating for Trump on the economy.
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Christiane Amanpour
That's catastrophic for him because he won the election on the economy.
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Tina Brown
This war is not what they signed up for. People know what they're paying for gas. They know that's not a democratic hoax.
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Christiane Amanpour
Israel doesn't want a ceasefire. Israel doesn't want an end to this because it should just wants to, quote, unquote, finish the job.
- [00:32]
Tina Brown
Trump's problem is, is that he just doesn't have any strategy but force.
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Christiane Amanpour
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of the X Files. Today, we're going to ask, is the Iran war about to heat up again? What is the cost of trying to hold Trump to account in this era? And has King Charles state visit to Washington reset the special relationship? So I'm Christiane Amanpour, but this morning I'm to Jamie Rubin. I'm talking to Tina Brown. She is the, what can I say, the owner of this incredible substack Fresh Hell. And she's also an ex, having been the top editor in chief of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Hi.
- [01:16]
Tina Brown
Hello.
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Christiane Amanpour
Good to see you again in the studio. You know, I didn't expect to be talking about Iran again, but it has just flared again. President Trump has laid down the gauntlet using Operation Freedom, something like that, to say he's gonna open the Strait of Hormuz and escort the stuck boats. Well, Iran has responded by sending drones into the UAE and basically upping the ante again and saying this cannot be fixed by this political, you know, crisis can't be fixed by military means. How is it going down in the United States? You've just come from there.
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Tina Brown
The skepticism is really growing. I mean, the fact is that the American people, 61% now say that military action in Iran was a mistake. 21% approval rating for Trump on the economy, which is really coming from the rise in the gas prices due to the war and the rise in groceries and the fact that people understand this war is not what they signed up for. They voted for him because they didn't want this. And, you know, it's very telling, actually, that the Iranian foreign minister is now using the Q word quagmire, about the Iran war, because that is the word that Trump kept bringing up, you know, when he was campaigning. Like, we're not going to get stuck in a quagmire like they had in Iraq. Whatever it was all about, we're not going to do that. Kind of folly. Well, he's doing it and he is stuck in a quagmire.
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Christiane Amanpour
Did you say 21% on the economy?
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Tina Brown
21.
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Christiane Amanpour
That's catastrophic for him because he won the election on the economy, he's viewed as being able to at least bring a strong economy. That's always been his strong point, 21%.
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Tina Brown
And he's bluffing about that still, which, of course, you can't. He's calls it a Democratic hoax. Well, people know what they're paying for gas. They know that's not a Democratic hoax. A And secondly, he's also showing, I think, how more and more out of touch he is with how Americans feel. I mean, just on Monday at a business conference, he talked about how the federal workers he'd fired should be grateful to him because they went on and got better jobs. Well, I mean, that. I mean, how can you actually say that as a politician and not expect people to be hurling rotten eggs at you or like the Iraqis used to do, Throw their shoes.
- [03:32]
Christiane Amanpour
Throw their shoes. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you rem. George W. Bush when he was president, and he came to Iraq shortly after, I believe, the Mission Accomplished banner.
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Tina Brown
He got hit with shoes.
- [03:43]
Christiane Amanpour
Yes. And Trump, though, a lot of critics of this war and a lot of his supporters say he should just declare Mission Accomplished and say that he's, you know, desperately degraded the Iranian military machine. Its nuclear facilities and ability are under, you know, tons of rock. They've turned it into rubble, and that he's weakened the leadership and call it a day. But it appears that he is doubling down. And this is as. As, you know, this is something that is. Many of his critics say he's being pushed by Israel and that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire. Israel doesn't want an end to this because it just wants to, quote, unquote, finish the job. And that, you know, the skeptics and the critics say it's Trump's donors and certain people with special interests in the United States who keep saying, don't worry about the economy, don't worry about the oil prices. They will go down. Just finish Iran. You, you know, collapse Iran's economy. Finish it and you'll be a hero and you can get it done by the midterms and sail to victory. To me, that sounds fantastical because we're in a bit of a. And we've said it before with Jamie, this is a battle for who can stand the most pain for the longest. And most people think it is Iran.
