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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me.
- [01:58]
Rory Stewart
Alistair Campbell and with me Rory Stewart.
- [02:00]
Alistair Campbell
I think we should probably talk about Donald Trump. We may not want to, but I think we must. Tariff gate goes on apace. And I think we should also talk about Israel, not merely because Trump saw Bibi Netanyahu yesterday, but also because of this ongoing scandal over the Red Crescent killings. And I think with Trump we should not just do tariffs, but also some of the other stuff that's going on. And I know you're in the States so you can give us lots on that. So where do you want to start?
- [02:25]
Rory Stewart
Let's start with tariffs in the world economy because this is a story beyond imagining. I mean, it's so big that I think nobody's really managing to get their head around it. We don't know what it means. It's completely unprecedented. Nobody's ever done anything of this scale. During wars, occasionally people try to do blockades against their enemies. But something of this scale, this general, this undifferentiated, this speed, never been seen before. And we don't know the most basic things about it. We don't really know why he's done it. That's quite important because if we don't understand why he's done it, it's very difficult to predict which bits that are going to stay and which bits are going to go.
- [03:06]
Alistair Campbell
We know the reason that he gives, which is a false reason, because it's not true. There is a grain of truth in the idea that other countries have taken advantage of America's scale and size and generosity in trading terms. But that's because America, and this is the point Trump's makers allowed them to, but that's helped make America, until recently, the richest, most powerful country in the. So his reason, his ground, his basic grounding is complete nonsense, but carry on.
- [03:33]
Rory Stewart
Just to develop that for a second. So, like all populists, and I think this is something you've often said on the show, there's often a diagnosis of a problem that's got something to be said for it. It's just the solution is completely mad. And I guess the question really about why he's doing it, it's about why this is the solution and what exactly it's supposed to achieve. So you're completely right. There's a big diagnosis. And I'm here at Yale and I've been talk economists here at Yale, particularly a guy called Matt Klein who wrote an amazing book called Trade wars or Class wars, and he points out some of the problems that Trump's team are talking about. So in particular, the only thing that really matters in this whole story is the US China relationship. So US has had this massive trade deficit with China, and basically what's happened is that China has suppressed its wages, sold an immense amount of goods to the United States over the last 25 years, and in return have kind of got IOUs out of the American in the form of buying U.S. treasury bills. And the result of this seems quite positive, which is that it makes the US this very strong world reserve currency. It allows the US to borrow money very cheaply. And on the positive side, that's what allows Biden to do his big IRA investments. It gives opportunities to the American government. That doesn't exist for Rachel Reeves because they have this huge store of cheap credit. But on the other side, the downside of the whole thing is that it's ended up with a massive ballooning debt and deficit, which is increasingly difficult to unafford. It's led to very, very bad examples of the cheap credit leading to things like the 2008 financial crisis, so people buying mortgages they couldn't afford and then going under. And it's also contributed to the rich getting much richer and median income stagnating. So in theory, just totally in theory, if you had a magic wand and you could completely unravel the last 25 years, make sure that you didn't have a trade surplus between China and the US stop the US being the world's reserve currency, you could perhaps reduce the debt and end up with a situation in which your society is more equal. But what Matt Klein would say and what he said to me yesterday is at no stage has anyone suggested that this is the way to do it. His whole book does not suggest the way to do it is to try to impose tariffs on 190 countries.
- [05:53]
Alistair Campbell
Let's try and debunk a few more myths and lies actually at the heart of this. So it is incredible. I saw your friend Ian Bremmer did a very good explanation, but one of the points he made on social media yesterday was he can't believe how many people have bought this idea that the tariff is somehow a charge on other countries, when in fact it is a tax. On your own country, it is a tax. So that's the first thing which I think we have to keep reminding people. And the second thing is this thing about reciprocal. He talks about these being reciprocal tariffs. Well, they'd only be reciprocal if there was some genuine formula that was kind of globally accepted as a formula. But as we said on the live stream we did the other day, this has been worked out according to. Even if it is a chatgpt form, it doesn't really matter because it doesn't actually address the reality of trade relations between the United States and these countries around the world. Added to which, are you aware, Rory, of something called the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act? This has been. This was done by Roosevelt, but this was the act of which has formed the basis and the backbone of most American trade agreements ever since. And it's called the Reciprocal Trade Agreement act, which basically gives presidents the authority to adjust their tariffs, but also to negotiate bilateral trade agreements. So which is kind of what he's doing now. So that's another piece of absolute madness here's. A quiz question for you, Rory. When is the only time in history that the United States actually did have a trade surplus with the rest of the world?
- [07:26]
Rory Stewart
I have absolutely no idea. What's the answer to that?
- [07:28]
Alistair Campbell
As if we're not alarmed enough already. It was during the Great Depression. What I find it incredible about this whole situation. And we're going to be talking about Netanyahu later. And in fact, these two stories weave together because a lot of this is about leaders getting themselves into positions where they feel they can do absolutely anything that they want and get away with it. Be that in foreign policy, be that in legal matters with convicted felon Trump. And Netanyahu's facing all sorts of corruption and other charges. So. But what I found extraordinary watching it yesterday was that here we are in the middle of this incredible, as you say, I hate the word unprecedented because people kept using it during COVID and it really got on my nerves. But this sort of genuinely is. Feels like we're in absolutely new territory. And there's Trump and Netanyahu. And it reinforces this point that we keep making that Michael Wolff sort of made so clearly that it's just a show. And so there we were a few weeks ago. The show was Zelensky. When Trump was talking yesterday about Ukraine, it was in the context. I'm not happy with Vladimir because he keeps bombing the Ukrainians. And you know, in that episode a few weeks ago, I told him he had to stop doing that. I'm now paraphrasing. But this is the sort of stuff in his mind. But in terms of what the media. And bear in mind, they canceled the press conference and allowed just this sort of kind of rambling, this sort of episode in the Oval Office. And I discovered, Roy, there's a reason for this. When you have a sort of full scale press conference, there are certain protocols that are decided by the media. When it's in the Oval Office, the President decides who's there and the President alone decides who asks the questions. Because the thing about, we have to understand about Trump, his demeanor, he loves looking calm amid chaos. And that goes on the macro. The world is going mad. And he's saying, don't panic. You're all weak, you're all stupid. I'm the only person who understands where this going. And it goes for the micro. So that in that pool spray at the top where he speaks and then the questioners all literally shout at him, these journalists gives him 10 seconds to hear who's asking a question he wants to answer. And Then he points at people. Not one difficult question yesterday. Not one. Not one difficult question for him and not one difficult question for Netanyahu. So, for example, the Red Crescent thing that we're going to talk about, not even raised Gaza discussed almost entirely in terms of his real estate insanity. So it just makes you think that this all underlines the fact that he's creating a system of absolute power with no real accountability. You're seeing that in the weakness of the response from Congress. You're seeing it in the media, you're seeing it in some of the business voices that are bending the knee.
