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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com Are.
- [00:14]
James O'Brien
You more or less worried by Vance presidency or Trump presidency?
- [00:18]
Alistair Campbell
I think there's a very good chance it could be even worse. When Trump says something he thinks it is true. Vance knows that he's lying.
- [00:26]
James O'Brien
Vance in a 2021 interview says, we are effectively run in this country by.
- [00:31]
Unknown
A bunch of childless CA cat ladies.
- [00:33]
James O'Brien
The Zelensky Showdown in the White House it's not normal to have a Vice President sitting in there and interrupting.
- [00:40]
Alistair Campbell
I thought it was utterly disgusting. That was Vance showing I will be your attack dog. This is a guy who's had a pretty rough life, pretty rough childhood, and meanwhile he has a level of ambition that makes him prepared to do or say anything in the moment to get to the next step. And the next step for him is the White House.
- [01:01]
James O'Brien
Take that lack of virtue, that lack of moral character, and combine it with the economic and military might of the United States and you should be very, very worried about a J.D. vance presidency.
- [01:23]
Alistair Campbell
Hi there, it's Alistair here. As you are no doubt aware, we're right in the middle of our first ever miniseries, the Real JD Vance, exclusively on the Rest Is Politics plus.
- [01:33]
James O'Brien
And in this week's episode we cover JD Vance's journey so far during Trump's second term, how he became Vice president, how unusually prominent he is, his spat with the Pope, the extraordinary scenes with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, and how he may well be the lead contender to be the next President of the United States. I mean, so many interesting things psychologically, historically, politically. So if you'd like to hear the first four episodes in full right now, just head to the restlesspolitics.com to join the Restless Politics plus with a free TR where you can enjoy the full trip experience, including miniseries like this, monthly bonus episodes, completely ad free listening and much more. New episodes of series are dropping every Friday morning on the rest is politics plus. That's therestispolitics.com for the full trip experience.
- [02:20]
Alistair Campbell
And if you like a taster, here's a clip from episode four. Hope you enjoy it.
- [02:25]
James O'Brien
The story, basically the Vice presidency, is that it's set up with the Constitution in a very, very different world. Essentially for the runner up to the presidency, the first incumbents, these very distinguished figures, Thomas Jefferson Adams then in the 19th century, it enters a pretty bleak stage where most of the incumbents into the office are quite obscure. And by the early 20th century, the absolute assumption is that this is a total no end job. It's a job that was originally envisaged being vice President as presiding over the Senate. So a little bit like, maybe, I don't know, in that some of the roles actually of what we would call a speaker, not what the Americans would call a speaker, but what we would call a speaker was what they used to do.
- [03:14]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [03:14]
James O'Brien
As part of the legislative branch. And I think you've got a lovely phrase.
- [03:20]
Alistair Campbell
This was a guy called Thomas Marshall. Don't know if any of our listeners and viewers remember Thomas Marshall, but he was President Woodrow Wilson's vice president. And he once said once there were two brothers. He's talking about himself and his brother. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them. Again, I don't think we can say that about J.D. vance. He is definitely being heard of. I, I, of course, it's interesting. I, the ones that I saw close up. So I saw George Bush Senior, who was a serious vice president to Reagan. We then had Bush senior becoming president and Dan Quayle who was not a serious vice president. We then had of course, Bill Clinton with Al Gore, who was a very serious vice president and who frankly should have become president. We then had Bush Jr. Who went down the route of picking somebody as vice president who many people saw as even more serious than the president, that was Dick Cheney. Then we had Obama Biden, so Obama basically going for somebody really experienced because of his youth. And then we had Trump Pence and I would argue even that Trump Vance is very different to Trump Pence.
- [04:35]
James O'Brien
Yeah, well, so just to go back to the history of it, to take on my rest is history role for a second, the story seems to be that after the Second World War there was very, very scratchy relationships between presidents and vice presidents. So Truman, who was Roosevelt's vice president, was completely excluded from everything. He didn't even know that America had a nuclear bomb when he took over because FDR hadn't even informed him about the Manhattan program. When Nixon became Eisenhower's vice president, Eisenhower was completely contemptuous of him. And when.
