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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 this.
- [00:14]
Rory Stewart
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- [00:50]
Alistair Campbell
Hi there, Alistair Campbell here. What you're about to hear is very special Q and A. This is not to be confused with Question Time. This week's Question Time episode dropped yesterday. As per usual. This special Q and A is all about the miniseries that Rory and I have done on American Vice President J.D. vance and all of the questions that we're answering. They're some of the many, many questions that have come in from members of TRIP who have been listening to the series. Now, to round off this miniseries, in addition to today's Q and A, next week we're going to be speaking to somebody who knows JD Vance well, in fact was once, you could say his boss. That's David Frum, the former speechwriter to George W. Bush these days one of the most clear eyed critics of the Trump administration and the Republican family more generally. He will help us really try to get right under the skin of what Vance represents more broadly in US and therefore global politics. So if you want to hear the miniseries in full right now, just head to therestispolities.com for a free trial. You'll get access to this mini series. We've already started thinking, by the way, about our next one and you will get access to that. And you'll also get our monthly bonus episodes completely ad free listening members, chat room and much, much more. Anyway, enough for me for now. Hope you enjoy this special Q and A which has been made by you. Welcome to Arrestus Politics Special Q and Day about our miniseries on JD Vance. Thank you for all the very kind comments about it and one or two unkind, but you know, take the rough with the smooth. We've done four episodes now. This is our fifth in the miniseries on J.D. vance. But the difference with this one, it's not Just me and Roy talking. It's you, it's members of TRIP giving us their questions about what they've heard so far. Rory, let me kick you off with this one. Jacob Wilkie King, who's a member from London. Did the Democrats pave the way for J.D. vance appeal and broadens out to say this. J.D. vance's background of incredible social distress, feeling separated from an upper class, very similar to the story of many Labour MPs. How much responsibility did the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters? What do you think?
- [03:10]
David Frum
I think that's firstly a really interesting observation because, of course, if you were looking for people in British politics who've come from a social background like JD Vance, you might be looking at somebody like Angela Rayner, who came from a very, very difficult, troubled background. Naturally, in British politics, that would draw you to the left because you would have experienced poverty very directly. You would feel a very unjust, unequal society and you would be very, very focused on social justice and you would perceive the ruling of elite as stacking things against you. And you'd believe passionately that if you could just get rid of these people and bring in people like you, you could create a much more just equal world. And I think that that was the sense I get interviewing Anta Rayner when we interviewed on Leading Rachel Reeves or Bridget Phillipson. There's this very, very strong sense that their class backgrounds drive, you know, what makes them Labour in peace.
- [04:07]
Alistair Campbell
When you were an MP, did you have any Tory MPs? I mean, I think of John Major, who came from a pretty tough background, but did you have any MPs in your intake that you would say came from identifiably JD Vance type of background?
- [04:19]
David Frum
We had a lot of MPs who came from much tougher backgrounds than people acknowledge. I mean, you know, Patrick McLachlan, for example, had been a coal miner. There were many, many people in my intake who'd come from very poor backgrounds, grown up on housing estates, come out of poverty. But none of them, I think, to be fair, quite the kind of extreme type of poverty and domestic violence and abuse that Vance is talking about. But many of them also were people who had felt that their lives had been turned around, for example, in some cases, narratives about how their family had benefited by Thatcher selling council housing and how they'd been able to buy their own council house. Many of them had been small business people. So there was that different tone which you sometimes get in British politics of people saying, I came from a Very tough background. I pulled myself up. Other people can do it. And so you'd have these people talking about how angry they felt going onto housing estates and seeing people's curtains drawn at 11 in the morning when they were up first thing in the morning working. And that produced, I think, quite a sort of brutal, uncompassionate attitude towards people on welfare because they had come from those backgrounds and felt that they got away from them. Whereas strangely, often the kind of more privileged, more Tory wet lots of come from more privileged backgrounds and felt how lucky they were and didn't feel that people living in poverty were there because they hadn't worked hard. Now to just come back to you on that because there's a lot in Hillbilly Elegy Vance's book where he sounds a bit like some of those conservative colleagues of mine where he really is pretty contemptuous of a lot of the people he's growing up around. He blames them for not working hard enough, not sorting out their addiction, not sorting out in a way that someone from the left wouldn't. Anyway, I'd just be interested in how you kind of reconcile this odd thing that he comes from a kind of anti rayner background and the result is he goes to the R. I mean.
