170: Mad King Donald

0:00Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Ian Hislop and Richard Brooks. So we have just had an American import to the UK in the form of Saturday Night Live UK. It's a big American show that's come here after kind of 50 years. But we have just announced a really successful new export to America, which is the idea of having a mad king. America's taken that on and they've been running with it. And Helen, I believe you've been following just how well it's been going. Yeah, I mean, so much, so much winning.

0:37So obviously Donald Trump, I mean, I'm hesitant to say anything about the Iran war because it's existing in this sort of quantum superposition of whatever Donald Trump says is currently happening with it. He currently says he's negotiating with the Iranians. The Iranians say, we don't know what you're talking about. He did announce that just after the markets had opened, after a pretty grisly couple of days. So who knows where we'll be by the time this goes out. But essentially, what we now know after four weeks of war is that they didn't have any contingency planning about what would happen if the Strait of Hormuz got closed.

1:09They assumed, per report in the New York Times, that based on Israeli intelligence, it looked like, that Iranian protesters would rise up and overthrow the regime, which has so far not happened. And that they wouldn't at any point have to put boots on the ground. Boots are now kind of sailing over from... Boots are hovering over the ground, I would say, at the moment. So, you know, and that is an incredibly symbolic thing for America to do. But the main thing about it is the fact that it has really revealed there is no one in this White House who can say no to Donald Trump. And why is that? Because they were all hand-selected to be people who wouldn't say no to Donald Trump.

1:44That's a reasonable answer. Well, but in one way, look at it. One of the qualifications to work in that White House is you have to believe that Donald Trump was grievously robbed of the 2020 election, right? You have to be a kind of reality denier in favour of the cult of, you know, El Presidente. So by saying that, you have to say, you know, you've accepted this one thing. Your loyalty to Trump matters more than the facts. You can kind of see everything else flows from that. But fact is quite important in the run up to a war. I mean, the failures of intelligence you've described could be applied to Iraq or some of the other adventures or picnics or whatever.

2:21What is the definition for the war at the moment? I believe it's a Shara Bank tour. A Shara Bank tour. But again, none of this was unforeseeable. Why did no one mention any of it? Did he even know about things like, you know, oil going through the Strait of Hormuz? You know, did he think about that? He's making these decisions, isn't he, without talking about anybody. Does it occur to him that, hang on, there's going to be a consequence like that? We don't. They do seem to have been completely caught on the hop by that. I think the way that their intelligence was running was essentially we'll go in, you know, take out the Ayatollah and the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards.

2:56We'll be back home and sort of tea and medals. And that is obviously not what has happened. The regime has basically said, well, hang on a minute. What's the point of negotiating? Right. That's the fascinating thing is that Donald Trump has been hopping from foot to foot for days now, obviously desperate to negotiate an end to the war that he can claim as another great Donald Trump victory. and the Iranians are the ones who really don't see what's in that for them. What we have at the moment, as you said, Donald Trump has just declared that he's spoken to Iran and he now graciously won't bomb energy infrastructure for five days, whereas previously it was a 48-hour deadline and the Iranians have said, well, we haven't had that chat, so we don't know who you were talking to.

3:37I mean, things are probably quite chaotic at the top of the regime at the moment, obviously. Well, everyone's got Donald Trump's phone number, So it's quite possible that someone with an Iranian accent has phoned him up claiming to be the Iranian foreign minister. And they've had a very good chat. But the last time Donald Trump said things were going well in negotiations, I had a little check. It was the 6th of February, if you can remember all the way back then. He said the talks they were having had been very good and it looks like they want to make a deal very badly. That was about three weeks before he unleashed Armageddon.

4:06So maybe his word on how the talks are going is not gospel. I have this vision of Donald Trump inventing a talk at one end and the other end there's a an ayatollah who may or may not be alive we don't know there's a series of men who you see grainy footage of in bunkers who may or may not be talking to each other or to anyone else who's actually in charge of a missile I'm not quite sure how these talks are happening. They're clearly not. That's the problem. There's been so much chat wasted on Donald Trump's reasons for doing things as though there are reasons. But you're right. I mean, it's a crisis for international diplomacy if you end up with a leader that nobody believes a word that they say and they go back on themselves all the time.

