287. Trump’s VP, Labour vs. China, and the King’s Speech

0:00Thanks for listening to the Restus Politics, sign up to the Restus Politics Plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestuspolitics .com. That's therestuspolitics .com. At Blinds .com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100 % satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

0:32Because at Blinds .com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit Blinds .com now for up to 40 % off site -wide, plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

0:50Welcome to therestus Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we were going to kick off with the UK ahead of the King's speech. But I think we should start with the United States. Come back to the King's speech. And this very interesting European political community event that Kierstharmon will be chairing later in the week. And also we both want to look at China. But let's just start with the United States. We now have the former President Trump with a bandage on his ear. We have the convention opening in Milwaukee. We have JD Vance named as his runny mate, a man who once called Trump America's Hitler and who just referred to his politics as cultural heroine.

1:30And who I see all over social media this morning, a recent speech he made saying that we once thought that Iran and Pakistan might be the first Islamist power with a nuclear weapon, but now that labor and power, it's actually United Kingdom. Where I'd like to start, Rory, is actually just underlining the fundamentals of who and what Trump is and represents have not changed by the fact that he was somebody tried to kill him. That's right. That's right. Well, so just the background on this. So this is the beginning of the big convention for the Republicans. And the timing for Trump is extraordinary.

2:03It's a very, very good week for Donald Trump and his candidacy. He survived the assassination, came out of it looking with that extraordinary photograph of him looking defiant and unbout. He wasn't a badly injured. He's come into the convention. And at the moment at which the conventions announced the case that was held against him for illegally taking classified documents out of the White House has been dropped by the judge and astonishing everybody. I mean, this was just announced on Monday. So a judge that he appointed, judge that he appointed, but it was the case where people thought there was the highest chance of having him prosecuted on criminal grounds.

2:42And she's just thrown the whole thing out, claiming that the special counsel appointed was illegally appointed overturning 30 years or more of legal precedent. So he's been cleared of this big case or the case has been taken off his shoulders to be appealed. He's come onto the convention floor. And if you watch what's going on at that convention, you have never seen the Republican party so unified or so energized. And it's an extraordinary first day. And in some ways, it calls into question a lot of what we believe about Donald Trump. He's playing it very, very differently at the moment. So, you know, everybody will hopefully be listening to the incredibly good reporting from Anthony Scaramucci and Kathy Kay on the rest of his politics US.

3:24But one of the points the Mochoffen makes is to say that traditionally Trump loves to take the limelight, doesn't want any competition, doesn't want to share a stage with anyone, and would only want a well -known billionaire in his ticket. What's actually happened now is a very different Trump. He basically sat there beaming and listening to people through the whole day of the convention. And the day of the convention is going right into the Democratic heartland. Almost everybody's speaking was African -American. And it then finished with the head of the teamsters union and then a man from California with a seek prayer.

3:56You have never seen such extraordinary kind of unity and into into this picture comes the appointment of JD Vance, which is also unusual because he's 39 years old. We'll get into him a little bit. But it's a real sign that Trump is setting up the next generation of Magal Leadership over you. There's a German word in the city, which means it sort of means stage. It's not staging. It's a combination of staging and stage management. It's how you exploit situations. And what I think has been interesting is, you know, we talked on the other day in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt about how that amazing picture of Trump on the ground, you can see his face through the legs of the secret service people trying to protect him.

4:38You can sort of still see the mind worrying. And I think that's the moment where there's an instinct telling him, this is a massive opportunity. And he gets up, he does the fight fight fight thing, which has now become a kind of battle cry. That's what they were saying at the convention, they were pumping their fist fight fight fight. And you say that he tends to avoid others getting the limelight. But in a way, what he was doing by handing the limelight to others was actually in the knowledge that they were all going to be talking about him. And they were all going to be talking about how he's a martyr.