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Tina Brown
Well, that's correct. I don't actually anymore. Subscribe so much to that theory. There are indeed many people saying that, you know, who are in his donor base. But I think at this point, Trump really wants to get out of there, but he stuck. I mean, the straits of Hormuz has foiled him and the realization, the horrible, creeping realization amongst everybody that actually Iran does hold that card. So now he says, again, you know, they're going to be blown off the face of the earth if they try and do anything to Operation Freedom. But Trump's problem is that he just doesn't have any strategy but force. You know, bombing, you know, bullying. Those are his weapons, you know, of choice. And this is one that doesn't respond to that. You know, the Iranians are just strategic and tactical and clever, and they're playing this long game, which is like we've sustained pain before in the Iran Iraq war. I mean, they are. If you're prepared to die, if you're prepared to sort of repress your people and not care that they have, you know, not enough to eat or, you know, all the things that are going to happen with these terrible sanctions going on and on, they just don't care. So, I mean, if you're prepared to not care about your own people, you have going to, inevitably, you have got a much longer game you can play. And Trump has not been able to see that. And I think. I don't even think he really sees it now.
- [06:14]
Christiane Amanpour
That's also, I think, really interesting because again, and I would say, and we're gonna get to this in the press bit, I wonder whether the American press is lucid enough about this or whether it actually sort of feeds the idea that this is a winnable war by the United States. We'll talk about that in a moment, because you're more on that side than you know, but there are very few people actually standing and saying exactly what it is. Now, I am willing to also bet that Iran, although it absolutely has, as you say, withstood decades of outside pressure, war, sanctions, et cetera, and its own catastrophic mismanagement of the economy, that potentially this squeeze by Trump could really bring it to its economic knees, which is what Trump's critics and or other his supporters absolutely want. But that's still. The jury is still out on there and on this Operation Freedom. As you and I were saying before we sat down, I think they've only escorted I at as. As we record right now, two or three boats.
- [07:16]
Tina Brown
Yeah, I mean, big deals. I mean, Quite honestly, there's 2,000 boats in the Strait of hormones. I mean, how much money is it going to cost for a massive, you know, American escort to bring a boat out? It's just not, not. It's just not a viable plan. And it's a silly idea to make a big deal of that because of course you can use a massive American boat, you know, to bring boats out, but what kind of a strategy is that for running a commercial, you know, Waterway?
- [07:43]
Christiane Amanpour
And then IR showed again that all it has to do is send a cheap drone into not, not even against America, against the uae, which it just did. And boom, up go the price.
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Tina Brown
I know. It's so fascinating the way these nimble low tech solutions, as it were, can keep on foiling America's might. I mean, you saw it at 911 with the box cutters, you know, and the hijackers. It wasn't a big high tech, you know, calamity at all. It was done by people willing to die with little, you know, armaments, but.
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Christiane Amanpour
And in charge of great big flying missiles, those aircraft.
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Tina Brown
Yeah.
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Christiane Amanpour
Tina, you're here for the Truth Tellers Summit, correct? Just explain that before we go because it's really vital right now. It's in memory of your late husband, Sir Harry Evans. And it's about keeping the focus on real journalism and investigative journalism. And also in the title, you know, speaking Truth to Power, holding the Powerful Accountable, which is getting more and more difficult.
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Tina Brown
Correct. Well, when I started it sort of in 22, you know, the first impulse was to sort of honor Harry's great legacy. You know, he was a brilliant editor of the Sunday Times and his investigative team Insight. They broke these huge stories like Kim Philby as a Soviet spy. They did the campaigning for nearly 10 years to get compensation for the victims of the thalidomide drug and the DC10 air crash. All these great investigations that were sort of iconic. And I thought what better way to kind of memorialize him than to do what he passionately believed, which is to support the great, you know, sleuthing, unsung, you know, dogged journalists who are really the bedrock of our democracy because, you know, it's not a very well paid profession when you think about it. And I mean, journalists are passionate and dedicated and obsessive. And I love that tribe. And Harry loved that tribe. They were his tribe. And so what I have tried to do is to remind people because the tre. The press is constantly being trashed. I mean, since the, you know, the Trump era began, it's always about, you know, the press being, you know, the enemy. And I Thought, you know, what a great idea to actually be able to bring these, give voice and faces and voices to the people who are courageous, who go and fight in these wars. I mean, what is it, 100, is it 180 who've been killed?
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Christiane Amanpour
This last year is one of the, was the worst for journalists.
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Tina Brown
I mean, they get sent into war zones and they die, you know, and they're doing it for us to get the information up. So we started the summit and it's now become this wonderful kind of convening on the media calendar where people really come to be reinspired, I think, about what journalism actually is, which is holding power to account, which is getting the truth out in this horrendous quagmire of lies and disinformation and, you know, political propaganda and all these things that have militated against truthful storytelling and really try to remind people why it is so important. I mean, journalism is not a kind of ornamental add on. It's not like, well, it's nice to have good journalism. I mean, without good journalism, we flounder, we fail. I mean, there's no freedom without freedom of the press.
