Do Dems have to sound like Trump to beat him?

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1:00I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons. There we were thinking that Trump was trying to solve the Ukraine war for a Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, he had something more existential on his mind. Those pearly gates, the one bit of real estate he'd really like to get his hands on. But the problem he's got is that as he moves a bit towards Europe and starts saying things like security guarantees and helping the peace, so the MAGA movement hits back and says, no, we want to stay out of the forever wars. How does Donald Trump square this circle?

1:45Heaven and hell. Welcome to the News Agents USA.

1:55It's John. It's Emily. And you always think that the division that Donald Trump has is that on the one side, he's got Putin wanting one thing. And on the other side, you've got Zelensky and Europe wanting something else. You've also got MAGA, the MAGA base, the base of people, the core of support for Donald Trump who voted for him to end the forever wars. And any time that Donald Trump says anything which looks like the merest scintilla of a movement towards American involvement, there is a shuddering reaction from those people saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. This isn't why we put you in the White House.

2:39This is a fight between Slavic peoples that is absolutely bugger all to do with us. Stay the hell out of it. Yeah, I wonder if we have to go back to first principles here. And it's funny sort of being out the office, being out of the whole news cycle, you tend to see things very differently. And it kind of has been striking me that actually for a war to end, you need two leaders who want a war to end, you know. And here we have two leaders who want the war to end. But one of them is Trump because he wants the Nobel Peace Prize or the gates to heaven or because he feels like an idiot for not having done it on day one as he promised.

3:19And the other is Zelensky, who wants Putin to get the fuck out of his country. but I've yet to hear Putin say he wants the war to end. Maybe he does but I don't think that is clear and I think the tangle that we get ourselves into as commentators actually is all this discussion of bilaterals and trilaterals and security guarantees and boots on the ground and air cover is that we are getting so massively ahead of our skis because fundamentally there isn't a ceasefire. There is no volition to end the fighting. So why are we talking about the next stage? And I just feel like we've sort of fallen into a trap here, which is that when you use all the diplomatic language and bilaterals and trilaterals and where is it all going to be, it just, it overwhelms you with the momentum.

4:09And fundamentally, we have heard nothing, nothing from Putin that suggests he wants the war to end. Well, he hasn't moved a single inch so far in his demands. And, you know, he's even talked about if there is a bilateral, I want it to be held in Moscow. Now, Trump has apparently ruled that out. But I mean, you can see Putin wants a surrender. Putin wants, you know, he wants it like to be the Japanese imperial emperor signing the surrender at the end of the Second World War. That is what Putin wants from Zelensky. He doesn't want it to be two equals meeting to hammer out their differences. That is not the way Putin sees it.

4:51So although Donald Trump has said, look, the most important thing is that we get a bilateral meeting and I'm tasking that diplomatic giant, Steve Wyckoff, to deliver it. It's nowhere near happening. The other place that they're suggesting that it happens is Budapest. Now, the glorious, delicious irony if this bilateral were to take place in Budapest, where in 1994, Vladimir Putin, on behalf of the Russian Federation, signed a document guaranteeing Ukraine's safety and security. Fat lot of good. That is bloody well done. If you're Zelensky and you're flying to Budapest, you have every reason to think This is a ghastly trap from which Ukraine does not emerge intact.

5:39Yeah, I mean, you see it as an irony. I see it as a logical next choice for Trump because Orban is the most Russia friendly, Putin friendly of all the EU leaders. and I think this goes back to the point we were just making which is that we are not in an age of Reagan you know or of Clinton the Oslo Accords or of George Mitchell with the Good Friday Agreement or of Blair we're not dealing with chess players we're not even dealing with people who employ other people who play chess for them people who try and anticipate the move that their opponent will make and counter it before it's actually made.