5:11He's sacrificed his own blood for us. He's taken the bullet for us. So it plays into that. And then at the same time, giving this sense of being a figure of unity, which is the last thing Donald Trump has ever been. And frankly, I think ever will be. And of course, because the Democrats are basically being pretty decent about it, they're all coming out and saying violence has no place, political violence has no place, get well, Donald and all this sort of stuff. But they know deep down that were the were the boot of the other foot. This would not be happening. In fact, I was I was on CNN the other day, Roy, and the on the Christian Alan Paures program was on with David from who was worked for George Bush as his speech writer and a very, very clever guy.

5:54And he now writes a lot for the Atlantic and, you know, amid this. So this is like within, you know, before we've even had a few days to pass, he has written this extraordinary piece. And actually, we've asked him onto the podcast and we're going to be talking to him in the next few weeks. I'll just read you the first couple of paragraphs. Well, I think it's instructive and interesting. When a madman hammered nearly to death, the husband of then how speaking Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, jeered and mocked one of Trump's sons and other close Trump supporters, avidly promoted false claims that poor Pelosi had brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

6:26After authorities apprehended a right wing extremist plot to abduct Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat to rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted lock her up, Trump laughed and replied, lock them all up. Fascism says, from feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the capital to overturn the 2020 election, many of them threatening harm to Pelosi and vice president might bence. Trump has championed the invaders, would be kidnappers and would be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He's vowed to pardon them if returned to office.

6:59His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem in television. Now the blotcher that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. And it goes on in that vein. It's a really, really powerful piece of writing. I think it's so easy to get caught up in this, is this sort of, you know, well, he's going to be changed. He'll be, he'll come back a different man. Everybody does when they survive a brush with death. I don't think he's changed in that sense. I just think he's very, very able politically. And I think the bruce will truth is that he's on a role.

7:32The Democrats are in real trouble. This is now his election to lose. So you're absolutely right. It's awful. Trump is an awful man. He is small -minded, nasty, unpleasant. I mean, his reaction to the assault on Pelosi's husband was unbelievably unpleasant. But that's the problem of running as liberal Democrats against a proto -fascist. I mean, yeah, we have to stand up for values that he completely rejects and undermines all the time. The problem, though, is that Biden has never looked weaker. And they need to get rid of him very, very quickly. There's very little time left now. And the Republican Party has never been so unified.

8:09I mean, that was an extraordinary convention. Everybody falling in behind. And a coalition that he's now forming around him that would have been almost unimaginable eight years ago. Yeah. So the Democrats are pumping out stuff that JD Vance has said about Trump. But it'll just be sort of brushed off. Oh, well, you know, he's, kind of, seen the light. So just a little bit on JD Vance. And love to get short your thoughts on him. So I first came across him, I guess, in 2016, when people reached out to me saying he was the future of American conservatism. So he had, he was then in his early 30s. He grew up in pretty extreme poverty.

8:47He wrote this book, Hillbilly, LG. Hillbilly, LG, yeah. Which is also quite a good Netflix film. I mean, it's, it's pretty remarkable. This was a big New York Times best setter. If you go on Amazon, it's got like 97 ,000 reviews. It was a New York Times best setter for almost two years. Well, it's going to sell a hell of a lot more now. Yep. Very unusual to have a vice president, such as with his own documentary, basically, on Netflix. So Angela Rainer's style backgrounds. And like Angela, very much that dissonance between the childhood that he grew up in, with a mother as a heroin addict and living in poverty to now being this big governor.

9:24He left high school, joined the Marines, served in Iraq in a public affairs role, came back, went to Ohio State University, but then got into Yale Law School. He's married to Usha, who is a woman, vice president, her parents come in a shift from the Indian subcontinent. And she clapped for Brett Kavanaugh, who's the man that Trump put very controversially onto the Supreme Court. They then worked, moved to California where he worked for Peter Teal, controversial, bench capitalist. And he then decided after the success of his book to run to be the senator in Ohio. And he was nowhere really in that race, despite the best selling book.

