In short
Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 119: Tommy Vietor: How Democrats Can Fight Trump
Podcast Description In this episode, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart engage with Tommy Vietor, a prominent figure in Democratic politics and co-founder of the "Pod Save America" podcast. The discussion covers the evolution of Barack Obama’s political career, the implications of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign mistakes, and the current state of American politics under Donald Trump.
Key Topics and Discussions
Early Political Career of Tommy Vietor
- Background: Vietor’s introduction to politics began during Barack Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, where he served as a spokesperson.
- Campaign Dynamics: He discusses the early challenges of the Iowa caucuses and how Obama managed to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.
Obama’s Leadership and Political Philosophy
- Strengths:
- Ability to disagree without being disagreeable.
- Consistent internal compass and core beliefs.
- Weaknesses:
- The decision to escalate military involvement in Afghanistan was viewed as a significant mistake.
- Lack of effective strategy in dealing with foreign policy crises, particularly concerning Syria and Russia.
Reflections on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign
- Campaign Strategy: Vietor critiques Clinton's traditional campaign approach, highlighting missed opportunities in crucial battleground states like Wisconsin.
- Disruption by Trump: Trump’s unorthodox style contrasted sharply with Clinton's strategies, appealing to a voter base seeking change from the status quo.
Current Political Landscape
- Trump’s Influence: Vietor explains how Trump’s unique communication style and relentless presence in media dominate the political narrative, leading to a 'flood the zone' strategy.
- Democratic Challenges: The Democratic Party faces a gerontocracy issue, with a need for younger and more relatable leaders to connect with voters.
Strategies for Democrats
- Engaging with Voters: Vietor stresses the importance of reaching out to uninformed voters who rely on social media for news.
- Avoiding Emulation of Trump: He warns against adopting Trump’s tactics of division and false narratives, advocating for a return to high-minded politics.
Lessons for Global Leaders
- Strength and Respect: Vietor advises world leaders to stand firm against Trump, understanding that he respects strength and decisiveness.
- Navigating Corruption: He outlines the dangers of Trump’s corruption and its implications, urging leaders to recognize and respond to the challenges posed by his presidency.
Key Takeaways
- Impact of Media: The evolution of media dynamics, particularly the rise of right-wing media outlets, has significantly affected public perception and narrative control.
- The Importance of Messaging: Effective communication and engagement with the electorate are crucial for the Democratic Party to regain ground.
- Historical Context: Understanding past mistakes, like those during the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign, is essential for current and future Democratic strategies.
Conclusion Tommy Vietor provides an insightful analysis of the current political climate, emphasizing the need for Democrats to adapt their strategies in response to the unique challenges posed by Trump and the evolving media landscape. The discussion highlights the importance of maintaining integrity, engaging with voters effectively, and addressing systemic corruption within the political system.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Thanks 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 chatroom and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com.
0:20Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell, and really delighted to be with Tommy Vita, who looks 18, but he's in his mid-40s, and goes all the way back to the start of the rise of one of the most remarkable political phenomena of recent times, which is Barack Obama. A trailblazer, Rory, in our world of podcasts. Tommy was one of the founders of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World. Still really deeply involved in American politics, American Democrat politics in particular. So lots and lots to unpick. Couldn't be a better time to talk to you, Tommy, because I know how you're feeling, and we're feeling a British version of what you're feeling about just the stuff that's going on in your country right now.
1:08And we'll get on to that. But first of all, just give us a brief kind of, you know, early years of Tommy Vita and how Tommy Vita became one of the youngest kind of campaign spokesmen and then one of the youngest operatives in the White House under Obama. Well, first of all, thank you very, very much for having me. I'm a longtime listener, first time participant. And I know it's a special day for us because Trump just announced his plan to annex the Falkland Islands. And I think, you know, hopefully that won't drive us apart. That's a joke, but it could be real. Kind of run that one back. We like conflicts from the 70s and 80s.
1:38Listen, luck and timing is it was everything for me. I fell backwards into a job on Barack Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, worked for him in the U.S. Senate as a young spokesperson and then got shipped out to Iowa for the Iowa caucuses, which is the first part of our interminably long primary process, but was really the place where I think Obama proved that he could build something and win and defeat Hillary Clinton and win the election. And fast forward a couple of years, I worked in the White House press office for a couple of years under a guy named Robert Gibbs, who was the first press secretary for Barack Obama.
2:13And then after two years, I got promoted over to the national security staff, where I was a national security spokesman starting in around 2011, and then left the White House in early 2013. So it was a fascinating time. I think you could write a book about that time period and how it disrupted the world in mostly bad ways. Tommy, just bring us back to that moment with with President Obama and how young he was as a senator. I was friends with Samantha Power then and was in Harvard. And I remember conversations with her where she was trying to work out whether or not to jump on the senatorial campaign and how early to get in with him.
2:51And it seemed very, very uncertain. And you were quite unusual from, I guess, the kind of democratic establishment, and I guess, allying yourself to Obama so early. Just give us a sense of how improbable it felt, even if with hindsight it now seems inevitable? Yeah, I mean, listen, I was young and stupid. So it was easy for me to take the leap for this, you know, go work for this guy named Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama in 2004. Actually, I'd worked for another presidential candidate in 2004 named John Edwards, who later ended up being John Kerry's vice presidential nominee. But when we lost to John Kerry, I got offered a job on the Kerry campaign and turned it down because I wanted to work for Obama.
3:29I'd read his book. I was excited about everything. he stood for and did something very stupid, which is turn down a job on a presidential campaign. But yeah, for someone like Samantha Power, who's a good friend of mine, she spent some time working in our Senate office. She wanted to work in foreign policy, right? I mean, she led the USAID later in the administration. And when she decided to work for and support Obama in the presidential campaign, she was getting calls from people who were in the Hillary Clinton orbit saying, if you do this, you will never work again. You will never work in DC again.
4:03So there was real pressure. I mean, this is something we don't often hear a great deal about party because Alistair is very, very fond of the Clintons and admires them immensely. But there's a little hint there of a relatively ruthless machine running with Hillary Clinton. And I'm sure you've become very fond of her over the years. But give us a little sense if you were going to give a sense of the sharp elbows and the ruthlessness of that campaign. Yeah, I mean, it was a brutal campaign. So we won the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, 2008. And I celebrated that night. It was this big accomplishment.
4:38And then I got a call from my boss back in Chicago who said, you need to get back to Chicago right now. We need you doing rapid response. When John McCain gets the nomination, we secure the nomination because we need to kind of kneecap him early. And so I left all my stuff in my apartment. I left my car. I abandoned my truck that I purchased somewhere at a gas station, and I got to Chicago as fast as I could. And then, lo and behold, it took six months of brutal fighting and brutal campaigning against the Clinton machine to finally win that nomination because, you know, she's got some sharp elbowed operatives, people like Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson, the communication staffers who were very good at what they did.