- [06:08]
Alistair Campbell
I think what's interesting in the question is partly answered by the interview we did recently with your friend Congressman Seth Moulton because he basically says that the answer how much responsibility do Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters? His answer is a hell of a lot. He basically says that the Democrats genuinely lost contact with the values aspirations of traditional working class voters. Now he pins it, a lot of it on the minority issues. I mean it gets identified as woke. But I think what the right did very, very well, and this is a big part of JD Vance and a big part of MAGA is the weaponization of woke as to mean anything that isn't sort of very traditionally almost nativist American. I think there's a lot in what Jacob is saying. I think it's why, you know, when you look across the European perspective, it's why I think the left has got to think really, really carefully about how they handle this sort of wave of the rise of the populist right that seems to be happening. I agree with you, by the way, on reading Re. Re. Reading Hillbilly Elegy as I did. The more I looked into it, the more I felt he's actually really contemptuous of these people. The thing about John Prescott when he was in the Labour Government and Angela Raine. Now you have a really real sense that their role and their position in the government is really to fight for the people and the places that they came from. You don't get that feeling with Vance at all. He's fighting for ideology more than anything.
- [07:34]
David Frum
One thing that I loved about that leading interview with Aannsha Rayner, which I still think is one of the very best leading interviews we've done, is that there's an enormous amount of compassion and good humor in the way that she talks about her family background. A real compassion understanding towards her mother, who, you know, you could have been very, very angry with. Because basically she says, my mother didn't love me. She was obsessed with my father, and she made no real effort to look after me. But she sort of processed it. And she isn't in the way that Vance is driven by anger. I mean, I think anger is a really important theme that we kept referring to in those four. Whereas Aunt Charayna has come through that she isn't actually somebody who sees herself as a victim, really. She seems to have quite a sort of realistic, nuanced, good humored attitude towards it and quite a sort of practical sense of solving it. Whereas Vance's anger, but also, oddly, although he hates the idea of victimhood, there is a sense of victimhood that he hasn't quite processed this thing in the way that someone like Angela Rainer has.
- [08:40]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And the other thing I say that's really interesting about Angela is that you saw this in particular when occasionally she stood in for Keir Starmer at Primus Questions, particularly with Boris Johnson, where she sensed that they're thinking she's really gonna have to try a lot harder than I have to try because she doesn't come from my sort of really clever background. And she's standing there basically, listen, sunshine, you're gonna take me exactly as I am. Whereas actually, you have a feeling with Vance that he's constantly becoming a slightly different thing. I mean, I thought the most interesting thing, given that we went through the series almost chronologically through his life, is you felt like you were talking, I think, with Andrew Rainey, you're always talking about the same person. John Prescott, the same. You're always talking about the same person. With Vance, I always feel I'm talking about a different person at various stages of his life. And I think if he does become president, he'll have another Persona that he kind of peels off and that becomes it. Let's go with this one from Ben Kelly. This is about the discussion we had about the influence of Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. So Ben Kelly says this is JD Vancey's positioning behind Trump comparable to that of Octavian behind Caesar, in that he allows the latter to destroy the Republic and then goes on to rule akin to a monarch. Is that placing too much of a Machiavellian level of intelligence and ambition on JD Vance? That's a great question.
- [09:58]
David Frum
This is such a rich scene that we haven't really even begun to get into. But Yuval Noah Harari, who we've interviewed, I think now twice on leading, said to me this morning, actually just before we're talking, that one of the things that strikes him about the monarch thing is that it's all about the personal. So one of the points he makes about watching JD Vance, Zelenskyy and Trump together is that it isn't really the American government dealing with the Ukrainian government, it's Trump dealing with Zelenskyy. And when you question Trump about the fact that Putin has broken every deal that he's done before, again, it's like a medieval king thinking just in personal terms, because his reply is, yeah, he broke a deal with Obama, he broke into deal with Biden, but I'm different. I'm Trump. And the implication of that is he can make a deal with Putin and it will last as long as he's in. And when he's no longer president, the deal's not valid anymore because it's not state to state, it's person to person. His final point, I'll come back to you on this, which I thought was kind of really revealing. It's a sort of crazy idea, but it shows something about the world we're in that you can sort of imagine a world in which Trump kind of marries Baron Trump to Putin's granddaughter and gives them Crimea as their territory. And that that would sort of somehow resolve the situation. Anyway, back over to you.