10:04He was somebody who was best known to sort of liberal intellectuals, who saw him as a man who was good at explaining the Trump base until Teal convinced Trump to get behind him. And when Trump endorsed him, he romped home to victory. And all these attacks that Democrats are now launching, they launched to no higher too. They spent a lot of money reminding people in Ohio that he heard attack Trump. But it didn't work then. And I don't think it's likely to work now. Yeah. I think the position that he holds that may work is he's very, very, very profoundly anti -abortion. And once we get back to more normal post assassination attempt debate, I think the abortion issue really was beginning to hurt Trump.

10:43And so that may be something that plays to advances disadvantage. It's also an injury. One of the few things that Donald Trump and I have in common, Roy's that we both dislike facial hair. And yet we just don't believe it, the sort of the beard philosophy. Yeah. Trump said that he's on the record of this. Yeah, he definitely is. He's not a fan of beards. I remember what's suggesting to Frank Dobson that he should shave his beard off. You tell him to shave my beard off. You can fuck off. So I guess he's allowed one of his kids to grow a beard. And now we've got JD back. Is that why Jeremy Corbyn won't come on our show at the moment?

11:20Listen, I had a very nice meeting with Jeremy Corbyn the other day. We're making progress. We're making progress. We opened a mental health residential unit together. I find this whole thing really, really worrying. You're right about the Biden situation being grim. And the thing is that what's happened here, there's been very little in the last few years, really to shift the dial. People like you and I, we thought that Trump losing and then provoking that riot and genuinely the Sikhs, we thought that would be the end of it. We were wrong about that. And not just us. Most of the Republicans, many of them, most the Republican congressmen and senators who refused to vote for his impeachment, were saying privately at the time, we don't need to do it.

12:02He's yesterday's news. That's not to mean ourselves by impeaching him. And as you say, now he's got complete control of the Republican party. He's got greater control of some of these judges that he's now looking to in this changed mood that he's trying to create to get rid of other cases as well. So there's been no kind of really change moment in the whole thing. We thought maybe the him being convicted would be a change moment. It turned out not to be. This assassination attempt has become particularly in light of Joe Biden's debate performance. And interestingly, in David Frums piece, he makes the point that there was something he found profoundly unsettling about the fact that Joe Biden felt he had to do the debate with Trump because Trump is actually against American institutions.

12:46He's an extremist, not somebody in the mainstream. Joe Biden took that decision because he felt he had to and it was a disaster. We've now had another game change moment. And it seems to me the only similar moment that can move the dial in a different direction now. Is I'm afraid for Joe Biden to step down and for the Democrats to find the candidate or the pair of candidates, the running ticket that can beat what we now know to be the Trump Vance combination. That shouldn't be impossible, but they seem to find it impossible. And let's be honest, the Republicans are going to come through this week, hire in the polls.

13:17It shouldn't affect the fundamentals, but it will. They'll come out hire in the polls. You'll have an amazing display of unity. Trump will try to project himself as a more unifying figure. Vance will become a really interesting character, not very well known to most Americans overnight. His book will become a best seller again. Meanwhile, the Democrats are completely on the back foot. Yeah, let's just for a second before we move back to the Democrats, just a little bit more on JD Vance. So 2016, as I say, he was seen as a conservative intellectual. And as you can imagine, those are pretty few and far between.

13:48So everybody gets very excited whenever you find a conservative intellectual. So, um, such as yourself, Roy. That's right. Exactly. And people said, you know, you've really got to meet him, Roy, because he's very interested in Scots, Irish, heritage, and American history and that's sort of more traditional vision of conservatism. And he is an interesting figure. I mean, if you go back to the 2016 article, which people talk about where he says that, you know, Trump's views range between the immoral and the absurd, you know, he's quoting Walt Whitman, but his argument essentially is that Trump is responding to people who are alienated by stagnant wages, you know, just the sense that the American economy is not delivering for the kind of working class by the Iraq war and by the fact that free trade has taken everybody's jobs by the opioid crisis by unemployment and by immigration.

14:39And that's his, his kind of vision of this whole thing. And I suppose, let me just throw this one back to you. There's, there's an interesting question here. So he's speaking for what he calls hillbillies. It's kind of what a really called kind of red necks. People in the whole appellation spine of America right away from Kentucky up to Ohio. He's speaking for people who often are struggling to graduate from high school, certainly not, not getting to university who are below the poverty line who've been affected horribly by the opioid crisis, who live in these rust belt towns or these rural areas.