4:48That's the thing. Even if America was sending out very strong signals of being utterly bonkers consistently, that would be something that people could work with. But the problem is that everybody and, you know, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in this because all of their fiscal plans for the entire year are resting on what Mad King Donald rampaging down the ha ha in his white nightshirt flapping behind him decides to do next. Although it does give them a bit of a let out, doesn't it? Because, you know, global turmoil is a bit like Covid and so on. If I were Rachel Reeves, I'd be thinking, phew, you know, at least I'm not going to be held to those plans.

5:24The thing you said about the purity test of saying that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that's the sort of threshing machine which you have to pass your brain through in order to be accepted into Donald Trump's inner circle. It's weirdly reminiscent of what happened to the Conservative Party after Brexit, where you had the Boris Johnson cabinet, which was only loyalists. You know, all of the anyone who disagreed was cleared out. You know, the kind of left of the Tory party and the centrists and the people who thought Brexit looks like it might be not a brilliant idea. They were all cleared out.

5:57I think even before then. So for a long time, if you wanted to get selected as a Tory MP during the 2010s or the late 2000s, the question that came up in selection meetings was what you think about leaving the European Union. And, you know, it was a very popular thing to say. So you had a lot of people who had never really looked into it or didn't think it was a great idea. but also thought it was never going to happen, just going along with it. And I think that is exactly the problem we're seeing repeated, is that people who just think, well, it doesn't matter if I just make this one compromise, actually know sometimes that bill does come due.

6:29And how does it happen that the head of counter-terrorism, who, from what I'd read, I assumed was pretty much full-on Trump loon, has declared that Trump's a loon? What on earth are we doing here? Why is this man suddenly the new bellwether? Well, a new type of loon is rising in the east, no, hang on a minute, in the west, actually, which is he is, Joe Kent we're talking about, resigned. And he made a fair point in the resignation letter, which was a bit about this kind of idea that the US has embarked on a joint war here with Israel. And actually, this might be suiting the Israelis rather more than the Americans.

7:06But he then brought in this other stuff about how his wife was killed in Syria by suicide bombing, about how that was another Israel-led foreign war. And that shades into lots of things he said in the past that shade into the idea that actually maybe the Jewish state and then maybe by extension Jews are maybe controlling America's foreign policy in the kind of way that if you saw somebody saying it online, your eyes would go up and go, is this going to just stay as strictly a critique of foreign policy or is this going to go... Is it going to end up where I think it is? In a little bit puppet master hands in the cartoon.

7:38Right. And I think that is an emerging strain of MAGA. So there are people who are both anti-Israel for very principled reasons, in the sense that they think it is a foreign war adventurism and that America's foreign policy should be dictated by America's interests first and that those don't lie in wars in the Middle East. But there are also some flat-out white supremacists who have glommed on to MAGA, who are anti-Jewish Holocaust deniers, people like Nick Fuentes, who I've mentioned before, But this has caused this going into a war with Israel has caused a split in the what you might call the kind of MAGA elite.

8:17So I looked at the polling and actually voters who self-identify as MAGA, 90 percent of them backed strikes on Iran at the start of the war. That may have softened up since then. Only 70 percent, only 77 percent of those who define as Republican back it. Right. So being MAGA is being, you know, Donald Trump right or wrong to some extent. but within the elite people like tucker carlson megan kelly have started to and the kind of podcast comedian class so theo von joe rogan you can't lose the podcast comedians they're a core demographic right but they are a core demographic right because they all swung behind trump in 2024 right but they have been to their credit joe rogan is not a big fan of foreign wars in the way that donald trump once wasn't right and so they being a little bit more of a distance removed, have been quite critical.

9:08I'm going to just read you about something, just to give you a sense of the level of debate that is currently happening. So Mark Levin, very pro-Israel, talk radio host, versus Megyn Kelly, ex-Fox News, you'll remember her. Is anyone involved not in broadcast? No. That's the wit and right, OK. Everyone is 12, and everyone is a chat show host. Those are the only things you need to know to understand. That explains so much about the war. Everything about American politics. OK, so Megyn Kelly, first of all, attacks Mark Levin, calling him micropenis Mark Levin. and saying that's why he's in favour of this war.

9:37He then says, busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly. She wakes up and has micropenis on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot and posts like a harlot, it's, well, you know the rest, shalom. At which point, Donald Trump thinks, here's a beef I should get involved with, and posts on True Social defending Levin as a truly great American patriot who is far smarter than those who criticise him. The rest of the United States has got nothing better to do. to sway in on the great micropenis controversy of 2026. But this is what's happening, is you've basically got a load of, yeah, like cable news hosts.

