190. How the Media Still Misunderstands Trump (Tina Brown)

20:07He believed that journalism was there to repudiate that whole concept and to keep doing the right journalism, to get it right, to be living in a fact-based world, you know, adhered to rigor, inquiry, you know, telling it real and publishing without fear or favor. So, I mean, he absolutely did believe in that. Well, he believed in that. You believe in that. I believe in that. But it's not the world that we're in. In some places it is. I mean, the thing is that, you know, I do feel there is sometimes a condemnation of our whole profession in a way that you don't see with like, you don't go to a crappy hospital and blame the entire medical profession.

20:42I mean, you know, there's a lot of bad stuff out there, which I don't even consider journalism. And it's just digital slop, let's face it, or ranting, which is equally frustrating. But there's also a lot of very, very good journalism going on and brave journalism. 129 journalists were killed last year, you know, why are they doing it? Why are they going to these? war zones. They're not doing it for money. So actually our profession is full of heroes, is the truth. And they're doing it in an unsung way and they're dying for it very often. And they're being harassed and hassled for it. But they are so rigorous, many of them, and they care so much.

21:14I mean, yesterday on our stage, we had so many. A lot of them, the harassment is coming from owners, from editors who are controlled by owners. That's right. And I mean, that is the horrible part, which is that... But that's the majority of media outlets now, I would argue. Well, I would argue also that, yes, there is a huge amount of that. And you could argue, yes, you can only be as brave as you're allowed to be, right, by your owners. But that is, of course, where independent media is coming into that breach, and they're leaving in droves. I mean, it's amazing how, you know, the Washington Post was taken over by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who's essentially destroyed it.

21:50I mean, you know, he really has. I mean, his desire to kind of curry favor with Trump now and make it into an absolute, you know, mouthpiece in terms of its opinion side. The actual investigative style is still OK, but the journalists wouldn't have it. They just poured out. Journalists, the best ones, actually just won't do it. And I think that's admirable.

22:11Rory Stewart:I guess this has been a story, though, for quite a long time. You know, Murdoch, Beaverbrook. I mean, this idea of owners controlling what we read has been an issue in democracies for a long, long time. I mean, talk us through this and how this works. Well, that's absolutely right. I mean, we mustn't forget that. You know, I mean, look at William Randolph Hearst. I mean, you know, it was kind of a monstrous kind of one-sided view of the world. And maybe, you know, one can argue that all the plurality now gets you away from that. I think the rich people are always going to want to buy media. I was very amused to see now that James Murdoch is buying New York magazine.

22:45I mean, it's like they just can't keep away because what they realize is, and this is sort of gratifying. All of these wealthy people without media are just boring rich people. Nobody really gives a damn about them, quite frankly. So you can buy the tiniest thing and have more kudos in the world than some guy with a real estate fortune or a tech fortune who nobody cares about. So media gives them a profile still, which they really want. What is aggravating, of course, is they take over media and they don't give it any respect. That is the thing that drives me insane about the tech people is that they have no respect for the creators.

23:20They have none. They wish to have all the obeisance in the world, you know, for them and their amazing, brilliant skills. I personally think that writing words ought to be as well paid as writing code. And, you know, it has far more life in the end than some ephemeral algorithm, which, you know, something new is reinvented every day. Whereas, you know, show me a sonnet by Shakespeare and, you know, all I can tell you is it's going to last longer. Do you think these guys, do you think the Musks and the Zuckerbergs and the Bezos, do you think their influence upon the world and upon politics and media is even more corrosive than somebody like Murdoch?

23:54Yes. I think Murdoch has a lot to answer for. I think that he degraded journalism over three continents for, oh my God, what, five, six decades? It's unbelievable. Although latterly, I mean, I think that he's been a good steward of the Wall Street Journal and latterly the Sunday Times seems to be doing a lot of very, very good work. But the danger of the tech people is, I mean, their power and their wealth is just so astronomical, just astronomical. And they live in a different universe, not just a different world, but literally a different universe. I mean, they are in a stratosphere of, you know, separateness from everybody else, that they truly don't think that humanity is particularly important.

24:36They just don't. They don't think humanity is important.

24:38Rory Stewart:Can I just, before we get back to the topic, can I lean into a little bit the two of you on Murdoch? Because Alice has done a lot of Murdoch in that. He did a miniseries for us on Murdoch, and you've thought a lot about Murdoch. That's an amazing statement she'd made. You know, he's destroyed journalism over three continents for 40 years. just help help a general audience understand a little bit about what that means what journalism was like before and what kind of damage and then maybe bring in alistair i mean actually one of the problems with modoc is his talent he's so talented actually he's so good at it but i i would you know i i really believe that fox news has been the single most damaging thing that ever has ever happened to america you know because of its success you know so everybody then emulated it and rushed into the bottom as it were and he's the one who really first polarized politics to the degree that it has because he gave the right wing their own place to be separate from everybody else and let them rant and rave and you know now it's very hard to even get a conversation between the two sides because republicans now they won't go on other shows you know they only go to fox it's their absolute you know their their safe haven't fox foxes wasn't his first move was it i mean he'd done the same at the times which of course yes Tell us a little bit about Harry.

25:53Because Harry wrote that amazing book, Good Times, Bad Times, about the whole story of being, I guess, conned by Murdoch into taking over and then slowly realizing that all the promises that are made were literally absolutely worthless. Correct. Well, I mean, Murdoch, when you track the pattern of Murdoch, it's a pattern of seduction and betrayal every single time. He's really good at the seduction. I mean, I saw it. I was with Harry when he was being seduced. I thought he was a buccaneering swagger. Harry didn't dissolve, though. No, he didn't. But he did think that because Murdoch actually is talented about media.

