370. Starmer’s Silver Bullet and Trump’s War on the Poor

24:24I mean, they may not, you know, for us sake want to call it a customs union. By all means not call it a customs union. Call it, I don't know, a Western union. Oh, call it, you know, the UK economic European economic partnership or agreement, doesn't matter what you call it in the end. Well, it does, but you know, I don't think we should get too hung up on it. The point is, are you going to try to align more closely? Or are you going to fall into the trap that Faraj said I want you to of saying you have to choose between America and Europe. It's nonsense. Just on this book, Rory, I've not read it yet, but I've read a lot of the reviews and it strikes me as a bit of a problem this that it's almost like Keir Starma is a bit player in the story of Keir Starma.

25:06And that is not good for Keir Starma. I was talking to remember the cabinet yesterday, so this is the sort of book you expect to appear 10 years into a political project, not at the start. And I think too many people are talking to too many journalists about the stuff that really helps journalists, but it doesn't help the government. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the extraordinary thing. I mean, if people have a chance to look at this book, it's a remarkable piece of journalism. And it's quite remarkable. We had this, we interviewed people haven't heard our leading interview with Michael Lewis.

25:35He's incredibly funny about what it's like being a journalist when you suddenly granted access that you could never believe that you were ever going to get. You know, so he sits with Sam Bankman free, but somehow these journalists have got a lot of people talking. And the picture they've portrayed, if I'm right, is that Morgan McSweeney who's effectively the chief of staff is portrayed as the kind of genius behind the whole thing. And Starmer is portrayed as somebody's put in the driver's seat. Of a driverless train. The driverless train, yeah. I was rereading your Tom Bourbon book too and trying to look for clues there.

26:07I was fascinated by that Bourbon book because he makes a huge amount out of the idea that Starma is the most working class labor leader ever. It seems to be the story. But actually his description of Starma's childhood makes it seem as though Starma had a life pretty much like about 50 % of the British population. He grew up in a commuter belt and sorry. His parents both went to grammar school. His dad was a tool worker, his mother's an nurse. Their neighbors were pretty middle class people. He went to a grammar school which later became a private school. And I'm sure it's true that he's more working class than Tony Blair, Michael Foot, etc.

26:45But that sort of says more about the Labour Party than it does about Kierstammer. I mean, it's not that he comes from a particularly extreme version. I think what we'd say about his childhood is unbelievably normal, isn't it? Yeah, possibly. I think it was the, it's more the challenges that he faced than his childhood with a difficult relationship with his dad and his mother being very ill most of the time. And him having to kind of look after, you know, the brother who died recently was was always somebody clearly in the corner of, you know, special care. And so was I think it was that and this sense that they didn't really have much money.

27:16But yeah, I think it probably was for most people living certainly in a place like Surrey around that time, probably as you'd say normal. But I just feel with this book, I mean, I was trying to think we had lots and lots of books written about as well. We were in power, but I don't remember ever sort of feeding them. I don't remember. I always felt it you were better to be in a position of to say, I had nothing to do with it. You know, in Morgan with Swini's got to watch this because he, you know, once you become the center of attention in a way that you can't control, this is kind of what happened to me, but it happened to me in large part because the media decided, I didn't want to be the story.

27:50The media can I decide I should be the story. And that made my job a lot harder to do. But I think it, I felt reading, I think it was the F .T. review I read and I thought, God, if an Andru Rosy wrote a piece of the episode, I thought, God, if I was caring this, I think, no, this is not good. I've got journalists that I would count as friends. Tom Bourne would be one of them, but Tom's no longer kind of, you know, journalism, the conventional sense. But you should never ever imagine when you're doing your job in government and they're doing their job in media, never, ever, ever imagine that they're your friends.

28:20You know, you can be friendly with them, but they're not your friends. Well, I think that's a good line on which to finish the first half and move on to Trump, USAID, Musk, and a very, very different world where boy is America approaching the modern world in a very different way to start. Yeah, my dear. I also want to link it to Britain because I think that what they're doing to USAID is utterly horrific, but it's an opportunity this, I think, for Britain to step up because, you know, we've lost a lot of soft power and all of clout in the world because the retro Johnson got rid of Diffid. So let's come back on that.

28:56Very good. Bye -bye.

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30:41Welcome back to the rest of the forest from the Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we should point people to leading wherever they get their podcasts. And I thought this week was particularly interesting. I made Alshara, former al -Qaeda leader, now the president of Syria. And as Gerard Russell, our kind of Islamic expert, as he explained to us, often these interviews are more of a shift of what's not said than what is. But I thought it was, I've listened to a couple of times back now, and I think there's a lot in it. I wanted to, can I just have a little correction. I said in the debrief that the foreign minister, Assad Hassan al -Shabani, who is very close to the president.