10:11I mean, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is a former Fox News host. This is basically a load of preening prima donnas who have somehow accidentally been put in charge of the world's only superpower, and it's in Norbus Arsenal. And, of course, they're all fighting with each other. So the base is still very much with Trump, But he has lost significant portions of the kind of MAGA elite over this. Can I ask what happened to the army? Are there any generals left? Is there anyone left in command in America who says, I'm not sure about this? Someone's launching these messars, aren't they? Yeah. Well, I mean, Pete Hegseth has been pretty explicit about clearing people out.

10:53You know, he went and summoned them all, if you remember, of that lecture about how they weren't allowed to have beards. and he's been very clear that he wants a stereotypically masculine military and he wants one that is not going to gainsay anything that they're ordered to do. So you're right, the big figures of Trump, one, like General Mark Kelly, like H.R. McMaster, gone. He wasn't going to make the mistake of appointing anybody like that again. And the two things they used to do was, one, they used to tell him to his face things were a bad idea, and two, I think they used to quietly hide his briefing papers and hope he'd forget about it.

11:28Also, it turned out a great tactic. But now he's got Marco Rubio, who he used to attack all the time as little Marco and just, you know, once said, you know, if you locked him in a room, you know, he could slide under the door, right? He would just change all his principles. J.D. Vance, who's been stuffed in a cupboard and knows that his only lane for 2028 is, you know, continuity Trump, so he can't break from him. Susie Wiles, as a chief of staff, was picked because she was just there to enable whatever he wants to do. And who in the whole of the Republican Party is a counterweight to him? You know, like Mitt Romney's out of the Senate.

12:04You know, there are a couple of senators like Thomas Tillis, who's on his way out, who will vote against his nominee, stand up to him, make criticisms. But none of this matters. The great vaunted American system of checks and balances, it doesn't seem to work at all, does it? No. Congress, you know, at the moment, if you look online, you will see that there are two or three hour long queues at security at American airports. And that's just because of essentially a partial government shutdown in funding. They have this mad idea that you can fund agencies and you keep voting. Congress needs to re-approve funding.

12:37And what's happened with that is that the Republicans have attached a load of ICE funding, immigration enforcement funding to it, which the Democrats don't want to vote through. So while they continue to have this stalemate, people have now got to get to the airport 15 hours early and stand in the car park. There was this line, I think it was PJ O 'Rourke, who used to have about, you know, Republicans say that government doesn't work and then they set out to prove it. And there is a lot of that in American politics, right? It's just that we just, you know, don't really care that much about government working.

13:04So is it just that it takes so long for these checks and balances, for the courts to act and, you know, so it's just not effective? Because that was always the line, wasn't it? Oh, don't worry too much about Trump because the checks and balances will kick in. He's a lot better this time though. So without getting too conspiratorial, No, I mean, getting what he wants or the people who work for him. So in Stephen Miller, who's effectively his prime minister, you know, he has got a doctrinaire anti-immigration ideologue who is crucially quite well liked by his staff and really good at bureaucracy.

13:38Right. He is not a although his wife is a podcaster, inevitably, because that's the law. Someone in his family has got a podcast and it's going to have to be you. So, you know, he's got these kind of dry bureaucrats essentially in place now. And thanks to things like Project 2025, which was the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump government, he's got a kind of tick list of stuff that he can do, often using executive orders. You saw the big barrage of them at the start. Lots of those, when they eventually end up at the Supreme Court, will get overturned. But it takes months and the Supreme Court gets to pick its docket to some extent.

14:13So it can pick and choose what it wants to look at. I mean, the midterms are coming up and that really might be when it changes everything. And also at that point, lots of Republicans start thinking about their positioning for 2028. Do they want to be left holding this probably by that point unpopular failed war? And that might encourage a few of them to grow a tiny whisper of a vertebrae. I'm interested you say that there's no one pointing these things out until the head of counterterrorism says, do you think Israel is leading this war? I mean, last week on our letters page, one of our readers, you know, and this is a full two weeks ahead, said, I think we should call this the Israel-US Iran war.

