442. Question Time: Trump's Plot To Cancel The Midterms

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1:28MUSIC Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, I think we did that must be the first time in a long time that we got through a main episode without talking about Trump or Israel. We're going to do both in question time. Let's start with Trump. John Nixon, trip plus member for more than. If it's true that Trump is sending the military into blue states, Democrat states like Illinois, is it also conceivable that he plans to incite such civil disobedience that he can claim a national crisis, cancel them in terms of the basis of preventing civil war, and repeat for the 2028 election?

2:07We've got a lot of questions on this sort of theme. Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely stunning. I mean, basically what we're seeing now is stuff that would have been unimaginable a few months ago, in the way that Trump is using the military. I mean, traditionally the military is only deployed into civilian context in the most extreme situations conceivable. He's now making it almost the norm for the National Guard who are really the equivalents of the territorial army. I've had a much better armed, much more full -time version of the UK territorial army, people who deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, are now being deployed into Washington, and DC deployed into California and now the story is they're going to be deployed in Chicago in order to deal with what he calls an epidemic of crime.

2:54And basically what with pumping up Homeland Security and deploying the National Guard in this way, Trump is essentially creating a military state. And part of this is just about intimidating opponents. And part of it is he raided John Bolton, who was his national security adviser and become a prominent critic, sent people into his home, and you can see this. I was talking to American lawyers who over the last five months have been shocked at how people I knew who were very critical of Trump, and now beginning to be very careful what they say about him, because they're seeing what's happening to real people in their careers.

3:32University's another example. Anyway, every year. Yeah, I mean, just to go through some of the things in recent days that sort of play to this theme. So they've sat the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Why? Because he contradicted Trump's contention that Iran's nuclear sites have been obliterated. They've fired now, I think, two dozen law enforcement investigators who were involved in investigating January 6th. They've sacked the director of dance programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for being to woke. And then here's another one, which relates to the discussions we've been having about energy, they've ordered that all construction stops on revolution wind.

4:15And a 4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island is already almost built. And that is a classic example of doing something because I can and because it speaks to what I think. And I think this whole thing about, you know, this is about making people feel that they can't speak out against something that is non -Trumpian. I wanted the most extraordinary size this week was, I think it was Hexath Vance and Stephen Miller being heckled. My favourite heckle was a guy shouting out, did you shag the couch Vance? I thought I'd quite like that one. But Miller, I mean the guy is just, he's not even a kind of politician, he's an advisor, would it be like me when I was working in number 10, standing up and in his case saying that we've got all these 90 -year -old hippies protesting against what we're doing, they don't belong here.

5:10These were people who were protesting against the National Guard stuff in Washington. So I think it's very hard to say these are not... They're more than creeping signs of authoritarianism. They are very powerful signs of authoritarianism. Well, John Nixon's question on whether he might cancel the midterms on the base of of the Ranting Civil War, I think it's very worth thinking about all the different ways in which Trump can play with the midterms and use intimidation and the military to do that. So he could say, unfortunately, we can't hold elections in these strong democratic voting states because there's too much for a crime wave.

5:47He could say he could refuse to certify him, and of course, the majority of his team still insists he won the 2020 elections. But I think what he's proving is this line that ban and produces again and again, which is we're not afraid, we'll do anything and we sense that our opponents are afraid. Great speech, just a shout out before we move on to the next question to Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois. I don't know whether you caught his incredible response, but the bit that struck me most, which I think you'd like, is to the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country.

6:22I'm asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to the story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse -raced peace on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. And that's some of you say a lot about the British press, but this idea that there are always two sides to story or reducing everything to who's up and who's down and and distracting people from What's really going on because as Pritzker points out it's putting the National Guard in their possible situation They have to deploy because they could be caught marshaled if they don't But there are Republican governors and other states talking about sending their National Guards from their states to Illinois Which is really testing the boundaries of the US federal settlement?

7:16Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's it's it's horrific and getting ever more so and he'd want to be sort of Rumble we've pressed conferences yesterday, which you just I didn't watch the whole thing, but just the clips of it were absolutely mind blown We're now up to 10 wars that he's that he solved. He's decided six was boring seven was boring. He's now solved 10 Hasn't he's playing yet what they are now? The next one will be the civil war in the United States, which I mean he's his secret isn't it? is that basically to encourage wars and then claim that he's solved them by giving into the aggressor.

7:47Exactly. Gaza, Martin West, famine in Gaza, can the international community create a group of the willing to provide Gaza with food trucks from the land borders? Would Israel bomb the trucks? Do you say away, see a way out of this aura? They wouldn't bomb the trucks necessarily, but I think there's no doubt that they have been pretty active in making sure that trucks don't get through. I mean, This has been a pretty horrific week on the famine front. So the integrated food security phase classification IPC, which is back by the United Nations, is the world's leading monitor of hunger. They have these three key indicators, and you have to meet two of them to, for them to say that famine is taking place.

8:31Starvation, at least one in five households facing extreme shortage in food, Monutrition, roughly one in three children or more, acutely malnourished, mortality, at least two in every 10 ,000 people dying daily because of outright starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease. So they have decided that is happening. The UN Human Rights Chief Walker took this reminder that there's a war crime to use starvation as a method of warfare. And yet, of course, the Israeli lion remains that this is all down to Hamas and is all down to the failures of the international community and blah blah blah.