5:17Let's put it that way. Tommy, you said kneecapping there, which in a United Kingdom, particularly the Northern Ireland bit, is a troubling insight. But we'll come back to that. But listen, you said something really interesting. You answered before that. You talked about the impact that Barack Obama's book had. And we live in a world where too many politicians, frankly, think that, you know, it's all about TikTok. It's all about Twitter. That book really made a difference in his rise, didn't it? So Barack Obama wrote the book Dreams from My Father was his first book. And he wrote that well before he got into politics.
5:46And it was very candid about personal feelings, his father, drug use, a lot of things that politicians usually wouldn't put in writing. But I also think it gave you a window into who he was and his values. I mean, just sort of a core set of beliefs that for the nine years I worked for him were consistent and helped us when we would go to him and say, sir, there's a question from a journalist about this new issue. you could just tell he had like an internal compass that helped dictate what he wanted to say and where he wanted to go on issues. And I think that was incredibly valuable because he'd done all that thinking throughout his life in that reading and writing those books that got him to the point.
6:24I mean, this is an unfair question because you're a very good friend of his and you're very loyal to his. But can you give us a sense of looking back what you think his strengths and weaknesses were and what you missed during that administration and whether some of those things contribute to the problems we're in now? I think one thing Barack Obama was incredibly good at that is a bit of a lost art is, I mean, look, he was the first person I heard say we need to disagree without being disagreeable. I think he stole the line from a senator named Paul Simon, who was this legendary Illinois political figure.
6:56But I think Barack Obama truly believed in trying to persuade people and then the value of that persuasion. And I think Democrats sometimes forget how important that is, because we convince ourselves that we can win elections just by turning out the base. And I think that's a bad strategy in a divided country, and especially in one where the other side is kind of chipping away at your base. And I also think, you know, at the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, like his youth and normalcy was a huge asset. And by normalcy, I mean, he hadn't been in politics for decades, like a lot of his rivals had been like they were not rich.
7:30I remember going to their condo in Chicago in 2004. I staffed the first interview with Obama and Oprah Winfrey. And it was early in the morning on a weekend. So my boss didn't want to do it. So they sent the young guy. And it was a modest condominium. And I remember the photographer for Oprah like didn't like the space and they made a shift from an indoor photo shoot to an outdoor photo shoot that didn't really look nice enough. And I tell you that story because it was a reminder that they were like struggling to pay bills and they had student loans and they were in touch with your average voter in ways that, you know, other Democrats more recently have not been.
8:06And the weaknesses? Well, I mean, the weaknesses, I think, it's less weaknesses that I think about, Rory, it's like, it's mistakes. And I'd love, I love your thoughts on this. I mean, I've come to believe that the decision to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan in December of 2009 was a colossal mistake. And that the Pentagon sold us on this coin strategy idea that was always doomed to fail. And that if, you know, frankly, Joe Biden had been listened to at that time, it would shift to more of a counterterrorism focus, we might have been more successful. Now, ultimately, you know, I think the Taliban takeover probably happens, right?
8:42I just don't know that there was any process in place to set up a government that actually felt legitimate, people saw it as corrupt and illegitimate. And the more you read about military operations in Afghanistan over the many years, it seems like they had the end goal of radicalizing populations against us. But I'm curious what you think. I was very much against that search. And I was sitting in the States at that time, meeting Hillary Clinton when she was the Secretary of State, working with Richard Holbrook, and trying my best to convince them not to back that search. it made no sense at all.
9:17And I was really hopeful a few weeks out that President Obama wasn't going to back that search. And then somehow against all his kind of better judgment, he started saying stuff. I remember a speech, maybe you wrote it, in which he said, in order to catch Osama bin Laden, we need to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan. And I thought, where on earth is this coming from? In order to catch Osama bin Laden, you just got to catch Osama bin Laden. Where did all this stuff about winning in Afghanistan, stabilizing Pakistan come from? So can you tell us a little bit about how it feels to be trapped?
9:49What is it that traps you? Is it your rhetoric? Is it your deference to the generals? Is it your lack of confidence in foreign policy? I mean, how do you end up doing something that should have been clear to him, given everything he believed about Iraq? Should have been clearly idiotic. Right. I mean, well, if you look at his campaign rhetoric, he talked about the Iraq war being a mistake, the need to end it, the promise to end it. But he also referred to the war in Afghanistan and the war against Al Qaeda as the war we need to win. Now, that doesn't mean you need to switch to this coin strategy, massive influx of US troops into areas that they hadn't been before, etc, etc.
10:30But I do think, you know, if you remember that time, Roy, there were a bunch of leaks from the Pentagon about their needs. There was this famous kind of infighting with General Stan McChrystal and Obama fired him. And by the way, I think Stan McChrystal has proven himself to be an incredibly honorable, thoughtful, decent man, not that he wasn't at the time, but some of his underlings like General Flynn, who became Trump's first national security advisor is kind of a crazy ideologue. But I do think there's this bureaucratic pressure that squeezes you in these jobs. And there's also a can-do attitude from the military that is admirable in one sense, but I think can lead to hubristic decision-making in another.
11:09Tommy, did you feel at the time that it was a mistake? And was Barack Obama somebody who you were able to be very, very frank with? Because the presidents I've seen close up, I often feel that there's a kind of such an aura around them that sometimes the people who are close, even the people closest to them are not always very, very frank with them. Yeah. So what Obama did was he tried to set up a process where there was this series of very high level national security meetings about the issue where what he wanted to do was not just decide, OK, how many troops we send in boys. It was like, let's pick at all the underlying assumptions about this mission.
11:47Like, what is our goal? Who are we trying to defeat? How can we get there? The development assistance, the intelligence picture, etc. And I think in that process, I think there was candor. Like Joe Biden, I think, was famously candid in some of those meetings about his opposition to the surge, about his feeling that any sort of major military operation in Afghanistan was doomed for failure. But I don't know. I think he was sort of sold on this idea that you could surge troops in for a shorter duration of time, kind of give it your best shot and see if that leads to a better outcome through all this training, which clearly just didn't work.
12:22There's a very interesting interview that Barack Obama gave to The Atlantic where he talks about Russia and basically seems to be saying in about 2014 that Russia isn't really much of a threat because its demography is going in the wrong direction. Its economy is the third, smaller than that of the United Kingdom. That isn't really the place we need to be focusing. We need to be focusing on the Pacific, tilting towards the Pacific. And then, of course, there's the calls, strange, slightly reluctant call in Libya, and then the refusal to uphold the red lines in Syria. Put together, you begin to wonder whether actually that foreign policy vision quite stacked up and whether the problem wasn't.