- [10:47]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, it's interesting because in America, not so much here, because it's not constitutionally protected, but there, the First Amendment gets the American journalists to call themselves the Fourth Estate. So one of the four pillars of democracy, I mean, it's an informal title, but nonetheless, and I think that's super important, and to go all the way back to founding father Thomas Jefferson, who I love quoting this, I'm gonna paraphrase, but if given the choice, he would rather the newspapers without government rather than government without newspapers. And he said in those days it was newspapers, that the press is there to keep our democracy alive and to guarantee American freedom. And I think it's really, really important to remember that because in the Trump era especially, I mean, of course Nixon, there were many, many times when the press were abused or mistrusted or disliked by presidents. But I thought it was really, really impress important that President Trump came for the first time in basically not quite eight years, but in his first term and his second term, he had not yet been to the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Who knows what he was going to deliver as a major roast against the press. But of all times, this time was the one that was disrupted and we didn't because it's the one night when the press is in the same room not to fawn over the president, but to be there to show that this is what democracy is, that the President is accountable to the people via the press.
- [12:15]
Tina Brown
Yeah, I think, of course, what he would have done was to berate the press. So, you know, it's possible that the assassins saved them from an evening of humiliation, gave them one of. One of terror instead of humiliation. But what I think is awful and terrible about what Trump has been really quite systematically doing is take this great article of faith, which it is the free press in America, and just undermine that supposition all the time. I mean, you know, the other day he was making a speech in Florida, and he talked about how critics of the Iraq war, Iran war were treasonous. Well, I mean, treason is a Putin word. You know, I mean, that's what they say in Russia, that it's treasonous to tell the truth. And that's what Trump is trying to do, essentially. He's trying to say those who criticize me are treasonous.
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Christiane Amanpour
And Hegseth says it from the podium.
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Tina Brown
He says it from the podium, wraps
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Christiane Amanpour
it all up in Christian Mission and all the rest of it.
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Tina Brown
And I thought it was thrilling, actually, that, you know, when Hegseth banned reporters from the Pentagon who he, you know, who's. Whose truthful reporting he didn't like, they all said, well, we're not coming on your terms. I mean, you know, they just left. And it was a nice moment to see them packing up their desks and leaving the Pentagon, and they went on reporting. They didn't need pen. They didn't need Hegseth's blessing to do their reporting. They just call in to be all their sources. You know, they call sources now leakers.
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Christiane Amanpour
Yeah. And, you know, I've always, because I've never operated inside the. Inside the US Press bubble, you know, the White House bubble or the Pentagon bubble or the State Department bubble. I've always been outside, and we don't have that abroad. We don't have that kind of what I call captive press audience that who travels with the principals or the cabinet secretaries all over the place. I've always thought it's a little bit too much pressure to be in the lion's den all the time. You know, you need to be outside. So this is good. I think that the press are outside the Pentagon and are trying to, you know, report using their own sources, whether they're being called leakers or not. It's absolutely rigorous. But President Trump has also managed to swerve around, you know, direct, you know, for a lot of direct confrontation or accountability by giving so many press members his cell phone, or somehow they got it and just Picking and choosing. The latest was over the weekend he called into. Is it Hugh Hewitt?
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Tina Brown
Yeah, he's not a journalist. I follow closely.
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Christiane Amanpour
But Trump was busy telling him how great this operation was.
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Tina Brown
Well, one of his great techniques, you know, frankly, it's a very cunning one, is sort of all access pass to the press and it's meaningless access. That's the point. So that in fact, as you say, every journalist has his cell phone number, but it's totally meaningless. He's going to call up and blather this nonsense at him. I think that one of the things that's also very interesting about now, which I think's a great help to investigative journalism, we have it on our stage tomorrow, is this whole new sort of form of digital sleuthing that can go on. I mean, we have actually coming the three sort of top digital investigators. Great. Christo Grosseff, you know, who, I'm sure you know, who's from his investigations.
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Christiane Amanpour
And he was very close to Navalny.