15:13But it's an interesting base because I would guess that's only, I don't know, 10, 15 % of the American electorate. And I don't know how much they vote. So in fact, Trump's coalition has to be much broader than that. He can't win on the basis of those people he's got to get a more ethnic diverse vote. He's got to get suburban votes. He's got to get quite successful conservative Republicans. What's your sense on on how important that kind of group is? Because I guess in Britain, the equivalent would be people in the Northeast who attempted to vote for Boris after Brexit or something over you. I don't know the American electorate as well as I do the British, but there is without doubt part of the reason for picking him is although he became very wealthy through all this sort of venture capitalism stuff.

15:56And by the way, the Peter Till connection, I think, becomes an opportunity for the Democrats and it will go through that sort of that sort of big tech route to try to kind of undermine him. You couldn't call your own memoir Hillbilly Elegy unless you had a genuine place that you were coming from. If you were kind of middle class politician, if you were Nigel Varage who would share his politics, you couldn't talk about being a Hillbilly unless you were. So he's definitely got that kind of that sort of root in. And of course, one of the things that the Trumps of this world have done very, very well and Vance is good at this as well is to essentially be the elite but sort of pretend to be speaking up for the people.

16:36Can I just interrupt on the second? Because I think Trump is different. I mean, he came from a very, very wealthy veteran. But I guess JD Vance is probably more like some of the labor front bench, somebody who came from extreme poverty but then got to an Ivy League school or in the case, the labor front bench got to Oxford and us now in a much more comfortable position. The thing about the labor front bench is, as Lisa Nandy said, when they were being vetted for their outside financial interest, there was a price of how few they all had. I think that the difference here is that they've come from that poor background and gone way out to the right.

17:11And in Vance's case, since he was presenting himself, he was a never -trumper, he defined himself as a never -trumper, he was close to Mitt Romney. And then as you said earlier, once Trump got behind him and he worked out that Trump was the future of the Republican Party, whether they liked him a lot, he got close to the family. And look, I was talking to this American guy the other day who said he'd listen to our podcast when we're talking about Trump the other day. And he was saying, you've got to stop thinking of these people as normal politicians. You've got to think of them more as a kind of organized crime syndicate.

17:46These people don't care about anybody other than themselves. And that goes for Trump, that goes for his family, and that goes for a lot of their supporters. But where the political support comes from is from quotes, ordinary working people who have decided that he is on their side. And I know there'll be a lot of people who find that offensive, but I think it is a different way of thinking. And if that's why he is attracted to people like Putin, that's why he is attracted to these strong man leaders. And on Putin, Rory, this is IJD Vance, his views on Ukraine, he actually did an interview not long ago with Steve Bannon, where he said I couldn't care less about Ukraine one way or the other.

18:23Now that's his basic take. He thinks America is wasting billions. Exactly. So he's Vance's brutal on cutting support from Ukraine doesn't want any support going to Ukraine from the US. He's also, I mean, just to state the blinding obvious, but this is really important to understand for all of these Republicans. He of course believes that the election was stolen by Biden. And he supported what happened on January the 6th. And every single senior member of the Republican Party has been forced now to buy into Trump's big lie. And so the whole thing is toxically anti -democratic and it's very, very core.

19:02And you've got to ask yourself about JD Vance what's going on here. I mean, here's this guy that was the darling of the New York Times for a bit, quotes Walt Whitman, goes to Yale Law School, and is now out there saying that Biden stole the election, tried to undermine American democracy, getting behind this man, who as you pointed out, he referred to as America's Hitler. I mean, this is a form of kind of political opportunitism and cynicism, which is kind of beyond him. I mean, I'm struggling even with my slightly shambolic former party to think of anybody in mainstream elected British politics who's prepared to go that far.