- [11:22]
Alistair Campbell
We're recording this around the time when Donald Trump, this thing he does of surprising journalists by phoning them up and giving them an interview. And Gary o' Donoghue of the BBC gets this interview. I don't know if you've heard it yet, but it's really good. Gary o' Donoghue starts asking about, you know, the state visit that's coming up to, and he says, you know, there seems to be this discussion about whether they should recall Parliament for you to address it. And I'm thinking, oh, God, here we go. This is going to be a nightmare for Keir Starmer. If he says, yeah, and he says, no, no, no. If they're on holiday, that's fine. Let's say, you know why? Because he wants to be at Windsor Castle. And he says, what are you looking forward to? And he said, I'm really looking forward to having a good time and being nice to the King because he's such a great gentleman. And that's your point. It's king to king. And in his head, he won't care what you think and what I think. I mean, he may or may not know there are millions of people who think like we do, but he's going to be on the level with the monarch. I think what's really interesting, though, about Ben's question, is the monarch the right word for Trump? I'm afraid it's not. The word is authoritarian autocrat. The thing about the monarch, our monarch today, unlike the monarchs in the days when they were sort of using marriage to carve out territory. And by the way, I think you put a horrible thought out there, which somebody will tell everybody that's a good idea. I think it's not that he's a monarch, he'd love to be a monarch, but what Thiel and Curtis Yarvin want, and I think Vance and Musk, when he was in the tent as well, is a sense of powerful politicians who are not beholden to politics. And in a way, that's what true monarchy really is.
- [13:01]
David Frum
Yes, absolutely. I think this is the most interesting point. We haven't done enough on this because a traditional dictator from the 40s or 50s was connected to the fact that they were a communist or a fascist, and that constrained them to some extent. I mean, if you were Stalin, you still had to talk a bit like a communist. A king can completely flip day to day. Their entire. There's no ideology. If you're Trump or you're Vance, there isn't actually an ideology. I mean, that's one of the things I think our miniseries is all about. And this is your chameleon point, that he's a different thing every week. And kings can do that because in the end, all the loyalty isn't to their program or their policy or their manifesto. It's just personally to them. It's the cult. They are a messiah. So they can flip completely. It doesn't matter. One moment we're putting tariffs on China, next minute we're not. One moment we're saying we're not bombing Iran, next minute we are. Doesn't matter. And in that sense, Vance and Trump are not in the same world as Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is very constrained. He can't do certain kinds of things on welfare because in the end he's a Labour prime minister, he's got a Labour Party, he's got Labour MPs and they're going to say we're about social justice. You don't get to cut welfare like that. Trump and Vance aren't constrained in that way at all. They've broken free of parties, of ideology, of institutions, and made it personal.
- [14:22]
Alistair Campbell
Throw me a question.
- [14:23]
David Frum
Well, okay, here we are. Diana Brocklebank, Norfolk. Trump's policies over the coming years will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. How can this possibly sit with J.D. vance? We know he blows with the wind, but his base won't be able to handle the ever increasing wealth divide over to you. Can he reinvent that far or are there limits even to what he can do?
- [14:45]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I think it's a very good question because I think one of the reasons that Trump's ratings are actually not as good as he pretends they are is that I think a lot of people have realized, hold on a minute, your big beautiful bill is really helping rich people and it's not going to do that much for me. In fact, you might be taking my Medicaid away and all the other stuff that we know about. So I think it will increase inequality. Why do I think that? Because that is what it is designed to do. This goes back to the monarch thing. The billionaires, the trillionaires as they want to be. They have probably more economic and political power than business people in the American system have ever had. And they see Trump as one of them. And to some extent, Trump is one of them. So he doesn't care about the inequality. How does it sit with JD Vance? And would he be able to hand the increasing wealth divide? Yes, if he changes and of course, what he'll do. The reason why I think he's very Machiavellian and he's sort of playing quite a canny game. He knows that Trump. Well, I guess he could get rid of him up to a point. He could do what he's doing with Jerome Powell now and try to make his position untenable. But Vance is elected just the same as Trump was. I mean, okay, it's a ticket and they were voting for Trump, but Vance is there. He's the second most powerful person under their constitution, so he's there. However, if Trump does go, say doesn't stand for a third term, if Vance does stand for the Republican Party and does win. These are very big ifs, by the way, he can then change. Why? Because, one, we know that that's what he does. Two, because he can say, I was the loyal number two, now I'm the number one, and I've got my own agenda. Here's where I agreed with the previous administration, but these are the challenges now. And we've seen wealth inequality rise, and I'm going to bring it down again. He can actually turn it to his advantage.