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Tina Brown
He was Navalny documentary and the, and the, and the scalpel poisonings was one of his great stories. And Malachi Brown, who's the video in charge of all the video at the Times and Merlin from, from, from the BBC Verify. And what they spend all their time doing is, is looking at, you know, video, body cams, drone footage, you know, phone footage, all of this unbelievable new tsunami of visual information that comes on. And really they can use it to give the lie, you know, to a lot of the things the administration says. Like for instance, when Kristi Noem, you know, the Department of Homeland, you know, Homeland Security, Homeland Security, who now fired, you know, when she was telling the world that Alex Preety, the young protester in Minneapolis, in Minneapolis was a, quote, terrorist, they were able to, as she was speaking literally in real time, calling him a terrorist, put up the video which showed that he wasn't a terrorist at all. He was a totally peaceful protester and she was telling a lie, you know. So I think that's really important. This video sleuthing now has become a wonderful new tool for, for investigation. We're going to be talking about that tomorrow, which I think is going to be really interesting, actually.
- [16:34]
Christiane Amanpour
So I'm in one of your panels, the first panel, and I think it is about trying to hold a president accountable. So I've actually never, because it's not been my job, interviewed a sitting president. A lot of never, never, never. Because the White House correspondents get that or the anchors or whatever. But I did have the occasion to question President Clinton when he was doing an international global sort of town hall at cnn, and CNN chose a few of us. I happened to have been in Bosnia. It's 94, and it was really relevant. And I, you know, I didn't need access. I didn't need anything. And I was just listening to the president. And I remember, you know, saying to him, why, Mr. President, after all the niceties about what an honor to, you know, address you from Sarajevo. How come your administration is, you know, conducting so many flip flops over Bosnia? And I went on and on, and he just got madder and madder and madder. And he responded by, there have been no constant flip flops, madam. And off he went. The point I'm making now is that the entire CNN high command was in the audience because it was taking place at cnn. So Ted Turner, Tom Johnson, Ethan Jordan, these are all names of, of everybody who was running cnn. Not one of them told me off. Afterwards I heard that they all went white rigid with probably fury at me and worry about what the President would say, but not one of them told me off. And in fact, that's superb, isn't it? It is actually. And it's really important because now you hear from others, look at 60 Minutes, what's going on, that it's about access. It's about, you know, kind of access. Kissing the ring.
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Tina Brown
It absolutely is. And I think that, you know, one of the things that we're gonna discuss to is like, you know, journalists in a way, are, can only be as brave as they're allowed to be. Right? I mean, I think that there's so many courageous journalists, but there's a lot of people that you talk to who say, I can't do that story because, you know, either you'd have to quit the network because they're gonna, you know, I will be banned from doing it. I'll be told I can't do it. This is something that's very, very alarming. I must say that my partner's Reuters at Truth Tellers. They really have an unsung hero in the Thompson family that, you know, David Thompson is the chairman of and he actually was. His grand grandfather was the. Owned the Sunday Times when Harry was at the Sunday Times. And he's been a huge supporter of Truth Tellers, but they really back their journalists there. They give them, you know, good budgets. They, they got, you know, incredible bureaus all over the world. They publish really tough stuff. They just want to Pulitzers and they, they're, they're really holding power to account there and you know, there are outlets that really will. And actually we also have Emma Tucker tomorrow.
- [19:16]
Christiane Amanpour
I was going to ask you, because I think the Dow Jones company, when they sold to Rupert Murdoch, wasn't there a clause that they had to maintain, Murdoch had to maintain editorial independence.
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Tina Brown
There was that clause. I have to say that in the past, that has meant nothing to Rupert. He's quite happy to blow past it.
- [19:35]
Christiane Amanpour
And that's what Harry suffered from, which
- [19:37]
Tina Brown
is what Harry suffered from when he owned the Times, when Harry was there. However, I think at this point, he does understand Rupert, that in a way, the Wall Street Journal's brand has to be independence. And in fact, if you start changing that, you're dead.
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Christiane Amanpour
Even though he's still a very, very, very committed Trump supporter and I believe supports this war.
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Tina Brown
He does. But he did not interfere. When Emma Tucker published the Epstein birthday book piece, which made an enormous amount of noise, which was, you know, obviously implicated Trump and Trump went absolute ballistic and sued the Journal. And they've, they've held firm. So, you know, she's doing courageous work. I mean, the biggest fear obviously, is these, and Trump understands it, is the flurry of lawsuits because unless you have a budget, getting a Trump laws, which he will know is frivolous, not going to win it.
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Christiane Amanpour
Well, we saw it at abc, at cbs.