- [10:07]
Rory Stewart
I think that's all really important. And I think just to loop it back to where we began, which is economics, there are lots of different stories going around. We've talked in the past about the fact that there are three big apparent policy objectives which all contradict each other. One of them is that he's going to raise a lot of revenue. So he's going to charge hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs, make a lot of money for the US.
- [10:27]
Alistair Campbell
Government, so he can do tax cuts.
- [10:29]
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. Second idea is that he's going to move manufacturing back to the U.S. they're going to build their own stuff. And the third idea is that tariffs are new sanctions. So it's not really about income or about manufacturing. It's just about bashing other countries to achieve other things.
- [10:44]
Alistair Campbell
Is that why he's put none on Russia and none on North Korea and none on Belarus and Cuba, but he's put them on every other country in the world? Is that the thinking behind that one?
- [10:53]
Rory Stewart
That's quite difficult to understand that bit, isn't it? Because, as you say, he seems to be going after his allies, not his enemies. But I guess the theory on that one from the national security people might be that you go to Cambodia or Vietnam and you really twist Cambodia's arm and you say, unless you kick the Chinese navy out of the naval base in Cambodia, we're going to keep these tariffs up. In other words, you're using them like sanctions as a way of just punching people in the face in order to achieve foreign policy objectives, not necessarily economic objectives.
- [11:19]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [11:20]
Rory Stewart
And that gets to this sort of weird story of one of the reasons why it's almost impossible for any of this to work. Not just that logically those three things contradict, but that you get the sense that, a bit like that signals chat that we looked at about the bombing of the Houthi, everybody below him is having the equivalent to the signals chat, trying to work out what it is he wanted to do. And they all stick. Different theories.
- [11:45]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [11:46]
Rory Stewart
After the fact that the guy that's really doing a lot of this, of course, is our friend Scott Besant, who's out again and again, as my friend Felix says, looking like he has an artichoke up his bottom, trying to produce a post facto reassuring justification of something that makes sense.
- [12:02]
Alistair Campbell
It's funny you mentioned that. I was, I was just looking for something about Besson because when you were talking about that, he did an interview the other day with that awful Tucker Carlson. And it is amazing. These people, they only do interviews with the same people again and again and again and again. It's like today there was an interview, an exclusive interview with Elon Musk on Fox News. It would be exclusive if it was on a different channel, but given it's on Fox News about every other day. So Scott Besant, the other day, when he was talking about the. He was trying to. This is as the markets were absolutely tanking. Biggest crash ever in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, double digits in Germany, bad here, bad in the States, what have you. And Scott Besant, one of the sort of, you know, mega rich billionaire class who is now the Cabinet, he actually tried to make the argument that this was, this was really addressing wealth inequality. He talked about how he'd been visiting food banks. And he said, you have to understand, Tucker, the top 10% of Americans own almost 90% of the stock market. The next 40% own 12% and the bottom 50%, they're all in debt. So this is like a relief. It's as if he was saying, we're punishing the rich here so that the poor can feel better about that. And the ludicrous Carlson, honestly, that guy, I mean, he honestly should be put in a museum somewhere. He just goes, that's the message right there. Scott, as a bystander, he says, as a bystander, my ass. As a bystander, I'm like, wow, could you imagine what he would be like in an interview with Kamala Harris or Tim Waltz or Hillary Clinton or Larry Summers if they had been responsible for wiping trillions off the stock market overnight? Can you imagine it?
- [13:45]
Rory Stewart
And not to trigger you further, of course, there are echoes of some of the stuff that we had around Brexit, which is there were some figures around Brexit saying, yes, we're tanking the economy, but by tanking the economy, we're going to level up because we'll bring rich people further down. Even you have people, you remember saying, if we can really crash the British economy. We can bring house prices down, and we can make things more affordable. So there's some of this stuff going on. When you Hear Besant and J.D. vance, this very, very complicated theory, which is somehow, if you trash the US Dollar, trash Treasury bonds, stop yourself being the world reserve currency and potentially also torpedo the stock market, you reverse the last 40 years of the economy and create more equality between the rich people that own shares and have been doing well and poor people. The problem, of course, as you've just put your finger on, is the way you're achieving it is through a recession, which is not the normal lever that you pull in order to level things up. Because you're leveling down. You're not leveling up, you're leveling down.