- [16:33]
David Frum
Yes. I mean, there's an interesting question maybe here just for you, before we move on to the next question from a listener, which is, do you think that we've entered a world where, in a sense, reality doesn't necessarily catch up? I mean, when we're being optimistic, we keep hoping that in the end these guys get undone by reality. But it's possible that when you've entered reality tv, they can keep spinning, they can keep blaming other people. Whatever happens, they can keep distracting, pushing so that actually maybe one of the reasons one needs to organize and push against them is that you can't sit back and say, in the end, they're going to get undone by reality. They're only going to get undone by really fierce opposition.
- [17:12]
Alistair Campbell
I would argue that Boris Johnson got undone by reality in the end, and it wasn't the reality of the issues on which he had been truly terrible. It was actually a sort of tipping point issue at the end. I think Putin might in the end be undone by reality, but, you know, I don't know. He's an amazing survivor. Netanyahu is an amazing survivor. The reality surrounding Netanyahu ought to be destroyed many times over, but he hasn't. Trump is a bit like Putin, that he's created an unreality and he's made people feel, those people who are part of it. He's made them feel that they belong to something really, really important and that makes them feel good even as their lives are not good. Now, that is an amazing piece of sort of political communication conmanship. Call it whatever you want. I still hold out hope that eventually reality will catch up on these guys. But I agree with you, you can't take it for granted.
- [18:01]
David Frum
Mandelson. I saw an interview.
- [18:03]
Alistair Campbell
Lord Mandelson.
- [18:04]
David Frum
Lord Mandelson. Lord Mandelson. Former First Secretary of State, etc, Commissioner Lord Mandelson. I saw an interview with Peter Mandelson at the weekend in which he said Vance was much more thoughtful and nuanced and private than in public. Does he really believe that or is that the Kind of thing ambassadors have to say.
- [18:22]
Alistair Campbell
That's from Florence Hobson. That's a very, very good question. I saw one of his fellow ambassadors in Washington recently. I won't do the accent because he'll give away the country, who basically said, I really enjoy Peter Badlor's low profile approach to the, to his ambassadorship. And I said, oh, really? He says, yes, I read about it in the Financial Times, or Peter was talking about it in the Financial Times. Anyway, I did see parts of this interview. I think it was the Sunday Times. And then they put some clips out on social media and in one of them he did say that he was sort of hanging out of what looked like a sports car being filmed. And he said, Trump is really good fun. Vance is, as Florence said, very thoughtful, much more nuanced. So does he really believe that or is it the sort of thing ambassadors have to say? Well, it is certainly the latter, whether he really believes that. Peter may well believe that. Peter does like really interesting, complicated, difficult people. He's interested in them and he will have no doubt at all. He's enjoying being surrounded by very interesting, difficult, complicated people and then having to deal with another set of difficult, complicated people back in London. I think he'd be quite enjoying that. But, Florence, that is a very, very good spot. Very, very, very good spot.
- [19:47]
David Frum
I just put a small qualification in my $0.02 worth, which is, of course, ambassadors don't quite have to say that. I mean, that isn't the way that Kim Darrek spoke about Trump. There is another way of being an ambassador, which is more the Angela Merkel, which is that you're pretty dignified, you're pretty restrained, but you don't go overboard on the praising.
- [20:05]
Alistair Campbell
I actually met a group of ambassadors a while back and one of them, who was no longer in the US but was there for Trump's first term, and said that they had got to the point where they were no longer putting down in their telegrams their reports back to the Foreign Minister. They were no longer putting down what they actually thought in a lot of occasions because they were making assumptions that wolves have ears and all that, and that they were finding other ways to communicate really what they thought about things. That's dangerous.
- [20:34]
David Frum
So just to remind listeners, Kim Darrek, who was our ambassador to the us, there was a leak of a telegram that he had sent back to London very critical of Trump. A classified telegram was leaked and Trump basically demanded that he be sacked. And the British government went along with it and fired Derek.
- [20:54]
Alistair Campbell
Well, Johnson went along with It Johnson.