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Tina Brown
Yep. They fold. ABC folded and paid. Cbs, you know, folded. There is an absolute cravenness, you know, right now in the corporate managements who own these outlets. And I think it's a curse for media. So one of the other sort of goals of the summit tomorrow is to sort of put the steel in the owners, too, because, you know, the fact is they love to go to big things and show off about the Pulitzers their companies get. But where are they, you know, when the editor says, I'm gonna do this, and they turn around and look for support, and guess what? There's nobody there.
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Christiane Amanpour
I'm glad you mentioned the Pulitzers, because we were just talking about what a deadly and terrible year last year was for journalists, particularly in the Palestinian territories, in Gaza, in Lebanon. And Saha Al Gora, a Palestinian photographer, a Times contributor, won a Pulitzer Prize.
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Tina Brown
Oh, I'm so amazed.
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Christiane Amanpour
For work from covering the Gaza conflict. So I think that's really good to note and it's great that that work went, you know, recog. That's also been a story that, you know, most, you know, outlets have, have tried to crush under pressure from their owners and the, you know, sort of ideological space that we operate.
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Tina Brown
Well, there's a, there's a horrible new word around which people tell me about. And it's by the way, not just, you know, news journalists, it's entertainment. It's. And they say, well, the management doesn't have an appetite for that. Right? For appetite, frankly. You can read testicles, right? Because you know, what they're really saying is we don't want the flak. We don't want, it's not just one of the lawsuits. It's called self censorsh, called self censorship. And there's a lot of it going around now because people think, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want the, we don't have the appetite here. So it's actually very insidious. It's actually affecting entertainment. I mean, you were hearing it. Stuff can't get done. Not, not just on, on, on sort of trump aspects. But we don't want to upset the Saudis, you know, because of them all their money. We don't upset the Chinese because they've, you know, we've got problem. We have distribution there. We don't want to, there's a whole sort of strand now of things that you supposedly cannot talk about. And I think it's essential that the press has to do their one of these places without being stopped.
- [22:31]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to talk about a few other things, including your cameo role in DWP2. That would be Devil Wears Prada 2. And actually it has a really strong message about the state of, of glossies like the ones you edited from Conde Nast and elsewhere. So we'll, we'll be back in 2 sec.
- [22:54]
Tina Brown
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- [23:29]
Christiane Amanpour
All right, we're back with our second segment and we're going to talk about DWP2 and a few other things. So Tina, I saw in your latest substack Fresh Hell that you had a cameo with a bunch of other people. There's a picture of you with wonderful Meryl Streep and a whole bunch of other media figures. What was that all about? What Was that scene from.
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Tina Brown
It was so much fun. It was a day last summer when this group of us, me, Kara Swisher, the tech journalist, a big NBA player and you know, all the John Baptiste. I mean, it was a fabulous group. Anyway, we were asked to come and be the sort of social wallpaper, if you like, in the. The scene at Miranda Priestley, Meryl Streep's character's house in Oyster Bay where she has. Has this big fancy lunch party to try.
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Christiane Amanpour
And that's kind of Long island, right?
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Tina Brown
It's Holiday Place. Holiday Place. I mean, and. And we had to kind of vavoom around in the background, you know, while. And. And no speaking roles. Well, I actually, I did have a speaking moment where I was supposed to say to the new. To. To Anne Hathaway's character, I've been following your byline, Andy, but I'm so bad at doing that. There were like 20 takes when I had a TV show. I could never say. I remember I was Tina Brown. I'm topping. I could never do that. So I'm a mute guest at the lunch party. But it was just a lot of fun. And I mean, Meryl. I just adore Meryl. I've known her for many years. I have to say, I did rather cheer that she refused to be a co host of the Met Ball, even though that she is playing Miranda Priest.
- [24:56]
Christiane Amanpour
And that's in real life.
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Tina Brown
And that's in real life.
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Christiane Amanpour
It just happened this week.
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Tina Brown
It was Monday night, co hosted by
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Christiane Amanpour
Anna Wintour, and this year Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Bezos, right, Absolutely.
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Tina Brown
And what's amusing about that is that they are sort of characters in this film because the film is about how unlike the last Devil Wears Prada, you know, Runway, ak Vogue magazine is now really challenged by the whole digital disruption. It's got shredded budgets, it's on the media, down, down slope, just like all magazines are. And Miranda Priestley is having to wrestle with the new world of. Of, you know, no budget. There's a lovely, lovely scene actually, where. Where Meryl has to. Has to. Has to show herself getting on a plan plane, flying coach for the first time. And she's wrestling, God forbid. It's such a funny moment, but actually it says it all. But I think.