13:03And I sometimes wonder this when I see him in those early days doing these seven-hour seminars on how to save the Detroit car industry. That he's trying to do something he can't do. He's trying to rethink single-handedly through some sort of academic seminar every element of U.S. foreign policy. And inevitably, he's making confident calls that are slightly going awry. Well, Russia prediction doesn't wear well over time, does it? I mean, back to 2012 being an interesting year, right? I mean, that was the year when Dmitry Medvedev handed the reins back to Vladimir Putin. Now, Putin clearly was in charge the entire time.
13:41But I used to read the transcript of every single phone call between Barack Obama and Medvedev. And it was not the Dmitry Medvedev you see today. This was a thoughtful lawyer who would give on issues, who would work with us at the United Nations on various Security Council resolutions. So it was a different time. 2012 was also when Hu Jintao was succeeded by Xi Jinping. So again, an incredible inflection point. But I mean, maybe the best place to dig in, Rory, is on the red line decision. Because I was there when Obama drew the red line in August in 2012. I was sitting in the briefing room right next to him.
14:13This is about the use of chemical weapons. Yes. We had intelligence at the time that Assad might be moving around or planning to use chemical weapons. And those comments were designed to be a deterrent. It worked temporarily, but then a year later, and I left the White House by this point, there was that large-scale sarin gas attack. Fast forward a bit, Obama decided not to immediately respond. He sought congressional authorization, did not get it. Ultimately, the UK, the British Parliament voted it down, and there was no military response. A month later, Russia, Syria, and the US, they cut this deal to get 1 ,300 metric tons of chemical agents out of Syria through international bodies, but obviously not his entire stockpile.
14:52Now, I will fully concede to you that when the president United States says something, they should execute on that. And I think it would be far easier politically to just fire Tomahawk missiles into Syria and say, look, I enforced the red line. But I do think people talk about that refusal. And I agree was the wrong decision and a failure, like it would have had some major impact on the course of the war. And I think that that's, there's some strong evidence that that's not the case because Trump did exactly what we're talking about here in 2017, when he fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria and it, nothing changed.
15:28And so I think the question is, there's often this extrapolation from that event that, um, the refusal to enforce the red line is what drew in the Russians, uh, two years later. But I guess I'm, I'm, I wonder what the evidence is for that. And if you've seen information that I have it. Can I just jump in there for all the answers to that, Tommy? It was really interesting that you referred there to the UK Parliament voting it down. And I can remember in the build up to the Iraq war, when obviously, Tony Blair and George Bush were kind of, you know, very closely locked together in so many ways. But the Americans did at one point say to us, listen, we can do this without you.
16:05You don't feel you have to be there for this. And I just wonder whether when it came to Syria, why Obama felt that it was so essential to have particularly the UK support before he could actually go ahead. I think what it reflected was a broader hesitation, a feeling that U.S. military intervention more often than not has led to bad outcomes rather than good ones. A frustration in the United States that it is easier for a president to start a war than to end one, as we just saw with Joe Biden in Afghanistan. And just a feeling of not wanting to get dragged into a slippery slope. Because if you enforce that red line once, and again, I fully admit it was the wrong decision.
16:48Doing something at that moment would have been right. But if you enforce that red line once and you take a military strike into Syria, what if Assad tests you again and uses chemical weapons again or uses chlorine gas? Are you then obligated to strike again? And at that point in the war, there were two challenges. There was the Assad regime, but there was also this growing ISIS threat. And so the focus, I think, over time pretty quickly shift to that ISIS threat rather than Assad. I'm going to take a big, bold leap, leap forward. The great supporters of President Obama, and I think this is fascinating, but I guess we want to get on, I'm afraid, to the terrible fact of Donald Trump.
17:24And just as our route into it, can you set up for us what it was about Barack Obama's time in office, about Hillary Clinton, more recently about President Biden or Kamala Harris that creates the possibility of Trump winning twice? I mean, I think there's something very high level and basic where American politics are a pendulum and we tend to swing back and forth. And after eight years of Obama, eight years of a black president, the fact that you could see this backlash that led to someone like Donald Trump getting elected, who began his campaign with a overtly racist speech about, you know, Mexicans sending rapists, I guess with the scope of history kind of of the United States, it probably shouldn't surprise us.
18:09I also think there was some frustration in 2016 with the status quo, with economic inequality, with a feeling that government wasn't working for people in a variety of ways. And the Democratic response in that moment was to say, we nominate Hillary Clinton, someone who most voters had known and associated with kind of business as usual in Washington for decades. Whereas Trump comes in, and he's the ultimate disruptor. I don't know if you tracked the Republican primary as closely as we did in 2015, but I remember canceling plans with friends to watch Republican debates because Trump was just, he looked and he sounded so different.
18:45I mean, you'd walk in there and you're expecting a conversation about education policy and he's just telling Rand Paul he's ugly or whatever, you know, crazy insult was happening. And it just felt so new and shocking that I think people wanted that disruption. Did you think it would be effective? No, I was naive and wrong. And I thought American voters would ultimately reject it. I think 2016 was unique in that a lot of people weren't excited about the race and they kind of sat it out and they thought there was no chance Trump could ever win in part because of pundits like me who said as much and were just catastrophically wrong.
19:18Would Obama have fought a different campaign to the one that Hillary fought? Because I think you're right that it's the uniqueness and the disrupting nature of Trump that makes him such a difficult opponent. It's very hard for me to look back at Hillary's campaign and think, well, should have done this, should have done that. It was a pretty traditional Democrat campaign, wasn't it? It was pretty traditional. I mean, I think, you know, that they didn't go to certain states where she lost, like Wisconsin. You know, there were some massive polling errors and some things people just didn't see and missed.
19:48I think Obama was a better communicator. He had higher favorables. He was just better able to reach people. So I do think, I don't think 2016 was the best run campaign. I'm trying to be kind and judicious here, but I don't think it was perfect. I can tell. I can tell. Tommy, then it seemed at least in 2024 that people had learned a lot of those lessons. My goodness, people spent a lot of time in Wisconsin. My cousin was turning up at doors in Pennsylvania where she was the sixth canvasser to turn up in two days at people's doors. I mean, you know, kitchen sink was thrown at this thing. And, you know, people like Jake Sullivan, you know, spent years in the wilderness trying to get their head around what it got wrong.