- [20:56]
David Frum
Went along with it and fired Derrick. Johnson has a double problem. We talk a lot about truth and if you can't be honest in secret telegrams from an ambassador back to headquarters, you're in real trouble. Johnson's other problem, which I saw again and again, is, and this is true, I'm sure in the Trump administration, is that he didn't want to read anything that was uncomfortable. So that every telegram began to go. Another win for global Britain. It was all kind of booster ish, optimistic because Johnson would get angry if an ambassador wrote back saying, actually, Britain doesn't have very much power in this country. The US has more influence or India has more influence, or China has more influence. He wanted to hear that we were the center of the world.
- [21:39]
Alistair Campbell
So, of course, Tom Fletcher, former ambassador, who's now doing a brilliant job at United nations, speaking up for refugees. I think that there is something, I think really important in all of statecraft about ambassadors. The old cliche about your centre abroad to life for your country. And it is a cliche, but there is also sometimes a little bit of truth in it. Peter's job is to project the interests of the Britain and the British government, but at the same time, you have to operate according to the politics that you're swimming in. It's the point that again, to quote Seth Moulton, he said that when he's on these trips with Republicans and they will say privately things about Trump, but he says they're terrified about getting it back to him because he will hold it against them. I think there will be a little bit of ambassadors doing that as well. And that's why really bad for the foreign policy debate right around the world.
- [22:30]
David Frum
It's kind of weird, isn't it? Because what you're talking about there is the sort of corruption of institutions. Oddly, so much of what's going on in the world, I think, is genuinely about social media and what's happened to truth and what's happened to journalism. But that's a little bit different. That's about weird forms of almost tyranny and corruption. It's that sense in the American government that you can't really be an FBI agent, but doing your job anymore without risking being fired on that.
- [22:58]
Alistair Campbell
I don't know if you noticed that recently there was a story in one of the American papers that in the FBI now they're doing lie detector tests on the staff. And one of the questions before they do the lie detector is, have they said anything critical of Kash Patel, the new politically appointed head of the FBI. I mean, that is nuts. I would quite often go home from work with Tony Blair and say to Fiona, God, what a fuse of fucking nightmare today. Christ Almighty, why did you do this? Whatever. Right, yeah. So does that mean if I'm doing a live chat, have you ever criticized Tony Blair to any of your friends or family? Well, the answer is yes, occasionally.
- [23:31]
David Frum
So this is very weird too, because the standards that we're now asking of people, these completely unrealistic standards, are actually making our institutions worse. The example that we were talking about a couple of days ago, which I've been interested in, is that there's now this new letter from the BBC that came out on Monday, requires journalists, anyone narrating. You have to go back through all their social media to be absolutely certain that they are completely impartial on an issue before they can present. On the surface, it sounds like that's going to make things better, but actually it's a massive drop because you're suddenly ruling out almost everybody because almost by definition somebody presenting on a subject has firm views on it. Let's imagine the BBC thought it would be fun for you or I to do a program on Trump, right?
- [24:21]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [24:22]
David Frum
Well, suddenly they go through our social media, they conclude we don't like Trump, so we can't present on Trump. The only person who could present on Trump somehow is somebody who's never expressed a view on him. But somebody who's never expressed a view on him over the last five years would be somebody with no interest in contemporary affairs.
- [24:36]
Alistair Campbell
It's utterly absurd.
- [24:37]
David Frum
What's so odd here is that the BBC has been driven almost in this Kash Patel direction of this sort of very strange idea that people who can function are people without opinions.
- [24:50]
Alistair Campbell
Really interesting example. There was recently on A Thought for the Day. I actually most days can't stand Thought for the day on the BBC Radio 4. But there was an amazing one.
- [24:59]
David Frum
You'd be brilliant at it, Alistair. I can just see you.
- [25:02]
Alistair Campbell
The producer just tasted great stuff. But can we link this back to Vance? Right, I'm going to try and link this back to Vance. So this links back, right, to J.D. vance, Rory, because.
- [25:11]
David Frum
Oh, very good. Yeah.