31:20But I'd said that he'd also been a fighter with him in Iraq and that they'd crossed into Syria together. That's not the case. Apparently he's never been to Iraq. So apologies to the foreign minister. But thank you to him and to his assistant, Razan, for their helping with the interview, which is we've already had 600 ,000 views of the Arabic version alone, Rory. Yeah, it was so we did it in Damascus. We traveled to Damascus together, saw it at this amazing moment of transition. And again, a really pleased that we've managed to put out an Arabic version, that's really being picked up across the Middle East.

31:55It's been a lot of press coverage and at least also encourage people, maybe worth if you're doing it on YouTube, going forward to the end where the two of us provide a little bit of an introduction and an explainer and context. It's probably the best. I think you and I have done on trying to explain Syria and some of the contexts of Syria. So think about it as two things, an interview, but also quite an interesting self -contained episode of the end, if you're looking for a guide to Syria and some of the challenges he faces. Now, Alistair, we're now moving from Britain, which is struggling with how does it get out of the status quo?

32:30Is it just stuck in the mud? Can government do anything? Will it be regulations and civil service to the US where Trump is taking entirely the opposite approach? He is behaving like a profoundly authoritarian, almost a kind of absolute monarch and he is brushing aside checks and balances. He is firing members of the executive, the security services. He is challenging judges. He's ripping up international treaties. And the reason I think we wanted to talk about this is that there is a tendency of people who are sympathetic towards Trump to say that we're all suffering from Trump to arrangement syndrome.

33:13So I remember when we did our garrison thing, even members of your family were like, well, be a bit careful there. You know, you're making him sound more crazy than he really is. The fact is that by going carefully through what he's doing, I hope we can get people to understand just how radical it is that this isn't just talk. And the example of this, which means a lot to me is what's happened to USAID. So if I've had a career at all, it's largely oriented around foreign countries and development. And I have been a contractor for USAID and the British Aquaman Diffid. And I've been foreign office diplomat, but I've also been a Diffid minister and finally the Secretary of State for International Development in the UK.

33:52So this stuff, I quite and I run a couple of NGOs. So I kind of understand this work quite well. USAID was the largest development organization in the world. It was spending almost 50, 60 billion US dollars a year if you take into account all US spend. And the core spending of USAID was about 40 billion. As I think we said before, 90 % of the assistance for the humanitarian crises in the hall of Africa last year were coming from the American government. And to put it in context, the UK, which is a big development spender will be spending about a third of that amount. I mean, America last year has spent $8 billion in sub -Saharan Africa.

34:34It will have spent much more though. So what they've done there, and I can get into the weeds of this, but it's to do with whether you're just counting bilateral or you're counting multilateral. And so they will have also put billions through the world bank, through the IMF, through UN agencies. So it's way more than that. So the A billion was the bilateral stuff. Yeah. So the money will probably be in Africa, given its importance, well, will probably be approaching 15, 20 billion. And they would have had thousands of USAID staff working directly. So these are people directly employed by the US government in Washington or in embassies around the world.

35:11And then there will be tens of thousands of additional people employed who are working for contractors, so big development contractors or NGOs. So we've interviewed Dev Miliband on the show. IRC gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year directly from USAID. So all the programs he was talking about, when he was talking to us about programs in Somalia Sudan, many, many of those will have stopped. And to put it in context, the announcement was that all USAID money stops on a dime with a few exceptions, which we can get into, stopped. Doesn't matter, you have a contract. So you know, turquoise mountain, which my wife Shashana runs, has a contract, had another million dollars to go.

35:54Money just stops. And then they've announced that all the staff are being fired. So lots of my friends who work for USAID or working for contracting organizations now, emailing me, say, if lost their jobs. And if you look at the Africa bit, they have gone from literally thousands of staff working in Africa to guess how many staff now will remain to work 12. 12. Exactly. 12 staff to oversee what was literally over 10 billion dollars worth of annual funding to Africa. 12 people. It's hard not to see this as an act of absolute barbarism, cruelty, economic vandalism, social, political vandalism, call it what you want.

