In short
Podcast Notes: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 392: Trump’s Rampage: The Fight Against Global Crisis
Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart delve into the complexities of Donald Trump's recent tariff policies, the implications for the US economy, potential authoritarianism, and the responses required from Europe and the global community. The discussion is marked by an examination of economic, political, and ethical dimensions of current developments in the US and abroad.
Key Themes
- Tariffs and the Economy
- Unprecedented Tariff Policies: The episode opens with the assertion that Trump's tariff policies are unprecedented in scale and execution.
- Economic Impact:
- It is suggested that tariffs are essentially a tax on American consumers rather than a charge on other nations.
- The discussion includes potential ramifications for the US-China trade relationship, notably the significant trade deficit with China.
- Economists argue that tariffs do not address the underlying structural issues in the economy, such as income inequality and manufacturing shifts.
- Populism and Policy Responses
- Populist Solutions vs. Diagnosis: Campbell and Stewart highlight that while Trump identifies real issues (like trade imbalances), his proposed solutions (tariffs) are flawed.
- Complex Interdependencies: The conversation touches on how global trade and production are interconnected, complicating the effectiveness of protectionist measures.
- Global Authoritarianism
- Slide Towards Authoritarianism: The hosts discuss the worrying trend of increasing authoritarianism in both the US and Israel, with comparisons drawn to historical contexts and leaders who operate without accountability.
- Media Manipulation: Trump’s media strategies, including controlling press access, are critiqued for contributing to a lack of accountability.
- International Reactions and Global Stability
- Calls for a Unified European Response: The hosts argue for a stronger, cohesive response from European leaders as the US shifts towards isolationism and protectionism.
- Need for New Alliances: With America's reliability in question, European countries must reassess their partnerships and focus on self-reliance.
- The Red Crescent Incident
- Humanitarian Concerns: The podcast discusses the tragic incident involving Red Crescent workers in Gaza, painting a picture of the humanitarian consequences of military actions and the impunity with which they are treated.
- Global Response to Human Rights Violations: There’s an emphasis on the need for international accountability in conflicts and the implications of ignoring such events.
Key Takeaways
- Tariffs Are a Tax on Americans: The misconception that tariffs are a charge on foreign countries is debunked.
- The Risks of Isolationism: The potential for increased global crises due to a retreating US presence in international affairs is highlighted.
- Urgency for Collective Action: Stewart and Campbell stress the importance of urgent collective action from nations to counter the rising tide of populism and authoritarianism.
Conclusion The episode provides a detailed analysis of Trump's economic policies and their broader implications for global democracy and stability. Campbell and Stewart advocate for thoughtful, united responses from international leaders to address the challenges presented by current US policies and to uphold global humanitarian standards.
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Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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2:03Welcome to the rest of the policies of the media and Mr Campbell and with me Rory Stewart. I think we should probably talk about Donald Trump. We may not want to, but I think we must. Tariff Gate goes on a pace, and I think we should also talk about Israel, not merely because Trump's or BB Netanyahu yesterday, but also because of this ongoing scandal over the Red Crescent kings. And I think with Trump, we should not just do tariffs, but also some of the other stuff that's going on. And I know you're in the States, so you can give us lots of that. So where do you want to start? Let's start with tariffs in the world economy, because this is a story beyond the imagining.
2:38I mean, it's so big that I think nobody's really managing to get their head around it. We don't know what it means. It's completely unprecedented. Nobody's ever done anything of this scale during wars, occasionally people try to do blockades against their enemies, but something of this scale, this general, this undifferentiated, this speed never been seen before. And we don't know the most basic things about it. We don't really know why he's done it. That's quite important because if we don't understand why he's done it, it's very difficult to predict which bits that are going to stand, which bits are going to go.
3:14We know the reason that he gives, which is a false reason because it's not true. There is a grain of truth in the idea that other countries have taken advantage of America's scale and size and generosity in trading terms, but that's because America, and this is the point Trump's makers, allowed them to, but that's helped make America until recently, the richest, most powerful country in the world. So his reason, his ground, his basic grounding, his complete nonsense, but carry on. Just to develop that for a second. So like all populists, and I think this is something you've often said on the show, there's often a diagnosis of a problem that's got something to be said for it.
3:51It's just a solution is completely mad. And I guess the question really about why he's doing it is about why this is the solution, and what exactly it's supposed to achieve. So you're complete right. There's a big diagnosis, and I'm here at Yale, and I've been talking to economists here at Yale, a particularly guy called Matt Klein, who wrote an amazing book called Trade Wars, a Class Wars. And he points out some of the problems that Trump's team is talking about. So in particular, the only thing that really matters in this whole story is the US -China relationship. So US has had this massive trade deficit with China.
4:25And basically, what's happened is that China has suppressed its wages, sold in the midst of amount of goods the United States have the last 25 years. And in return, have kind of got IOUs out of the Americans in the form of buying US Treasury bills. And the result of this seemed quite positive, which is that it makes the US this very strong world reserve currency. It allows the US to borrow money very cheaply. And on the positive side, you know, that's what allows Biden to do his big, ira investments. It gives opportunities to the American government that doesn't exist for the richerevs because they have this huge source of cheap credit.
5:01But on the other side, the downside of the whole thing is that it's ended up with a massive ballooning debt and deficit, which is increasingly difficult to unafford. It's led to very, very bad examples of the cheap credit leading to things like the 2008 financial crisis. So people buying mortgages, they couldn't afford and then going under. And it's also contributed to the rich getting much richer, immediate income stagnating. So in theory, just totally in theory, if you had a magic wand and you could completely unravel the last 25 years, make sure that you didn't have a trade surplus between China and the US.
5:38Stop the US being the world's reserve currency. You could perhaps reduce the debt and end up the situation in which your society's more equal. But what Matt Klein would say, and what he said to me yesterday is at no stage has anyone suggested that this is the way to do it. His whole book does not suggest the way to do it is to try to impose tariffs on 190 countries. Let's try and see if debunk another few more myths and lies, actually, at the heart of this. So it is incredible. I saw your friend Ian Bremmer did a very good explanation. But one of the points he made on social media yesterday was he can't believe how many people have bought this idea that the tariff is somehow a charge on other countries when in fact, is a tax on your own country.