- [25:12]
Alistair Campbell
These are people who say that they believe in free speech, but of course they don't believe in free speech. They actually believe only in those voices being articulated that echo what they say, think and do. But just briefly, if I may, on the BBC point. So Ridian Brooke, the author, did a brilliant, brilliant thought for the day the other day about Live Aid, where his message, his Thought for Today was basically just weaving together lyrics from some of the most famous songs ever written. It was an incredible piece of work. Okay. And I did a tweet. I just said, best thought for the day and ages. Well done, Riddy and Brooke using the message of Live Aid and the genius of songwriters to say something powerful and worthwhile. And then I thought, I don't really know much about this bloke. I'll follow him on Twitter. So I went over to Twitter and his first tweet was a reposting about the quotes, the persecution of Francesca Albanese. He reposted a post where somebody said, the real Nobel Prize candidate, a picture of Francesca Albanese. Now, I hope I haven't damaged Ridley and Brooks relations with the BBC in saying that, but that illustrates the utter madness that you've just called out. Utter madness.
- [26:22]
David Frum
Let's bring it back to Vance. I'll do sort of nimble mental gymnastics as we go down. Went down a little rabbit hole there. But I do think it does connect because what we're talking about here is attitudes towards freedom of speech. You know, what do we mean by freedom of speech? And Vance is right at the heart of this. You pointed out that his whole Munich speech, JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference, which as you said, went down like a pail of cold sick in front of the European leaders, was a speech in which JD Vance fundamentally says there is no free speech in Europe. And what he means by that is people are imprisoning Tommy Robinson or they're trying to stop a far right fascist party basically stealing an election in Germany. And then he goes after. J.D. vance is very much at the heart of the chasing of these Ivy League universities. Whatever his experience was at Yale, some level, he's going after Columbia, Harvard and the rest. And again, it's this story about free speech. But what it really means is not what liberal free speech meant in the past, which was pluralism, tolerance, a democratic society, society where we accept that we all have different values, we all have different views, and we let them out. In this case, it's policing it. I'm going to set up for Columbia University a panel that will assess are these people saying things which are moving from critical of Israel through to anti Semitic? I'm going to shut down demonstrations, I'm going to fire faculty. That's his idea of freedom of speech. In other words, I think it's the point you keep making. Basically, he thinks free speech somehow. And I'd love you to sort of get into this a Bit more because you made the point, but it's just so paradoxical and difficult to understand. He somehow has convinced me himself that free speech means being able to say very powerfully and loudly what he believes and stopping people saying things that he doesn't believe.
- [28:18]
Alistair Campbell
Correct. That's exactly what it means. And you know, we talked in one of the episodes about, I sent you those videos of this guy who's a psychiatrist who analyzes these politicians in these rather impressive YouTube videos that he does. And he did one recently about the cruelty. He called it the cruelty of the Trump administration. And he focused on, on Trump, Vance and Musk. And you said earlier about the point about Musk's anger. And this psychiatrist basically says that we had quite a lot of questions actually asking whether people thought that Vance was a woman hater. Now he parades around with his wife and it seems to be a genuine marriage and all that. But he does come across slightly, as I said in one of the episodes, as, you know, a captain in the Handmaiden's Tale. It's like women are there to serve and men are where the power should be and what have you. And the anger, of course, comes from a mother that didn't love him and then these sort of this utterly chaotic upbringing that he had more than didn't.
- [29:11]
David Frum
Love him, that actually tried to kill him.
- [29:12]
Alistair Campbell
Tried at one point to kill him. And at one point, as he says in his own book that he wished she was dead. The point that he makes about the cruelty is that it's about understanding. And this is maybe where Vance is clever in a kind of really horrible way. So basically, they have one power in large part by persuading working class and middle class people that he, Trump and Vance are for them. Okay, what does for them mean? What does make America great mean to those people? It means make America like it used to be. And like it used to be essentially means that people like them, the white working class, they had the power. They were the most important people in the country. They now see all these kind of university educated and immigrants and black people rising up through the system and they don't like it. And so the, the cruelty is a way of saying to those white working class people, even though their lives aren't necessarily getting any better, these guys are having it a lot worse because we are giving them hell. And that's why the performative stuff with immigrants, which he defends, or the eating the dogs and never forget, he was the one who started all that nonsense. It's performative to make people Whose lives they're not actually improving. Feel that actually, well, at least we're doing better in the hierarchy.