19:40I mean, even this trust wasn't prepared to say that Trump won the election and that Biden stole it. I mean, this is really crazy stuff. And yet, JD Vance just represents so many of them. I also wonder whether, because if you remember, Trump had this sort of beauty parade of this possible running mate, picks when he got them all down to Mar -Elaugone, and he sort of made them parade in front of him and like a kind of reality TV show. And reading the American media, apparently Vance sort of made it through a final short list of three. And he didn't know that it was going to be him until a few minutes before it was announced on Trump's social media.

20:17And I wonder whether the clincher was the fact that after the guy shot at Trump, Vance was one of the first people out publicly to say this. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. No factual evidence, nothing to back it up is a straightforward kind of, well, it's a lie. The idea that Joe Biden sort of tried to get Trump killed is ridiculous. But that is the message that is now doing the rounds at the convention. One more thing that's maybe not been reported enough in the UK media, as part of this convention, the Republican manifesto is announced.

21:00And this is a pretty radical manifesto. So we can begin to see some of the policy ingredients of what's going in behind a new Trump presidency. And probably the most dramatic news on it is on free trade. So the Republicans basically completely given up. They don't talk about free trade at all. Instead, they're talking about 60 % tariffs on almost all goods from China. And we'll get to that in a bit. But we're only in a situation of over 100 % tariffs on Chinese vehicles. 10 % tariffs on basically all goods from elsewhere in the world. And this is not only going to be very damaging for the global economy, if Trump comes in.

21:34So we really need to think about what that means to move away from free trade protections, but also will drive up prices for ordinary Americans for a lot of Trump voters. Almost certainly. So there's a big economic story that needs to be on picks. And I don't know whether, well, maybe that's a question for you. Is that too complicated an economic story? Can the Democrats find a way of explaining to people that if Trump carries on his manifesto and puts these huge trade barriers up? I mean, China's exporting has a trade surplus of $30 billion a month to the US. If you put up tariffs on almost all Chinese goods to 60 % and all international goods to 10 % prices are going to skyrocket for ordinary Americans.

22:13Rory, one of the reasons why the Democrats are in a mess is because they haven't been able to tell properly the positive story about the positive state of the US economy under Biden. So if they can't tell a factual picture effectively and convincingly, a lot harder to give them a project fear type operation based upon what Trump say. And remind us of your trio. You have a trio, don't you? You talk about what you've done, what you're going to, what's the three things you think you got to do in election again? What you've done? Yeah. What you're going to do and the risk of your opponents? Okay. So in this case, you're saying the Democrats really got to find a way of explaining what they've achieved in the economy because it's positive.

22:54And people are better off than the economy is strong. You've then got to have a plan for the future. Second term. Yeah. Yeah. Which again, I think Biden needs to sharpen up on that. And then you've got to talk about the risk of your opponents. But the problem with Trump is the where do you take the language when you're talking about him being, you know, a threat to democracy, authoritarian, etc. Maybe they do need to bring it down to an economic place that says, have you actually thought through the consequences of what he's proposing? But I think with Trump now, his supporters just don't care.

23:26The only thing I'd say is that David Axelrod Obama's strategist, he always is a wonderful line. Conventional wisdom in American politics is always wrong. That's not necessarily true. But maybe there is a conventional wisdom growing here that this single event is going to make the election virtually unloosable for Trump. That's the conventional wisdom at the moment. It might be wrong. It might be wrong. It may be that the sort of people Trump needs to win over. I'm not going to come over whatever. But the problem is that Biden has lost people in the some of those swing states and is he who has to get them back.

24:02I suppose almost at the break, but at some point, we need to do a proper deep dive into the alternative democratic candidates. So there are these very strong governors, Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan, Governor Pritzker from Illinois, Gavin Newsom. I was actually very struck by Josh Shapiro. So he just gave a speech. He's the Governor of Pennsylvania, and he's a Democrat, Governor of Pennsylvania. Just gave a speech after the shooting, paying tribute to the firefighter who had lost his life, protecting his children. And I was really impressed. He really knows how to communicate. And he's so worth watching Josh Shapiro.