6:22It is a tax. So that's the first thing we have to keep reviving people. And the second thing is this thing about reciprocal. He talks about these being reciprocal tariffs. Well, they'd only be reciprocal if there was some genuine formula that was kind of globally accepted as a formula. But as we said on the live stream, we did the other day. This has been worked out, according to even if it is a chat GPT formula. It doesn't really matter to the United States and these countries around the world. Added to which are you aware of something called the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act? This has been, this has done by Roosevelt, but this was the act which has formed the basis on the backbone of most American trade agreements ever since.
7:09And it's called the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act, which basically gives President the authority to adjust their tariffs, but also to negotiate bilateral trade agreements. So which is kind of what he's doing now. So that's another piece of absolute madness. Here's a question for you, Rory. When is the only time in history that the United States actually did have a trade surplus with the rest of the world? Right. I've absolutely no idea. What's the answer that? As if we're not alarmed enough already, it was during the Great Depression. Why find it incredible about this whole situation? And we're going to be talking about Netanyahu later.
7:48And in a lot of this is about leaders getting themselves into positions where they feel they can do absolutely anything that they want and get away with it. Be that informed policy, be that in legal matters with convicted felon Trump and Netanyahu's facing all sorts of corruption and other charges. So but what I found extraordinary watching it yesterday was that here we are in the middle of this incredible, as you say, I hate the word unprecedented because people get used to COVID that really got my nerves, but this sort of genuinely is feels like we're in absolutely new territory. And there's Trump and Netanyahu and it reinforces this point that we keep making that Michael Wolfe sort of made so clearly that it's just a show.
8:33And so there we were a few weeks ago, the show was Zalensky. When Trump was talking yesterday about Ukraine, it was in the Conta, I'm not happy with Vladimir because he keeps bombing the Ukrainians and you know, in that episode a few weeks ago, I told him he had to stop doing that. I'm not paraphrasing, but this is the sort of stuff in his mind. But in terms of what the media and bear in mind, they cancel the press conference and allow just this sort of kind of rambling, the sort of episode in the in the oval office. And I discovered Roy, there's a reason for this. When it you have a sort of full -scale press conference, there were certain protocols that are decided by the media.
9:08When it's in the oval office, the president decides who's there and the president alone decides who asks the questions. Because the thing about we have to understand about Trump, his demeanor, he loves looking calm amid chaos. And that goes on the macro, the world is going mad and he's saying, don't panic, you're all weak, you're all stupid, I'm the only person who understands where this going. And it goes for the micro. So then in that pool spray at the top where they fit the he speaks and then the question is all literally shout at him, these journalists, gives him 10 seconds to hear who's asking a question he wants to answer.
9:39And then he points at people, not one difficult question yesterday, not one, not one difficult question for him and not one difficult question for Netanyahu. So for example, the red crescent thing that we're going to talk about, not even raised. Gaza discussed almost entirely in terms of his real estate insanity. So it just makes you think that this all underlines the fact that he's creating a system of absolute power with no real accountability. You're seeing that in the weakness of the responsible congress you're seeing in the media, you're seeing some of the business voices that are bending the knee.
10:14I think that's all really important. And I think just to loop it back to where we began, which is economics, there are lots of different stories going around. We've talked in the past about the fact that there are three apparent policy objectives, which all contradict each other. One of them is that he's going to raise a lot of revenue. So he's going to charge hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs, make a lot of money for the US government. So as you can do tax cuts. Absolutely. Second idea is that he's going to move manufacturing back to the US. They're going to build their own stuff.
10:42And the third idea is that tariffs the new sanctions. So it's not really about income or about manufacturers. It's just about bashing other countries to achieve other things. Is that why he's putting none on Russia and none on North Korea and none on Belarus and Cuba, but he's putting them on every other country in the world? Is that the thing to be out of that? Well, that's quite difficult to understand that bit as Netanyahu. Because as you say, he seems to be going off to analyze non -as -enemies. But I guess the theory on that one from the national security people might be that you go to Cambodia or Vietnam and you really twist Cambodia's arm and you say unless you kick the Chinese navy out of the naval base in Cambodia, we're going to keep these tariffs up.
11:18In other words, you're using them like sanctions as a way of just punching people on the face in order to achieve foreign policy objectives, not necessarily economic objectives. And that gets to this sort of weird story of one of the reasons why it's almost impossible for any of this to work, not just that logically those three things contradict, but that you get the sense that a bit like that signals chat that we looked at about the bombing for Houthi, everybody below him is having the equipment to signals chat, trying to work out what it is he wanted to do. And they all stick different theories.
11:52Yeah, after the fact that the guy that's really doing a lot of this, of course, is our friend Scott Besant who's out again and again as my friend Felix says, looking like he has an arsearcher cup is bottom, trying to produce a post facto reassuring justification of something that's made sense. It was funny. You mentioned that I was I was just looking for something about Besant because when you were talking about that, he didn't interview you the other day with that awful Taka Carlson. And it is amazing these people. They only do interviews with the same people again and again and again and again.
12:23So like today, there was an interview with an exclusive interview with Elon Musk on Fox News. It would be exclusive if it was on a different channel, but given it's on Fox News about every other day. So Scott Besant the other day, when he was talking about that, he was trying to, this is as the markets were absolutely tanking biggest crash ever in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, double digits in Germany, bad here, bad in the States, whatever that would have you. And Scott Besant, one of this sort of, you know, mega rich billionaire class who is now the cabinet, he actually tried to make the argument that this was this was really addressing wealth inequality.