20:26And they kind of reimagined a foreign policy for the middle classes. And Biden had a big vision on how he was going to get, you know, big borrowing, big spending, get the US economy off the ground. So it wasn't quite as sometimes people imply that the liberals didn't learn any lessons. I felt people like Jake and indeed the whole Biden team were desperately trying to learn lessons from what they thought had gone wrong with Hillary Clinton. Am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong that they tried to learn lessons. And I know Jake well, and I respect him. And I think he's a brilliant guy. But I think, you know, the framework of foreign policy from the middle class was less likely to get heard.
21:03If you're an average voter, then hey, we keep sending all this money to Ukraine to blow stuff up. Why are we doing that? You know, I think the last mile problem is the hardest one in politics. I think Democrats spend a lot of time perfectly tailoring and crafting our speeches and our messages. And it just never gets to the people because the biggest disconnect in US politics is people like me who are obsessed and read newspapers all the time and people who get, you know, three minutes of political news a month via social media. And they probably see Donald Trump working in McDonald's. And so I think the lesson Democrats didn't learn in 2004 was Joe Biden running for reelection was a catastrophic mistake that we will be paying for for decades.
21:42Decades. I think the damage Trump can do in four years will spill out for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think that was the primary mistake. I was very surprised by how we went from a world in which the conventional wisdom was that Kamala Harris was pretty hopeless. That seemed to be the story in kind of 2022, 2023. Nobody really rated her to suddenly she was the obvious great successor for Biden. What happened there? I think what happened was her 2019-2020 presidential campaign went very badly. It seemed rudderless. They didn't make it to the Iowa caucuses before she dropped out. I think they ran out of money.
22:21And so it just didn't, you know, didn't reflect well on her. I mean, Barack Obama used to say that in many ways, how you run your campaign is kind of seen as a proxy for how you would run a government. And if that's the standard by which we're judging that campaign, it was very, very bad. Biden selected her. And I think what happened here is we had that catastrophic debate. It was self-evident that it was unrecoverable. Biden waited a month to drop out after getting, you know, his arm twisted by Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders. And when he finally got out, it seems like Biden just decided he wanted to anoint Kamala Harris.
22:55And that might have been the only viable decision given the timeframe and how few days were left and how campaign finance rules work that would allow her to use the existing infrastructure, campaign infrastructure, and use money that had already been raised. I was arguing at the time that I thought some sort of mini primary might be better that allowed us to at least show that it was a contest. But that got end run. Okay, Tommy, Rory, quick break, and then back for more.
23:25Last time I saw you, Tommy, was at the DNC. I saw you in person. And I was, I think Rory was as well. We were both kind of quite caught up with what became known as the vibe. We sort of maybe saw in Kamala Harris, and we saw in the energy of the event, something really quite exciting. And it felt kind of positive. and it felt this, I just sort of sensed this is going to be okay. And then I had breakfast with your lunch with you and you didn't seem to me to be sharing that vibe. So what were you reflecting on that maybe came to pass and what should we have been more aware of? I just think that the, the convention, two, three, four days, whatever it is, is always kind of the sugar high for all of these candidates.
Read the full transcript
24:09And Democrats were certainly excited to have moved on from the kind of will he won't he debate about Joe Biden and his candidacy. They were excited about the prospect of Kamala Harris and having something to root for, someone to vote for and cheer for. But I just, the headwinds were still there. You know, the inflation, the questions, the anger at Joe Biden, the frustration about his age, the questions about how he could have been allowed to stay in the race that long. I just kind of knew that was all out there. Plus, I mean, had the Butler shooting happened? I mean, that was just such an iconic moment.
24:40That had happened before. I mean, when that happened, you know, my reaction was, oh, God, I hope he's OK. But also that the campaign was over in that moment. What about Tim Walz, who we were very excited about at the time? Where is he now? What do people think about him now having been an extraordinary hero for a matter of weeks and then vanished from our screens? It was really weird. I mean, I had Tim Walz in here in February of last year, had a great interview with him. we talked about everything, his time, you know, teaching in China, his time as a football coach, his time as a teacher and serving in the army, and he just seemed like a down to earth, normal, regular guy.
25:14He got the nomination and they kind of bottled them up for like a month. We just didn't hear from him. And I think part of that was debate prep and all the things you need to do in 107 days to, you know, have a convention, give big speeches, get prepared, et cetera. But a part of it was Kamala Harris wasn't doing interviews. So maybe he wasn't doing interviews either during that time. And I just don't know that he was used to the best of his ability. And I think Republicans quickly, you know, decided to brand him as outside the mainstream, based on a couple of things that happened in Minnesota, like some school districts allowing tampons in men's bathrooms, as if a tampon is going to jump out of the drawer and attack you.
25:52And none of us have mothers or sisters and have, you know, seen these sort of things around. But I think he still has a political future ahead of him. I just don't know what it's going to be. Tommy, you wrote a book in 2024, ahead of the election, Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. That hasn't aged very well either. No, no, we need an 11th. I mean, number one, step number one was surely stop the return of Donald Trump. So a couple of questions on that. One, what were you trying to do with that book? Secondly, trying to sort of step aside from your own politics and what we all maybe think about Donald Trump.
26:27How do you analyze his strengths? what do you see is that the what are the qualities that make him the incredible force that he's become i think that one thing that's remarkable about trump is his ability to talk and talk about himself all day long everyone talked a lot about that joe rogan interview he did i heard joe rogan talking about it afterwards a day later with some of his buddies about how it went and rogan said trump walked into the studio didn't ask to use the bathroom talk for three hours straight got up and left without using the bathroom. That was just a remarkable feat of just narcissism.
27:01So he's got a strong, he's either got a strong bladder or a bag. That's right. That's exactly right. Well, I mean, Al, I was thinking about this today in advance of this interview. I mean, we had this horrific plane crash a couple of days ago in the US. Trump decided to just host this freewheeling press conference the day after. What he said was disgraceful. He blamed the accident on DEI and all these racist things. but it's this new sort of communications strategy that he has where he just, he owns every news cycle, every piece of it, every single day. You know, on inauguration day, he didn't give one speech.
27:34He gave a speech, then a speech to the overflow room, and then a speech to this huge rally later that night. And then he did a 45 minute press conference. You know, he is like everywhere all the time, all at once. And I think that is a, maybe that's how politics goes going forward. We obviously like half the world are very interested in this question of whether he's a fascist. How do you think about that? I'm very worried about it. You know, I think you can look to kind of soft fascists is maybe not underplaying it. People like Viktor Orban and the path they've taken to fascism and, you know, controlling the courts, controlling the media, controlling parliament through gerrymandering.