6:23We're dealing with Trump, who greatly admires everything that Putin has done so far. He's a bit like, you know, a dad sniggering at his own son's stagnant stripper antics because he sort of secretly wishes he could do the same thing and get away with it. And so just this idea, you know, that Trump emerged from the meeting on Monday saying there's going to be a bilateral with Zelensky and Putin. Putin never said that. You know, Putin has not agreed to meet with Zelensky. And Putin's people are now saying, well, we're not offering Putin, but it might be, you know, some little surf down the pecking order right in the heart of Moscow, a country that Zelensky is at war with.

7:08Zelensky He's not going to go and do that. And so it strikes me that maybe even the kind of the discomfort of the MAGA base right now is something that is being manufactured, that is quite useful for Trump, because it suggests there is movement and there is a little bit of friction. And there are people who are like, well, I'm trying to solve it, but there are people who are against it. And I understand the difficulties here. The difficulty is that Putin has not agreed to end the war on any terms yet. So why are we even talking about what the next step looks like? Why are we even talking about Trump's troops on the ground or or EU troops on the ground?

7:51Or what was the word he used this week? Coordination. You know, the US is going to be coordinating. Coordinating what exactly? Yeah, I mean, these questions are completely unanswered. I mean, you said that the MAGA base is useful for Donald Trump. It's also bloody useful for Vladimir Putin because they are echoing almost the talking points. And it's very much, I mean, this symmetry of guilt idea that a plague on both their houses, they're all bloody awful, bad as each other. We should stay out of it. Listen, this is Steve Bannon, who we've had on the podcast, who's a very smart political operator.

8:28This is him on his War Room podcast. There's a ton of Ukrainians, as human nature says they should, that want vengeance. And now you're going to put the United States in the middle of this? It's very simple. Tell the chaperones, it's your baby. Tell Zelensky, hey, this is your issue. Deal with it. You guys initiated this. You pushed the Russians, and the Russians punched back. And hey, they're not guiltless. The KGB that runs them are bad hombres. Very bad hombres.

9:05Inexurably, we can't get sucked in here. I mean, look, Bannon has a way with words. And he's echoing something, actually, that Marco Rubio, you know, Secretary of State said on the Sunday shows just this past weekend, where he said, fundamentally, if Trump doesn't manage to stop the war, it's not really going to affect any American's life. It's not really going to affect, you know, much in the way of the price of goods at home or, you know, how people think about the economy going forward. It's not going to have the same effect even as it does on gas prices as it does in Europe. And I mean, it was weird to hear Marco Rubio making that case because he's always been, you know, something of a neocon, something of a hawk, a Russia hater.

9:49And clearly that's not a very sort of popular place to be in the Trump administration. But I think Bannon is right in the sense that there's never been any pretense that the Magalot wanted to get involved in this war in any way. They didn't want to send weapons. They didn't want to send aid. They didn't want to send help. They definitely don't want to send, you know, their young men and women to fight. and so there is a kind of logic to what he's saying to go back to the first point there won't ever ever be an occasion where trump asks young men and women to stand on the border of ukraine and fight russia not least because he quite likes putin tell you what there was one thing that i've been reflecting on about the meeting that took place with the european leaders on monday and you saw ursula von der Leyen there you know from the eu commission yeah absolutely you can see totally why she was there and macron and mers and starmer yeah that all made sense as well the nato secretary general absolutely and then there was alexander stubb the president of finland i think he has a crucial role because if we imagine that donald trump has steve bannon and marjorie taylor Green and all the rest of them in one ear, giving him pure MAGA.

11:07Stubb speaks fluent Trumpism and he's able to get through to Donald Trump. Why? Because he's a scratch golfer and that impresses Donald Trump. He went to college in America. He also has this kind of, you know, urbane charm about him. And he is the one who can say to Donald Trump, we, my country, has a 700 mile long border with Russia. They're bad people. You can't trust the word that Putin says. And if you're looking for a countervailing force and Donald Trump does listen to, you know, that old idea that he bears the impression of the last person that sat on him, actually Stubb is someone who can make a bit of a difference.