36:33So in Kenya alone, they reckon 40 ,000 people currently involved in aid and development will now lose their jobs. The Americans have been funding refugee camps in Kenya, where three quarters of million people are located from 19 different countries. Ethiopia, 5 ,000 health care professionals losing their jobs overnight. And you know, I guess the sort of mega people will say, oh well, they can sort themselves out. They should, you know, but this is a relationship that the United States has built up with these countries over decades. American aid and development money accounts for 15 % of South Sudan's economic output.

37:14But in Jordan, as we said, it's almost 40 % of the security budget. Correct. And key departments of the Jordanian government just stopped. Jordan, which is now going to have to take a million refugees, otherwise it loses that money. The thing that I find so grotesque and defensive about Musk, here is the richest man of the world on a massive ego trip and a massive power kick taking it out on the poorest people in the world. And what you've got here is the weak being made weaker and the strong being made stronger, which of course is what Trump is and really is all about. And the other thing that this was saying about this does relate to Britain.

37:5420 years ago this month, Rory, a very important event happened in Trafalgar Square. Very good. Have a guess. I think you've already told me, but tell me, tell the listeners. So Nelson Mandela stood in Trafalgar Square and launched Make Poverty History 20 years ago this week. There's a reception in London tonight to commemorate the event. And my favorite quote in a brilliant speech was this one, sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation, let that greatness blossom. All the people that you were talking about, or including yourself, including Shashana, including anybody who's worked in this area, in the eyes of the man with the biggest Twitter following in the world, Elon Musk, you are basically all part of organized crime.

38:42He said, you're all criminals. Can I get into this? So to leap back to this narrative point with Elon Musk. So two things that are interesting. One is that quite a lot of what they're saying about international development is what Boris Johnson's conservative party tried to say about Diffit. But the difference is that if Boris Johnson had taken it into its head to cut all UK development spending overnight and sack all the stuff, he might have tried it. I'd like to get into on this. He probably would have tried to place some stories and newspapers, you know, Daily Mail, writing some stories about wasted aid, bad development project.

39:18You can always find them right. If you're spending billions around the world, you can always find the classic ones, usually tiny projects which have been approved as a favor to someone in the country. So the one that dominated a lot of our lives when I was in Diffit when I was a minister was I think a 40 ,000 pound project for funding tropical fish research in the Caribbean, which the Daily Mail managed to run the headline, funding Nemo. And usually it's these small projects because the big projects, these multi -million dollar projects go through very complicated peer reviews, strategic plans, bidding processes.

39:57But often ambassadors or development professionals on the ground may be making smaller decisions with small amounts of money because it's something the president from the country has requested for some reason. He's obsessed with trying to support his national aquarium or whatever it happens to be. So there's quite a lot of soft power and diplomacy behind these projects. Let me jump in there, President Kennedy, JFK, when they set up USAID. Let's remember the word the D. The USAID, it doesn't mean USAID, it's the United States Agency for International Development. It's about developing these countries, not just giving them sort of charity.

40:34And Kennedy made the point. He actually addressed the first aid workers. And he said to them, you should think of yourselves like soldiers in that you are going to places where you are representing our interests in a way that will prevent us having to send other Americans to take part in wars. And I think that is an important insight on this. And I think that what you have with Trump, because he's Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, he made this really interesting observation. I saw him in Norway recently and he says, we're moving from a Helsinki world to a yolta world. And Helsinki is all about where smaller countries and poorer countries can rely on the bigger ones to kind of have rules and order and systems that will help everybody.

41:24And the yolta world, which Trump wants us to be in, is where he and Putin and Xi Jinping can say basically, you have this bit of the world, Xi, you have Taiwan, have bits of Ukraine, Vlad and I'll take Greenland and Panama and Canada and anything else I can get my hands on. There's a point also about an incredible change in the way that we think about our obligations towards other people, which I guess is the heart of this JD Vance attempt to say, as a Christian, he really cares mostly about his own family and country and not about other people. Because what the story since the Second World War has been is that the poorest countries since Sub -Saharan Africa have largely been stuck while the West has grown incredibly.

42:06So time of independence in 1957, GDP per capita in the UK compared to Ghana would be about four times that, the average person, Britain about four times, well, the average person in Ghana. Today, the average person would be 25 or 30 times wealthier and the contract was in the UK compared to Ghana. The contract broadly was in the end, we're quite privileged. In the end, some of the story about how we made our money was to do with the ways in which these other countries were frankly exploited and the ways in which we did a lot of strange things with our companies and funding wars and not really investing in their structures.

