46. The Golden Age of Corruption

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1:15Hello and welcome to a special edition of The Rest is Politics U.S. It's Thanksgiving week here in the United States. So happy Thanksgiving to everybody, even if you don't live in the U.S. We don't have Katty Kay with us this week. She's on vacation. In fact, she's on a remote beach somewhere celebrating her family's Thanksgiving. But you have the proletariats in the house, okay? That would include myself and Alistair Campbell. Alistair, welcome to the Restless Politics U.S. edition. So good to see you, by the way, my friend. How are you? I'm okay. I've got to tell you, though, Rich, honestly.

1:48Katty Kay, first of all, she's a Brit. What on earth is she doing celebrating Thanksgiving? Secondly, your podcast has been going how long now? The rest is politics US. Six months, maybe. Six. Yeah. Six months. Roy Stewart and I have been going, I don't know, two, three years or something. We have not missed a single week. Yeah. So what is this vacation stuff that Katty K does? What's that all about? I don't know. I think she's onto something. It's the true American spirit of leisure. You and me, man, we're in the good. I'm rowing the boat, man. You know, I learned from my grandfather, row the boat without complaint.

2:22You know, I used to say to him, he'd say, what's the sense of complaining? Nobody listens, Alistair. Row the boat, man. So I want to talk about three things with you in the first half, if you don't mind. I want to talk about tariffs. What does the Trump presidency mean to the rule of law? We've uncovered some corruption already in the transition team. And then let's talk about the future of democracy, not only here in the United States, but democracies under assault around the world. And what does that mean? But I want to go with tariffs because you were in the administration, the Blair administration, and you had to deal with tariffs on both sides, imposing them on goods coming into Britain or at least negotiating that with the EU and then dealing with whatever was happening with the US.

3:05And so what are your thoughts generally on tariffs? And what do you think of Trump's proclamation last night on Truth Social and X, where he's saying he's going to have anywhere from 30 to 200 % tariffs? And he's saying this is to prevent the arrival of drugs and illegal immigrants into the country. I mean, that is quite a link to make. Do you remember when we were together in New York, when you were calling the election wrong? Was I the only one calling the election? Roy did as well. Roy did as well. But not you. I love you, man. You are the best. I got it wrong. I do admit that. Okay. I said to you, when Trump talks about tariffs, does he understand what he's talking about?

3:48Because he was saying at that time that if he puts tariffs on, let's say, goods coming in from China, that that was going to be cost paid by the Chinese. A bit like with his wall and the Mexicans. You know, don't worry, America. And now that is obviously not true. And yet people have been voted for him and he couldn't have been clearer that tariffs are going to be a big, big, big part of his economic strategy. So he's now announced he's going to do 25 % tariffs on goods coming from Canada and Mexico on day one. Okay. And then a bit more on top for goods from China. I mean, what I can't get my head around is in his first term, didn't he do a trade deal with these guys?

4:29He did. He did. Yeah. Yeah. And we've abided by most of that trade deal. Everyone says, you know, on the right that Biden left all the tariffs in place. He did not. Biden surgically went through the list of tariffs. And I'll just give you my 30 second view on tariffs. Having studied it, I'm also good friends with Robert Lighthizer. He's got a great book on this called No Trade is Free. It's a big history of trade. What Biden did was he surgically went through the tariffs, his team, and where governments are financing private enterprise and they're helping them compete. They kept those tariffs, in some cases, believe it or not, even increased them.

5:07But where it was helping the American consumer to get the services or the goods into the United States, they actually did eliminate the tariffs. I'm assuming that Trump is going to reimpose those. But you're asking a really good question. He knows that the consumer pays the tariffs. He likes that lie because it sounds good to low information voters, but he does know that. And what he also likes doing, and you may or may not remember this, in 2020, he said to the Mexicans, I'm going to ram 25 % tariffs. He needed something from them. The president of Mexico called him and said, hey, what do you need?