26:30So if you talk to Murdoch about newspapers, he knows stuff. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who hasn't got a clue how to run a newspaper, Murdoch does actually know how to run a newspaper.

26:37Rory Stewart:Tina, I'm going to interrupt because not everybody listening is going to know who Harry was when this happened. So just situate who Harry was and then how this conversation with Murdoch happens. Harry was the most sort of celebrated, crusading, very well-regarded, respected editor of the Sunday Times in England. And he was celebrated for his great thalidomide campaign where he campaigned for 10 years to get compensation for the victims of this thalidomide drug. He broke the story of how Kim Philby was a Soviet, had been a Soviet spy. He did the great DC-10 air crash story. I mean, he just did these groundbreaking investigations with the Insight team, his investigative journalists, and it was a golden period.

27:21Now they're making a TV show, by the way, about that period. It's called Dragon Slayers. And Matthew Rhys is playing Harry, by the way. Yes, I know. It's wonderful. It's great. I know. It's great. It starts filming in the fall. And I've just, you know, I think Harry gets his… Autumn, we call it, in your birthplace. In the autumn. Yeah. And Harry gets his great wish, which was to be four inches taller with Matthew Riesbeth. That's great. So it was a great period in British newspapers. And this is the 70s. This is the 70s. But then there were the union strikes, huge amount of print strikes. And that was a really frustrating time, you know, when the paper was closed at one point for about nine months.

27:57Because they couldn't get the unions to agree to what was then called, laughably, the new technology. They were upstairs in a floor of the Sunday Times. There were all of these computers with hoods over them. And the union saying, you will never use, no human hand will touch those keys. This will be the union. You will give your copy to a union member and they will input it, okay? So that was the scene setter why, obviously, when Harry met Murdoch, Murdoch was like, oh, I'll get rid of that lot and I'm going to like, I'll open the paper. You know, so he seemed like the great buccaneer who was going to come in.

28:27And P.S., he did do that. That is the thing. And Harry will always give him the credit for that. He did break that whole situation, moved the Sunday Times to Wapping in an amazing greenfields operation at sort of literally dead of night. So that was pretty admirable, actually. However, unfortunately, I know, I'm sure you… He's more with the unions. I know you are. Listen, the print unions were an absolute nightmare. They were a nightmare. But the way that Murdoch did it was pretty vile. It was absolutely vile. You know, as Murdoch put it, however, the carnivores liberated the herbivores, which was quite a good way of putting it.

28:59all right so that i'm giving him that credit however you know he's just journalistically he broke every single promise he said you're going to have total editorial freedom and i won't come anywhere near it like within minutes same day pretty much the same day it was like he wanted him harry to support thatcher he was very angry when harry would publish stories that were not not for thatcher he wanted to support thatcher because thatcher was for his business interests as simple as that and harry was just supposed to toe the line and he just wasn't going to do it you

29:27Rory Stewart:You know, so... I can bring you both in. So Murdoch's views are, Pro Thatcher, pretty anti-monarchy. He's quite Republican, right? For a while. Yes, he's anti-monarchy. Basically, it's for his business interests. I mean, that's the end of it, you know. And he was very, very clear about what he wanted. I think over the years, by the way, he's been more undercover about it a lot of times. But what he does now, really, I mean, most of the time, I will say, as I say, now with the journal and Wall Street Journal and the Sunny Times, it's the very good newspapers, I think. But, you know, because his big interest has always been his business.

30:01You mentioned Fox News. He recognized that having used his papers in Australia and in the UK to polarize and to delve pretty deeply into post-truth as well, I would argue, where it didn't really matter if his story was true. It was the impact that really mattered. That then when he realized that model could be transformed and amplified in television, that's become his big thing since then. And then, of course, he then expanded into film and all the other stuff. So he's kind of, I think he's moved away from newspapers, hasn't he? He has, but it's always his first love. In fact, recently he launched the New York Post in California, a sort of mad, crazy venture because no one in California has never read a newspaper.

30:39But isn't that because he hates Gavin Newsom? Yeah, he hates Gavin Newsom. I mean, he still thinks that the tabloid front page is an instrument for harassment and shaming. And it is, and we all love reading it. But that's purely what would motivate him to do that.

30:51Rory Stewart:Explain the harassment and shaming. that's really interesting. So as a former politician, you know, I've been hit on front pages. And that's a lovely phrase, you got harassment to shame. But I'd never really thought about it as that. Absolutely. You know, he invented monstering, really, didn't he? And I'm afraid it's done with so much flair that, you know, it's compelling. And that's the problem. So and yet, you know, what I feel is a kind of conventional rather politician, you know, when I'm monstered on the front page, you know, in Daily Mail runs, minister gives green light to criminals or, you know, Melissa says his constituents hold their trousers up with twine.

31:25Rory Stewart:I feel sort of unbelievably distraught and can barely face anyone for the next few weeks. You've got a tough number, I keep telling you. Whereas one has the sense, you know, Trump or Boris Johnson or these kind of people, it doesn't seem to matter. They don't seem to get monster. They don't seem to be able to be shamed or harassed. You can't hide your monster and monster. I mean, they don't, they don't, that's their superpower, isn't it? Not caring. Everybody else in a human being, does care and should but they're also so good at what i call this terrible adjacent sort of mini-monstering which is like rory stewart whose nanny was the best friend of peter mandelson's boyfriend who was a friend and whatever whose father was like a client who had sex with a teenage girl i mean you know it was like it's this thing where it's like this endless guilt by association and the right right now they're really monstering the mayor of new york mamdami I mean, anything Mamdani does, you know, he's like having dinner with a jihadist as far as the New York Post is concerned.