12:57He talked about how you've been visiting food banks and he said you have to understand Taka, the top 10 % of Americans own almost 90 % of the stock market, the next 40 % own 12 % and the bottom 50 % they're all in debt. So this is like a relief. It's as if he was saying we're punishing the rich here so that the poor can feel better about that and the ludicrous Carlson. Honestly, that guy, I mean, he honestly should be putting a museum somewhere. He just goes, that's the message right there. Scott as a bystander, he says, as a bystander, my ass, as a bystander, I'm like, wow, could you imagine what he would be like in an interview with Kamala Harris or Tim Walsh or Hillary trillions of the stock market overnight.
13:51Can you imagine it? And not to trigger you further, of course, there are echoes of some of the stuff that we had around Brexit, which is there were some figures around Brexit saying yes, we're tanking the economy, but by tanking the economy, we're going to level up because we'll bring rich people further down. Even you have people, you'll remember saying if we can really crash the British economy, we can bring house prices down. Yeah. And we can make things more affordable. So there's some of this stuff going on when you hear best into JD Vance, this very, very complicated theory, which is somehow if you trash the US dollar, trash treasury bonds, stop yourself being a world reserve currency, and potentially also torpedo the stock market, you reverse the last 40 years of the economy and create more equality between the rich people that own shares and have been doing well and poor people.
14:45The problem, of course, as you've just put your finger on is that where you're achieving it is through a recession, which is not the normal, lever that you pull in order to level things up because you're leveling down, you're not leveling up, you're leveling down. Yeah, exactly, but your point about these guys do the interviews. So yesterday, it was very interesting watching it. Did you see Trump and Netanyahu? I mean, I'm afraid I watched the whole thing. And can I make a plea to media organisations around the world, but especially Sky and the BBC, you did not need to go live for 40 minutes to hear Trump droning on about baseball or to meeting with the LA Dodgers on the expectation that he might say something about the markets.
15:24He has got the entire world's media around his little finger and this is a big part of the problem, which is the thing we should come back to. But the point I was going to say about these interviews, we interviewed Simon Hart on leading this week and you're thinking, how have I gone from Scott Bessent to Simon Hart? And I'll tell you how, Simon Hart, do you remember he said that when he decided that the game was maybe up for the Tories, it was when he was doing all these media rounds during party gate and he'd be on to talk about something and every question would be about something to do with party gate and he would have to be justifying something that deep down in you he couldn't.
15:55Now, that's what I saw in Scott Bessent. And the question for all of these people is how long can they keep doing it? So yesterday, when Netanyahu, you had Vance, Rubio, Hexarth and I think it was Mike Waltz in the background. And you look at I looked at them, they were, it wasn't the same demeanor as with Starmer and Macron and Zelensky, it really wasn't the same demeanor. They looked really quite worried. At one point, Hexarth was asked to speak and he he looked like he was a bit scared to speak and so he did the whole thing about the the Hooties and Yemen. But my point is there must be some of them who are going home at night and their wives, partners, mistresses, whatever are saying to them, listen, you're becoming ridiculous.
16:38And I think we're not far off those. The question is whether they've got any guts. So the first thing just to come back to is that the impact on the real economy is going to be very dramatic. Right? Yeah. This will have a big, big impact on the US economy and and and the US economy is obviously the largest economy in the world. Some argument about that, Roy. Some argument about that. So anyway, he's behaving like a sort of, I suppose, a classic tinpot dictator. But if he was the router of some tiny little country, you know, if he was Eddie Armeen and had suddenly announced these things around the world, everybody would sort of sneer at him, laugh at him, it wouldn't matter.
17:15Yeah. But the problem is because of what America is. It's the problem for Europe, you know, the German car industry has been in a lot of trouble over the last few years and one of the things that's keeping it alive is 20 % of its exports go to the US and that allows Mercedes and BMW. Another Yale colleague in my morning salmon points us out that German is just about managing to produce luxury goods at kind of premium price, but mass producing them. So a lot of these cars going abroad and that really matters for German industry and that's going to be affected hard. But China, much bigger problem.
17:49China, as you know, has really been struggling. It's aging, very unhappy population, quite a lot of unemployment. Growth has come down from 10 % down to 5%. So growth is halved. Chinese government desperate to create jobs and it's creating jobs by trying to suppress wages and it depends. I mean, yes, it's trying to diversify, but America is, and this is what's shown in all these figures, it's huge export market. If that gets choked off and 54 % tariffs are a pretty good way of choking that off, the Chinese economy is then in real trouble. Chinese economy in trouble and the American economy in trouble, that's about half the world economy in trouble.
18:27And then many other things follow from that. It's very difficult for European countries and others to keep their heads up because global demand begins to drop, global manufacturing, global confidence begins to drop. So that's the real economy. I then want to talk about the other thing that nobody's talking about, which is the possibility of a financial crisis because the real economy is one thing, the financial markets, which is the way people perceive this, is another thing, but I'll stop there for a second. Just briefly sticking with the cars, because one of the things that Kia Starmadid was he went up to Jaguar Land Rover, made a speech, went a bit easy on some of the environmental measures, signaling to the car industry that, to quote racial reason, we've got your back.
19:04But this thing about the Chinese cars and BYD, see one of Trump's constant complaints, he did it again yesterday with Nanyahu. So, you know, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, you know, we let their cars in, they've got, you know, what, drive around America, you'll see Mercedes, you'll see a Volkswagen, but go to Europe, not only about Europe, you're in America now, I'm not a fan of American cars. I don't think they're very good, and I'll probably get shot out by also the Americans of that, but they're not as good as ours. And here's the, I was listening to the interview with the American economist the other day, who was obsessed with the idea that BYD cars are really, really good.
19:41The China with these electric cars, they're better. So I've started to look at some of them, and I'm thinking they are bloody good. So you'll write that this will really damage the Chinese auto market, but at the same time, what they will now do is try to get into different markets with their cars, but ask yourself this question, or if you're a European right now, if we did allow American cars more easily into our market, are you more or less minded right now to buy an American car rather than a European car? This is where I think he completely underestimates the role of soft power and messaging beyond his base.