42:44You can't say this. This is all very, very woke historical. You've got to be basically, we're great. The empire was great. Everything's fantastic. So the risk is that you end up slightly where we both had a conversation with the Prime Minister Denmark on Friday. What worried me about that conversation is that she seems to have entered a world which is basically push out the boat I'm in. Denmark is a lovely little country where we've got a lovely standard of living where terrific people and everybody else can go away. We're going to be a little island and we're not really going to care much about the rest of the world and we're not going to take positions on geopolitics and we're not going to challenge Trump.

43:25You're slightly exaggerated what she said. I'm exaggerating but I suppose that in a way what she's caught is the mood where instead of feeling we're very lucky and the way to both be generous and also ultimately protects ourselves from a lot of poor people starving around the world who might say, excuse me, I'll have a bit of that. How come you get to be so rich and I don't have anything? It's to invest in developing them. Just to go about our earlier conversation, I do wonder whether this much tougher approach in relation to the communication on asylum and borders and immigration with these pictures of people being loaded onto planes to be flown back to wherever it might be, whether that is part of the politics that she was talking about in Denmark where they have been very, very tough on asylum and immigration and they have seen off the Danish peoples party.

44:19But I agree with you this sort of sense of nationalism that we look after ourselves and I worry that Britain which has been this great global leader, you know, the Tony Blair government was introduced if it and created it and the OECD at the time said that the UK ran the most effective aid and development project of any country in the world when you think the money that we were putting in and how it was being used and you mentioned earlier the thing about soft power, soft power is real, soft power means something. You just think about what America is doing to its soft power. If you define soft power as how it is seen by the rest of the world, how it is seen and how that affects its relationships, Trump thinks he can just bully everybody.

45:05What they're doing in pulling the plug on USAID because you say across Africa, who do you think is going to step in? China. So there's a geopolitical element to this that they're just blind to. So you've put your finger on something really important geopolitically because the other thing is not just that it's gripping space to China to fill the world order. What it's also doing is giving incredible encouragement to Putin and other authoritarian rulers around the world because what Musk and by extension Trump seem to be saying about USAID which is that it's a criminal organisation and that NGOs, in other words charities that take money from governments but don't necessarily agree with the governments are illegitimate.

45:53And what you're doing by doing that is you're handing a huge thing to your opponents. Suddenly you've got DoDitch in Republic of Serbska saying, yeah, we've always said that USAID is a criminal organisation. You've got the Russians and you've got Ali F saying, yeah, we've always told you that these NGOs are a complete outrage and we should shut down civil society in NGOs because these are organisations that receive funding from the US or funding from our government and criticise our governments. And now we've got the Americans admitting it. It's no longer just a conspiracy theory. It's no longer us, it's just us saying USAID is a criminal organisation.

46:31These guys have come out and omitted it. And then they accelerate. And you can see this. The George and Dream will accelerate shutting down civil society in NGOs. Republic of Serbska will continue and the whole narrative that Trump is driving will be picked up by players around the world and accelerated. Yeah, it is on so many levels completely mad. You talked about Johnson and the Mail would have put out these, why we'd spend this, why we're spending that. The White House press secretary gave a long list of projects, why we found in this, turned out lots of them had nothing to do with USAID. As you say, you'll always be able to find stuff.

47:07There will always be some corruption here and there. You can find it. But the fact is, for Musk, presumably on Trump's behalf to stand there and say these 10 ,000 people, some of whom are working in horrible conditions for not very much money, doing amazing things to help some of the sickest and poorest people in the world. And by the way, I saw somebody in the foreign office sent me a while back an analysis of the decline or the demise of Diffid. Part of the analysis was the stent to which projects that we had been funding on the health of women and girls, which a bit like USAID now have just stopped.

47:46And systems that have been built over, over years have just stopped. And I just say I very fond of David Lamy, I think he's a very good foreign secretary to do a very good job. But he's now the secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth and development office. I don't necessarily like the idea of saying development is all about how we link that to growth and to immigration. It's actually got to be how do we help these poorer countries develop? That's got to be the focus. I mean, this is a story that we need to be honest about in Britain. What we basically did is we took Diffid, which was a very, very impressive world -renowned organisation.

48:27I mean, some of the most talented people in our country wanted to work for Diffid. I had these incredibly bright impressive subsents. And it could be a bit pompous at times, but my goodness in World Bank meetings or in donor meetings in the Congo, Diffid were often the brightest, best organised people in the room. And the money was protected. So when I was the Secretary of State, I was overseeing a budget of $20 billion a year to put it in American terms. And it was protected. The Treasury couldn't touch it. I could literally decide on the stroke of a pen, are we putting $150 million into health in Ethiopia or $150 million into education in Nigeria.