32:23So, I mean, it's relentless. But Fox is particularly, particularly awful. We interviewed Gavin Newsom a few months ago and he said without Rupert Murdoch, there is no President Trump. Now, I don't know if I believe that, but it's interesting that he said that. The other thing I'd say about the monstering, they don't like it when it happens to them. But of course, they have their own little club. So, you know, Dacre will never monster Murdoch. Murdoch will never monster Dacre. on it goes on. It's a sort of form of kind of Freemasonry corruption. So it's interesting, they know the power of it, but they hate it when it happens to them.

32:57Of course they hate it, but that's why they own things. So it doesn't happen to them. And most of the time people don't really want to do it to them because their powers of retaliation are huge, obviously. So it doesn't really happen. I mean, in the case, I think it's absolutely right what Newsom said about Fox. Do you? Oh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, Fox was just his total kind of canteen. I mean, he could just go there anytime he would phone into the morning shows and they would give him like 10 minutes on the air just to say whatever garbage would spew from the trash shoot of that endless loggeria that he has.

33:29But he is, I mean, the incredible thing that Trump proved, and he's so good at it. I mean, he understands the media so much better than the media understands him, even now. Because now, what he's done now is he just gives everybody access. I mean, every marginal loser of a reporter has the president's phone number. I mean, anyone virtually can phone Trump and get him on the phone, and he'll go spew out whatever's in his head, mendacity make it all up you know whatever we've just won the war in a round this morning like you know you know and they'll because it's exciting i mean there's no journalist really who's going to say i just had a long conversation with the president but it's all rubbish and i'm not going to print it because they know they'll never get another one they'll never get another one and also it's like you just got a scoop so he plays the scoop uh weakness but they're so weak i mean look you mentioned bezos so there's the owners that are so weak oh i know and the 40 million for milania and all that nonsense.

34:28The editors, there are some exceptions, I'll give you that, both editors and journalists, but most of them are just so weak. Let me give you an example. As you say, you're a woman in the media. Every time I see that Trump turning in those press packs on a woman reporter, the woman, Caitlin Collins from CNN, but he does it piggy. Remember on the plane when he called one of them piggy? How could I forget? Right. Why doesn't everybody just say, fuck this, we're out of here? Well, they should. I mean, in that instance... Well, why don't they? Well, I think it might have been on Air Force One, so they might not have been able to jump out of the airplane.

34:59But they kind of got back to their seats and said, you know, when you want to talk to us like human beings, come back. Well, I actually think they should be more of a body in that sense. They did do that with the Pentagon when Pete Hegseth said... And he's now filled it with all these crazy influences. Yeah, and of course, as Emma Tucker said yesterday on the stage, I mean, you know, the stories only got better coming out of the Pentagon because actually being in that bubble where you're sort of, you know, embraced is actually not good for journalism anyway. So being kind of kicked out of the Pentagon just meant, okay, right, we don't have any access issues.

35:29So we'll just go for the stories. And they just, you know, are better reporters because of it.

35:33Rory Stewart:I sometimes think that with the lobby in Britain, actually, let me bring in Alistair on this, but I was very struck as, again, as a politician, how timid the lobby journalists were, how important their access was, how much they wanted to flatter politicians. Being kicked out of the lobby may be quite powerful in terms of... Well, do you remember Tony Bevins? He was Tony Bevins, the Independent. He was the one who said, this is ridiculous, and I'm leaving. Of course, he had his cake and it because he had people like me who would come straight out of the briefings and tell him what was being said but i think the current lobby my complaint with them is not that they're trading access the whole time it's one that keir starmer gives them far too much access we're talking in the wake of the local elections he goes out and makes a statement on the back of the local elections and then literally takes the questions from the people who've been spent most of the campaign saying how useless he is he's like fight back a bit more and i think that my my problem with them is the relentless trivialisation of politics as a kind of blood sport and a game.

36:28And I think when you say Trump understands the media better, I think that's what he understands. He understands that ultimately they like the froth. They'd love to be talking about all the gold in the White House. Of course they do. As opposed to, why haven't we actually talked about the Gaza peace plan in the last several months and where we might be on it? And I think it's that trivialisation that I think that the insiders do. And if they don't, Caitlin Collins being quite a good example, I think, they get smashed. Well, they do, but they also, they're breaking great stories, though. I mean, you know, yesterday on the stage we had, you know, Reuters do great stuff.

37:05I think the New York Times is holding the line and doing great stuff. Washington Post, I actually think they are doing great stuff, a lot of them. I mean, you know, the Wall Street Journal published the Epstein birthday book. You know, they had that story for five or six months as they verified and verified and verified it and they knew that Trump would come for them and they knew it and they and they did it anyway and they were sued you know and he had he did go ballistic and they're holding the line so you know good stuff is really being done what Trump understands I mean one of the things that I've sort of realized about him is he always says we'll be dealing with that in two or three weeks why two or three weeks because he knows that's the length that is the length of time that anybody can hold their attention on anything it's gone two three weeks he knows it's like 21st 22nd century.

37:50Rory Stewart:And yet the amazing thing, if you look back over the Iran war coverage for the last two and a half months, is that he can literally have... Every day. Every day. Donald Trump says we're close to a peace deal. Donald Trump says the Straits of Home is about to open. It never happens. I know it doesn't. And I think this is where the disinformation and the confusion has become so toxic because people literally don't know what to believe anymore. We've really got to the point where you just think, well, what is really happening in the street? That is what I've always argued that post-truth is a strategy.

38:24People like Trump deploy it. People like Putin deploy it. These leaders, either dictators or with editorial tendencies, they have recognized that post-truth in this incredibly chaotic media landscape is their friend. Is their friend. Absolutely. It's true. But again, at Truth Teller Summit, we have this incredible panel about these visual journalists. now. I mean, they're doing incredible work with body cams, drones, you know, surveillance video, and so on. And you see when stuff happens now, in real time, they can verify the truth a lot of the time. I mean, it's, there was the whole of, you know, the Minneapolis, you know, ice raids and all of that.