20:18So I think he's, you talked about contradictory policy, the lack of alignment on the policy objectives, but I say in the messaging too, I think that this is doing the American, American trade that wants to look outwards. I think it's doing them terrible terrible damage. I'm not carnivated terrific point. As you made two terrific points here the day, one was the one that you just made. He basically said that America has done a global version of Brexit, and I've, he said, I've seen this movie before, the people who win say it's going to be great, and then after a little while, every realises not so great.
20:53But the second thing he said was, essentially, there's no such thing as the North as the American USA car market, because it's totally embedded with other countries, and he was making the point, where does the tariff come in? How many times do you have to cross a border with the same piece of equipment before the tariff? Well, how's that being calculated? No of these questions, it seems to be a being thought through. There you've put your finger another thing, which is the sort of politics and decision making against the real economics. So in theory, there's a big problem that you've just pointed out, which is even in Trump's fantasy.
21:25If he was to put these tariffs up, exclude everybody else, and companies were to relocate to the US. What you would have is companies would have to split into, they'd have to have a US factory and the rest of the world factory, because the US factory would face very, very high costs. There's labor shortage. Immigration is being choked off, so where are you going to get your labor force from? Let's say you want to make everything in the US, and your cost of inputs have just gone up. All the intermediate goods, you know, car has thousands of different bits, and you're spending 54 % more on those inputs.
21:57So you would not be manufacturing in the US in order to export, because your goods would be too expensive. But then you've pointed out the politics, which is that all of that is a bit theoretical. That's almost the best case scenario that he ends up moving factories, the US, that produce overpriced, not very competitive international goods. At least there would be some jobs in some industry. But in practice, that's not going to happen because as global demand goes down, as uncertainty goes down, people aren't going to have the money for new investments. And because he gives the impression that sometimes that he's prepared to trade on all of this, and this is the big paradox, you know, is he somebody who thinks, as Navarro says, Navarro, his kind of tariff advisor, who's been running the FT, says this stuff is there to stay.
22:42You know, tariffs are good full stop. They're not coming down because they're going to make money, and they're going to move business back to the US manufacturing about the US. But other people are signaling, no, no, and this includes Eric Trump. Oh, no, no, this is just a movie where we now negotiate, right? So who's going to move their manufacturing plant to the US if they think their sector's going to be exempt, their country's going to get it in India now thinks they can get a trade deal by August. They're feeling very smart about it. Modi thinks he's got an in none of this policy stuff can work because there's no certainty about what he's doing and when he's going to change his mind.
23:14Well, the other thing you talk about Modi thinks he's got an in Netanyahu thought he had an in, but he got pretty much nothing yesterday in terms of the tariff and the trade stuff. He might thought he got a few nice words about Iran, but just as, you know, he's had lots of words nice about nice words about cease firing cars, but the second phase hasn't happened. Just on Navarro Rory, this is absolutely brilliant. This goes, this is a whole chapter for Michael Wolfe in Volume 5. Do you know how Navarro got into the set? So basically what happened is that Donald Trump told Jared Kushner, who in term one was his big family advisor in term two is Don Jr who's the kind of Maggi guy.
23:51He told Kushner to find him somebody who is really good on the economy, but also would make him look tough on China. He wanted somebody who was tough on China and good on the economy. So Kushner goes on to Amazon and he finds that some guy is written a book called Death by China and he thought that's a really cool title. And this guy is Peter Navarro and one of the experts that Navarro quotes throughout his book is a guy called Ron Vara. Ron Vara, it turns out, doesn't exist. Ron Vara is an adagrab of, hey, Navarro. Right? This is the guy. Now what's really interesting about him though, Rory? I'll tell you what something really interesting about him.
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24:35You're beginning to see the divide between the Billy and his. He was the first one I think in the Trump circle who directly had a go at Elon Musk this week. When he basically said the guy's just a car salesman, he should sort of keep his nose out of this and Howard Lucknick has been saying similar noises. So the Musk thing, I'm convinced eventually Anthony Scaramucci is going to be proved right and Musk will be out of that circle. It's just taking a very long time. And the other thing that I think is interesting about all the Billy and theirs around him, the corruption Brookings Institute has done this amazing.
25:09I don't know if you had time to read our sentences. There's amazing. It basically says that this is now rampant corruption. And one of the, I would argue this is corruption. It emerges that Howard Lucknick, whose son now runs Cantor, the firm that he ran, their big thing is in bonds. Bonds do well out of this crashing of the economy. And I'm not saying that's why it's happened. I'm just saying, if this was Britain, there'd be quite a lot of questions being asked. Bonds brings us back to this final point that I want to make, which is on financial markets. So one of the problems for economists is that they look at the real economy and they try to model that.
25:47But what's very difficult for them to model is panic. So Matt Klein, who's this amazing economist here at Yale, I was talking to, would say, well, at the moment, the real economic impacts of this are not as bad as 2008. We're talking about a couple of percentage points of GDP. That's very big, but it's not, you know, it's not the 1930s. This is then where my friend Felix is interesting, because what he says is that you need to take into account the fact that what the markets are trying to do is guess where value will be in six months or 12 months time and price it accordingly. And if they start panicking, things get very strange and they're going to get particularly strange this time, because we haven't really understood the structure of our new economy.
26:302000 Apes all about banks. Since 2008, these private markets have emerged, private debt, private equity. And the point about that is we were supposed to feel reassured because they would, you know, borrow money for seven years from some big pension fund and then invest it for seven years in a company. But there are some problems. One is that they're much less transparent, right? This private debt's much less transparent. We don't know really what's on their balance sheet. It's not like a publicly listed company. You can't really see what the revenue of these companies are. So let's say you'd spend 100 million buying some widget factory seven years ago.
27:04You can still put it on your books as worth 100 million or even 200 million, right? When it, in fact, you might secretly fear it's worth 50 million. And the problem only comes when the end of that seven years comes and they say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to rollover and you're going to find that you can't sell it 21. You can't sell the company 21. And that's when the second problem kicks in, which is that in a banking crisis in the UK, there's very few banks. There's just four banks, basically four big banks and the central banks of HSBC, Lides, relating to the central bank here, there are now hundreds of thousands of little private debt private equity funds, which don't have those lines of credit, don't have those relationships, the central bank.