28:08It feels like in the US we're on our way in a lot of senses. I think that one thing Trump is good at is baiting Democrats into being outraged, into using language that maybe sounds It's hyperbolic. And I worry maybe that calling him a fascist takes us to that place. Remember, Kamala Harris called him a fascist at one point, and I think it kind of became a thing that I don't know that it worked as well. But I'm very worried about it. Yeah. The thing that I would worry about if I were American, and of course, because it's America, the whole world needs to worry, is this kind of voluntary obedience by people that we know in their heart can't stand him, can't stand his politics, but they're all just kind of bowing down before him.
28:54In a way, at least in the first term, you sort of sense there was major dissent there. When is that going to kind of come? Because this is so important, these first few weeks for establishing his second term. In 2016, I think the reaction was shock, and it led to a lot of direct action, a lot of protests, a lot of resistance. This time, I think people are not as shocked. They're just kind of crestfallen. And you're right that there hasn't been kind of the same level of activism, but also we've seen the most powerful people in America just bow down to him. You've got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos sitting on the dais.
29:29You got Sam Altman from OpenAI kissing the ring. The TikTok CEO was sitting up there next to Tulsi Gabbard, the incoming director of national intelligence. Not sure. That's kind of a funny seating chart joke right there. But you have ABC News settling defamation suits. Meta paid Trump$25 million to settle a lawsuit with him. CBS is reportedly in talks with Paramount to settle another suit. So you're right that these powerful institutions and corporations are kissing the ring. And it is very worrisome. While still talking to talk about free speech. Right, right. They've curbed their own free speech in order to prevent whatever fear they have that he's going to do to them.
30:11Yeah. And in the CBS case, it wasn't even about Trump's speech. They just edited an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes. It's a very strange moment, isn't it? I mean, one of the things that surprises me is, as you say, the lack of activism, the lack of emphasis on how many of these executive orders are illegal or unconstitutional. Yeah, the lack of sort of outrage and challenge. I mean, you lay out all this stuff and it's astonishing. There's so much of it. It's like dozens of horrors. I mean, really profound, illegal, chaotic, world-disrupting acts taking place. And yet somehow you're not getting a sense of the checks and balances of the US system, which we were all told was supposed to kick in to prevent arbitrary autocratic rule.
30:59I mean, theoretically, your whole system was set up to prevent people behaving like autocratic British monarchs, and it doesn't seem to be working. Yeah, I mean, our system is set up where, you know, the ambitions of one leader are supposed to be checked by the ambitions of the other. And I think one of the challenges right now is the Democrats control no part of the Congress. Trump has packed a lot of the courts. And it seems like so far, Republicans in the US Senate are willing to just cater to Trump's will in almost every single instance. I mean, the only nominee that kind of has gotten bounced from consideration was Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general.
31:38And that seemed to be mostly because a lot of these members of Congress hated him personally. It was not about his qualifications. But you've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. going through a confirmation hearing to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he's just lying. This man has spent the last several decades of his career focused on the anti-vaccine cause, and he's pretending otherwise. You've got Tulsi Gabbard nominated to be the director of national intelligence. She took this bizarre trip to Syria in 2017, met with Assad, met with Assad's wife, met with them again, met with the grand mufti of Syria, who at the time had been threatening to send suicide bombers into the US and Europe.
32:19And she pretended she didn't remember meeting the guy at this confirmation hearing. And they just don't seem to care. You and some of your Pod Save America colleagues were on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert recently. And I can't remember which, it wasn't you, but one of your colleagues was saying, and he got a round of applause when he said it, you know, after the midterms, Trump won't be able to sign another piece of legislation. But do you think it's a given that the Democrats are going to come back from this? No, it's not. It's not a given. We have to win the midterms. I mean, I think this is what's so tough about our system is Trump, I think, is going to get a honeymoon for at least 100 days.
32:51I mean, if you look at the polling, the Democratic approvals were in the tanks, Republican Party's approvals higher than it's been in a long time. He's going to jam a lot of things through. We're kind of betting on incompetence and court challenges and just lifting up how bad some of these actions are in the media. But what Trump is implementing is what Steve Bannon once called a flood the zone of the shit strategy, which is they do a million things a day. So you can't focus on anyone. So Democrats have a good chance of winning back the House of Representatives, just given that usually there is a backlash in the midterm elections.
33:22That has to be our focus. But the Democratic Party's got a lot of problems. I'm happy to get into them that we need to kind of work our way through. Tell us some. Yeah. What should the Democrats do to recover from this? I mean, I just think we have a gerontocracy problem that was, I think, most visible with Biden, but is visible across the congressional leadership. For example, there was a very important committee that could have been led by AOC, an excellent communicator, a young, dynamic, exciting member of Congress, and instead going to be led by this 70-year-old kind of boring white guy. And I think we need to be thinking about how to fix that gerontocracy problem and just elevating a new generation of younger, more nimble, more digitally savvy communicators.
34:10I also think there is no one singular leader, right? We have leaders in Congress, but there's no Obama. There's no Joe Biden. There's no one person that everyone looks to for guidance. And so we're flailing a bit. And I do think we need to be seen as fighting a little harder than we are right now, a lot harder than we are right now. And then I think Trump has taught us, again, that just being out there constantly seems to be what's necessary. And that's particularly true on digital platforms and social media where people are getting news. If you think that just going on MSNBC is going to get the message out, you're deluding yourself.
34:46I mean, there's a couple hundred thousand people watching these shows and they all agree with you. That AOC thing, I guess, maybe points to one of the problems that the Democratic Party is having to sort out. So I guess the people who would back that decision would say, listen, an old white guy just won this election. And the only person who's ever defeated this guy is an old white guy. And actually embracing AOC is exactly the wrong thing to do. And I guess maybe that comes down to your background as having been the extraordinary success of Barack Obama against the establishment that got behind Joe Biden.
35:21But that's the kind of fundamental strategic choice, isn't it? I mean, AOC represents presumably, for some people, risk, radicalism, and exactly not the way to get back the center grounds swing voter who voted for Biden and then didn't turn out for Kamala Harris. Yeah. And I should say, I couldn't remember his name, which is why I called him an old white guy. It's a guy named Jerry Connolly, Democrat from Virginia. I think the concern with Connolly is, we're talking about a 74-year-old congressman, pretty moderate, who's recovering from cancer, hasn't been out much, hasn't just been doing things.
35:54We're talking about chairmanship of a House Oversight Committee, where your sole goal there is to kind of lift up things Donald Trump is doing, show the corruption, show the incompetence, and create a political cost for it among the electorate. And I think you're right, Rory, that AOC might not be the obvious person to run for president. But I think if you're trying to get attention, she's the kind of person that you might want out there leading a committee that's designed to sort of get attention on things Trump's doing that are going badly. Do you think that there's a danger in the Democrats feeling that ultimately you can only fight fire with fire.