14:54And I thought, well, that's quite good. That's from one of our readers. Is there no one of that level of competence operating in the White House? I mean, as I say, most of the people I think are really competent are on the domestic side of policy. And, you know, the other thing is, I mentioned this before in my column, that you've got Jared Kushner, for example, one of the envoys, and Steve Witkoff. They're also supposed to be doing Ukraine. You know, you've got a situation now in which the U.S. is also blockading Cuba, right? Cuba's had power cuts intermittently. And they're all kind of going, well, there was a report in Atlantic, my other organization, saying that they're casting around for a Republican donor with family links to Cuba who might fancy going over and having a crack at being in charge of Cuba.

15:39To being the governor. I mean, there's a big Republican Florida community of expats who'd love to have a crack at being head of Cuba. They give you your own cigar. Absolutely. Your life expectancy is six to eight months. It sounds like reform taking over councils here, doesn't it? It's warmer, a lot warmer. So Trump's cut off the oil to Cuba and opened it again so Iran can sell. Yes, I wanted to bring this up. Richard, can you explain this? So, yes, this is exactly what I wanted to ask. So, so far, as far as I can tell, there are three beneficiaries of the war. One is big American oil exporters and producers.

16:12The price has gone up enormously. One is Russia. They'll get a lot more. They've just had their sanctions lifted. And the third is Iran. The USA seems to have allied with Iran to lift its sanctions to ensure that the prices don't go completely out of control. What's going on there? You know, like we were talking about earlier, is just not understanding the consequences of your actions. You know, this is going to hit the oil price, that's going to hit inflation. Oh, we didn't really think about that. You know, you go to war in the Middle East and don't think about the effect on the oil price until a bit later.

16:48So, yeah, I mean, it must be the most, perhaps the only example of one power funding its enemy during a war. It reminded me a bit of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Europe is still using a chunk of... They've tried to diversify a lot away from Russian gas and oil and I think they'll have completed the job next year. Well, I think they just haven't understood that the markets are all interconnected. It's not, you know, we don't get our oil from friendly countries and domestically and Iran just sends it to China and whoever, that it all goes on the same market and therefore you get this terrible effect on prices.

17:27They're not really understood that and not understood the way that we actually help break any kind of ring fence that you might want to set up by using places like Dubai, where Iran can route oil pretty much to wherever it wants through centres like that. Well, he doesn't understand tariffs. So it's possible he just also willfully misunderstands international markets. Yeah, and there's a similar sort of, you know, this negotiating tactic with tariffs, where we're going to, you know, if you don't come to the table, we're putting a massive tariff on you. And then the time comes and he sort of, oh, no, we'll give you another couple of months.

18:06you know this is the guy who's supposedly uh you know the great negotiator but what you've learned is that actually you can't believe any any threat he says doesn't really stand up the trouble is that if he did go through with those threats they're so catastrophic but it seems like a lot of these red lines have already been crossed i mean they were in the middle of a negotiation when the war was launched so why would iran come to the table to negotiate and enter the war given that yeah Trump has shown that his word is not to be relied on. I don't think theirs is either. No, no. I'm not entirely sure that the assembled Revolutionary Guard would be that worried about sticking to their negotiating positions either.

18:48I'm sure that isn't what you meant. But, I mean, the problem seems to be that we're in a phony war where if we are at war with Iran, why are we encouraging them to sell their oil freely and make more money and rearm themselves? why are we encouraging our so-called allies, and Richard's written about this, to carry on selling Iranian oil, but just doing it slightly under the radar. None of this makes a great deal of sense if we were genuinely at war. Right. But we have allowed them to become so embedded. That's the issue. Yes, it would be great if you could say, Iran, you're not selling any oil, and they suffer the consequences.

19:28But, you know, it's in the system. We've created that system. Is it international capitalism, Richard? Yeah, it's the scourge. Just checking. OK. I mean, this is, if anything, a resounding sort of cheer for international capitalism, because that's the only thing that has any restraining value on Donald Trump. right he obviously made the announcement that he did because he's very worried about inflation and the economy and particularly american gas prices which are like a kind of holy value i know they've gone from american petrol prices have gone from insanely cheap to criminally cheap and the american people will not put up with those extraordinary prices they're having to honestly as a brit looking at those petrol prices you think come on i know i quite regularly fill up like a big suv sorry close your ears you don't want to hear this when i'm driving and I consistently because my you've only charged me for the chocolate bar right because my car doesn't work like you have to have the special mag strap car and whatever in America I often have to go in and pre-pay for the pump and I always I go well that's I'm essentially driving a tank it's probably going to cost what like$50 to fill that up and then every time I've massively overestimated did you talking about Saturday Night Live did you see that Donald Trump reposted the Saturday Night Live sketch taking the piss out of Keir Starmer for being afraid of him the unkindest cut of all I know but that is It also kind of reflects the other thing that we've been talking about, about Trump's belief that his allies are really not stepped up for him.