49:07And everything was measured according to whether or not it contributed to decreasing global poverty. We weren't allowed to tie the aid, we weren't allowed to touch it, British businesses, we weren't allowed to try to leave for a jit in that way. We have specifically untied it, because if you remember during the such a period, it was very much tied to big economic projects. And there'd been a great scandal called the Pergao Dam, the sort of corruption scandal. So Johnson came along and a bit like Musk and to some extent Marco Rubio said, no, no, no, no, we can't have what sounds like so big international NGO.

49:44What we're going to do is we're going to bring it under the foreign office, we're going to reduce the budget, we're going to tie the aid. So he cut and cut very hard. On the surface, the cut didn't seem that much because it went from 0 .7 % to 0 .5%, but because so much of our money is already pre -committed to things like the World Bank and the IMF theme packs was that I turned up on the ground in Rwanda when I was running an international NGO called GIF Directly and found that at the moment where I turned up a few years ago, the British Bilateral Aid budget for Rwanda had reduced from about $100 million a year down to something in the region of $5 or $6 million a year.

50:19And I was coming in as an international NGO with a budget five times out of the British government. And if you imagine what that means when you're going into meetings with the president of Rwanda or the cabinet, who are they going to pay more attention to? British government or this international NGO that's coming in with far more resources. But you're under as much as to get a lot of money out of the British government in recent years, Rwanda. They've done it in a very different way. How have they done it? They've done it by trying to convince the British government to give the money for hosting asylum seekers.

50:45So Boris Johnson did this and then we interviewed Kier Samu. This is when Labour was still in opposition. Labour's in opposition. One of the things that really chaired up many, many people is that he said that he would restore the 0 .7 % and restore defeat. Both parties are committed to doing it when fiscal conditions allow. And they've never done it. When fiscal conditions allow, the Tories chose to do tax cuts. When fiscal conditions allow labour chooses to put up salaries for train drivers, but nobody's suggesting putting more money into international development. Now, this is a huge opportunity.

51:21And this is what I'm going to hand over to you on because this is the moment where Britain should say, OK, America's leaving, Britain is stepping up to 0 .7%. We're going to work with Europe on this. The West is going to be an international development plerum. We're not going to hand the whole game to China. Don't it? And it's another area where rather than sort of moving away from arguments where the daily mail, Nigel Farage et al say, why are we giving money to these countries and we've got so many problems our own, which is such an easy, simplistic, popular start against the make. You make an argument about why it is a good thing to help poorer countries become richer, sicker people become healthier, et cetera.

52:02Tony Blair did an interview a while back. I think it was with, I think it was with Amel Rajan. I remember he said, so Tony is very good at sort of, you know, framing arguments. And he said that when we were in power, he felt there were three main planks to our foreign power, if you like. One was our close relationship with the United States. Well, that's kind of, we've still got it, but it's much more fragile, maybe than it was because Trump's are unpredictable. That was number one. Number two was we're a leader in Europe. Well, you can't say that anymore because it breaks it. And the third thing he said was we have enormous soft power through Diffid.

52:41So two of those three, two and a half of those three are currently undermined. I would say all three of them have to be rebuilt. Final sort of point before we move off this, the bizarre thing about the Republican criticism's USAID is they're describing it as though it was the old Diffid, as though it was this sort of very high -minded, tetacratic organization that had nothing to do with US government policy. The reality is actually the problems with USAID with the reverse. USAID was much more like Boris Johnson's development agency. It didn't have a sectorist state. It had an administrator who reported to the sector state.

53:19It was incredibly that most of the problems with USID were when it went political. Many of the problems that I dealt with with USID is because Congress had suddenly decided that they needed to take maize from farmers in Iowa and imported it huge cost and to South Sudan. Or Congress had suddenly decided they couldn't support family planning in Africa because there were Christians who didn't like the idea of family planning. Ambassadors had far more control over USAID locally than any ambassador had ever a different program. Ambassadors and a lot of the programs that are being criticized, programs were an ambassador basically is trying to do a favor to the president's wife by funding some charity that she supports and those exactly things.

53:59In Afghanistan, of course, USAID was deeply part of the counterinsurgency strategy and did ludicrous programs with big contractors, 120 million on empowering women where it turned out that about 57 beneficiaries resulted. But the reason for those problems was because it was far too political. It didn't have any decent guidance on what its budget was, what its targets were, and it was being pushed around by the White House. What Trump and Musk are doing is making the situation much worse, not better. Although, in fact, actually what they're doing in practice, it seems that moment is just getting rid of the whole thing at all and leaving as you say, a whole which is going to end up for weights and coordination probably being removing a quarter of the entire international aid spend of the world overnight.