11:49And I think he's going to be the one to watch playing a pretty crucial role. You know, if Putin is kind of trying to get back in Trump's ear about this is the way forward and this is the only way forward. Yeah, I mean, I think that's generous. I know Alexander Stubb quite well. I've interviewed him a lot of times and he's very sound and he's very candid and he shoots from the hip. But I think you might be overplaying the importance of his strategic role and underplaying the brilliance of his golfing, which is what Trump most likes about him. I mean, as you said, I think Stubb managed to get himself in the room precisely because of that border.

12:29But I don't see where it takes you. I mean, I'm still returning. Sorry to sort of sound like a crack record, but we are not at a place of normal diplomacy. You cannot say that loudly enough. This is not normal diplomacy. We are not trying to get round a system. It's not even like Israel and Hamas, where what is going on is terrible for both sides, and they both kind of want to see, you know, an end to what is going on there. It is not terrible enough for Putin to give anything away at the moment. He doesn't see the need to acquiesce to anything that Trump asks, unless there is another US deal that he's after somewhere along the lines.

13:14And I think we're kind of missing that piece of the jigsaw because, you know, this stuff about troops and borders and, you know, is there another side to Article 5 and what happens to Ukraine and NATO? So like we know that there has been no adherence to any treaty signed that relinquished arms control during the Soviet period. And since Putin's been in power, he's signed three or four away and torn them up in the next breath. As you said, you know, whether it's in Hungary, whether it's the Minsk agreement. And so we're not even talking about an agreement that's been signed that we wonder will stick.

13:50Nothing's been signed. Nothing's on the table. I mean, maybe I'm just incredibly cynical and maybe I can't see around corners. You know, that's entirely possible that I haven't got a periscope brain that takes me around the corner. But I just haven't heard anything from Putin that says, yeah, I'm I'm ready to, you know, to give up this. Look, I share similar reservations to you, which I've been expressing a week. And, you know, I think some of the coverage about, oh, my God, the enormous progress that's been made. And, you know, this is so positive, this meeting. it's blah it's blah blah blah blah blah nothing has changed russia is still prosecuting its war against ukraine he has not agreed to a bilateral or a trilateral there is no mechanisms yet in place maybe they will come maybe vladimir putin is going to change but so far we've seen it's like an army that gets to the river and says right once we get across the river we're going to advance by 30 miles into and take this city you've got to get across the bloody river first and you've got no bridge.

14:50But I guess that, you know, the straws that you clutch at are that maybe Trump will decide suddenly that Putin is not serious and slap serious sanctions on. Maybe he will get heavy. You know what? The funny thing is, we sort of we grew up in an age where the neocon was roundly ridiculed, right? You know, the neocon who brought us the war in Iraq, the neocon who, you know, diverted attention from the Taliban in Afghanistan and started a whole new war. The neocon who always thought the solution was boots on the ground. And I'm not advocating a neocon position at all. But I think the one thing they got right was real skepticism when you're dealing with an enemy.

15:33You know, if somebody is a dictator at home, they're not going to be a darling abroad. If somebody has torn up their past treaties, then they're not suddenly going to acquiesce whatever you want now. And actually, the only thing that works on that sort of dictator is fear, is a sense that they're going to lose something. Putin doesn't, he has not been given anything to fear. He's been given absolutely no challenge, nothing to fear. Trump is literally trying to cut round the edges of the right sort of Ukraine map to make him happy. It's like fuzzy felt. Yeah, I think the stairway to heaven is littered with obstacles for Donald Trump, even if he was on it in the first place.

16:14We'll be back in a moment with the Democrats and what Gavin Newsom is doing to take the fight to Donald Trump. And Democrats are sitting up and taking notice.

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17:35The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. There's literally no more evidence than you need than the evidence that has been submitted in the first six and a half, seven months of the Trump administration. And you think this is going to get better? You think if we just say, well, Ms. Trump, it's fine. You know, we just, you know, we know it's a race to the bottom. You know, you may call upon those other states. Can you just do five and California will stand down? God damn it. Enough. Democrats, stop being weak. Step up. These guys have been dominating the narrative. They have been defining the terms of the debate.