- [05:10]
Alistair Campbell
Why did you pick him?
- [05:11]
James O'Brien
Well, a lot of this is to do with party management and trying to get. So when Poirot Nixon was running against Kennedy, Eisenhower was asked what had Nixon done as vice President? And Eisenhower said, well, I can't think of anything, if you give me a week, I might be able to think of something he's done as my vice president. And then Kennedy was completely contemptuous of LBJ and rfk, particularly. His brother treated LBJ terribly. LBJ then becomes president, and this bullying continues. His vice president, he refuses to send to Churchill's funeral just to kind of humiliate him. There's a little bit of an attempt with Ford to bring in Rockefeller as his.
- [05:49]
Alistair Campbell
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah.
- [05:51]
James O'Brien
But Rockefeller's completely sidelined by Rumsfeld and Chaney, the young Rumsfeld and Chaney who refused to let him do anything. So it changes in 76. And that the academic story is it's with Carter and Mondale that the modern vice president is formed, and the modern vice president is Carter. And this is just before your story, but just before you come up, as Reagan basically says, okay, we're gonna have a serious person who's gonna be basically my deputy, my advisor. I'm gonna give them big policy briefs. I'm gonna, above all, give them an office in the White House right next to me. Before that, they'd all been parked out in the way that Susie Viles parked Musk out in the executive office. I'm gonna have them in the White House. They're gonna have a staff, they're gonna have a team, and they're going to meet me every week. So they set up weekly meetings with the president, and they're gonna. They're going to be our main access to our senators. So the vice presidents would chair these legislative meetings. And that's the model that you're talking about. So with the exception of Dan Quayle, from then on, from 76 right the way through to the end of Obama, they're often, in many cases, older, more experienced. They know how Washington works or they know how foreign affairs works. The presidents are often people who've been governors in states. They don't understand Washington and foreign affairs in the same way.
- [07:08]
Alistair Campbell
So that would be the case, say, with Reagan and Bush senior. Absolutely.
- [07:13]
James O'Brien
Give them these portfolios. And it's not just that they use them to represent them abroad. It's that you imagine with Obama and Biden there will be times when Biden is giving him frank advice on how to get bills through the Senate. You'd imagine with Gore and Clinton, that Gore was given portfolio lead. You're doing the environment for me. And this will lead on to where we are with funds. Remember of these people that you've mentioned, George Bush Sr. Who's Reagan's vice president becomes the president. Right. Al Gore, who's Clinton's is supposed to become the president. Biden, who's Obama's becomes the president. Right. So a system is set up where an increasing and of course even these people that I said were humiliated since the second World War. Truman becomes president, LBJ becomes president, Nixon becomes president.
- [08:07]
Alistair Campbell
Right.
- [08:07]
James O'Brien
So what is this?
- [08:08]
Alistair Campbell
Do you know the statistics? I don't know. I'm just asking whether you're reading these books, whether you've discovered what the status for the proportion of vice presidents who become president.
- [08:16]
James O'Brien
Well, LBJ makes that joke. So when LBJ takes the role and people say what on earth you're doing? Lyndon Johnson was the master of the Senate, most powerful figure in American president and then he takes his role as vice president, everyone says this is ridiculous, this is a no end role, it's going nowhere. And he says being very brutal. I've looked at the stats and a quarter of us become president because the President's assassinated. And indeed that turns out to be the case with him.
- [08:42]
Alistair Campbell
Jfk, it could be fury. A new conspiracy theory. Maybe he's not a new conspiracy theory. I don't know.
- [08:47]
James O'Brien
Anyway. Yes. So back over to you. So he comes in and let's just start before we get into the details of it, what's your sense of what the key part, let's say in the past these people have been senior, experienced senators who there to guide. Is that what Vance is providing for Trump or is it something a bit different?