5:42Well, this is what I need. He guess he wanted more military, Mexican military patrolling their border on the southern side of the US. And then literally two days later, he said, I'm revoking my proclamation of tariffs. It's this sort of herking and jerking. And this is this overbite, this over-exaggeration that represents Donald Trump. So this stuff that he did yesterday, is this just negotiation? I think it is. So I think what he's doing is the same thing. I think the world was very shocked for season one of The Apprentice White House edition. But I think the The world is no longer shocked, okay?

6:20I think the world is like, okay, he's a television star. He's going for ratings. He's going to say ridiculous things and he's going to cast ridiculous characters because he's into ratings. And so I think this is a salvo. I know this sounds a little crazy, but I also think he would love to weaken the stock market going into January 20th. The stock market is his ultimate barometer. Forget about polls, Alistair. Forget about sentiment, cabinet discussion, feedback from friends. The stock market for Trump is the ultimate barometer. So if he imposes those tariffs and it crashes the market during his term, no bueno for Donald Trump, okay?

7:01He'll go in reverse on that stuff. But I just think this is now predictable. And I would say to people around the world, he's not going to do that. There's no way he can impose those tariffs without hurting the US economy. I mean, he'll find his way out of it sometime in the first or second week of the presidency, saying they've done this or that, and he'll declare victory without imposing those tariffs. Now, that doesn't mean he's not going to put other tariffs in because he thinks that the Chinese have been unfair to the US. And frankly, you know this. In some cases, they frankly have been. And I think that's now a bipartisan idea.

7:37What do you think? What I want to know is we sit here like in Europe and we're thinking, right, well, he's talked about 60 % on China, 200 % if they go after Taiwan, and sort of, you know, 10, 20 % for kind of the bit of the world that we're in. And then there's a discussion in Britain about whether because of Brexit, we sort of can somehow carve ourselves out of that. But the fact that he's gone for Canada, first of all, what is that about? Is that basically saying I don't like Justin Trudeau? Well, it's a combination of those things. He probably doesn't like Justin Trudeau, and he probably thinks rightly or wrongly that some migrant transfer is starting to come through the north.

8:19I don't have the exact numbers on that, Alistair. It's minuscule compared to what's going on at the Mexican border, but there is people trafficking and there's also potential drug smuggling going on. But the great irony of all this stuff is you know and I know some of it's actual people walking, border crossings, cars, but there's a lot of plane activity. Planes land all over this country, un-FAA approved. Drugs are taken out of the planes and then they take off, or planes are dropping drugs in the Gulf of Mexico and there are boats out there picking them up. I mean, unfortunately, this sort of nefarious activity is happening.

8:57I don't know if tariffs, which is a very blunt instrument, is going to stop that. It sounds good. It's a simplistic idea, but it doesn't get to the real issue. Right. Imagine you're back with him in the White House. You got granted a 12th day and it's today, right? How do you make this link? I can already feel my eye twitching. Hold on. Let me hold down my eye from twitching. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. Keep talking. How does he, Ryan, you're going out to do a briefing based upon what he's just put on his social media network. Oh my God. How do you make this link between tariffs and the thing about drugs?

9:36You say that we want to punish these governments because they are lax in terms of their controls on their side of the border. They're lax in terms of the drugs that are in their countries. Yeah, but drugs are illegal. You're not going to put tariffs on drugs. They're illegal. No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying I'm punishing these countries by, I'm punishing their economies and I'm punishing their corporations to get their governments to act and be more stringent on the enforcement of drugs. I understand that the tariffs are not on the drugs. Obviously, they're illegal and they get smuggled into the country, but I'm trying to incentivize through negative incentives.

10:16Okay. the governments around the world to stop the trafficking of drugs into the United States. I think if I was in the White House press room listening to you say that, Mooch, I'm not buying it. Well, okay. Well, that's why he's got a 27-year-old in that position now, right? This poor woman is going to be, you know, her tongue is going to come out of her mouth like a bow tie. It's going to be so twisted as it comes out of her mouth, right? But that's what happens, you know. But, you know, I don't have a lot of time with you and your time is precious. We've done the tariffs. I don't think they're getting imposed.