18:12It's time to get on our damn off our heels, onto our front toes. It's time to do just that. Dominate the narrative, flood the zone and surround sound. It's time for us to band together. That is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, trying to take a leaf out of Donald Trump's playbook. And it absolutely plays into a question we've had here from one of our listeners. And let me read it to you. It's Ellis here. Huge fan of the podcast. I was wondering your thoughts on the new strategy that the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, appears to be taking on social media with regards to handling Trump.

18:47Do you think it's helpful and or the only way the left can take a fight to Trump in America? Or do you think Newsom is doing this just to advance his own political ambitions and line himself up as a presidential candidate? Be interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you, Ellis. Love that, Ellis. And I think two things can both be true. I think Gavin Newsom is taking on the role of bulldog in chief for the Democrats right now. He's found his canines and he's not scared of attack. And what's interesting is even if you go back two or three years, Gavin Newsom was already trying to do it. When Trump, the Supreme Court started undermining abortion rights in America, the sort of overturning of Roe v.

19:37Wade, it was Gavin Newsom who stood up at the time and he said, where the hell is my party? You know, where the hell is my party? Why aren't we standing up more firmly, more resolutely? Why aren't we calling this out? And he was sort of hailed at the time as being the voice that was prepared to kind of stand up and say, you know, this is appalling and we've got to be shouting about it. But now he's taken a very different approach, which is block caps, imitation of Trump's language. It's a kind of trolling device that he thinks is going to get him noticed. and it has been so effective actually that one of the Fox and Friends anchors, Donna Perino, who used to work for George Bush, actually called him out and said, well, we'll let you hear the clip.

20:24But essentially, if I was Gavin Newsom's wife, I'd take away his Twitter. You know, stop it, you're looking like a fool. Clearly, it's agitating some on the right who think that he is sort of getting a little bit too giddy with his social media messaging. For the last week, Gavin Newsom, and why am I giving him advice? You have to stop it with the Twitter thing. I don't know where his wife is. If I were his wife, I would say, you are making a fool of yourself. Stop it. Do not let your staff tweet. And if you're doing it yourself, put the phone away and start over. He's got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.

21:05There is a technical aspect to this as well, which I think is really clever. It's not just that he is borrowing the language of Trump or putting out the same memes as Donald Trump in just as provocative a fashion. He's he's gaming the algorithm. He's calculating that if he provokes rage and fury from Republicans, which he is achieving in doing, then that pushes him up the algorithm. It gets more promotion. It gets more attention. And so by not being the usual kind of, well, I've got to respectfully disagree with Donald Trump on this, by going in for rage, by going in for provocation, by going in for a hit under the belt, Gavin Newsom is making his stuff get amplified even more.

21:54And so there is a lesson there. That's a technical lesson as well. Not just about the way you do it, but the way it can then get further coverage. Okay, so that's the technological kind of smart on that one. There's a political smart as well, which is one theory that's being espoused by Ron Brownstein as a political commentator and writer. And he thinks that what Newsom is doing is not just attacking, but he's also trying to show his own party that you do not have to be of the left to fight Trump. There will be lots of people going into the midterms and eventually to 2028 saying the centrists have had their day.

22:39You know, get out of the way. We don't want the Bidens. We don't want the Kamala Harris's. Bernie Sanders wasn't given enough of a chance against Hillary Clinton in 2016. You've seen Bernie on the road. You've seen Ocasio-Cortez on the road with him. Now it's the chance of the left. And I think part of what Newsom is doing. And if you look, he sort of modified his positions. He's sort of shape shifted a bit. on a lot of the cultural issues, whether it's kind of trans rights in sports or whether it's even, you know, which of the kind of ice detentions you call out. In other words, if you're rounding up criminals and sending them over the border, don't protest too loudly.