39:03As the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, was coming out on television saying the person they killed, the protester they killed was a terrorist, you know, who was attacked, the police, literally they could show, they'd put together all of the video immediately, which completely gave the lie to it. And it was watched by like, you know, 40 % of the American public. I mean, but that's how Navalny made his name and he found himself on the receiving end. So these new tools, you know, have there really got a lot to offer.

39:32Rory Stewart:Can I get to the bottom of something, which I've never understood, maybe two of you help me. When, let's say, a radio program at seven o 'clock in the morning says, President Trump has today announced a new peace deal on Iran. And then there's nothing that follows to say, on the other hand, he has announced the same peace deal every day for the last two and a half months. And these are the reasons to be skeptical about it. Why does that happen? Why is the default kind of respectable public service broadcast? Well, I think it's wrong. He just vents and everybody prints it, you know, and they shouldn't.

40:02I think a lot of it's laziness. But let's be honest, last year, giving away no trade secrets, I think I'm right that eight of our 10 most listened to episodes had the word Trump in the head. I'm sure. So they probably think people are still massively interested in Donald Trump, as opposed to, you know, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is announcing that. So they're thinking Trump keeps people in. I think it's driving people away. I've now got to a point where when I hear Trump leading the news, I zap it off because I'd prefer to go away and read it later. I'll give be fair to CNN, they did a very good montage recently of the various gradations of statements that Trump has made about the ballroom.

40:44It's not going to cost the taxpayer a single penny. And it's gone from that to 200 million, 400 million. And I think they're talking about a billion. Okay. But whenever he mentions the ballroom, as he did with your friend, the King, none of the journalists ever bothered to go back and set a context. So he's captured this sense of everything I do in the moment is news for you people.

41:08Rory Stewart:Or is it not more complicated? What's odd is you're right. Somebody like CNN will catch the context or the New York Times will write an earnest article talking about all the contradictory statements. But that isn't mainstream. It's not what then happens when the normal news channel reports a billion on the ballroom. They don't bother to do that. And these are his statements going back. More than that. So when that guy rushed through an event when Trump was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and the guy rushes through security and it's a massive event around the world okay now the fact that he was three floors apart you know didn't matter to me because it was dramatic secret service agencies jumping on trump dragging out vans all that it was dramatic and then it was like it wasn't actually that big a deal but then what was really interesting was like within In minutes, there were dozens of MAGA influencers with huge followers saying, this shows why we need Trump's ballroom.

42:07So they don't care about the mainstream because they've got their own. Tina said they've got Fox News as their safe haven. They've got their own infrastructure around it. I mean, the thing is, more viewers than Fox News now are these individual content creators with their massive followings.

42:22Rory Stewart:Of which we're two. Of which you are two. I think, I mean, one of the interesting problems. One of the problems, but it is problematic because there's a whole series of questions. Alistair and I is launched very, very quickly and we're lucky to have quite a large listenership. But we don't actually have all the infrastructure and costs of a normal newspaper, so that's affecting the business models. We can regularly, without being mean, but some of these channels that we've mentioned, we could have five, six times the number of listeners without their fixed costs. And therefore, it makes it difficult for them to pay their journalists, keep running their businesses.

42:56No, I mean, you cannot do investigations without the structure. That's the point. You've got to have lawyers. You've got to have four or five crack investigators. You've got to have time, which is the biggest deprivation of most journalists because they're taught to file, file, file, file. How could you possibly go out and do the checking? That's really the corrosion is the fact that they don't have the time because there's no money to give them the time.

43:16Rory Stewart:Exactly. So to put it, just to bring that, I know keep coming back to money, but I think money does matter because in a way the revenue stream, MC6, that investigation, five, six journalists, the lawyers working for six months on something, is somebody deciding that they're going to commit, I don't know, a million dollars to something that will only generate revenue at the end. Well, the truth costs money. That's one of the panel discussions that we did in the first year, actually. Truth costs money. And that's the thing that I most resent from the tech side of it. They have the money. They absolutely have the money.

43:49And if they wanted to, they could say, we're going to use this money to amplify and protect the truth by actually funding journalism. They do the opposite. They have no respect for it and they destroy it. Lies, disinformation, misinformation, polarization makes them money. It does.

44:06Rory Stewart:And also presumably your point there, right, which is that if you're just thinking about your revenue stream and you were simply bean counting, the million dollars that you've spent on a six-month investigation may just not generate the revenue that you can generate. Well, of course it doesn't. News is never going to generate the revenue because the fact is that no advertiser ever wants to be around reporting about a war or whatever. So they're never going to get any advertising. It's all got to be subscription-based. And, you know, it'll never be a business model that really brings in a lot of money.

44:36I mean, it will bring in some if you're good and have a big audience of subscribers, but it's not going to be a major profit business. And that is what their greed won't sort of stomach, essentially, even though they could easily afford it. Easily, easily. Okay, Tina, Rory, quick break, and then back for more.

44:56Welcome back to The Rest is Policy, leading with me, Alistair Campbell.

44:58Rory Stewart:And me, Rory Stewart. Tina, you've known Trump for a very long time. And one thing you said, I think it was in your substack, I read somewhere that you said that the one thing that really surprised you was how dark he's become. What do you mean by that? Was he ever light? Yeah, he has changed. There's no doubt about it. I mean, when I first met him in the 80s, he was this funny, you know, braggy New York character, very typical New York character, you know, who was sort of built the Golden Tower. And I first met him when he was married to Ivana. And they had, you know, they had this big lunch party, you know, and all the kind of Ivana kept trying to kind of make him part of the New York sort of society scene, which, you know, as soon as they got divorced, you never saw him again anywhere, actually.