36:28And actually, in the end, we're all going to have to create kind of populist sewers and progressive sewers and insult each other 24 hours a day and lie about each other 24 hours a day. Is there a danger of that politics? Because I always think about, you know, I know how much you admire Michelle Obama, you know, in a way that when they go low, we go high. And I think it's a great concept, but of course he won. I feel like the Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high. It's this line that always gets thrown in her face. And she didn't mean we kind of ignore slights or don't fight back or don't give it to them as well as they give it to us.
37:04It was like, just be high minded, think about the people we care for and the things we're fighting for, focus on the job. And also her communications compass is going to be different than like mine. But to your point, I do think there's a risk of thinking the way to beat Trump is to emulate Trump, to get into the sewers, is to be vicious and mean and cruel. And I don't think that's a winning proposition. I think there will be some backlash to, say, mass deportations that are going to happen where you're going to see communities ripped apart because Donald Trump has decided he wants to deport every person who's here without documentation.
37:38I think that ultimately what voters want is someone that talks about unity, that brings people together. There is some healing. That is a more long-term tried and true political strategy than just kind of the Trumpian slashing. But how do you do it? I mean, I guess we saw Obama and Michelle Obama make those speeches. We saw Kamala Harris and Tim Walz make speeches about healing and unity. And there is a sense in which social media has changed this whole world. And my goodness, it's all going to change now even more, right? Because Musk has changed the algorithms on X. And we've now heard that Zuckerberg is going to change the algorithms on Facebook, which will actually lead to more political hate, more polarization.
38:22and we've just come through, and I guess this is what I'm sort of leading into, just come through something that's been called a podcast election. And you are, you know, one of the US's leading podcasters. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what is this social media landscape? Do podcasts matter? Why do they matter? Was it a podcast election? And is this technology making it almost impossible to be a kind of Obama style politician? It certainly makes it a lot harder. I think the landscape in the US now is you have all these traditional sources of news, be they newspapers, network news, or cable.
38:56And all of them are seeing their viewership and their numbers go down. And it's this inexorable slide. Associated with that, for a while now, we've had a very well-funded right-wing media ecosystem. You know, that started with Rush Limbaugh back in the day, but over the years, it's evolved to a lot more outlets that your listeners might not have heard of, but are incredibly influential, like The Daily Wire, Breitbart News. There's some even more radical ones like The Federalist, the list goes on and on. And often those right wing conservative outlets are propped up by billionaires who invest in them because they view them as a political weapon that leads to tax cuts and deregulation.
39:34Then this election cycle was different in that there were all these notionally apolitical, but kind of conservative coded podcasts that had developed huge audiences. Often, there's people like Joe Rogan that are talked about a lot, but there were comedians with really big footprints who just kind of, for whatever reason, decided they liked Trump. And Trump really made a deliberate strategy to go on those shows over and over and over again and leverage those audiences. And I think very effectively targeted young men of all stripes, of all races and persuasions and convinced them to vote Republican.
40:11And that was kind of the new insight this time. Why does the left not have a, and I know the left in America maybe means something different, but we define as the left. Why are we so incapable of putting together that kind of ecosystem, that kind of wraparound? Because this is a global thing now. This is a global, organized, funded, billionaire-backed campaign. And right now it's doing pretty well. Why have we never been able to do that in the same way? And Clinton used to talk about this all the time, that we're just not as good at it as they are. Yeah, I've been complaining about this for a decade.
40:46I mean, there is, to your point, Alistair, you see these, there's an event called CPAC, this conservative conference that happens. Now there's, you know, CPAC in Brazil. There are CPAC in Hungary, right? There is this connective tissue between these right-wing parties through people like Steve Bannon. I think there's a couple pieces of this. I mean, just in terms of the, like, launching a liberal or progressive news outlet, we tried to do that. We're kind of lonely in this space. We hope others will do it. We'd love more competition. We'd love to see more liberal billionaires invest in kind of permanent infrastructure like this rather than lighting money on fire with shitty campaign ads every four years.
41:22But in terms of the cultural piece, I think Democrats just lost the cultural piece. And part of that was these voters just didn't feel like they could be for Biden. Democrats, we convinced ourselves that, you know what, he might look old. He might have lost a step physically, but we know he can do the job. we kind of like made it an intellectual problem where most voters viewed it from an emotional level or just kind of a common sense level. And we're like, that guy is too old. And I think that drove a lot of people away. I guess conservatives listening to this would laugh at this notion that there isn't a massive liberal ecosystem.
41:56In fact, their entire beef with the world, if they were looking at the United Kingdom, as they think the whole damn thing is run by podcasts like us and the BBC. And actually, of course, the liberal worldview, the liberal progressive worldview is very, very powerful. It's really kind of dominated the world since the early 90s. And if there are these CPAC conferences, there's any number of other institutions all around the world which have kind of taken into their bones the assumptions of liberalism, progressivism, the world order. That's exactly the elite, I guess, that J.D. Vance is complaining about.
42:28This is what the whole of the trolls on X are getting infuriated. They do see in a way that maybe we don't, that there's a lot out there, as it were, on our side. The curious question, I guess, is why doesn't it feel urgent? Why doesn't it feel exciting? Why? I mean, it's an extraordinary thing in the UK. I mean, the word journalist saying, you know, if you look at podcasts, it's the kind of right that's exciting. It's the right that's dominating. Actually, you look at the UK podcasts, the right doesn't really feature very much. It tends to be people who are from the kind of center progressive left.
43:00So what's going on? Why are we, at one sense, so sort of integral to so many institutions, so much of the establishment, and on the other hand, somehow feel as though we're losing way, losing momentum? I mean, I think there's some truth to the criticism that a lot of journalists themselves are personally have more liberal views. And that was probably even more true, you know, 20, 30 years ago, when everybody at the New York Times or the Post or CBS was some white guy who went to Harvard who was progressive, etc. Right. So there's some there's a legacy piece of this that had some truth to it. But if you look at the modern media landscape in the US, I think it's very hard to argue that it's progressive in any way.
43:42People think the New York Times is liberal because they have a liberal opinion page. That was not my feeling in practice. Like, I got the shit kicked out of me by the New York Times every single day for four years, nine years working for Obama. People love Jake Tapper on CNN, a dogged, tough journalist who held Trump's feet to the fire. Again, I would get into arguments with Jake that were so bad when I was the spokesman for the Obama administration that we wouldn't talk for a week or two. They were mainstream, traditional news outlets kicking the shit out of us. But meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch comes along in the 90s, right?