20:54And he's sort of like, why have you not guys not opened the Strait of Hormuz, you bunch of ingrates? But petrol prices will go up, as you say. And Americans do drive twice as far with much less efficient cars. So it will affect people there, won't it? Or certain people will feel it in their pockets. Oh, I mean, it's just an unfathomably vast country. So even just like the logistics of getting food and things around the country have a huge knock on effect. even if people weren't also driving pickup trucks where the wheels are like that high. But America is more insulated than lots of other places, is another element of this whole thing.

21:26Is this because of their shale gas, their fracking? Well, since the 1973 oil crisis, the oil shock, America was a big net importer at the time and now they're a big net exporter. That will affect their attitude to it. All the Asian countries are having a drive-out. I mean, they've already gone to four day weeks in various places because they're trying to preserve the stocks they've got. They've set limits on what you can set the air conditioning to because the electricity is gas based. So there are plenty of countries that are in a mad scramble at the moment to try and deal with this and not knowing when full supplies will be resumed.

22:01And there is a feeling that, and old Sparky was writing it for us, is that it's a big crisis, but it's particularly a crisis if you're a poor country, because the remaining stocks will be, you'll be outbid. Sorry, the rich countries will buy the liquefied gas. They'll buy whatever there is. And if you're Bangladesh, it's going to be a bit grim. We have a war in which the richest Western country, America, is saying, well, we can keep this war going. Yeah. What about the rest of the world? So we spoke last time on the show about what happened in Pakistan after Russia invaded Ukraine in relation to their energy system.

22:35Pakistan since then had a bit of a solar revolution where they've imported huge numbers, like gigawatts and gigawatts of solar, that has changed Pakistan's economy to a greater extent than Bangladesh's, where Bangladesh is still very reliant. Can I float a new conspiracy theory there? Yeah. Which is that Trump has actually been controlled by Greta Thunberg. Because this war is just a giant advert for, like, defossilising your economy. I like that theory. He's actually, all this time, he's been a mole. He's been an incredibly deep cover. You know, just putting the, you know, reformy alternative, perhaps it's for having, you know, emergency supplies of your own.

23:13Maybe we should drill the North Sea. I'm just going to float the idea. But it is about energy security. I mean, it does show, you know, the importance of security. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny because every time these crises happen and they do keep happening, the alternatives are looking better economically. You know, things like battery storage, which is probably down by about half since 2022. I mean, the costs of the alternatives keep on changing. China is the fourth beneficiary of this war, really, because I think a lot of countries will be looking at their plans for big expansions of natural gas and thinking, hmm, maybe we could just do a bit of solar and storage.

23:51Quite sunny here. Storage is quite cheap now. But we'll drill the North Sea and we'll be all right. That's the default opposition position at the moment, isn't it? Yeah. Why don't we just drill the North Sea? and it's kept happening since we, I thought we put this since your podcast when you explained how that wouldn't work put this to bed two weeks ago no, you keep putting it to bed and it keeps on getting up again it's almost as though Kemi Badenot wasn't listening to you Andy I can't believe that I've spoken this morning to more people involved I thought you were going to say Kemi Badenot she's not picking up it is an interesting one because lots of people are putting the case that we need everything all at once we need to do everything to ensure stability and security but a lot of the sides of the debate will say well we need to do everything except the thing i've chosen we shouldn't do so if you're chemi badenock or richard tice or nigel farage you say well we need to do everything but let's not do the renewables which is basically an argument for doing the north sea you know and again there's a case for doing it if you want to maybe nationalize the industry that would be that would be an option what about a lovely nuclear power plant Yeah, 10 years from now, terrific.

24:57Yeah, absolutely. What do you mean, 10? Sorry, 20. How many miles? It's so interesting because governments keep on having these shocks. We had this shock in 2022. Rishi Sunak, one of his next moves was to say, well, let's roll back the electric car mandate. Let's go slower. Let's keep our reliance on this stuff for longer. The government's initial package has been pretty decent. What they've said is very short term. if you're struggling with heating oil, but lots of houses use heating oil still, we're going to support you, but in a targeted way, because they're not yet countenancing the idea of supporting everyone's bills again.