- [14:51]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, exactly. But your point about these guys do the interviews. So yesterday it was very interesting watching it. Did you see Trump and Netanyahu? I mean, I'm afraid I watched the whole thing. And can I make a plea to media organizations around the world, but especially sky and the BBC? You did not need to go live for 40 minutes to hear Trump droning on about baseball at a meeting with the LA Dodgers on the expectation that he might say something about the markets. He has got the entire world's media around his little finger. And this is a big part of the problem, which is a thing we should come back to. But the point I was going to say about these interviews were we interviewed Simon Hart on Leading this Week, and you're thinking, how have I gone from Scott Besant to Simon Hart? And I'll tell you how Simon Hart, do you remember he said that when he decided that the game was maybe up for the Tories, it was when he was doing all these media rounds during Partygate, and he'd be on to talk about something and every question would be about something to do with Partygate, and he would have to be justifying something that deep down he knew he couldn't. Now, that's what I saw in Scott Besant. And the question for all of these people is, how long can they keep doing it? So yesterday with Netanyahu, you had Vance Rubio, Hexserth, and I think it was Mike Waltz in the background. And you look at. I looked at them. They were. It wasn't the same demeanor as with Starmer and Macron and Zelenskyy. It really wasn't the same demeanor. They looked really quite worried. At one point, Hegseth was asked to speak and he looked like he was a bit scared. To speak. And so he did the whole thing about the Houthis in Yemen. But my point is there must be some of them who are going home at night and their wives, partners, mistresses, whatever, are saying to them, listen, you're becoming ridiculous. And I think we're not far off. That is the question is whether they've got any guts.
- [16:34]
Rory Stewart
So the first thing just to come back to is that the impact on the real economy is going to be very dramatic. This will have a big, big impact on the U.S. economy. And the U.S. economy is going to, is obviously the largest economy in the world.
- [16:50]
Alistair Campbell
Some argument about that, Roy, some argument about that.
- [16:53]
Rory Stewart
Anyway, he's behaving like a sort of, I suppose, a classic tin pot dictator. But if he was the ruler of some tiny little country, you know, if he was IDI Amin and had suddenly announced these things around the world, everybody would sort of sneer at him, laugh at him, and it wouldn't matter. But the problem is because of what America is, it's a problem for Europe. The German car industry has been in a lot of trouble over the last few years. And one of the things that's keeping it alive is 20% of its exports go to the US and that allows Mercedes and BMW. Another Yale colleague of mine, Marnik Salmon, points this out, that German is just about managing to produce luxury goods at kind of premium price, but mass producing them. So a lot of these cars going abroad, and that really matters for German industry and that's going to be affected hard. But China, much bigger problem. China, as you know, has really been struggling. It's aging, very unhappy population, quite a lot of unemployment. Growth's come down from 10% down to 5%. So growth is halved. Chinese government desperate to create jobs. And it's creating jobs by trying to suppress wages. And it depends, I mean, yes, it's trying to diversify, but America is, and this is what's shown in all these figures, its huge export market, if that gets choked off and 54% tariffs are a pretty good way of choking that off, the Chinese economy is then in real trouble, Chinese economy in trouble and the American economy in trouble. That's about half the world economy in trouble. And then many other things follow from that. It's very difficult for European countries and others to keep their heads up because global demand begins to drop, global manufacturing begins to cut, global confidence begins to drop. So that's the real economy. I then want to talk about the other thing that nobody's talking about, which is the possibility of a financial crisis. Because the real economy is one thing. The financial markets, which is the way people perceive this, is another thing. But I'll stop there for a second.
- [18:43]
Alistair Campbell
Just briefly sticking with the cars, because one of the things that Keir Starmer did was he went up to Jaguar, Land Rover, made a speech, went a bit easy on some of the environmental measures, signaling to the car industry that, to quote Rachel Reeves, we've got your back. But this thing about the Chinese cars and byd see, one of Trump's constant complaints. He did it again yesterday with Netanyahu. He said, you know, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, you know, we let their cars in. They've got, you know, drive around America. You'll see a Mercedes, you'll see a Volkswagen. But go to Europe now, I don't know about you, or you're in America now. I'm not a fan of American cars. I don't think they're very good, and I'll probably get shot at by all sorts of Americans for that. But they're not as good as ours. And here's the thing. I was listening to an interview with an American economist the other day who was obsessed with the idea that BYD cars are really, really good, that China, with these electric cars, they're better. So I've started to look at some of them, and I'm thinking they are bloody good. So you're right that this will really damage the Chines Auto market. But at the same time, what they will now do is try to get into different markets with their cars. But ask yourself this question, Rory, if you're a European right now, if we did allow American cars more easily into our market, are you more or less minded right now to buy an American car rather than a European car? This is where I think he completely underestimates the role of soft power and messaging beyond his base. So I think he's. You talked about contradictory policy, the lack of alignment on the policy objectives. But I say in the messaging, too, I think that this is doing the American trade that wants to look outwards. I think it's doing them terrible, terrible damage. And Mark Carney made a terrific point, actually made two terrific points the other day. One was the one that you just made. He basically said that America has done a global version of Brexit. And he said, I've seen this movie before. The people who win say it's going to be great. And then after a little while, everybody realizes, not so great. But the second thing he said was, essentially, there's no such thing as the north as the American USA car market, because it's totally embedded with other countries. And he was making the point, where does the tariff come in? How many times do you have to cross a border with the same piece of equipment before the tariff? How's that being calculated? None of these questions, it seems to have been, are being thought through there.
- [21:06]
Rory Stewart
You've put your finger on another thing, which is the sort of politics and decision making against the real economics. So in theory, there's a big problem that you've just pointed out, which is even in Trump's fantasy, if he was to put these tariffs up, exclude everybody else, and companies were to relocate to the US what you would have is companies would have to split in two. They'd have to have a US factory and the rest of the world factory, because the US factory would, would face very, very high costs. There's labor shortage, immigration is being choked off. So where are you going to get your labor force from? Let's say you wanted to make everything in the US and your cost of inputs have just gone up. So all the intermediate goods, a car has thousands of different bits in it. You are spending 54% more on those inputs. So you would not be manufacturing in the US in order to export because your goods would be too expensive. But then you've pointed out the politics, which is that all of that is a bit theoretical. That's almost the best case scenario, that he ends up moving factories to the US that produce overpriced, not very competitive international goods. At least there would be some jobs and some industry. But in practice, that's not going to happen, because as global demand goes down, as uncertainty goes down, people aren't going to have the money for new investments. And because he gives the impression that sometimes that he's prepared to trade on all of this. And this is the big paradox. Is he somebody who thinks, as Navarro says? Navarro, his kind of tariff advice advisor who's been running the ft, says this stuff is there to stay. Tariffs are good, full stop. They're not coming down because they're going to make money and they're going to move business back to the U.S. manufacturing back to the U.S. but other people are signaling, no, no, no. And this includes Eric Trump. Oh, no, no. This is just a movie where we now negotiate, right? So who's going to move their manufacturing plant to the US if they think their sector is going to be exempt? Their country's going to go to India, now thinks they can get a trade deal by August. They're feeling very smart about it. Modi thinks he's got an in. None of this policy stuff can work. There's no certainty about what he's doing and when he's going to change his mind.