45:44But, you know, I was sort of sat next to him. He said, oh, Ivana made me go to the opera, you know, three hours. I mean, nothing to eat. I mean, God, Pavarotti, who cares? And it was funny. You know, you just thought he's just this funny, vulgar, funny guy. So he was irreverent. He was irreverent and he was funny and all the rest. But I think that he always had this chip on his shoulder, the man from Queens who wasn't really involved, you know, wasn't in the in crowd of the sort of real estate big shots. Wanted to be always, but not wasn't.

46:11Rory Stewart:And help us understand that because people talk about this chip a lot, but it's not exactly like an English class chip. It's not exactly like your maidenhead chip of wanting to hang out the dukes. It's some sort of different thing. No, it's not class based, but it's outer boroughs based, if you know what I mean. He never felt that he was given the respect of being in the sort of group that was like the big players. So it's relevance, respect. He wants to be at the table where the important people are. Correct. It's not so much that people are being snooty about his background or his accent. No, not particularly.

46:42It's just that he felt that strongly, that he wasn't.

46:46Rory Stewart:And were people like Mort Zuckerman, Zuckerberg, bigger? I mean, was that the idea? Bigger, but they also didn't take him seriously. I mean, because frankly, he wasn't that big. That was the other thing. I mean, despite his obsession with being big, he actually wasn't, you know, compared to someone like Sheldon Solo, who was a massive, you know, real estate person in New York. I mean, Trump was just a guy who built a tower and had some, you know, licensed his name. And, you know, he really wasn't in that realm. Never really was. Did you sense back then that he was a bit of a sleazebag? I didn't sense it.

47:17I knew it. I mean, he was obviously a bit of a sleazebag. And it was like, you know, the Ivana Trump divorce, which really, I think, catapulted a lot of the bad stuff. Because actually, I think Ivana Trump was rather good for Trump, in a sense. She kind of kept him. But when he left her for Marla Maples and Marla Maples talks about on the front page of the Post, no doubt dictated by Trump, best sex I've ever had, page on the front page of the New York Post. So he's always, you know, he's always been obsessed with his own press, etc. But he got darker. And I mean, I discovered it, in fact, when his business started to go wrong.

47:49And I was a person who published The Art of the Deal as a book extract. And that's how I got to sort of first meet him. And so that's really why I was at the lunch, etc, etc. Because he did this book. I thought when I read it, this is very funny. Nobody will believe it. It's all nonsense, but it's fun. So I published it in Vanity Fair. And then the next time we wrote about him, we did a really sort of quite a tough investigative piece about his business and how it was going wrong in Atlantic City. And he was so angry, it was by the reporter, Marie Brenner, that we were at a dinner one night and one of those charity dinners, Marie was at my table.

48:26And as Trump went by, she suddenly felt something cold. And she turned around and Trump had emptied a glass of wine down her dress, right? I just couldn't, but we couldn't believe someone would do that. And he was, you saw him like he'd gone and he emptied the wine and then he was gone across the other side of the room. Later, when I went to the New Yorker as editor, we got him again. I signed a writer called Mark Singer to do him. And it was a brilliant piece because, I mean, I have to say, I did sort of seduce Trump. I took him out for breakfast. And I said, no, no, no, no. That other piece we did when I was at Vanity Fair, it's all different at the New York.

48:58Rory Stewart:And then he did them again. Oh, it was a great piece. It was an absolute classic piece. It had the classic line of Trump saying to him. One shouldn't trust journalists. Yeah, exactly. It had the classic line of Trump saying, this is off the record, but you can use it. In those days, it was answer phones, you know, and Mark kind of sat there one day and there was this like 10 minute profane like rant, you know, on his machine. And when he published his book, Mark sent it to him and Trump sent it back saying, Mark, you're a loser. It's like, your book's no good. You're a loser, which he's framed in his office.

49:32But he was very angry every time he was criticized. There was no making up. There was no like, oh, time's bygone, et cetera. No, he was angry. You know, he always talked about wanting to run for office. And actually, in our Vanity Fair piece, all those years ago in the 90s, the first Marie Brenner piece, she wrote about how he had Hitler's speeches on his desk, Mein Kampf. That piece, that item made a great deal of news at the time. He denied it, but it was true. And it still gets quoted. So he was obviously, you know, beginning to be really interested. Did you remotely think he could ever be president?

50:08No. In fact, when I went to Talk Magazine, which was the thing I did after doing the Daily Beast, we actually did a kind of spoof shoot with Melania Trump sort of half naked on a mocked up Oval Office with an Oval Office seal and her in a bikini. And I think he was in the picture too, Trump, sort of sitting at a desk sort of pretending to be the president. So, no, I mean, it was all a huge joke. But I was also at that famous dinner, White House dinner, where Obama roasted him. and I mean I know it's now become folklore but it was true I was sitting right behind Trump and I saw his neck turn from sort of pale pink to sort of flaming magenta you know because Obama really roasted him and it was him at his most because Obama can be really sort of he can be pretty condescending in a way you saw the room laughed and Trump was just and And what he got out of that was he looked around that ballroom and he thought, he saw what he now thinks of the liberal elite.

51:10Because they are the liberal elite. I mean, all these news organizations laughing uproariously at him. And I think it really did crystallize for him. King Charles did it rather more subtly. Well, he did. Brilliantly, I will say. Absolutely brilliantly.