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Christiane Amanpour
You don't think Anna Winter would ever fly coach.
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Tina Brown
Well, so far she's managed to preserve that privilege, but who knows where it's going? So, I mean, what is good about the film as far as I was concerned? And of course, at the media screening, it went over fabulously was that sense that, you know, the editorial people are all at war with this horrible moment of downward mobility in the media. And, you know, there is a Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez characters who are trying to get a hold of Vogue, you know, so that Lauren Sanchez character can, can run it.
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Christiane Amanpour
Warning, Warning. Look what they've done to the post.
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Tina Brown
I know, exactly right. So there is a sense that when they're foiled, like the cry goes up of like, the tech bros have been defeated. You know, it's a great moment essentially, which I think bespeaks to the mood as well. I think there was a kind of people are just over it with, with the billionaires, with the tech techno fascism, with all of these tech bros telling us that our jobs are not important, that we're dispensable, that AI is going to be so much better than the human race. I mean, people are actually getting very tired of it. And I think it's been a long time coming. I thought that that revolt, that mutiny, as it were, of the human race would have started before. But these things do take time to
- [26:58]
Christiane Amanpour
percolate and the young generation is particularly distraught because it obviously affects.
- [27:03]
Tina Brown
They can't. And we keep being told, you know, well, actually you can spend more time on your hobbies. Well, I'm sorry, what hobbies? Exactly. What hobbies. And the whole point of hobbies is they're a contrast to work. Right.
- [27:12]
Christiane Amanpour
The whole point of life is to work and to lust and to have motivation and inspiration and team experience. Yeah. And try to take care of your family and pay all of that stuff. We weren't born to be hobbyists.
- [27:24]
Tina Brown
No, we were not born to be hobbyists. And I think that's what is having resonance. It's not just about the dresses, you know, this time it's about that.
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Christiane Amanpour
Just a quick note. Anne Hathaway's character, Andy, when she was just a humble intern in the first one, she mentioned me. It was my first VI viral moment and I loved it. Loved it. Love Anne Hathaway, love the film. And I'm going to go see the second one.
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Tina Brown
It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. You will see me hop knobbing around.
- [27:50]
Christiane Amanpour
I will now. I did see you hobnobbing around in a different kind of cameo with Camilla, the Queen and the King Charles.
- [27:59]
Tina Brown
It's been a busy week.
- [28:00]
Christiane Amanpour
It's been a busy week of cameos and hobnobbing for you. And now you're in the global studio. So I guess we're very, very fortunate. Are you a d. Dame?
- [28:08]
Tina Brown
I'm not a dame, but maybe I
- [28:10]
Christiane Amanpour
was about to call you Dame Tina. You might be one of these days.
- [28:13]
Tina Brown
Jinx it.
- [28:13]
Christiane Amanpour
Oh, no, I won't. I won't say a word. What was it like? Seriously, because the King was thrown into the lion's den and he literally rose with great dignity and seemed to have put a calming, quite interesting and ironic sort of spell on a balm, really, but it. But not sort of sycophantic at all. He did the exact opposite.
- [28:37]
Tina Brown
It was absolutely magnificent. I mean, Charles the King sort of became a moral leader to Americans, as a matter of fact, not just to the uk. He became a moral leader that night and it was like a rebirth of him, a rebranding of him, shall we say, the night that he. The day that he sort of finally escaped essentially the huge shadow of his amazing, you know, mother and really showed who he was and the values that he has. And I think that some of the most. For me, the most resonant thing that he said was in this beautifully sort of gentle, oblique rebuke of Trump. America's words matter. Words matter. What America says matters. And, you know, as someone who is, you know, celebrating truth and the meaning of words and so on, I found that very resonant because he is saying, like, when Trump says things like, I'm going to bomb the hell out of them, you know, civilization, wipe out, they said. I mean, these words matter. They resonate across the, you know, many civilizations. And the beacon of the free press in America suddenly becomes what. I mean, it's like we always look to America to be different. And I thought it was very telling and I thought that he did an amazing job. He had. He was elegant, he was eloquent and he was himself. And I was very proud to be British. I have to say, I was very proud to be British. And he. He looked very well.
- [30:00]
Christiane Amanpour
Because you were up close.
- [30:01]
Tina Brown
Yes, I thought. I was so pleased that he, you know, his health. I don't know anything about his health.
- [30:06]
Christiane Amanpour
Cancer. And he's under treatment that much. We.