- [23:07]
Alistair Campbell
Well, the other thing you talk about, Modi thinks he's got an in. Netanyahu thought he had an in, but he got pretty much nothing yesterday in terms of the tariff and the trade stuff. He might thought he got a few nice words about Iran, but just as you know, he's had lots of words nice about. Nice words about ceasefire in Gaza. But the second phase hasn't happened just on Navarro. Rory, this is absolutely brilliant. This goes. This is a whole chapter for Michael Wolf in volume five. Do you know how Navarro got into the set?
- [23:32]
Rory Stewart
No.
- [23:33]
Alistair Campbell
So basically what happened is that Donald Trump told Jared Kushner, who in term one was his big family advisor. In term two, it's Don Jr. Who's the kind of MAGA guy. He told Kushner to find him somebody who's really good on the economy, but also would make him look tough on China. He wanted somebody who was tough on China and good in the economy. So Kushner goes onto Amazon and he finds that some guy has written a book called Death by China, and he thought that's a really cool title. And this guy is Peter Navarro. And one of the experts that Navarro quotes throughout his book is a guy called Ron Vara. Ron Vara, it turns out, doesn't exist. Ron Vara is an anagram of, hey, Navarro.
- [24:21]
Rory Stewart
Right?
- [24:23]
Alistair Campbell
This is the guy. Now, what's really interesting about him, though, Rory, I'll tell you what's something really interesting about him. You're beginning to see the divide between the billionaires. He was the first one, I think, in the Trump circle who directly had a go at Elon Musk this week when he basically said, the guy's just a car salesman. He should sort of keep his nose out of this. And Howard Lutnick has been saying similar noises. So the Musk thing. Look, I'm convinced eventually Anthony Scaramucci is going to be proved right, and Musk will be out of that circle. It's just taking a very long time. And the other thing that I think is interesting about all the billionaires around him, the corruption. Brookings Institute has done this amazing. I don't know if you had time to read it. I sent you this amazing thing. He basically said that this is now rampant corruption. And one of the. I would argue this is corruption. It emerges that Howard Lutnick, whose son now runs Cantor, the firm that he ran their big thing is in Bonds. Bonds do well out of this crashing of the economy. And I'm not saying that's why it's happened. I'm just saying if this was Britain, there'd be quite a lot of questions being asked.
- [25:30]
Rory Stewart
Bonds brings us back to this final point that I want to make, which is on financial markets. So one of the problems for economists is that they look at the real economy and they try to model that. But what's very difficult for them to model is panic. So Matt Klein, who's this amazing economist here at Yale I was talking to, would say, well, at the moment the real economic impacts of this are not as bad as 2008. We're talking about a couple of percentage points of GDP. That's very big, but it's not the 1930s. This is then where my friend Felix is interesting, because what he says is that you need to take into account the fact that what the markets are trying to do is guess where value will be in 6 months or 12 months time and price it accordingly. And if they start panicking, things get very strange. And they're going to get particularly strange this time because we haven't really understood the structure of our new economy. 2008 was all about banks. Since 2008, these private markets have emerged. Private debt, private equity. And the point about that is we were supposed to feel reassured because they would borrow money for seven years from some big pension fund and then invest it for seven years in a company. But there are some problems. One is that they're much less transparent. This private debt is much less transparent. We don't know really what's on their balance sheet. It's not like a publicly listed company. You can't really see what the revenue of these companies are. So let's say you'd spent 100 million buying some widget factory seven years ago. You can still put it on your books as worth 100 million or even 200 million, right? When in fact you might secretly fear it's worth 50 million. And the problem only comes when the end of that seven years comes. And they say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to roll over and you're going to find that you can't sell it to anyone. You can't sell the company to anyone. And that's when the second problem kicks in, which is that in a banking crisis in the uk, there's very few banks. There's just four banks, basically, four big banks and the central bank. So hsbc, Lloyds, relating to the central bank here, there are now hundreds of thousands of little private debt, private equity funds, which don't have those lines of credit, don't have those relationships, the central bank. So as these things start tipping, here's my final nightmare. This is one that Marnik Salmonds just pointed out, the Yale economist you mentioned, treasury bonds. One of the things that Trump has said in a passing moment is that he's considering not honoring U.S. treasury bonds. So China owns trillions of dollars of U.S. debt. So he said in passing, well, maybe we'll just not pay China back. That way, we make $7 trillion for free and we don't need to worry. Right?
- [28:04]
Alistair Campbell
That's good for trust.
- [28:05]
Rory Stewart
Really good for trust. So if people begin believing that US Treasuries may be. Won't be honored, then you have a real problem, because US Treasuries underpin everything. They're the security that everybody puts behind every transaction in the world because they were supposed to be safe as houses. If the value of those things suddenly start dropping because people start panicking. Pretentious words. The risk premium goes up, then you can have another form of financial crisis. So we don't know whether this will happen. Nobody knows how to model this. But the point that everybody keeps making. I talked to George Osborne yesterday, talked to Martin Wolf yesterday, is because it's completely unprecedented, nobody's ever seen anything like this before. Guessing whether or not it's going to result in a financial crisis is close to impossible.