10:49We'll see what happens. Let's switch to the rule of law. I think we're entering a golden age in America. Let me tell you what that golden age is. It's the golden age of corruption. I think we're going to have such wide scale equivocating corruption. So you can join the cabinet. You can join as an undersecretary, but wired to my personal bank account$100 ,000. Okay. Well, why not? Everyone else is doing it. God only knows what is going on with family members. God only knows what's going on with underlings. He's opened the space for that. The other thing he did, which is he got off all these cases.

11:32These were real and legitimate cases, but Trump knew if he won the election, the Department of Justice since 1973 has had an honor agreement. This is not in our constitution or anything like that. It's an honor agreement that they will not prosecute sitting American presidents. So Jack Smith went to the judge yesterday and said, yeah, this election interference case where we have tremendous damning evidence, we're dropping the case. Oh, the worst case of all, Alistair, is he left the documents in the bathroom and he had Chinese spies and Russian spies joining Mar-a-Lago. And the agency's upset, MI6 is upset, and we've got an unbelievable amount of evidence in the complaint.

12:15That's also been dropped. And I am asking you the following question. Doesn't that create licensing? And doesn't that create space for all these people? Trump gets away with everything. We'll get away with it too. The fish stinks from the head down. He's got this man, Boris Epstein, caught by his own team, caught by his own team, wanting to take a bribe to get people into the government. And by the way, in 2016, Paul Manafort was caught getting a loan from a banking official in Chicago. And the banking official wanted to be Secretary of the Army. And Paul was pushing him very hard. And I interviewed the guy.

12:54And I sent a text to Jim Mattis. I said, this guy's a bozo. He shouldn't be anywhere near the secretary. I don't know why we're even interviewing him. I did it as a favor to Paul. And Paul kept pushing, kept pushing. I sent out a few more emails. I said, certainly we can find somebody more qualified than this. We landed on Mark Esper. I don't know how well you know Mark. He's a very accomplished guy. And then he went on to become the secretary of defense. He's a real gentleman and American patriot. But I was a witness, Southern District of New York, because they uncovered all those emails. The Department of Justice called me and said, hey, we've seen these emails between you and Secretary Mattis.

13:31Could you come in and testify? And voluntarily, by the way, otherwise they would have subpoenaed me and I did. And this guy went to jail for two years for bribing Paul Manafort. Okay. So now we're back there again. What happens to these people? Does Trump just pardon them? Does Trump punish them? You tell me. I think we're heading into the golden age of corruption worse than the teapot dome scandals in the 1890s. Well, listen, if I'm right, your entire political democratic system is founded on the notion that no single person, including the president, should ever be above the law, right? Donald Trump has now been, thanks to the system, thanks to the system's failures to nail him during the four years when he was out of power, thanks to the democratic system of the people reelecting him as president.

14:22And now, thanks to special counsel Jack Smith doing, as you've just said, getting rid of these charges against him, he is above the law. Now, as you say, it rots from the top. If he is above the law, the lack of respect that people then have for the institutions of law, I think, spreads. And this stuff about the money, I mean, can you imagine what the discussions that are going on between his sort of current sidekick, Elon Musk? Elon Musk's the richest guy in the world, right? How many government departments that Musk has now sort of got his hands into, how many of those departments actually have a role in making him even richer?

15:02And how can that ever be justified in a system of government? And throw into that, Anthony, the fact that he's not doing the FBI checks on the people that he's bringing in, he's put them out of the equation, he's not signed the official transition thing. So he's not taking the public money that he could get for the transition process, because as you say, he's using the private money. That's a kind of undermining of the, it seems to me, of several foundations of your system of government. So there's a wrinkle in our system of government. There was a presumption that an honorable person would rise to the presidency.