27:44So if these things start tipping over and here's my final nightmare, this is this is one that Monarch Salmon's just pointed out, the yellow columnist. You mentioned Treasury months. One of the things that Trump has said in a passing moment is that he's considering not honoring US Treasury bonds. So China owns trillion dollars a US debt. So he said, and possible, maybe we'll just not pay China back that way, we make seven trillion dollars for free and we don't need to worry, right? There's good for trust, really good for trust. So if people begin believing that US treasuries maybe won't be honored, then you have a real problem because US treasuries underpin everything.
28:20They're the security that everybody puts behind every transaction in the world because they were supposed to be safe as houses. If the value of those things suddenly start dropping because people start panicking, potentially it's worse, the risk premium goes up, then you can have another form financial crisis. So we don't know whether this will happen. Nobody knows how to model this, but the point that everybody keeps making, you know, I talked to George Osborne yesterday, talked to Modern Wolf yesterday, is because it's completely unprecedented. Nobody's ever seen anything like this before. Guests sing whether or not it's going to result in a financial crisis as close to impossible.
28:53Closer and possible, however, those whose job it is to guess whether it might are moving towards the view that it will. Let me just give you, before we go to a break room, then we'll come back and talk about some other aspects of what's going on in the states and also his time with Netanyahu. I've been having some exchanges with Mr. Steve Bannon, who you'll be pleased to know, I hope, has said that he wants to come on the podcast, which I think we should welcome. What's not to like about talking to the man who is the sort of, was certainly was the intellectual driver of the old Trumpism thing.
29:25Anyway, I say, well, okay, can we get a date? And he said, well, when do you want to do it? And I said, well, I want, you know, fairly soon, I mean, your guy is pretty topical right now. Seems to be making a lot of use, you know, he's sort of making ways. And he just, he just texted back, you just wait to the next round of reciprocity. In other words, they see this, I think, is cranking up and cranking up and, and cranking up. And on Chyna Hurley, this just underlined to me how what incredible two things that saw this week that really underlined how incredible all this is. First was somebody I used to know who worked for George Bush sent me a video of George Bush making this speech that I think we referred to before to some students years ago, you know, well, it was since presidency, but not recently, where he said that the three big threats to the world were American isolationism, protectionism, and nativism.
30:17And we had to fight against it. There's Bush saying that. And the thing that happened today that really struck me was China, the Chinese embassy in Washington posting videos of Ronald Reagan explaining why tariffs were a really, really bad idea while we're on the business of the sort of more traditional writers it were. Another thought I had watching Trump yesterday, he's now got that bust of Churchill behind him. And I thought, just imagine what Churchill would think of this. He would think it was utter insanity. But the other Churchillian aspect to my thinking was this. And this goes to Britain and France and Germany and we'll have you.
30:53I think the one thing you've got to say of Churchill is that even during the war, people like him and people like Atley, they were already thinking about what the consequences were that would need to be have to be addressed once you were through the crisis. And I worry at the moment, and I know it's only been a few days, but very soon, before very long, leaders like Kineist armor, macro, marts and the rest of them, I've got to start thinking about what this actually means for the future. I saw a great interview this morning with Yosh Confisher, the former German foreign minister, who's a really smart guy.
31:31And he was basically making the point, look, can we stop pretending? We cannot rely on America. Yes, Trump may go, but this is a fundamental change. And the answer for us, Europe is now on its own. China doesn't lie, Europe, Russia hates Europe. So we've got to start looking after ourselves together and then looking to build all these other new partnerships. And I feel at the moment, for all that I think they're technically handling it quite well, day to day, I do think it's about time we started to see some of the sort of bigger picture, bigger vision. We're not even yet in the in the place where British government minister feels they can say that Donald Trump goes to all this.
32:11And I honestly think that Trump is, I even begin to wonder yesterday watching you, you just think, I mean, honestly, you've got to watch your back, Roy, it was, it was, it was just a ramble of kind of unconnected nonsense. But this is now the basis on which the entire world is kind of having to operate. It's madness. Let's on that take a break and come back after the break.
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33:48Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, I'm Mr Campbell. So Rory, should we do USA madness brackets, miscellaneous? Yeah. So I'm in the US moment and it's a very interesting experience because every day I'm seeing another bit of what Trump is doing. So on Friday, for example, I saw a friend of mine who works for the US Institute of Peace. So US Institute of Peace is a very long -established federally funded, congressional established, think tank, which has done incredible work. I mean, if you wanted to get good research on Afghanistan, it had some of the great Afghan analysts in the world working for it.
34:37And sure enough, he and everybody along with him lost their jobs. And they suddenly got a notice saying they lost their jobs and the head of the US Institute of Peace has been replaced by a kind of young tech bro who's been sent in from Doge who went in with the Washington police to try to enter and seize the building. So that's just, you know, I'm just turning up at a conference. I said, next to guy, I'm saying, how's your job going? And he's going, well, you know, we've all lost our job. And this tech guy's gone. Then I went to Ohio State University. And that's very interesting because in Ohio State University, the Republican state is now quickly changing all the rules around what people can teach.
35:19So professors are now being told they're not allowed to teach controversial subjects. New centres being established. Then I talked to somebody yesterday and foreigner and academic who's worried about Haviza because foreign academics have been seized on the streets. Fulbright scholars have been expelled. Academics coming in have been detained. And then we've got the bigger stories that kind of begins spelling over. So we've got, sit down and this was maybe two weeks ago. I was talking to somebody who runs a big pharmaceutical drug discovery company in the West Coast. And they can't get any approvals on their drugs because the food and drug administration has had all its buildings or a lot of its buildings have been closed, a lot of its staff have been laid off.