- [28:47]
Alistair Campbell
Close to impossible. However, those whose job it is to guess whether it might are moving towards the view that it will. Let me, let me just give you. Before we go to a break, Roy, and then we'll come back and talk about some other aspects of what's going on in, in the States, and also his time with Netanyahu. I've been having some exchanges with Mr. Steve Bannon, who you'll be pleased to know, I hope, has said that he wants to come on the podcast, which I think we should welcome. What' to like about talking to the man who is the sort of, was, certainly was the intellectual driver of the whole Trumpism thing Anyway, I say, well, okay, can we get a date? And he said, when do you want to do it? And I said, well, I want, you know, fairly soon. I mean, your guy is pretty topical right now, seems to be making a lot of news. You know, he's sort of making waves and he just, he just texted back, you just wait. To the next round of reciprocity. In other words, they see this, I think as cranking up and cranking up and. And cranking up and on China. Rory, this just underlined to me how. What incredible two things that I saw this week that really underline how incredible all this is. First was somebody that I used to know who worked for George Bush sent me a video of George Bush making this speech that I think we've referred to before to some students, years ago, you know, well, since presidency, but not recently, where he said that the three big threats to the world were American isolationism, protectionism, and nativism, and we had to fight against it. There's Bush saying that. And the thing that happened today that really struck me was China, the Chinese embassy in Washington posting videos of Ronald Reagan explaining why tariffs were a really, really bad idea, while we're on the. The business of the sort of more traditional. Right, as it were. Another thought I had watching Trump yesterday. He's now got that bust of Churchill behind him. And I thought, just imagine what Churchill would think of this. He would think it was utter insanity. But the other Churchillian aspect to my thinking, Roy, is this. And this goes to Britain and France and Germany and what have you. I think the one thing you've got to say of Churchill is that even during the war, people like him and people like Attlee, they were already thinking about what the consequences were that would need to be. Have to be addressed once you were through the crisis. And I worry at the moment, and I know it's not. It's only been a few days, but very soon, before very long, leaders like Keir, Starmer, Macron, Merz and the rest of them have got to start thinking about what this actually means for the future. I saw a great interview this morning with Joska Fischer, the former German foreign minister, who's a really smart guy, and he was basically making the point, look, you know, can we stop. Stop pretending we cannot rely on America. Yes, Trump may go, but this is a fundamental change. And the answer for us, Europe, is now on its own. China doesn't like Europe, Russia hates Europe. So we've got to start looking after ourselves together and then looking to build all these other new partnerships. And I feel at the moment, for all that, I think they're technically handling it quite well day to day. I do think it's about time we started to see some of the sort of bigger picture, bigger vision. We're not even yet in the place where a British government minister feels they can say that Donald Trump caused all this. And I honestly think that Trump is. I even began to wonder Yesterday, watching him, you just think, I mean, honestly, you've got to watch it back. Rory it was just a ramble of kind of unconnected nonsense. But this is now the basis on which the entire world is kind of having to operate is madness.
- [32:23]
Rory Stewart
Let's on that. Take a break and come back after the break. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone, without exception, will experience stress and anxiety in their work or personal life. And it can show up in a lot of different ways. Physical symptoms, headaches, teeth grinding, not sleeping. In my case, I'm pretty sure that my migraines are certainly partially connected to stress. And it's very easy for most of us to forget to take care of ourselves when the world keeps pushing us harder and harder to do more and more. So here's a reminder. Take care of yourself, do less. And as part of this, therapy can be helpful. 85% of BetterHelp therapists have a strong expertise in anxiety, and 69% of BetterHelp members report improved symptoms after just six weeks of therapy. I found that therapy has made a huge difference in how I manage stress. It's given me tools to cope with stress and reminded me to take time back for my as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Get the tools to help manage stress and anxiety. With BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com restpolitics that's betterhelp.com restpolitics welcome back to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart, and with me, Alistair Campbell.
- [33:56]
Alistair Campbell
So, Rory, should we do USA Madness, brackets, miscellaneous?
- [34:01]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah. So I'm in the US at the moment, and it's a very interesting experience because every day I'm seeing another bit of what Trump is doing. So on Friday, for example, I saw a friend of mine who works for the US Institute of Peace. So US Institute of Peace is a very long established, federally funded, congressionally established think tank which has done incredible work. I mean, if you wanted to get good research on Afghanistan, it had some of the great Afghan analysts in the world working for it. And sure enough, he and everybody along with him lost their jobs. And they suddenly got a notice saying they lost their jobs. And the head of the US Institute of Peace has been replaced by a kind of young tech bro who's been sent in from Doge, who went in with the Washington police to try to enter and seize the building. So that's just, I'm just turning up at a conference, I said, next to a guy, I'm saying, how's your job going? And he's going, well, we've all lost our job and this tech. Then I went to Ohio State University. And that's very interesting because in Ohio State University, the Republican state is now quickly changing all the rules around what people can teach. So professors are now being told they're not allowed to teach controversial subjects. New centres being established. Then I talked to somebody yesterday in Florida, an academic who's worried about her visa because foreign academics have been seized on the streets. Fulbright scholars have been expelled, academics coming in have been detained. And then we've got the bigger stories that kind of begin spilling over. So we've got sit down. And this was maybe two weeks ago. I was talking to somebody who runs a big pharmaceutical drug discovery company in the west coast. And they can't get any approvals on their drugs because the Food and Drug Administration has had all its buildings, or a lot of its buildings have been closed, a lot of its staff have been laid off. And once a backlog develops in a bureaucracy, you'll be familiar with this. I guess it's like when the post office gets behind on its mail. Everything gets clogged up for months because you don't have enough stuff. The analogy Shoshana came up with is Covid and the nhs, you remember, basically, you get a backlog building up over a year and then your whole system almost breaks. And that's now happening with. With drug approvals.
- [36:34]
Alistair Campbell
So if only we'd taken bleach, that.
- [36:35]
Rory Stewart
Would have cured it all. Well, anyway, let me hand back to you, but I suppose these are anecdotal examples, but what I'm trying to say is that every day I'm encountering some other aspect of what's happening.