15:38And so there was a benefit of the doubt for that honorable person. They would give them pardon powers. But of course, the honorable person would be judicious with those pardon powers. There was a presumption that, okay, there could be snafus, but this is an honorable person, so we're not going to prosecute them for minor things that have happened while they're president. They weren't expecting insurrections, and they weren't expecting the president to foment one, and they weren't expecting the president to take documents and put them in his bathroom. That wasn't stuff that they were expecting.

16:09And so we're there now, and there's a great movie that one of my friends, Gabe Sherman, wrote the screenplay on. It's called The Apprentice. If you haven't had a chance to watch it, I heartily recommend it because it's based on a lot of factual information about Trump's rise and the coaching he got from Roy Cohn. And of course, for listeners outside the United States, Roy Cohn was a very famous, hard ass, hard edge New York lawyer. He worked for Joe McCarthy in the 1950s during the big Red Scare where everyone was being accused of being a communist. And he hurt a lot of people. He was a very insidious sort of a guy.

16:45He liked inflicting pain on people. And he said something to Donald Trump. He said three things to Donald Trump. He said, never back down, never admit defeat under any circumstances, and never, ever apologize for anything. Those were the three things that Roy Cohn rammed into Donald Trump's head. That manifestation has led to the cretin status that Trump has, but it's also led to his rise. These tactics have been very successful for him, Alistair. He backed down on Matt Gaetz. Well, you know, but Matt Gaetz is an object in his field of vision, okay? He ran Matt Gaetz over with the, you know, that tank, that car that they let him drive in, whatever they call it, you know, the monster or whatever it is.

17:27He just ran him right over with it. He didn't care. And then five minutes later, he went to Pam Bondi. So when you say he backed down on Matt Gaetz, hey, Matt, I'm putting you up for this. If you can't make it, I actually could care less about you. I've got another person in the wings. But there is a wrinkle there, okay, that Trump has now picked up. So the Trump antenna, because he's got very good political instincts, just went up and the antenna is blinking on the top of his head. He says, wait a minute, the Republicans are growing backbones in the Senate because I know the inside story. I talked to several Republican senators and full disclosure, I'm still a Republican.

18:05I've donated to many of these people. You'll see me on the - Hey, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. On the night in New York, you said you were going to become an independent. Well, I did. And there's a good chance that I will. But if these Republicans back up what they're doing right now, I probably will stay Republican. Because these guys went to Gates and Vance behind closed doors. And they used some expletives. But they said, NFW, you're not getting confirmed. So you can have a show circus and a show trial here. It'll embarrass you. It'll embarrass the president. We're going to read the ethics report into the congressional record about your nefarious sexual activity with underage women.

18:48Okay. And we're going to blow you out of the water. So if you want to do that, there's going to be no recess appointment for you, none of that other stuff. Are there going to be any more of these appointments that get the treatment? The Matt Gaetz treatment? Yeah. I don't know. It's a good question. McCarthy is telling people that he thinks Hegseth will get through and Tulsi Gabbard will get through. but there are senators saying that they won't get through. But Tulsi Gabbard, is she - Can I interrupt you for one second? Our producer is saying, you said you were now an independent. No, I said I was thinking about it.

19:21These are our producers riling me up. I'm still a Republican. It's very hard to break ranks. What is your football team again? They're one up north. It's called Burnley. Okay, Burnley. Okay, so you're just going to drop Burnley? I mean, they suck apparently. I don't know, but if they did suck - No, they don't. No, they don't. But if they did suck, you would just drop them like right away? No, but the question wouldn't even arise. So therefore, I would never be on a live stream in New York saying that I was going to drop them. It just wouldn't happen. Well, I mean, all right. We got a bad manager now in Donald Trump.

19:52I got a little emotional. I mean, what the hell? I mean, you know, it was an emotional night for me. I got a lot wrong and I'm on the deportation list. It was a tiny bit of emotional. Okay, the trouble is I'm feeling this step-by-step return. And then when the 27-year-old gets sacked after three weeks, he's going to pick up the phone. He's going to say, hey, Mooch. No, no, no, no. I'm a major loser now. He just tweeted about me. Call me a major loser. How much does this guy love me? Like on a scale of 1 to 10, it's probably like a 15, right? But go to the rule of law for a second, okay? Go to the rule of law.