51:27Rory Stewart:Come back to Trump for a second. And he must have somehow gone from being really angry with you, you know, writing negative stuff about him and Vanity Fair or whatever, to a breakthrough where he must at some level have thought, actually, it doesn't matter that the whole liberal media is going after me. It doesn't matter that they're saying I have my camp on my desk. It doesn't matter that I'm being monstered by Tina Brown. I can somehow have a strategy where they can literally say, I've incited January the 6th rebels to take the capital. I've denied the election. I've stolen hundreds of millions of dollars.

52:02Rory Stewart:I've done incredibly immoral, illegal things, and I'm still going to get reelected again. Well, he did. And he figured out, I think, that if you just keep lying, lying, lying, you just keep denying, denying, denying, lying, lying. Post-truth world. Exactly. He created that universe where he couldn't win the journalists in that regard, but he could change the reality on which they report. I mean, he has been a distortion field himself in which he has just changed. I mean, you could have a picture of him, like, say, getting on a plane and going somewhere. He will say, I never was on that plane and I didn't go somewhere.

52:45And it's like, but, but, but, but he just keeps saying it. And in the end, everybody just gets tired.

52:50Rory Stewart:It didn't develop this because it's so fascinating. It is. It's the total change. I mean, you would have thought that actually in the end, that relentless attack from the biggest, most established media organizations in the world would mean that you could not be elected a second time as president. So what's going on? What has changed is that he's succeeded. I mean, the force field has taken force. What I find so interesting about the second term is he hasn't just done it to America, he's done it to the world. He's colonized the world. I mean, it's like I was talking to James Harding, you know, and when he was in New York, and he was talking to his news editor and, you know, and he put down and he said, it's incredible.

53:27This is ridiculous. Every story that I'm being offered for the, you know, for the Sunday news agenda is Trump. It's like, what about what's happening in the UK? It's like he's on the front page of every organization, not just in America, but the whole world. And he does it by, you know, I'm going to take over Greenland. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to come out of NATO. I'm going to, I mean, and everybody puts it on, you know, in their news organization. So he's sort of, the Trump show has essentially gone global, completely global. Look, we do the same because he is a hugely, we said when he got elected, this is going to be a hugely consequential presidency for all sorts of reasons.

54:04most of them I would argue bad, but you can't ignore it. What I think you can do is not imagine that every time he says something, you have to cover it because so much of the time it's absolute bullshit. It's true, but he's doing very consequential things though. I mean, that's the thing. He's not just saying things. He's doing very consequential things. He's genuinely very dangerous.

54:23Rory Stewart:I mean, he's worked out the one way to dominate the news is who's going to report the local elections if the guys have had to launch a nuclear bomb at Iran. I mean, if you genuinely become Dr. Evil, you can guarantee that everyone's going to push you. And I mean, I think you really do see the slide now into the complete autocratic posture, essentially, because what he's understood is that you get the media owners and he doesn't have to tell the press individually. If you get Larry Ellison, you know, who's such a Trump supporter and friend and ally in the tech world and his son, David, to take over CBS and CNN, you don't need to worry about individual stories.

54:57You've got the bloke in charge who's going to make sure that it goes your way. Do you think he's a fascist? I think he's become one, actually. I think that he's kind of, he's like this sort of evil angel at this point. I mean, it really has become so. I did not think so much in the first term, but I think that as he's got more and more and more power, and look at the things that he's doing, you know, gold statues of him, You know, gold everywhere and, you know, the ballroom and putting his name on every single building. And I mean, it's totally like Saddam Hussein putting his like statues of himself.

55:36I mean, we're in a place where he just wants the Trump Kennedy Center. He wants it to be the Trump Kennedy Airport. He wants it to be. I mean, you know, he's gone out of his mind.

55:45Rory Stewart:One thing that is very difficult to report is when you're dealing with somebody who's genuinely done evil, horrifying, brutal, damaging things. It's also true that part of what has enabled them to do it is a certain kind of charm sense of humor, which then becomes very difficult to talk about. One of the classic examples of somebody you spotted as a wrong one very early compared to other people was Jeffrey Epstein. But presumably part of the story there too is there must have been a certain kind of charm or sense of humor that got all these famous Nobel Prize winning physicists and economists and actors to come to his house.

56:23I wouldn't have said that Jeffrey Epstein had charm but he understood how to do this extraordinary sort of Rolodex game where it was like get Rory Stewart and by getting Rory Stewart you get Ali Campbell by getting Ali Campbell you might get Tony Blair by getting Tony Blair you know so he was able to do this kind of extraordinary dance where he I mean the emails I think just show the amount of time and volume of this kind of endless this often kind of concierge-like networking. I mean, it was really incredible to me how he's always writing to people saying things like, you know, I can get your kid a job or, you know, shall I send a car to the airport or you could use my plane.

57:03I mean, it was all this. And I think that the private plane I've decided is the sort of ultimate, you know, origin sin, essentially. Once you've flown in a private plane, you never want to fly commercial ever again. People will crawl on glass just to be on that private plane. And everybody wants to be on the plane.

57:20Rory Stewart:Let's lean into this just a little bit more because, as I say, you were very, very good about saying, I don't want to go to this pedophile dinner with Woody Allen and the rest of them. And therefore, I'd like you, though, to talk a little bit more about this society, this culture, this kind of New York networking, this kind of Rolodex, how you end up putting Stephen Hawking and Larry Summers and Bill Gates and Woody Allen and what's happening when you get an invitation to this fancy house. What is it that an ordinary British or European listener doesn't quite understand about what's going on in this whole culture and this world?

57:59Well, I mean, I go back to the plane. It was really critically important. I mean, everybody thinks, you know, Clinton was there for the girls. Clinton was there for the plane, right? He needed to get someone to fly him around the world. Once you've been the president, who's got a plane? It's available. And he had one. And so that was the major thing with Epstein. Other people just wanted, they thought that he might give them money for their thing. I mean, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was in it because, you know, they wanted academic grants. His wife wanted one, you know, so everybody's got there.