36:08And once the backlog develops in a bureaucracy, you'll be familiar with this. I guess it's like when the post office gets behind on its mail, everything gets clogged up for months because you don't have enough stuff. The analogy it's just kind of came up with is COVID in the NHS. You remember, basically you get a backlog building up over a year and then your whole system almost breaks. And that's now happening with drug approvals. If only we'd taken bleach. Let me hand back to you, but I suppose these are anecdotal examples. But what I'm trying to say is that every day I'm countering some other aspect of what's happening.
36:45Yeah. Well, the other thing that sort of shocked yesterday watching the Netanyahu Trump press conference, I thought surely somebody who is going to have a Netanyahu about Ray Crescent and Trump about El Salvador. And the reason I thought somebody must ask about El Salvador is partly because it had gone all the way to the Supreme Court. But also because there was this extraordinary 60 minutes, CBS 60 minutes did this film. And it told the story of this gay stylist who had fled Venezuela because of persecution for being gay and have you. He'd actually been, his case was going through and the American authorities have said he definitely had a case.
37:31And the interview to his lawyer suddenly he literally disappeared. And it turned out that the reason or one of the reasons why they took him and thought he was he thought he was a member of this gang that Trump has said he's going to go after. And the reason for that is of course he had a tattoo of a crown on each arm. And apparently a crown is one of the symbols of one of these gangs. The only thing was that the crown on one arm was over the which looked very masculine crowns sort of thing that King Charles would wear. And on the other arm was a crown that a queen might wear. And under the crown, the big crown it said dad and under the more feminine crown it said mum.
38:12And another guy and this guy by the way, so this has now been accepted that the mistakes have been made. But they're now saying this is the thing that went to the Supreme Court. They can't get him back because he's in a foreign jurisdiction. And also their lawyers went to the wrong court. This is all well, this is Kafka quick explainer for people who've not been following the ins and outs of this. So one of the most celebrated cases is that the case of Kilmogasia. So Kilmogasia came to the United States and he was detained in 2019 accused of being a gang member. Judge looked at it, decided that he wasn't a gang member and ruled that he could not be deported back to El Salvador for fear of his life.
38:56He then returned happily to his life. And then he was just picked up and disappeared. And the next thing the family knew is they suddenly saw a photograph of people on a plane with hands over their head being deported and realized that her partner was on his way to this notorious horrifying prison in El Salvador. We talked about El Salvador before. It's got this tough guy autocratic leader who is proud about locking up a huge repulsion in the population in these notorious jails. So at this point, a judge intervenes and says there was no and this is the point, I guess, about the legal system in the US and what's going on.
39:33There was no legal authority to arrest him. There was no justification to detain him. There were no grounds to send him to El Salvador. And this is one of the most dangerous prisons in the West and hemisphere. And he was detained purely on the basis of the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie. And some story going back to 2019 that a confidential informant had seen him connected with a gang in New York or those never been based in New York. So yeah, I mean, you've seen, when you've seen the El Salvador jail with full of El Salvadorians, the tattoos obviously have a big part to play in in gang culture.
40:11So there's another guy who's been taken to this jail. And by the way, they filmed inside the jail, because there was a film crew there filming the whole thing for this unbelievably cruel social media stuff that the Department of Homeland specializes in. So for example, they were able to reveal happily to the Americans who want to see this happen. The beds, we call them beds, but actually they're just slabs of steel. Sort of bunk upon, bunk upon, bunk of steel. No bedding, no pillows. They're kept in stress positions the whole time. But there's one other guy there who's also got a tattoo of a crown.
40:44But do you know why he's got a tattoo of a crown on his armory? Because it's the logo of real Madrid. I don't if you know this bit or hey, I'll, the reason a real Madrid is called real Madrid is because a real means royal. And the royal, the royal family back in 1920 gave the, they gave permission to the club to call themselves the royal Madrid. That is why it's a crown. And this guy's got parents, he's got siblings, they can't see him, they can't speak to him. And the Americans have admitted this. And this is, here's a terrifying thing. So the Supreme Court on technical grounds has backed the government.
41:19Trump then immediately tweets, this is a great victory for justice. Basically what happened is the lawyers, the Supreme Court, they went to the wrong court. Anyway, a judge called Sottermeyer, who's a more liberal judge, she did a dissenting judgment and she said this, the government takes the position that even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it sent them. The implications of the government's position is that not only non citizens, but also United States citizens, could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress.
41:57History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but the nation's system of laws is designed to prevent not enable their rise. Now that is basically saying we are heading towards absolute authoritarianism if this isn't reversed. And part of the story is the weaponization of the Department of Justice. So the Department of Justice is in a very, very awkward position. Theoretically it reports to the president, but clearly there's been very, very good reason to try to create fireballs between the President and the Department of Justice. Let's say in the United Kingdom, we had Sir Keir Starmer as the director of public prosecutions under a conservative government.
42:44And obviously the conservative government with its many flaws did not try to say, well, Keir Starmer, obviously an old lefty labor dude, we're sacked here and we're going to use the DPP to go after our political opponents. Indeed, on the contrary, on the contrary, it just made me a rare, rare, pro -conserved point for me. Many of them stood up for Keir Starmer's independence as a DPP, even after he became a politician. And in fact, wanted to renew them. I think Keir chose to step down, but they wanted to keep him in place. But to give us a small example of this, when one of the DOJ lawyers in front of this judge, and we're back to this case of Mr.
43:26Garcia, admitted that they'd got it wrong and apologized. He's now immediately being put on a administrative leave, effectively sacked, because the Attorney General Pambondi has said, you're not doing your job, right? The point about the Department of Justice, and the implication is the point about the Department of Justice, if necessary, is to lie to the judge. Oh, good. Continue to insist you did nothing wrong. No, let's just look quickly at some of the other institutions, because they don't really get covered media. I think we've talked in passing about what's happened, basically, cutting Voice America, which is the American Equivalent of the BBC World Service, really, really important part of the soft power, international broadcasting around the world, bringing news to countries often with autocratic regimes where news can't be achieved.