- [30:33]
David Frum
Nikki Joyce is one of the people who's asking that question that you've just raised, who's a TRIP member on Discord, where she says, to what extent do you think that sexism or misogyny feeds into J.D. vance's developing views and is he the same or different to Trump and MAGA more broadly? In this, again, without sounding like I've been completely taken over by the Woke mind virus, it's very striking how gender and race are at the heart of a lot of what's going on. That, as you say, Vance and Trump are trying to return back to some American past. A pretty sort of extraordinary move back. I mean, fluoride was introduced to drinking water in the 1940s. Vaccinations were sort of stuff. The 1940s. A lot of the environmental protection on air quality was sort of 1970s. They're trying to reverse all of that. They're trying to get back to sort of something which is well before James.
- [31:25]
Alistair Campbell
More subservient.
- [31:26]
David Frum
Exactly. That's absolutely right, yes. Do you have something to say, Mr. President? Yeah, exactly. That sort of stuff. Yeah.
- [31:31]
Alistair Campbell
Hollywood was John Wayne rather than Woke. Sort of films about equality and Harvey Milk.
- [31:38]
David Frum
Exactly, exactly. So gender and race is really interesting here, that it's partly a story of male white anger, but there is something in all the pushes against minorities and all the kind of dismantling of liberal democracy seems to be something about silencing the voices of non whites and of women. And my goodness, that's powerful. My goodness. It seems that he's able to draw on something in the American psyche or the male psyche that really seems to respond to this kind of very simple, misleading idea of what society. I mean, because we're in a very modern society. It's completely changed. It's not the 1940s anymore. Totally half the workforce for women. Civil rights has been completely transformed. Sexuality has been. So it's very weird because you're not being somebody from the 1940s and the 1940s. The genie is, in a sense, out of the bottle. You're trying to be someone from the 1940s in 2025. And that's even stranger in terms of the way that plays out.
- [32:41]
Alistair Campbell
I'm not convinced, though, that Vance can do this without Trump. I could be wrong. And I floated the idea that the Trump that Vance might relate to is Don Jr. And that that might be the ticket that they try to get where you and I agree, and I think we agreed again on this with Seth Moulton, is we shouldn't just see Trump as a unique one off, couldn't be repeated again because he is the head of a movement. These are trends that are very, very powerful. I'm not yet convinced that Vance has the political and communication skills to do what Trump does as well as Trump does it. So he has to become something different.
- [33:17]
David Frum
Right now. I wonder whether we could finish with a kind of more positive question from Maggie Whiteman from Colchester. Listening to your series on J.D. vance and the associated link to Trump leaves a feeling of despair about the worldview of these people, little feeling of hope. Where do you see hope coming from?
- [33:35]
Alistair Campbell
His ratings are falling. You made a point on the main podcast recently about how the markets have almost baked in some of the kind of economic chaos. It's this acceptance that a lot of it is performative and therefore it doesn't necessarily have any sort of lasting impact. And that's a kind of optimistic view. The other place where I see hope, because you have to, is even though I would like the Democrat Party to be showing more signs of deep analysis and an understanding of how themselves got themselves into this mess, I'm seeing enough of it to think that they'll do reasonably well in the midterms. I think to really damage Trump, they've got to do very well. But let's say they do reasonably well. I see hope in that. I see hope in some of the leaders that have stood up against some of this nonsense. Fair play. Keir Starmer, you know, he's done. He gets a lot of criticism for a lot of things and a lot of people, particularly on the Labour side, probably think he's been far too sympathetic to Trump and not call him out enough. But actually I think he's pursued the national interest quite well. And he was one of the few people who actually did straight out call out Vance on this free speech thing. He did in a very polite way. But when Vance was raising the issue of free speech in the Oval Office, when Keir was there, he called it out and they moved on. And so I think leaders are getting a bit more confident about calling this stuff out when they can. So. And I find hope as well, to be absolutely frank, I find hope in the fact that so many people, maybe outside America, but certainly in Europe, so many people kind of thought, well, we've got to give this guy a second chance. And they've actually thought, no, this isn't going to work. And I think that does Damage Vance So my hope is that actually he, he won't become president. He won't become president provided the Democrats get their act together and find a decent leader.