58:27He understood that everybody had a weakness, a pulse point that he could sort of tweak in that sense. At the Daily Beast, when I was the editor, you know, we were the first to expose the fact that he had had, he got this sweetheart deal in California, in Florida rather, with the DA there who only charged him with one, harassing one girl, sexually assaulting, sexually propositioning one young woman, as opposed to the volume of people that we then, you know, revealed he had. He always had incredibly powerful lawyers who, I mean, he really understood how to work the network and he did.

59:02Rory Stewart:And how did these people convince themselves to continue seeing him after he had been convicted the first time? Well, that's what's incredible, isn't it? They really didn't seem to care. They just didn't seem to care. Or is it that he told them, oh, it's a misunderstanding? He did. He was very good at obfuscating what had actually happened. It shows how lazy people are. I mean, when I was invited to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein's, you know, for Prince Andrew, I mean, it was a classic invitation. We had just published about a few months back these six pieces about the fact that he, you know, he'd actually raped these young women.

59:33So this PR calls me and she says to me, you know, I'm giving, oh, Tina, I'm giving a wonderful dinner tonight for Prince Andrew. It's going to be at Jeffrey Epstein's house. And the other guests are Woody Allen and Charlie Rose. And I'm just thinking, and that's when I yelled, you know, what the hell is this, the pedophile's ball? She said, oh, oh, oh, what do you mean? She said, it's all been overblown about Geoffrey. Overblown, she said. That offended me even more because we published six pieces. So my actual journalistic amour proper was offended. It was like nobody's reading the Daily Beast and they don't understand.

1:00:00I said, Peggy, you're out of your mind. We've published six pieces. It's a pedophile. She goes, no, it's all just overblown. All of that was just not, it was just somebody who was just a shakedown. And that's what he put around. And it stuns me that people with so many, I mean, for instance, I can't believe that Prince Andrew didn't have security people saying to him, are you aware like what he's done?

1:00:22Rory Stewart:Or Peter Maddelson, who stayed in his flat when he was - Why are you hanging out with him? You're a person with public persona. Peter Maddelson as deputy prime minister stayed in his flat when Epstein was in jail. I know. It's really stunning. I mean, I guess people's judgment gets completely eroded by, I'm afraid, by money and corruption. I mean, there is a leading lawyer at Goldman Sachs, Kathy Rumler, she writes in one of her emails, by the way, I don't have any nice Manola Blahnik shoes or something. And he writes back, we can remedy that. Well, she must have been earning$700 ,000 a year at least as a partner in Goldman Sachs.

1:01:00Much more. Much more. I'm sure much more. I'm not okay with those salaries, but I'm going baseline, okay?

1:01:05Rory Stewart:She didn't need someone to buy the shoes. She could buy her own Manola Blahnik, let's put it that way. So he just understood. He understood the people who had vanities, who had, you know, weaknesses, who had greed. It's a very nasty skill to have, but he had it. I mentioned in the introduction, your book's about the royal family. How much has Diana played a role in British and global culture, would you argue? Oh, massive. I mean, just absolutely massive still. Oh, yes, absolutely massive. I mean, I think she, I mean, certainly in America, she is the royal that everybody, you know, remembers and loves.

1:01:40it has been to the king's detriment because he couldn't sort of shake off the very, at this point, like passé myth that he was responsible for every bad thing that ever happened to Diana. This visit actually completely has rebranded Charles. The state visit of the US. Yeah, the state visit. I hate to use the word rebranded, but I'm now thinking in the American sense. It has completely rebranded him. It's as if people saw him and they've never seen him before. They were so impressed. I think he's really become now something that you never would have expected. He's now become, for Americans, I'm talking now, I don't know about so much here, sort of a moral leader.

1:02:21Because, you know, he spoke with such kind of judicious but absolutely sort of perfect tone about the things that so many people care about is the truth. you know, the erosion of truth, but without actually saying that, the need to have, you know, to heal our differences, to be people who can talk to each other, all these things that he said, and he forced Congress to listen to them. They don't listen to anybody or anything. They just sitting there like, you know, doing their own social media all day long, you know, raising money on one phone, social media on the other, don't pay any attention.

1:02:57And he made literally both sides of the aisle pay attention. And the American public really paid attention. I was watching, actually, I went to the garden party, which was wonderful. And they just seemed like people who had stood above the fray, who we needed so desperately. And Charles, you know, the king was seen in a different way. So I was actually extremely pleased as a fan of his to see that he was finally, I mean, God, he's 75, whatever he is, getting some realisation of what his role has actually always been. And your take, if I recall right, from the books you wrote, essentially that whole sort of Charles Diana thing, was that, to paraphrase something Trump said about Charlottesville, there was bad going on on both sides.

1:03:41Look, I mean, she was a child. I mean, the thing about Diana, I mean, now that I have, you know, a daughter in her early 30s, I think, you know, Diana was 19 when she met Charles. I mean, he was an old 32 and she was a very young 19, you know, bopping about in a sort of Sony Walkman while he was, you know, meeting Lawrence Van der Post for dinner. You know, it was such a kind of awful thing. I mean, they'd met 13 times when they got married. So these things today just feel genuinely cruel. It was cruel. Plus, she was the only one in the setup who didn't realize it was an arranged marriage. I mean, you know, he was in love with somebody else.

1:04:17So put it all together. And it was a very cruel situation for Diana, I think. And I feel for her in that sense. But I also felt for him because he was sort of, he wanted to marry somebody else and he couldn't. And, you know, he tried to do the right thing and it was an awful mistake for them both. And they were stuck. So I don't, you know, I've never felt sort of judgmental of him in that sense. I think it was an awful situation that he was trapped in. That's my view.