- [36:47]
Alistair Campbell
Well, the other thing that sort of shocked yesterday, watching the Netanyahu Trump press conference, I thought, surely somebody is going to ask Netanyahu about Red Crescent and Trump about El Salvador. And the reason I thought somebody must ask about El Salvador is partly because it had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, but also because there was this extraordinary 60 Minutes. CBS 60 Minutes did this film and it told the story of this gay stylist who had fled Venezuela because of persecution for being gay and what have you. He'd actually been. His case was going through and the American authorities said he definitely had a case and they interviewed his lawyer. Suddenly he was. He literally disappeared. And it turned out that the reason, or one of the reasons why they. They took him and thought he was. They thought he was a member of this gang that Trump has said he's going to go after. And the reason for that is because he had a tattoo of a crown on each arm. And apparently a crown is one of the symbols of one of these gangs. The only thing was that the crown on one arm was over the which looked a very masculine crown, the sort of thing that King Charles would wear. And on the other arm was a sort of crown that a queen might wear. And under the crown, the big crown, it said dad. And under the female, the more feminine crown, it said Mum. Okay. And another guy and this guy, by the way. So this has now been accepted, that the mistakes have been made, but they're now saying this is the thing that went to the Supreme Court. They can't get him back because he's in a foreign jurisdiction. And also their lawyers went to the wrong court. This is all.
- [38:32]
Rory Stewart
Well, this is Kafka, quick explainer for people who've not been following the ins and outs of this. So one of the most celebrated cases is that the case of Kilmar Garcia. So Kilmar Garcia came to the United States and he was detained in 2019, accused of being a gang member. Judge looked at it, decided that he wasn't a gang member and ruled that he could not be deported back to El Salvador for fear of his life. He then returned happily to his life, and then he was just picked up and disappeared. And the next thing the family knew is they suddenly saw a photograph of people on a plane with hands over their head being deported and realized that her partner was on his way to this notorious, horrifying prison in El Salvador. We've talked about El Salvador before. He's got this tough guy, autocratic leader who is proud about locking up a huge proportion of the population in these notorious jails. So at this point, a judge intervenes and says there was no, and this is the point, I guess, about the legal system in the US and what's going on. There was no legal authority to arrest him. There was no justification to detain him. There were no grounds to send him to El Salvador. And this is one of the most dangerous prisons in the west western hemisphere. And he was detained purely on the basis of the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and some story going back to 2019 that a confidential informant had seen him connected with a gang in New York, although he's never been based in New York. So, yeah, I mean, look, you've seen.
- [40:02]
Alistair Campbell
When you've seen the El Salvador jail full of El Salvadorians. The tattoos obviously have a big part to play in. In gun culture. So there's another guy who's been taken to this jail. And by the way, they filmed inside the jail because there was somebody, There was a film crew there filming the whole thing for this unbelievably cruel social media stuff that the Department of Homeland specializes in. So, for example, they were able to reveal, happily to the Americans who want to see this happen, that the beds, we call them beds, but actually they're just slabs of steel, sort of bunk upon bunk upon bunk of steel. No bedding, no pillows. They're kept in stressed positions the whole time. But there's one other guy there who's also got a tattoo of a crown. But do you know why he's got a tattoo of a crown on his arm, Rory?
- [40:48]
Rory Stewart
No.
- [40:49]
Alistair Campbell
Because it's the logo of Real Madrid. I don't know if you know this, but real. The reason Real Madrid is called Real Madrid is because real means royal. And the royal family, back in 1920, they gave permission to the club to call themselves the Royal Madrid. That is why it's a crown. And this guy, he's got parents, he's got siblings, they can't see him, they can't speak to him. And the Americans have admitted this. And here's a terrifying thing. So the Supreme Court, on technical grounds, has backed the government. Trump then immediately tweets, this is a great victory for justice. Basically, what happened is the lawyers of the Supreme Court said went to the wrong court anyway. A judge called Sotomayor, who's a more liberal judge, she did a dissenting judgment, and she said this. The government takes the position that even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it sent them. The implications of the government's position is that not only non citizens, but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but the nation's system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise. Now, that is basically saying we are heading towards absolute authoritarianism if this isn't reversed.
- [42:15]
Rory Stewart
And part of this story is the weaponization of the Department of Justice. So the Department of Justice is in a very, very awkward position. Theoretically, it reports to the president, but clearly there's been very, very good reason to try to create firewalls between the president, Department of Justice. I mean, just as, let's say, in The United Kingdom, we had Sakiya Starmer as the Director of Public Prosecutions under a conservative government. And obviously the conservative government with its many flaws did not try to say, well, Keir Starmer, you're obviously an old lefty Labour were, dude, we're SACU and we're going to use the DPP to go after our political opponents.
- [42:58]
Alistair Campbell
Indeed, au contraire. On the contrary, Roy, just maybe a rare pro conservative point from me. Many of them stood up for Keir Starmer's independence as a dpp, even after he became a politician and in fact.