- [09:08]
Alistair Campbell
No, he's not. I don't think he's providing that at all because of course his political career to that point had been fairly short.
- [09:13]
James O'Brien
Two years, I think.
- [09:14]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. So no, I don't think it's that. I think what Trump saw in Vance was. Well, first of all, let's go back to what we said in the previous parts of the series. Vance is representing some of these very, very powerful people who are funding the Republicans, who are the intellectual powerhouses of the Republicans. Peter T. The one we talked about most, but there are plenty of others. So he's representing part of the kind of money and intellectual base of the Republican Party. But clearly Trump saw something in him. Let's just go to Trump's sort of basic narcissism. He doesn't want somebody to challenge him. Well, the youth kind of gives him that in a way. Even though I think Vance could end up as a very, very powerful force within the White House. He doesn't have the. It's not like George Bush Sr. Who Everybody knows, understands the world of intelligence and diplomacy more than Ronald Reagan did. Same, you could probably say, for Joe Biden, possibly, when it came to, certainly with Cheney. I mean, Cheney and Bush Jr. Yeah, yeah. So I think he's got somebody who he basically sees as part of his political operation. He's going to be the attack dog. And if you think about one of the things that most of our listeners and viewers will remember, one of the first big moments in the Vice presidency was not Trump going to the Munich Security Council Security Conference, which is one of the big foreign policy events in the global calendar. He sends Vance, and he had just.
- [10:37]
James O'Brien
A quick sort of history thing there. In the First Trump presidency, 2016, he sends Pence, and I've just been reading the Pence biography, and Pence essentially goes to the Munich Security Conference. And Pence sees his entire role as trying to reassure people, it's not going.
- [10:53]
Alistair Campbell
To be as bad as you think.
- [10:54]
James O'Brien
What, he goes. Yeah, he goes all the way around the world, and he does it in Latin America. Everywhere he goes in the world, he informally takes people aside and says, don't worry too much about what Trump's saying in public. In practice, it's going to be.
- [11:04]
Alistair Campbell
He does to Everybody what Kevin McCarthy did to us in Davos. He says that it's all going to be fine, don't worry.
- [11:08]
James O'Brien
And that was the traditional way of handling. But tell us about what.
- [11:12]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I was in Germany at the time, and Vance goes to Munich and delivers a speech that I think I said at the time, if he just sort of stood up with a bucket of vomit and thrown it at the audience, it would have had pretty much the same effect.
- [11:28]
Unknown
He said, free speech, I fear, is in retreat. The threat that I worry the most about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe, from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
- [11:44]
Alistair Campbell
And then at the end of the day, goes off and meets the leaders of the AfD, having snubbed the far right party, having stubbed the official government. So it went down like a lead balloon. And yet, fast forward to where we are now, and we have a succession of European leaders. We saw it in NATO, we've seen it in summits, we've seen it in bilaterals, who are essentially. I saw that, you know, if I dare mention the presenter of a lesser podcast in the United Kingdom, Louis Goodall, for example, said about the NATO summit that it was like watching a king and all the other leaders from around the world were his courtiers. Now, that may be a bit over the top but you get the point he's making. So the consequence of Vance attacking Europe, humiliating European leaders essentially wasn't to have those European leaders rise up and say hey listen mate, who do you think you're talking to? It was to play into this sense of Trump is the only figure that.
- [12:42]
James O'Brien
We have to think about and is he actually doing to Europe what Trump has done to him? So we hope you enjoyed that extract from episode four. To hear the first four episodes in full right now just go to the restlesspolitics.com for a free trial today. It's incredibly simple to sign up wherever you listen and it takes less than two minutes. You'll get every regular and member only episode of the rest is politics and leading all in one clean ad free feed plus a bunch of extra benefits like our members chat room. Just head to therestayspolitics.com to try it for free. See you soon.