44:17Cuts to cultural institutions, so big cuts against almost anything to do with, you know, 52 smaller state organizations working on heritage, working on community programs, massive cuts to the national endowment for humanities, to a lot of the big funding agencies that support culture, support research. They've eviscerated not just USIP, but they've also taken down the Wilson Center, they've taken down the Kennen Center, which is the big center for research in Russia. And this then gays into other stuff, which connects with what I was doing as an environment minister, so when I was an environment minister, I'm I too in the UK.
44:57The two bodies that I visited in the US were the Environmental Protection Agency and FEMA, which is the emergency response, because they were doing the equivalent of what the environmental agency does in the UK. They've been cut, so the environmental protection agency is trying to deal with things like monitoring air pollution or monitoring runoff from factories. That's being cut presumably because Trump and Musco are going all capitalism, red and tooth and claw, and they don't want people pointing out if businesses are polluting. FEMA, which is doing stuff which was really impressive when I visited them, what they were doing that was better sometimes than what we were doing in the UK, was getting ahead of the floods, putting in investments in flood defenses before the floods happened.
45:43Obviously, much cheaper to do it before the floods happen after all that funding is being cut. So there no longer is money going into preemptive flood protection from the Government. And as I try to gather the list, you quite quickly get into 30, 40, 50 different agencies where this is happening, Center for Disease Control not managing to stay on top of measles, University of Columbia, I'm speaking to you from University at the moment, lost $400 million of federal funding and the classic Trump thing, we demand that you're going to change everything that happens in terms of protests. You're going to sack the head of your Middle East and Center in the University, Harvard, SAC, that two directors in its Middle East Center as its funding is threatened.
46:34And Columbia does all this and of course, I think in classic Trump thing, he doesn't then restore the funding, what he says is good, you've done all I've asked, and now we can talk. One of the other economic arguments has put is the, I don't know, this is true, I saw this somebody saying this, one of these economic I was watching. And he said that what Musk is about is trying to sort of rip through the public sector, both by sacking, but also by demoralising making people, this is not for me, I'll leave or I don't want to apply. You then have people who generally on lower salaries than people in the private sector who move into the private sector and can lower wages.
47:10So this is the richest man in the world, the strategy of absolute cruelty in order to lower wages for people around about, you know, $60 ,000 a year. Just a few, maybe before we go to Israel, Roy, to close off from my perspective, you talked about sackings there, the other sackings that happened this week, senior people in the National Security Infrastructure sacked on the advice of this far right conspiracy theory is Laura Luma, who still has access to Trump, might once the National Security Advisor had to sit in a meeting with Trump, while Laura Luma gave Trump a list of names of people that she felt weren't loyal to him.
47:47And they've gone. The other thing, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, who's finally apparently admitted that vaccines might actually be quite good for measles, he attended the funeral this week, I mean, fair play, I would blame on one level for his anti -vaccine campaigns have helped kill people of measles, but he went to the funeral of one of the children who died, he's now trying to stop fluoridation of water. And then the other one that I think we should just remind, going back to the the venous Walons and the El Salvador and Jell, Trump in this ridiculous thing that we now have to get used to, of him talking to journalists on his airplane, Air Force One, back from playing golf, where he was telling them how he won the tournament that he won and he's very proud of his golf.
48:31But he then was asked about the El Salvador thing, because the El Salvador present as volunteered to take Americans into his prisons. And without giving it a moment's thought, Trump just said, yeah, I'd be up for that, if we can get these rapists and gangsters and hoodlums off the streets, put him in Jell's and El Salvador. So this is all stuff that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago. And I think the point you made earlier is exactly the same point that Yoshka Fisher made is the thing we should be really mindful and terrified of. Is the speed of all this. So when Kierstheim really speech yesterday said it's a time for cool heads, fine, he also said it's a time for urgency.
49:14But I think the urgency, actually, and I understand why every world leaders find this so challenging, it really is challenging. But I think the, there's got to be a greater sense of urgency about the potential of this, it is unpicking virtually every international rule and order that we have taken for granted for most of our lives without anybody really defending them right now. One of the best responses this week I saw, and I'm slightly biased because it's a friend of mine. But the Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, he did a speech where just a short piece to camera, but it was very, very powerful because he didn't, he basically said this is arbitrary, it's protectionist and it's unbelievably dangerous.
49:57And it's this is America, which built this system, yes, it needs reform, but this isn't reform, this is a destruction. He then went on to say however, now as it happens, we're in the 10%, so you could argue we're lucky the most, but he then went to argue about the point of principle, and he then then went on to say what he would do for Singapore, etc. But I think there has to be more of that, unless of, let's all pretend this is normal or we're just kind of going to have to do a deal somehow. I couldn't agree more, and I think we need real imagination courage by which I mean, Kirsta, I shouldn't just be sort of making little concessions around the edges and hoping to charm Trump.
50:37What actually we should be doing is taking this as an opportunity to make a big play to get closer to Europe, politically, security terms, economically. But in order to do that, one of the things is the difficult job for everybody covering this, of trying to see the whole picture, because what we've described in this podcast so far is catastrophic effects on the US economy, which then spent under global economy. But then we've also talked about what's happening to the law, what's happening to funding for institutions, what's happening to disease control. Now, a week ago, we would have been talking about what's happening to NATO, what's happening to Ukraine, what's happening to Greenland.
51:19So these are very different on the surface areas. Some of them is about people dying of measles in the US. Some of them is about America abandoning its commitments to Ukraine and some of them are about destroying the global trading system. And the reason it's really important to try to look at the whole thing as a whole is that this system is a very delicate, complicated system that America has built up over 70, 80 years that does have a security dimension and an economic dimension and a democratic dimension. And Trump is pulling it all these things at the same time, with accelerating speed. And all of these things then spill over to the others.
52:02But only if you can try to hold the whole thing in your head, can you see what a threat he is? If you just look one at a time, you can say, well, maybe he's just making the government more efficient. Yeah, at the other point you made last week about the penguins and the herd of McDonald's, the other thing that they like you to do is to find the funny bits. And sometimes you have to, because that's the only way black humor is the only way to deal with this stuff sometimes. But I think we've got to be very wary of all that as well. Now, and the point you're making relates absolutely to Netanyahu.