- [43:12]
Rory Stewart
Wanted to renew the Attorney General, actually wanted to renew him. I think he chose to step down, but they wanted to keep him in place. But to give a small example of this, when one of the DOJ lawyers in front of this judge, and we're back to this case of Mr. Garcia, admitted that they'd got it wrong and apologized, he's now immediately been put on administrative leave, effectively sacked because the Attorney General, Pam Bundy, has said you're not doing your job. The point about the Department of Justice and the implication is the point of out justice if necessary, is to lie to the judge. Continue to insist you did nothing wrong. Now, let's just look quickly at some of the other institutions because they don't really get covered. Media. I think we've talked in passing about what's happened. Basically cutting Voice of America, which is the American equivalent of the BBC World Service, really, really important part of American soft power, international broadcasting around the world world bringing news to countries, often with autocratic regimes where news can't be achieved. Cuts to cultural institutions. So big cuts against almost anything to do with 52 smaller state organizations working on heritage, working on community programs. Massive cuts to the National Endowment for Humanities, to a lot of the big funding agencies that support culture, support research. They've eviscerated not just usaip, but they've also taken down the Wilson center, they've taken down the Kennan center, which is the big center for research into Russia. And this then goes into other stuff which connects with what I was doing as the Environment Minister. So when I was Environment Minister, my two in the uk, the two bodies that I visited in the US were the Environmental Protection Agency and fema, which is the emergency response, because they were doing the equivalent of what the Environment Agency does, has in the uk They've been cut. So the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to deal with things like monitoring air pollution or monitoring runoff from factories that's being cut, presumably because Trump and Musk are Going all capitalism red and tooth and claw. And they don't want people pointing out if businesses are polluting fema, which is doing stuff, which was really impressive when I visited them, what they were doing that was better sometimes than what we were doing in the UK was getting ahead of the floods, putting in investments in flood defences before the floods happen. Obviously much cheaper to do it before the floods happen after all that funding's been cut. So there no longer is money going into preemptive flood protection from the federal government. And as I tried to gather the list, you quite quickly get into 30, 40, 50 different agencies where this is happening. Center for Disease Control not managing to stay on top of measles. University of Columbia, I'm speaking to you from a university at the moment, lost $400 million of federal funding. And the classic Trump thing, we demand that you're going to change everything that happens in terms of protests. You're going to sack the head of your Middle Eastern center in the university. Harvard sacked the two directors in its Middle east center as funding is threatened and Colombia does all this. And of course, I think in classic Trump thing, he doesn't then restore the funding. What he says is good, you've done all I've asked and now we can talk.
- [46:44]
Alistair Campbell
One of the other economic arguments is put is that I don't know if this is true, but I saw somebody saying this in one of these economists I was watching, and he said that what musk is about is trying to sort of rip through the public sector, both by sacking, but also by demoralizing, making people feel, this is not for me, I'll leave or I don't want to apply. You then have people who generally on lower salaries than people in the private sector, who move into the private sector and can lower wages. So this is the richest man in the world with the strategy of absolute cruelty in order to lower wages for people on about, you know, $60,000 a year. A few, just a few, maybe before we go to Israel. Rory, to close off from, from my perspective, you talked about sackings there. The other sackings that happened this week, senior people in the national security infrastructure sacked on the advice of this far right conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who still has access to Trump. Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, had to sit in a meeting with Trump while Laura Loomer gave Trump a list of names of people that she felt weren't loyal to him. And they've gone. The other thing, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, who's finally apparently admitted that vaccines might actually be Quite good for measles. He attended the funeral this week. I mean, you know, fair play, I would blame him on one level for his anti vaccine campaigns of help kill people of measles, but he went to the funeral of one of the children who died. He's now trying to stop fluoridation of water. And then the other one that I, that I think we should just remind, going back to the Venezuelans and the El Salvadoran jail, Trump, in this ridiculous thing that we now have to get used to, of him talking to journalists on his aeroplane, Air Force One back from playing golf, where he was telling them how he won the tournament that he won, and he was very proud of his golf. But he then was asked about the, the El Salvador thing because the El Salvador president has volunteered to take Americans into his prisons. And without giving it a moment's thought, Trump just said, that's, yeah, I'd be up for that if we can get these rapists and gangsters and hoodlums off the streets, put him in jails in El Salvador. So this is all stuff that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago. And I think the point you made earlier is exactly the same point that Joschke Fischer made, is the thing we should be really mindful and terrified of is the speed of all this. So when Keir Starmer in his speech yesterday said it's a time for cool heads, fine. He also said it's a time for urgency. But I think the urgency actually, and I understand why every world leader is finding this so challenging. It really is challenging, but I think there's got to be a greater sense of urgency about the potential of this. It is unpicking virtually every international rule and order that we have taken for granted for most of our lives without anybody really defending them right now. One of the best responses this week I saw, Rory, and I'm slightly biased because he's a friend of mine, but the Singapore Prime Minister, Lawrence Wong, he did a speech where, just a short piece to camera, but it was very, very powerful because he didn't. He basically said, this is arbitrary, it's protectionist, and it's unbelievably dangerous. And this is America which built this system. Yes, it needs reform, but this isn't reform. This is a destruction. He then went on to say, however, now, as it happens, we're in the 10%, so you could argue we're luckier than most. But he then went to argue about the point of principle. And he then went on to say, what he would do for Singapore, et cetera. But I think there has to be more of that and less of let's all pretend this is normal and we're just kind of going to have to do a deal somehow.
- [50:26]
Rory Stewart
I couldn't agree more. And I think we need real imagination, courage, by which I mean Keir Starmer shouldn't just be sort of making little concessions around the edges and hoping to charm Trump. What actually we should be doing is taking this as an opportunity to make a big play to get closer to Europe politically, security terms, economically. But in order to do that, one of the things is the difficult job for everybody covering this, of trying to see the whole picture, because what we've described in this podcast so far is catastrophic effects on the US Economy, which then spill into the global economy. But then we've also talked about what's happening to the law, what's happening to funding for institutions, what's happening to disease control. Now, a week ago, we would have been talking about what's happening to NATO, what's happening to Ukraine, what's happening to Greenland. So these are very different on the surface areas. Some of them is about people dying of measles in the US Some of them is about. About America abandoning its commitments to Ukraine, and some of them are about destroying the global trading system. And the reason it's really important to try to look at the whole thing as a whole is that this system is a very delicate, complicated system that America has built up over 70, 80 years that does have a security dimension, an economic dimension, and a democratic dimension. And Trump is pulling at all these things at the same time with accelerating speed. And all of these things then spill over to the others, but only if you can try to hold the whole thing in your head, can you see what a threat he is. If you just look one at a time, you can say, well, maybe he's just making the government more efficient.