- [30:08]
Tina Brown
Yeah, he did. And Camilla was just charming everybody. I mean, she really was. And she. She was just. They were perfect, actually. I thought how lucky we were.
- [30:15]
Christiane Amanpour
And just to note, I think it is important that it was because I called it expectations busting because, you know, so many in the UK didn't want the King to go because Trump had really unloaded shovel loads of the bad stuff onto KE Starma, onto our soldier, onto our country.
- [30:32]
Tina Brown
No, he was walking into the most horrible load of audio, quite honestly. But what he was actually celebrating was the real values that are so much gonna last longer than Trump. And the kind of implicit message was, I've seen a lot of prime presidents, as has my mother, and they come and they go, they come and they go, but the values of America are rock solid.
- [30:54]
Christiane Amanpour
And I thought it was just inspired to quote the Magna Carta in Congress telling them that actually they need to be using their DOCT document to hold power accountable. I thought that was.
- [31:04]
Tina Brown
It was something. And they say it was magisterial. And they sat there and they listened
- [31:10]
Christiane Amanpour
and bipartisan standing O's.
- [31:12]
Tina Brown
Yes, it was. It was really a. A triumph, actually. So I'm thrilled.
- [31:16]
Christiane Amanpour
Now, just to get a little bit more on the dark side. There is a feeling, as we know amongst all our European nations that Putin is not satisfied with just Ukraine. And that Putin made may try it on some kind of less powerful European nation, may try it on to humiliate a NATO nation, dare NATO to respond. Because, you know, NATO's motto is not one inch. Everybody will respond if an enemy comes into any NATO territory. And I was, I've been speaking to some very important and, you know, high level. You know, there's a president I talked to and a couple of former heads of intelligence and heads of the military, and they're basically saying that, look, okay, Trump is, you know, dumping everything all over us right now. All of a sudden, we suddenly have to go from 0 to 100 overnight to defend ourselves. And yes, we should, but it is gonna take at least a decade. But what I was hearing was that none of our leaders, whether it's the prime minister here, whether it's presidents and chancellors or whoever they might be, are actually telling the people that this is what we face. And I'm sorry that it's gonna be hard, but we are gonna have to make budgetary decisions on what we put and what we increase to the military budget. It's going to affect various other welfare and other and other issues. And that at the moment, the leaders just aren't doing that because it's politically too difficult for them, but it's something they're going to have to start doing because it's a total reality.
- [32:48]
Tina Brown
Well, I think the only positive thing that Trump has achieved is to really make a wake up call to Europe about. It cannot go on just depending on America to defend itself. And it was depending on America to defend itself and has led. Let its budget completely crumble with regard to the Military. It has been humiliating to see actually that even if Starmer had sort of wanted to throw his hat in the ring, as it were, with Iran, we're just not military prepared for it. I just don't understand why it takes so long, quite honestly, to get it done.
- [33:20]
Christiane Amanpour
It does. It's the pipeline and it's because everything is unintegrated, I would say.
- [33:24]
Tina Brown
Well, I think that's right. But I also think that there's nothing like a threat to make everybody accelerate. And look what Zelensky pulled off in Ukraine.
- [33:32]
Christiane Amanpour
Can we just say what a wartime leader is? That man, he is remarkable.
- [33:37]
Tina Brown
He's remarkable. And of course, like all wartime leaders, when a war drags on, he's losing popularity in his own country. But the man has been a hero. He really has.
- [33:45]
Christiane Amanpour
And the way Ukraine is not doing as badly as everybody wants to think and Russia is not doing as well as it tries to convince Trump.
- [33:52]
Tina Brown
Correct. Of course, Putin may well also be looking at Trump's Hebrews in Iran and wondering it might also be a little bit of a, like, do I want to get in that to that? Because let us not forget that he said, you know, Kyiv in three days, if you remember that. And he's been mired in for three years. So he understands.
- [34:07]
Christiane Amanpour
Going on five now.
- [34:08]
Tina Brown
Yeah. What it's been like.
- [34:09]
Christiane Amanpour
Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, that's a good place to end this. And when we come back, we're going to have our recommendations, so stay with us. Okay, we're back with our recommendations. Tina Brown, what is yours?
- [34:28]
Tina Brown
Well, I'm going to recommend the great Netflix show the Beast in Me, which stars Matthew Reese. It's a gripping thriller. But I also wanted to say that Matthew Reese is soon gonna be playing Harry Evans because the BBC.
- [34:40]
Christiane Amanpour
Your beloved late husband.