23:17And Ron Brownstein has called this very effective confrontational centrism. In other words, you do it from the centre, You attack from the center. You show that you've got the teeth from the center. And I guess my only kind of criticism or my concern about that is that when you are doing the block caps and the trolling and using the kind of language that Trump is using himself, I don't think it's yet clear whether Newsom is parodying him, trolling him or copying him. And I do think that's going to be a problem because, you know, either you're saying it's very effective, it works, I want to do that too.

24:02Or else you're saying that man sounds like an orange idiot and I'm going to take him down. And I think Newsom's kind of got a foot in each camp at the moment. He doesn't quite know. Is that the battle, though? Isn't it the attention economy? How much attention can I get from people? And, you know, advertisers are trying to figure out how they can sell their products in the best way and get people's attention. and whether that's through, is it through TV anymore? No, that's done. Is it through kind of news bullet? No, that's done. Oh, I know we can do it on X and stuff like that. And I think that's where Gavin Newsom is going, that, you know, if you want attention and that's what politicians want, you've got to be heard.

24:41And the way to be heard is to be smart on TikTok or to be smart on Insta or to be smart on X, as he is being right now. And I think that that is the name of the game. I think you're absolutely right. I think maybe the Democratic Party, you know, we don't look at the fissures as between left and right, but those who communicate in the old way and will only reach a very narrow proportion of the population. And those who are prepared to engage. And we're seeing it in British politics as well, to some extent, where people like Robert Jenrick in the Conservative Party are being very, very effective on social media.

25:14Farage as well. And others who are being left behind by that. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Newsom did recently was an interview, I think it was like a four hour interview with, you know, a sort of alt-right podcaster. And I mean, I'm not sure I could do an interview for like four minutes. But, you know, he sits there chewing the cud for four hours, a la Joe Rogan, a la Theo Vaughan. You know, these are the people that sort of allow the character of a politician to come out in a way that the sort of six minutes pre-weather interview no longer does. And he's definitely leaning into that.

25:53But I suppose you're right. Of course, it's about attention. But I was revisiting, I was writing a piece recently about the 2016 election campaign and how it took shape. and all those who were on the stage with Trump during those first presidential debates. And you'll remember this, but Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State, tried to copy the language of Trump. And he started talking about Trump's little hands. And then he made this inference, which clearly was a bit kind of, you know, seaside smutty. And the next day, you know, if he's got little hands, what about the rest of him's little? and the next day Trump went on the stage and just went there is no problem there is no problem in that department and actually points to his own penis right and the person who gets told off for lowering the tone is not Trump it's Marco Rubio and so I think you know back to the Newsom thing yes I mean at the moment the Democrats are sort of you know lying in the road like they've all been run over.

26:58So anyone doing anything that sort of makes them feel like they've got a pulse, I think is sort of quite heartwarming. But does Newsom end up just being the guy who's trying to emulate Trump? I mean, in terms of communicators, I think Pete Buttigieg is far and away the most effective communicator they have. He goes on Fox News. He keeps the language really simple, really straight. He absolutely fires from both cylinders, but he doesn't have to do it in a kind of sort of Trump-like way. You know, it feels a bit sort of shiny leopard skin, I think, when Newsom does it. And I sort of wonder if there isn't, you know, there must be an alternative way to the future politics rather than everyone having to sound like Trump.

27:42Look, everything in American politics takes time. And, you know, we are already in the build-up for who will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028. And at the moment, if you were to look around and say well who are the obvious people it is bloody hard to see well Kamala Harris is still in the lead right yeah and she's the person who's just ruled out going for California governor and so you're kind of left with the thought that actually what Gavin Newsom is doing is he is becoming the national figure of the Democrats by what he's doing now some are probably hating the stunts the the mimicry the kind of you know is it Trump like what he's doing but he is the one person who is out there upsetting the republicans and i'm sure an awful lot of democrats are so thrilled to see that given how supine they seem to have been since donald trump moved back into the white house for his second turn and the the only one seeming to do you know there are others there you know there's the aocs and the bernie sanders and and look you know credit to aoc i I mean, she has been, their tour around America has been gathering huge audiences.