1:04:43Rory Stewart:My final thing, Tina, is often now when I go to the US, particularly over the last couple of years, people are barely talking about the UK or Europe. I go to these kind of fancy conferences and the story basically is America, amazing, China, dangerous. Oh, and by the way, I forgot to mention Europe doesn't matter. Well, I think one thing that Americans will never understand is Brexit, because they can't understand why a country, I mean, this is the country of the Tesla truck and the Big Mac, okay? England chose to be smaller. They don't get that. How do you choose to be smaller? They don't understand it.

1:05:17They just wrote us off at that moment. And secondly, they don't even know the name of the prime minister. I doubt if anybody you could speak to know there is someone called Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister. England has shrunk. The last prime minister they paid attention to was Tony Blair. and they don't think it's really relevant now. I find that sad, you know, as a Brit because of all the glories that we know we have. But I don't think there's been a great job done of actually exporting those glories, I have to say. And now, I mean, it just looks like with all these, they don't even know, all these different prime ministers coming and going, it suddenly feels like sort of Italy or something.

1:05:56Nobody knows what's going on. So, I mean, but Charles, I mean, the king has done a lot. for soft power. He really has. I mean, I think the King has been the best thing that's happened in that state visit for years, as a matter of fact. So maybe it's a turning point. I hope so, actually. Well, lovely to talk to you. Lovely to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you for being so frank. Thank you. That was very enjoyable. I've probably made an awful lot of mistakes. Thank you for coming on. So Rory, that sort of went against one of my rules of this podcast, that we don't just interview journalists. But I think Tina's much more than a journalist.

1:06:31Rory Stewart:Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating rule of this, given that you're a journalist. You've given us Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, who are definitely journalists. And I might use this as a Trojan horse to bring in some more, because actually, I do think sometimes when you're talking about current affairs, journalists are some of the most thoughtful, interesting people in the world. I thought that was very good. I enjoyed that actually more than our interview with Anna Wintour. I thought she was more relaxed, more open, a little bit more sparky. And I thought some of her insights into New York society, very difficult to achieve.

1:07:02Rory Stewart:You've known for a long time. I've known Tina for quite a long time. And certainly when I was visiting her and Harry in their beautiful house in New York right next to one of the great British residences, she was very much a queen of New York society. So when she talks about Trump, when she talks about Jeffrey Epstein, she's really getting to the heart of a lot of what American money and intellectual credibility and celebrity and society is about. I mean, she and Harry were an amazing couple. And Harry was a real, I think he was one of the last of that truly great journalists. And she's right.

1:07:39I'm probably too hard on journalism most of the time. There are some great journalists out there. But there are many like Harry Evans. and she said i think it might have been in one of her substat columns fresh hell her substat is very good i think she she said this thing and she said i've heard her say often that the great thing about harry is right to the end he had this real capacity to be outraged and i you know the last conversations i had with him were about yeah about where politics was going where the media was going It really offended him. It offended him that people could sort of lie in public and nothing happened to them.

1:08:15And it offended him that journalists just went for the easy option every time. A lot of them. So, and I think she's, I think she's actually, you know, the truth teller summit that she's, that she started in his, in his name, in his honour. I think that's partly about taking on that fight that he was having as well.

1:08:32Rory Stewart:Well, on her big story and your big story around post-Truths and Trump, what I thought was interesting is she's reminding us that there's the big fact of his personality. There's the big fact which we didn't get into, which is why many people vote for him, which is to do with a lot of the social and economic problems and anxieties and anger amongst the American voting population. But I thought she was also very good on the big structural facts. You know, we've talked a lot about the way that social media changes things and the emergence of podcasts change things. but also just the fact of money.

1:09:04Rory Stewart:You know, where is the advertising revenue? When she's running these newspapers, I mean, she says in New York, she took it from losing X tens of millions, I don't know, 70, 80 million a year, and she gets it down to only losing a few million a year. But she's also operating at an era where when she moves to New York and when she's at the top of these newspapers, the big television and newspaper houses are generating revenues of$50 billion. a year. And that has collapsed off a cliff, right? They're minnows compared to what they were. And that means that the whole ecosystem of foreign correspondents, deep, investative journalists has gone.

1:09:45Rory Stewart:And therefore, they have to be more dependent on press releases. I mean, you know, even when I was, when she was editing these papers, and I was a young journalist in Indonesia, where now you'd be lucky if you got a sort of part-time person being paid, you know,$300 for an occasional article, there were full-time correspondents from the Wall Street Journal, from Bloomberg, from Reuters, Financial Times, all had their people sitting there working full-time, which isn't true. No, well, look, when I was in the Daily Mirror, when I was in the Daily Mirror, we had offices in Paris, Bonn, Rome, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, they've all gone.

1:10:25Rory Stewart:And you were flown out to do a full interview with the Eritrean leader, yeah right which again they wouldn't fund anymore if you said i want to go out to eritrea and spend days sitting with the eritrean leader someone's gonna pay for your flight no at all no see it has changed i think and she what what tina's done incredibly well is sort of you know surf the waves of change so magazines digital campaigning and now you know she she kind of just as you say she goes around as being a very you know big thing in media and political circles the other thing i love about her is that she's you know she's incredibly frank i don't think it was a single question we asked her where you thought she was finessing no whereas i'm afraid with that with anna winter one felt more that she was being a little careful with her words a little bit more discreet and want to offend key people then well i mean jeff bezos what did he do this year basically funded the met gala which she runs yeah keep them on board yeah anyway i enjoyed that and i'm glad that you did thank you very much see you soon bye

1:11:25Thank you.