44:13And Fox News becomes this 800-pound gorilla in the U.S. media ecosystem. system and they not only reach, you know, 3 million people in prime time at night, it's that the Fox can drive a narrative and make it the, make it the thing everyone is talking about. That was true for Obama's birth certificate. It was true for the Benghazi attacks, right? And that is what the left is really lacking. And I think this has now been supercharged by this evolution and, and purchase of Twitter by Musk and God help us if he gets tick tock too, if, if Trump can force that sale. So that's kind of what people like me are complaining about.
44:48Really great to talk to you as always, but my last question is really about what advice you would give to other leaders around the world. So you've worked for a leader on the national security side. I was at a funeral yesterday and Keir Starmer was there and we were having a chat about this, that and the other, and inevitably one of the things we talked about was how do you deal with Trump? So what's your advice to people like Keir Starmer, people like Merz, if he becomes chancellor of Germany, people like whoever follows Trudeau, how do you deal with this guy? Yeah, I mean, I think Trudeau is an instructive example.
45:19Justin Trudeau tried to say the right things. He tried to laugh off insults. He flew down to Mar-a-Lago for a dinner and Trump insulted him in the most childish ways called Canada, the 51st state, insulted him, diminished him, and now he's gone. And I think there's a lot of people around the world, a lot of progressives and foreign ministers or whatever doing a lot of cleanup on aisle two. They're trying to say that their past criticisms or Trump are wrong. I don't know that that's going to be effective. I think he respects strength. He likes Xi Jinping for that reason. He likes dictators that do and say whatever they want.
45:51I think you have to be strong in his face or else he won't respect you. I also think, though, that if my advice to leaders around the world is like just loosen up and let rip, you know, Trump did. Trump's talking four hours a day. He's backtracking on things. He's flip flopping. He's making mistakes. He's flooding the zone. I really think there's a lesson to be learned there about talking like a human being, getting on digital platforms, not, you know, editing a speech for seven days and then thinking, delivering the, you know, the perfect 25 minute stem winder at Davos is going to solve your communications problems.
46:24Thinking about, okay, how do I reach the person in name your part of the world who doesn't know what Davos is? Tommy, my last one is what do you think European or British viewers don't quite get about Trump and the US political system? What do you think people misunderstand about the United States when you hear foreigners talking about the US? What you guys probably have not caught on to that we have in the US is just how corrupted it's gotten so quickly. I mean, Donald Trump's first term, he installed Jared Kushner, his son in law to be his kind of shadow Secretary of State. Jared Kushner walked out of the White House, started a private equity firm and got a$2 billion check from the Saudis.
47:06And now Jared, also got a bunch of money from the UAE and the Qataris, I believe. Now Jared says he's going to stay outside of government, but he's going to be kind of a shadow advisor on any Saudi-Israeli normalization talks. Trump basically IPO'd himself. There's a DJT stock that you can buy on the Nasdaq, I believe. So if you're a foreign leader who wants to pour money into his coffers, that's one avenue for you. In the first term, it was booking hotel rooms at high rates for months for no reason. And now you can just buy his stock or you can buy the Trump crypto coin. So I just think we are in a totally new era of corruption with Trump.
47:43And I'm not sure. We're starting to feel more like how people operate in sort of, say, Saudi Arabia, right, where you install your kids in these jobs and there's transactions that personally benefit leaders. And I don't know, I'm more just complaining out loud about how bad it's gotten. But that's one thing that I'm really worried about. What I don't get, Tom, is why people don't seem to care about that. I know you care and maybe people in your circles care and lots of people who voted Democrat care, but it seems to me a lot of people just don't care about that. They think, well, the guy wants to get rich.
48:18He's a business guy. They don't get rich. It's staggering. People just don't care. And look, I think Republicans raised a lot of fair questions about hunter biden and his business dealings and uh ethical lines that may have crossed and they just do not care a bit when trump does it and it's just polarization well listen to me keep saying keep talking keep podcasting away and keep in touch thank you for having me on a big fan of the show and appreciate what you guys are doing thank you very much very best wishes bye-bye well alistair thank you for that i think he's great i hope people don't feel it's a little too incestuous given that i've been interviewed on his pod we're interviewing on our pod he's a podcaster you're a doubt doubt about if i interviewed on his pod i think it's it's worth pointing out to people that pod save america is a very very big deal i mean in a way it's the kind of counter movement to joe rogan and it's lovely to hear his voice and his clarity i mean what did you take out of it i like tommy i think he's a very smart guy i think he's a bit of a loss to politics actually i mean i know he's still involved and still engaged but i think he I think he's a very clear thinker.
49:23But I guess, you know, I think he probably just feels he's kind of had his time with Obama and it kind of doesn't feel like that anymore. But I think he's somebody who's pretty frank about their mistakes, pretty frank about mistakes the Democrats have made in recent times. And I think he's worth listening to. One of the things that struck me just sort of reflecting on that is how at the end, And he said these completely staggering things about Trump and corruption. And how difficult it is at the moment in the US to get the balance right. I mean, you sort of go from sort of quite small things like Trump saying Ron Paul's ugly to suddenly things which are sort of 10 ,000 times more important.
50:06Yeah. Like the fact that he's being corrupted by foreign leaders. Yeah. And I guess that's part of the problem, isn't it? trying to see the wood from the trees and get people to focus on where the really big crimes are rather than getting dragged down into all his minor misdemeanors. Well, it is this, it is flood the zone with shit, isn't it? There's so many things to talk about. I had a meeting with some of the podcast team, our team today, and they were saying, oh, you know, every time we talk about Trump, the numbers are good and people are really fascinated by Trump, et cetera, et cetera. Well, of course they're fascinated by him, but I think there is a danger times that we play his game by analyzing every single thing that he does and says, when a lot of it will kind of go nowhere.
50:48I think what Tommy's good at is sort of separating out the stuff that really matters and the stuff that maybe matters a lot less. But this is Trump's power. I was looking at the day at, I think it was the BBC and looking at the thing of the top 10 most read, most watched. And it was, I think it was something like five out of 10 were to do with Trump. I then went on to Der Spiegel and had a look, and four out of 10 were to do with Trump. And then I looked at a French size, and then I looked at an Italian one. And this is just a guy with this unbelievable capacity to be the thing that we talk about, to be the thing that we get agitated by.
51:32Tommy said to me when we were in Chicago and he said, this thing about owning the libs, they're never, ever, ever going to give up on it. It's absolutely fundamental to their strategy. The vulnerability though, I think, is that if one makes the mistake of attacking him for smaller things or being kind of outraged when he makes a joke, you create a whole ecosystem of conservatives. And I feel like I'm in touch with a lot of conservatives who sort of feel that we're crying wolf yeah they're gonna be hysterical and i slightly felt that you know we got so excited about the fact he'd been you know he's a felon who'd been convicted for 32 felonies but actually what in the end did that boil down to something much much smaller than him taking two billion dollars from foreign governments yeah it was 32 things all related i think to him 34 was it we've already forgotten this is 34 yeah but all the 34 basically were just different variations on him having paid somebody to knock kibosh his campaign by saying they'd had an affair with him.