52:33And not for nothing I would argue was Netanyahu's stop between Israel and Washington was hungry to see Orban. And bear in mind, this is a guy who's wanted by the International Criminal Court. Now he argues that it's all nonsense. Trump argues it's nonsense. Orban has said he's pulling out the whole thing anyway. But this is what I mean about this, they have a desire to break down the international institutions that were created in the way of the Second World War for themselves. You know, I quite regularly look at, because I think we sometimes assume that Israeli public opinion now is so, because we see their leaders, we see Netanyahu, we see the spokesman, we see their military.
53:15I regularly just take a look at Harretts, the Israeli newspaper. And I, I lighted on this article by a guy called Amos Hallel, defense analyst, and he said, Netanyahu's true objective appears increasingly clear, a gradual slide toward an authoritarian star regime who's survival, he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts. Now, that's his opinion. But it's easy to see lots of things that have happened in the last few years that relate to that. And you know, I really do think this, I cannot get my head round the fact that he wasn't even asked about the Red Crescent killings when he was there in front of the media yesterday.
53:57Quick explainer on background, just just bring people up today, I think people haven't necessarily been focusing on Gaza over the last few weeks. So what happened is the ceasefire began under Trump. It lasted until the beginning of March, so about a month ago, and then the second stage didn't go through, second stage didn't go through because there were violations by Hamas, there were these horrible scenes of maltreatment of hostages returning the wrong hostages, and the war's so violations by Israel in terms of following through on the first thing. So trust breakdown, second stage didn't happen.
54:32Since then, what Israel's done is basically impose a total blockade again on Gaza. And that's much worse than anything we saw in 2024. This is more like what happened in the first few days after the attack in October. So fuel's not getting through, food's not getting through. And of course, it's worse now than it was year and a half ago because the hospitals have largely collapsed, the clinics have collapsed, many of the health workers have been killed. And at the same time, it's not clear what they're trying to achieve. They're taking more and more of Gaza. 67 % I think of Gaza according to the UN as now under Israeli control.
55:09Netanyahu seems to be signaling that he's just going to continue. The story is he's going to continue until he gets the hostages back, but fewer and fewer people in Israel believe that. They don't think he's serious about guessing the hostages back. And certainly smothered from Bank of the Air want this thing to roll on. So it feels like an ever -enem -e -walt, meanwhile, on the West Bank, more and more set are activity, more and more aggressive attempts to reclaim. And finally, before I come to you on the red crescent, of course, the international situations changed. Last year, there was at least the hope that you could influence Biden, and maybe he could put pressure on the Israeli government.
55:44Trump has made it clear that he's more extreme than the Israeli government. He wants ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The Israeli government's lent into that. This created a little department called the department for the inverted commas voluntary repatriation of Palestinians from Gaza. And Trump has, of course, allowed all the heavy weapons supplied, which Biden didn't supply. And so nobody in the whole world now thinks that there's any remote American break on what Netanyahu might do over to you on the red crescent just to explain to people what happened there. No, I think if anything, there's, as you say, there's an accelerator.
56:18And just on the institutions, of course, you talked about this in relation to Trump, Netanyahu, who is at war with the court. So if he's on case, he's now trying to get rid of the head of, he's been trying to get rid of the head of his domestic agency, spy agency, and also the attorney general, and so on. So it goes on. So the red crescent is a, you know, this sort of took me back to when we were involved in the conflict in Kosovo. And I've talked to you before about one of the worst moments was when we got into a complete mess with global public opinion over the, when NATO accidentally bombed a convoy of refugees, and it was horrific.
56:56And we only were able to move on from that when we were, went out there and just admitted terrible, terrible mistake, apology, and you just have to go do that. But the one thing we know about Trump and Netanyahu, they remember with Trump, he was advised by that lawyer, Cohen, about which the film apprentice never apologized, never admit you wrong, and always blame the other side. And that's the kind of, that's the, that's the model. So this is a story of essentially, of red crescent workers, these are almost all, I think, local, they're there, they're trying to help people who are injured and so forth, and 15 were killed.
57:37Okay. And the Israeli defense force and the Israeli government line has been that they was, that they, the convoy approached the area they were going to suspiciously, and that they didn't have their lights on. And this is then, film is found of this, and that is, he's exposed as completely untrue. Then worse than that, the bodies are sort of, you know, put into shallow graves just to, could have get them out of the way, but then they, the red crescent go to get them, so they can give them burials and so forth. And they find on one of the people who's been killed, is still recording telephone, because he's been recording, he, he was recording a message to his mother, he was begging for, for forgiveness from his mother for going there, for forgiveness from God, and, and it was horrific to listen to.
58:26But what the film show, the film completely debunks the official version of events that the Israelis have put there. And the stuff that's come out in the last 24 hours, suggesting that some of these people were actually taken out alive and shot at point blank range. Now, these are red crescent society workers, they are aid workers, they're emergency aid workers, and the government line now is, well, Hamas has always tried to get into the emergency aid workers as well, so you can't be sure, still trying to sew down. And the numbers, the sheer numbers of people in the aid world who've lost their lives, you've now lost more aid workers have lost their lives in this conflict, than every war combined going back over several decades.
59:11So this is impunity, this to me is impunity, is absolute impunity. Well, maybe, maybe, because I guess we're coming up to the end of this, we could return a little bit to the sort of bigger picture in tomorrow's question time, because I think you've raised the huge issue about aid workers, civilians, and conflict, the UN. But anyway, thank you. I mean, we've done a lot, and I guess if we sort of thread it together, we've talked about economics, we've talked about a democracy in the US, we've talked about international security, but we're also now talking about international law, the rules -based order, and what happens to that in a world in which it appears that people come with impunity, kill ambulances and hospital workers trying to go and rescue people, bury them in shallow graves, and then try to hide their trucks.
1:00:03Okay, everybody, well, let's, doubtless, we'll talk about more elements of this in question time to my CSU.
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