- [52:14]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And the other point you made last week about the penguins and the herd of McDonald Islands, the other thing that they like you to do is to find the funny bits. And sometimes you have to, because that's the only way. Black humor is the only way to deal with this stuff sometimes. But I think we've got to be very wary of all that as well now. And the point you're making relates absolutely to Netanyahu. And not for nothing, I would argue, was Netanyahu's stop between Israel and Washington, was Hungary, to see Orban. And bear in mind, this is a guy who's wanted by the International Criminal Court. Now, he argues that it's all nonsense. Trump argues it's nonsense. Orban has said he, he's pulling out the whole thing anyway. But this is what I mean about this. They have a desire to break down the international institutions that were created in the, in the wake of the Second World War for themselves. You know, I, I quite regularly look at, because I think we sometimes assume that Israeli public opinion now is so because we see their leaders, we've seen Netanyahu, we see their spokesman, we see their military. I regularly just take a look at Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper. And I lighted on this article by a guy called Amos Harel, defense analyst. And he said Netanyahu's true objective appears increasingly clear, a gradual slide toward an authoritarian style regime whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts. Now, that's his opinion. But it's easy to see lots of things that have happened in the last few years that relate to that. And I really do think this, I cannot get my head around the fact that he wasn't even asked about the Red Crescent killings when he was there in front of the media yesterday.
- [53:59]
Rory Stewart
Quick explainer on background just to bring people up to date, because I think people haven't necessarily been focusing on Gaza over the last few weeks. So what happened is the ceasefire began under Trump. It lasted until the beginning of March, so about a month ago. And then the second stage didn't go through. Second stage didn't go through because there were violations by Hamas. There were these horrible scenes of maltreatment, of hostages returning the wrong hostages. And there were also violations by Israel in terms of following through on the first thing. So trust broke down. Second stage didn't happen. Since then, what Israel's done is basically impose a total blockade again on glass. And that's much worse than anything we saw in 2024. This is more like what happened in the first few days after the attack in October. So fuel's not getting through, food's not getting through. And of course, it's worse now than it was a year and a half ago because the hospitals have largely collapsed, the clinics have collapsed, many of the health workers have been killed. And at the same time, it's not clear what they're trying to achieve. They're trying taking more and more of Gaza. 67%, I think, of Gaza, according to the UN is now under Israeli control. Netanyahu seems to be signaling that he's just going to continue. The story is he's going to continue till he gets the hostages back. But fewer and fewer people in Israel believe that they don't think he's serious about getting the hostages back. And certainly Smotrich and Ben GVIR want this thing to roll on. So it feels like a never ending war. Meanwhile, on the west bank, more and more settler activity, more and more aggressive attempts to reclaim. And finally, before I come to you, on the Red Crescent, of course the international situation's changed. Last year there was at least the hope that you could influence Biden and maybe he could put pressure on the Israeli government. Trump has made it clear that he's more extreme than the Israeli government. He wants ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The Israeli government's lent into that. This created a little department called the Department for the Inverted comm is voluntary repatriation of Palestinians from Gaza. And Trump has of course allowed all the heavy weapons supplied which Biden didn't supply. And so nobody in the whole world now thinks that there's any remote American break on what Netanyahu might do over to you on the Red Crescent just to explain to people what happened there.
- [56:15]
Alistair Campbell
No, I think if anything, as you say, there's an accelerator and just on the institutions, of course, you talked about this in relation to Trump. Netanyahu is at war with the, with the courts over his own case. He's now trying to get rid of the head of his, been trying to get rid of the head of his domestic agency, spy agency, and also the attorney general and so on. So it goes on. So the Red Crescent is a, it, you know, is this sort of took me back to when we were involved in the conflict in Kosovo. And I've talked to you before about one of the worst moments was when we got into a complete mess with global public opinion over the, when NATO accidentally bombed a convoy of refugees. And it was horrific. And we only were able to move on from that when we went out there and just admitted terrible, terrible mistake, apology. And you just have to kind of do that. But the one thing we know about Trump and Netanyahu, remember with Trump, he was advised by that lawyer, Cohen, about which the film Apprentice Never apologize, never admit you're wrong, and always blame the other side. And that's the kind of, that's the, that's the model. So this is a story of essentially of Red Crescent workers. These are almost all, I think, local. They're there, they're trying to help people who are injured and so forth. And 15 were killed. Okay. And the, the Israeli Defense Force and the Israeli government line has been that they were that they, the convoy approached the area they were going to suspiciously and that they didn't have their lights on. And this is. Then film has found of this and that is exposed as completely untrue. Then worse than that, the bodies are sort of, you know, put into shallow graves just to get them out of the way. But then they, the Red Crescent go to get them so they can give them burials and so forth, and they find on one of the people who's been killed, his still recording telephone, because he's been recording, he was recording a message to his mother, he was begging for forgiveness from his mother for going there, forgiveness from God, and, and it was horrific to listen to. But what the film showed, the film completely debunks the official version of events that the Israelis have put there. And there's stuff that's come out in the last 24 hours suggesting that some of these people were actually, actually taken out alive and shot at point blank range. Now these are Red Crescent society workers, they are aid workers, they're emergency aid workers. And the government line now is, well, Hamas has always tried to get into the emergency aid workers as well. So you can't be sure, still trying to sow doubt. And the numbers, the sheer numbers of people in the aid world who've lost their lives, you've now lost more, more aid workers have lost, lost their lives in this conflict than every war combined going back over several decades. So this to me is impunity. It's absolute impunity.
- [59:17]
Rory Stewart
Well, maybe, because I guess we're coming up to the end of this, we could return a little bit to the sort of bigger picture in tomorrow's Question time because I think you've raised a huge issue about aid workers, civilians in conflict, the U.N. but anyway, thank you. I mean, we've done a lot and I guess if we sort of thread it together, we've talked about economics, we've talked about democracy in the US We've talked about international security, but we're also now talking about international law, the rules based order, and what happens to that in a world in which it appears that people can, with impunity, kill ambulances and hospital workers trying to go and rescue people, bury them in shallow graves and then try to hide their trucks.
- [60:05]
Alistair Campbell
Okay, Rory, well, let's doubtless we'll talk about more elements of this in question time tomorrow. See you soon.