52:34Whereas the biggest stuff, you know, upending the world order, ethnic cleansing Gaza, pushing to annex Greenland from Denmark. Scrapping the PEPFAR program. Right. Bringing an FBI director who's doing terrifying stuff, handing over TikTok to some corrupt friend of his. I mean, we've got to somehow find a way of concentrating on the big stuff. Because what I'm noticing with conservatives is when you actually get them onto the big stuff, they're like, wow, that does sound pretty terrible. I wasn't really aware that he was doing that because they're so flooded with us getting kind of pious and upset with all the small stuff.
53:13Yeah, but how can – but you say the big stuff. So, like, you mentioned Jared Kushner. You know, I've said several times on the podcast. How can it be anything other than corruption that somebody leaves office, leaves that position, and walks straight into multi-billion pound deals? Okay? Now, so when you had the inauguration, because the broadcasters are so sort of, you know, terrified of losing their license, whatever it is, the whole thing, there was no mention of the fact that this Rotunda is the place where the January 6th rioters, you know, were basically trying to kill police officers or loot paintings, whatever it might be.
53:47There was no mention of the fact there's Kushner standing there, right? You know, and he's just, and there's Jared Kushner and there's Ivanka wearing a lovely green suit and there's Elon Musk looking a bit weird. And it was just, you know, this normalization of something that's totally abnormal. And it was funny, I don't know whether who Tommy was referring to when he said that I don't think Trump's going to respect all these people who just sort of, you know, recant past statements. Because of course, one of the things that Peter Mandelson did this week ahead of going to be the ambassador was to say he was wrong to say that Trump was this and Trump was that.
54:18Well, no, he wasn't wrong. And he knows he wasn't wrong. But they feel they have to do that. This is interesting. A Syrian friend of mine who I just spoke to said, when are you guys going to stand up to Trump? Right? I mean, he understands strength. Britain, European leaders need to absolutely stand up to this guy. That this idea that we were being sold when we were in Davos by the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, that all you have to do is go and apologize to him, be nice and improve your golf, and everything will be great, is ridiculous, particularly when what he's doing is so damaging to the world.
54:54Yeah. It's like if I were Denmark and the Greenland thing happened, I mean, okay, Denmark, I think they've handled it reasonably well. But the fact is, Denmark is a member of NATO and a member of the European Union. So therefore, if that was me, I'd have been thinking, right, okay, we need to get something out. We need to get something out of the NATO machinery here, saying it is obviously absurd to think that one NATO country would attack another. We need the European Union to say, Europe stands by Denmark. And I just think, cow-towing to this guy is not going to do anybody any good. No, no, no, no.
55:28know and actually there were little bits of communication from Denmark where they were like well you know you know that the call was longer than people think and it was politer than people think and you're kind of getting around the fundamental fact that this man is basically saying give me part of your territory yeah because I've got money and I've got troops the other thing I think that Tommy said that really struck a chord is when he said what the right-wing ecosystem is very very good at is making a story out of something so he he produced two examples which many people won't remember. One of them is this story that Obama wasn't a real American citizen.
56:01It's the kind of birthed story. And the other was the story around Benghazi. So there was a terrible attack in Libya where an American ambassador was killed. And this thing, which is, I'm afraid, more normal in international stuff than anybody wants to acknowledge. It's just, sadly, an almost inevitable risk of doing business in difficult parts of the world. and we've come very, very close to it on many, many occasions, suddenly became this incredible story, which was kind of bringing down Hillary Clinton and getting into the emails and totally changed the way the State Department behaved all over the world.
56:34Instead of people saying, what a brave man, very, very sad, the whole thing became the scandal, right? It was a kind of world of scandals and massive overreaction. And I feel it's also recently in the British press, you know, Everybody on X is absolutely obsessed with the Rotherham grooming gangs, who were horrifying, who did terrible, terrible things. But what's also clear is that this story has suddenly been resurrected, that it sort of died for a few years. These people, many of them prosecuted, many of the events happened before 2012. And then suddenly, bang, it's right up again and talks about it as though it's happening now under our noses and we're in this existential crisis.
57:15so that is a very weird thing and i'm not sure i mean do you recognize that from when you were doing this stuff in the 90s no look people would exaggerate there would be lies told about you and so forth rumors would spread but i think there was there was a sense that the truth could out over time whereas i think now funny enough at the funeral john prescott's funeral i was i was on the talking to angela rayner and we're talking about you know some of the stuff that was that was helping reform in different places. And she was talking about how many people genuinely believe now that Keir Starmer helped Jimmy Savile.
57:55And it's just, you know, it's the opposite of the truth. But if you are peddling that stuff below the radar and in the sort of, you know, on social media, on the sort of friendship groups and all that sort of stuff, these things can take hold. And, you know, the reason I was saying to Tommy, well, should the progressives, should the progressive side play the same game? I guess I am saying, you know, like if you think of the damage that was done with so many people, there are lots of people in America who genuinely believe that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile rig from a pizza parlor. Now, whoever invented that, you know, it's quite a leap of imagination.
58:34I can invent this story and then we can seed it and then cement it and get it into the public consciousness. You know, I don't think we would want to be in a place where we say, you know, let's make up a story that Donald Trump Jr. did this or Ivanka Trump did that, whatever. It's kind of horrible. But that's, you know, I think that's the direction that Trump has sort of dragged politics. And, of course, the problem for politics around the world is it's sort of, well, you know, he won. So it's, and I thought towards the end, you know, I thought towards the end, he did say, you know, listen, I'm just complaining out loud now.
59:09It's like how to deal with this guy really is the question. But I'm not remotely convinced that whoever you are, whether you're in American politics or global politics, I'm not convinced that sort of pretending that you think he's a great one, you know, that he's not, is the way to deal with it. Good. Well, thank you for that, Alston. see you soon bye
From the publisher
How did Barack Obama become President? What was Hillary Clinton's huge mistake in 2016? How corrupt really is American politics today?
Pod Save America host and former Barack Obama speechwriter, Tommy Veitor, joins Rory and Alastair to answer all these questions and more.
TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
Instagram: @restispolitics
Twitter: @RestIsPolitics
Email: restispolitics@gmail.com
Assistant Producers: Alice Horrell
Video Editor: Josh Smith
Social Producer: Jess Kidson
Producers: Nicole Maslen
Senior Producer: Dom Johnson
Head of Content: Tom Whiter
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