54:50But Rory, in other news, they've announced that White South Africans should be entitled to refugee status in the United States. And Elon Musk is a White South African as me. Indeed he is indeed he is. So this is what I mean about the powerful, getting more powerful and the weaker getting weaker because that in the end is what they're about. And I do think that the world is beginning to catch up a little bit. I was listening to the Ezra Klein show a New York Times with Kara Swisher who's a journalist who's been covering must for a long long long time. And she was basically saying this guy doesn't care about anything or anyone apart from himself.

55:30And the things that he thinks make him this Herkulean sort of historic figure. We should maybe think about getting on the podcast. It was a very very interesting analysis of the guy. But I would just say the thing about Diffid Roy and this applies to USAID as well. It's very rare that you can combine things that are both morally wrong and strategically inept. But I think this does it really really well. My final point as we go to an end is I think there's another risk that we haven't lent into enough and that we should discuss in a future podcast. As America gets moral authoritarian, it's very tempting to look at Germany and Italy in the 1930s and imagine that what happens is that as Trump ignores judges, tells the executive not to implement what they say, takes over the FBI and security services.

56:22You end up with a very centralised authoritarian government. But the US is not Germany or Italy in the 1920s and 30s. It's a society with huge divisions and an immense amount of distributed power and opposition. So states, California, money, Wall Street, media and almost half the American population very very angry. And as Trump begins to take institutions to pieces, those Americans won't put up with it. They'll push back. They'll try to push back institutionally. So you can see they try to push back with judges. But as Trump begins to get rid of those institutional safeguards, uses his majority in congress, says these are Obama's judges.

57:07Musk's is saying we're going to impeach the judges. Not going to implement the judges' decisions. Then the only route for the opposition is going to increasingly become non -institutional, non -constitutional because Trump is dismantling the institution. In other words, without going all the way on Trump's arrangement syndrome, I would say that the biggest threat facing the United States over the next four years is not actually authoritarian control. But a society getting increasingly divided and violent as state governors begin to push back and reject federal rules. And Trump tries to use force to inflict them on people that don't want them.

57:45And this question of how minorities resist. I don't want to use the word civil war. But that is a risk that we're not talking about enough yet because we're imagining that Trump is always going to win. Things get more dangerous in fact when people oppose. Yeah, very interesting. There's a debate going on already amongst constitutional lawyers and experts in the United States as to whether they're already in a constitutional crisis because Trump and Musk and Vance, Vance who I say is now saying judges are not allowed to control the executives' legitimate power, which is basically the way of saying judges allowed to rule against what the government says it's doing based upon the the mandate he got from the people.

58:26And this was on the back of a guy called Judge McConnell in Rhode Island who he's the first to say that the White House has actually defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants. And that's the first time in this term that has happened. The 40 lawsuits have been filed so far. But the crisis of there is one. The constitutional crisis of there is one is because an elected president is deliberately testing the bounds of all the other parts of the constitution that you mentioned and then going beyond that and to include media. I mean, some of these settlements, the media maker, quite mind blowing, this is bowing down to a perceived possibility of authoritarianism.

59:09You know, the George Steppen -Oppelus interview, the one where he is suing is CBS over their editing of an interview with Kamala Harris, which they're thinking of settling because it might then help them make a deal in another part of their business empire. This is kind of mafia stuff. Yeah, and you're effectively just giving billions to Trump. I mean, it's all hundreds of millions to Trump. It's a very, very horrible world. And I do think that for us is balancing the Trump -derangement syndrome we're being to alarmist, with continuing to remind people that, and we'll return to this tomorrow when we do question time as we begin to look at Germany, Austria, Kosovo, Serbia.

59:53So we begin to look at how this plays out around the world. What this means for the West, what this means for democracy, and what happens in a society with as much distributed power as the US as people begin to push back. Yeah. And finally, Roy, on Saturday, you're going to have a day off. I'm going to team up with Anthony Scaramucci to have a chat about how to deal with all Trump with none of the Mark Carney who's fighting to become the next prime minister of Canada. So we'll put out details of that soon, but that's going to be on Saturday, leaving you to watch the football all Saturday afternoon, which they'll know how you'd like to spend your time.

1:00:31Absolutely. My favorite thing. Yeah. See you tomorrow. Bye -bye.