- [34:41]
Tina Brown
Yes, my beloved late husband. Because this morning, this very morning, the BBC announced that they're doing a six part drama series called Dragon Slayers based on Harry's time at the Sunday Times and the Insight team's investigations.
- [34:54]
Christiane Amanpour
Fantastic.
- [34:54]
Tina Brown
And Matthew Rhys is playing Harry, which is pretty fantastic. Not least because he's three or four inches taller than Harry, which would have actually thrilled Harry more than any anything else. So I. Harry never wore, you know,
- [35:07]
Christiane Amanpour
elevated heels, did he?
- [35:08]
Tina Brown
Not at all. He was the proudest short statured man who, who, who inherits the earth. But one thing we were just talking about Putin and, and the press and, and, and, you know, his own hubris. One of the effects of killing off the free press is even the leaders don't get the truth. So, you know, they're not reading, especially the truth.
- [35:28]
Christiane Amanpour
Yeah.
- [35:28]
Tina Brown
So he's killed off the free press in Russia and guess what? He's surrounded in good news. And it isn't good news what's happening in Iran.
- [35:34]
Christiane Amanpour
And it's very similar to Trump gets, you know, small digests videos showing all the successful bits of the, you know, boom, boom of the military, which has been very successful indeed. This is not a military campaign right now. It's political and it's economic.
- [35:49]
Tina Brown
It is.
- [35:50]
Christiane Amanpour
So all of that. So mine is going to be a departure from all things, you know, newsy. I would like to recommend the great Sir David Attenborough's latest fantastic epic which is on BBC iplayer and it's called, called Life on Earth, which was his dramatic and revolutionary, you know, delivery of the natural world to the British people. But this is, this is the making of Life on Earth. So you have him today remembering what he did before. You have a lot of his camera people and producers and this and that, who you see them today talking and then you flashback all these years. Because I think it was 76 that
- [36:26]
Tina Brown
they started and he's 100 this week. He is.
- [36:28]
Christiane Amanpour
And that's why it's so important to remember this man brought, brought us a world that nobody had ever known. And, and people who see this are just going to be transported because it also coincided with the beginning of color TV in the UK and apparently it had a viewership of 15 million people, which in 1979 was massive. Anyway, it's massive. But imagine in 1979 and it is just transporting.
- [36:54]
Tina Brown
That is going to be my post. Truth Tellers sort of bomb.
- [36:57]
Christiane Amanpour
Bomb, yes, that's. And a massage.
- [36:59]
Tina Brown
Well, he's a great truth teller himself and his stature has been non parallel. He and Harry were good friends actually, and that was just a generation of giants.
- [37:08]
Christiane Amanpour
And do you know, he came from about 10 years of being a top executive. He was a controller at BBC2 and he was a top executive, but he was desperate, like somebody like me to get out into the field and he really wanted to go and he convinced them that they would go all over the world and tell the story of evolution from almost beginning to end it. It was fantastic.
- [37:29]
Tina Brown
And can you imagine that project getting green lighted?
- [37:32]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, well, there you go. And now after, you know, doing it very, you know, honestly and scientifically and in a natural. He has dedicated the latter part of his life to warning the world about the threat to natural life, about the threat to the climate, about the threat to our habitat and all the great species, flora and fauna that we should be really respecting and preserving. It's phenomenal. Phenomenal.
- [37:54]
Tina Brown
That was a good recommendation. I'm blown away.
- [37:57]
Christiane Amanpour
All right, Tina Brown, thank you so much indeed.
- [38:00]
Tina Brown
And if you want to cease Truth Tellers, which I strongly recommend, you can livestream it@sirharrysummit.org or at Truth Tellers. But it's worth watching. The panels are gonna be fantastic. Not least with Ms. Amanpour, which opens the show in Emma Tucker, Wall Street Journal editor Christian Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book is number one, and Catherine Viner, the editor of the Guardian, all in with Emily Maitland. So it's going to be a absolutely blowout opening. And I think it's 9:30 tomorrow, the
- [38:31]
Christiane Amanpour
way you curated with all the different panels and you've got, you've got, you've got news, organization heads and all the rest of it. So it's really good. Okay, Tina, thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you all for listening. You can always listen for free on Global player. Now. Jamie and I will be back with the Q A bonus episode for later this week. And don't forget, you can always see us. You can see us on YouTube. YouTube. You can see the bonus and the main episodes on our YouTube channel. You just search Christian Amanpour presents. So listen, watch, enjoy, and thank you.
- [39:08]
Tina Brown
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