20:30If you were sitting here in the opposition and now all the rules are being broken, everything's being stretched, what do you do? Do you play dirty like they do? Do you get on a high horse of righteousness? What's the political strategy, Alistair? God, it's so hard because, of course, I think that what was at the heart of the Democrat strategy in the election is they genuinely felt that in their tale of two futures that they were telling, a big part of it was we're good people, not bad people. We tell the truth. We don't tell lies. We believe in the rule of law. We believe in international institutions, et cetera.

21:08He says the opposite and he wins. So that makes it a difficult judgment for them. I'm surprised at how little this stuff is being called out by the big guns inside the Democrat party. I don't get a sense of them really firing on any cylinders at all about that. Is that because I'm in Britain or is it because they're not doing it? It's a really good question. I think they're in disarray. I think that it's been said, but it bears worth repeating that Biden really screwed them because Biden said, I'm old. I'm going to serve one term. I'm going to help you guys find my successor. Love the power. I'm going to stay in power.

21:47And they didn't flex on him in any way. And so he's got them in disarray. I can't see the successor. I don't think Harris is going to be successful if she runs again. It's interesting because I thought she was going to win. But when I did that interview with you and Rory, and it was back in April of this year, I did say that he would be more fearful of Gavin Newsom. Turned out that she couldn't win, but it is also unfair to her. They only gave her 107 days. So she's been weakened. Newsom, I think, is going to jump the shark. He's going to turn 60. Democrats do better with the younger people, Alistair.

22:26So, Richie Torres, somebody that you and I interviewed, I don't think he's prime time for 28, but could he be a 32 or a 36 aspirant? It's possible. We don't know at this point, but AOC wants it. She's too hard left for me, frankly, but she's got the charisma and the work ethic. But I don't see the person that's galvanizing the party. I don't see the Obama that comes in and says, okay, I'm going to represent the opposition. I'm going to represent the shadow government, as you guys would call it. And here's what we stand for. And here's how we're going to rebut what's going on in Trump world. I don't see it.

23:07No. Is it harder because they're still in power or they're still in office? So Joe Biden is still there. Kamala Harris is still there. Yeah, he's the president, she's the vice president. So anybody else who comes and starts maneuvering, that's what it looks like. Yeah, you can't do it. So they have to wait. I presume they have to wait till Trump gets in. But I really think there's a lot of damage being done now by him to the country before he's even got there. And I'll tell you the other thing he's doing, which reminds me of the Brexit debate here. So the Brexit debate here, 52 % to 48%, so it was close.

23:40But the way that the winners reacted to it was as if they'd got 100%. We can do what we want. Trump's doing that, helped by this totally false narrative that he's pushed that this was some kind of landslide. And he's redefining landslide in so many different ways. I mean, I was looking at some of the figures. So if you want to talk about a landslide, you go back to Lyndon Johnson, 64. He wins by 22.6%. Yeah, big. Nixon, 23.2. Reagan in 1984 by 18.2. And since then, there's never, ever been a double-digit win. And he, Trump is down, and I think he's the third smallest popular vote win. But they're talking and behaving like, I am all-powerful.

24:27Now, that is a narrative that has to be pushed back, because otherwise that's what makes him do some of the stuff he does. And I'm just shocked at the absence of the Democrats from the debate. Oh, yeah, for now. But I mean, what could happen, though, is the Republicans in the Senate that hate Trump grow a little bit of a spine and they say, OK, you're entitled to pick people, but you're not entitled to pick abnormal people. So we're we're going to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk to you about Europe because you're the expert there. And I want to make some predictions about the Ukraine in the Middle East with you.

25:02And then I want to talk about season two of The Apprentice White House edition. How is it going to differ from season one? How are the cast going to shape up in the screenplay? All right. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. That sounds good. See you soon.