- [35:23]
David Frum
Yeah, I think hope has to be hope in each of us being active, whether it's what you and I do for a living or what citizens do for a living, or what political people do for a living. That's the sense that we can't do it all. We're not superheroes. But equally, we can't just complacently sit back and expect reality to somehow write itself. And what are the areas that we need to focus on? One of them I think we've talked about is social media and AI. And here's some hope. Peter Malinowskis Regulating social media in Australia I think is a huge step in the right direction. I think some of the stuff that the European Union is doing on regulating data, AI, algorithms, trying to develop a more sensible European architecture which really relates to trust, truth, facts and the facts in our world. The area where I think we're weakest is filling the gap that's emerging in international stuff. Conflict, war, this rules based international order. I mean, I think the next real challenge for our citizens and politicians start rebuilding. What we do about this culture of impunity, what we do about a world in which rich countries with technology, Israel, the US appear to be able to just do whatever they want, whenever they want with no consequences. And then the final thing I think is can we have hope about rebuilding this sort of very unfashionable thing, which is institutions, trust in human institutions. What would it mean to really reinvigorate assistance, get away from where we began, which is Trump trying to be, Vance trying to be a personal monarch. This kind of medieval idea of monarchy that my friend Yuval Noah Harari keeps talking about. This kind of idea that we're going back into the Middle Ages. What would it mean to all of us? Get behind institutions? Say actually we believe in civil services, judges, elected politicians, parliaments, prime ministers, parties. What kind of reform would you need to do to make that more credible? How would you make those institutions? And then how would you get people to believe in them so that instead of just putting all our trust in either algorithms or monarchs, we can get a bit of trust back in democracy?
- [37:54]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, I saw an interview that Ursula von der Lyon said, where do you get hope? This gave me a bit of hope. Actually. She did an interview with De Seit, the German newspaper. Just listen to this. Europe is still a peace project. We don't have bros or oligarchs making the rules. We don't invade our neighbors and we don't punish our neighbors. On the Contrary, there are 12 countries on the waiting list to become members of the European Union. That's 150 million people in Europe. Children can go to good schools, however wealthy their parents are. We have lower CO2 emissions, we have higher life expectations, expectancy. Controversial debates are allowed at our universities. This and more are all values that must be defended and which show that Europe is more than a union. Europe is our home. People know that. People feel that now. I wish she'd got up when Zelenskyy was in Munich and said that to his face. Now, I think he's got the message in that since then because a lot of leaders had said that. So I guess that's. Yeah, let's finish on that. Because if we say started really in the political side of him taking on Europe, that's when I think he broke through as a global figure. By the way, that speech. Speech is still really, really matter in politics. If Vance becomes president. People will talk for the rest of time about Vance's Munich security conference speech. It was really consequential, very significant. That was where a bit of a mask slipped. The real Vance sort of came out. He will try to become a different Vance to become presidential candidate, and he'll become a different Vance after that. But I thought, well done, Ursula. Sehr Gutgesprochen, as we say. There we are. I hope our listeners have enjoyed us. We're also going to do a chat with David Frum about Vance because of course he. We've interviewed David and he was. We used some of that interview in the. In the series. But David is somebody who knows JD Vance a lot better than we do, to some extent, used to be his boss.
- [39:45]
David Frum
So.
- [39:45]
Alistair Campbell
So we're going to do. That will be. Our final take in this miniseries will be a chat with David Frum. But I hope you've enjoyed everything so far.
- [39:52]
David Frum
Thank you very much indeed. That was great. I loved your message of European hope. I'm sorry you don't have your bagpipes to play out to Joy. That was a great moment and I wish we had a little bit more of that.
- [40:06]
Alistair Campbell
I've got more of that optimism because. So tell people what that is, Rory. Tell them what it is.
- [40:16]
David Frum
Yeah, that is. That's. Well, it's the chanter. So it's the bagpipes without the bag. And that's him playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which is the European national anthem. I just wish we could hear more of that because there's so much sort of despair and self hating in Europe and a sense that we're falling behind economically and in productivity and we're forgetting that our public education system and our public health system is far better than that of the US and that if you were poor you would much rather be living in Denmark or Sweden than you would be living in Mississippi. So let's not beat ourselves up too much and let's try to get the hope from individual people in Britain and you're rebuilding a world of trust in human institutions.
- [40:57]
Alistair Campbell
Excellent. See you soon. Just before you go, I hope you enjoyed that special Q and A off the back of our miniseries on JD Vance with questions from members of the Rest Is Politics. Plus, if you want to hear the miniseries in full right now you enjoy a free trial@therestisproducties.com you get access to the one we've just done. You'll get access to the next one which is already in the planning. You get monthly bonus episodes completely ad free, listening our members chat room and much, much more. Hope you enjoyed it. All the best.