9:10Just a sort of short one on that as somebody who was a development minister. This IPC classification is a very very serious international process with a lot of international NGOs involved and usually the IPC is accused of being too cautious. But definitely if you take it back in the day when I was a different minister. If a official came in and said an IPC five classification, which is the most serious in the world, has been declared in Somalia or South Sudan or Congo or Ethiopia or Yemen, that is would be the immediate trigger for the UK government suddenly announcing a massive hundreds of millions of pounds contribution to a big UN fund on dealing with famine.

9:53And for that to happen in what's basically a middle -income country, I mean, there's other places I've described with some of the poorest countries on the world. But Gaza before October the 7th was a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It was a middle -income country with people living lives very similar to what you would have seen in a lot of southern Europe and the Middle East. To trip that into famine is extraordinary.

10:25And for the the detail of the report. So I mean obviously there's a lot of focus on death, there's a lot of focus on pictures of you know of children with their bones sticking out and what have you but get this, fishing facilities destroyed. 90 % of commercial or industrial assets required for any kind of food production destroyed. 62 % of the road network destroyed. 82 % of agricultural Virtual Wells destroyed as of April 2025. 71 % of greenhouses destroyed. 90 % of cropland destroyed. As of June 25, 26 % of sheep have survived. 34 % of goats. 3 .8 % of cattle. 1 .4 % of poultry. So when you read stats like that, you were basically seeing the absolute breakdown of an ecosystem that is meant to keep people alive.

11:20Yeah, and let's just point out what's hidden behind those figures because Israeli journalists have now got hold of documents from the Israeli army that suggests that the Israeli army itself is acknowledging the very, very high number of civilians that are being killed, that this isn't a question of everybody being killed being Hamas. But the story on the killing of civilians, of course, is that they're used as human shields by Hamas. To put it very bluntly, that is not true sheep and it's very, very difficult to understand what the explanation is for the death of that number of livestock and the erosion of that amount of agricultural land unless it's a deliberate policy I'm afraid or a very, very odd policy of targeting munitions when you end up with that kind of destruction.

12:07And again, the water is electricity provided from Israel to run desalination plants and in gas are directly controlled by a soil when the water is turned off. 96 % of people report moderate to severe water insecurity. Municipal water reduction is 28 % of what it was in 2023. 78 % have lack of access to sufficient required toilet use, 80 % no income, no savings. During July, this is July, I think things have got a lot worse since. 43 % of children have diarrhea, 58 % reported fever, 16 % had vomiting episodes, 25 % acute respiratory episodes, and 49 % of children had skinned conditions. This is off the scale.

12:55It is man -made and it can be addressed by the international community, but if Israel doesn't let people in, they don't let them in. The final thing which I think you said in the past worth re -emphasizing is that that then contributes to so many other problems, so much more difficult to survive surgery if you're malnourished, much more difficult to get vaccines to work if you're malnourished. So the starvation then will contribute to a whole series of other very, very extreme life threatening conditions facing people in Gaza. A question from Tom McEwan, who is a trip plus member from limmington.

13:34Assuming that Putin will continue to sacrifice men and materials until he's able to claim victory against Ukraine, do you think that he would be able to hold such a huge territory populated by a determinedly anti -Russian population and if not what then? When you think about how many words we and everybody else devoted to what happened at the meeting in Alaska and then the meeting with European leaders in the in any progress on the political front, none that I've seen. I think broadly speaking, that was our sense, which is that the only policy Trump really had was hoping that by conceding everything he could to Putin, that that would bring an end to the war, there was no real sets of negotiation.

14:21I'm afraid this is returning to my boring metaphor that the Europeans feel all the time, so they're just sticking their finger in the dike, that the basic direction of Trump is to get behind Putin and Cells Lensky down the river and the Europeans that spent months hoping that they can sort of stop left from happening. But we've had revelations now from the Washington Post confirming that the Americans prevented Ukraine from using its attack on missiles and indeed from using British stormshade missiles to fire into Russian territory hoping that by reducing attacks on Russia they would encourage Putin to stop.

14:57but Putin isn't going to start because he feels he's got momentum. He doesn't feel he has any incentive to start. There's no leverage that Trump has over Putin and increasingly no leverage he has over Zelensky. On the question though, and I'd love to hear a little bit about independence, and your reflections on that, and your reflections on North Korea as well, but on the technical question, I think Putin's hope is to take control of the Donbass. He hasn't at the moment been talking about permanent occupation in Western Ukraine. If you attempted that, that would be a complete nightmare. I mean, that would be another Afghanistan for the Russians because he would be facing a continual insurgency from a profoundly anti -Russian population against Western Ukraine.

15:40Yeah, I don't know. The independence day was profoundly moving. I thought his speech was, I thought he was very nice that he wore a suit. It was a more traditional suit than the one that J .D. Vance told me what to wear. I thought it was great that Mark Carney was there, and I had an exchange with Mark Carney last night who said he found it almost poignant, things that he's done in his entire life, never mind since he became Prime Minister. But I think there's an understanding that, you know, Zelensky is, as you've said in your radio series on heroes. I think he is the closest we've got to a sort of modern day political hero.

16:18and he's a very, very impressive guy. I think the fallout in a way from the whole sort of fuss that there was last week with Trump and Putin, and then the European leaders, is we are pretty much back where we were. And then a lot of this is about whether Zelensky can maintain the levels of political support. And I think he does, this is what's so remarkable. If you read Mark Arnie's speech, That was somebody who is not remotely moving away from a position of absolutely solid support. The Kim Jong Un thing that you mentioned was fascinating. I saw this on Dershpil. I don't know whether you've got much coverage in the UK, but have they North Koreans admitted that they've been sort of sending lots and lots and lots of soldiers to help the Russians?

17:07Initially it was the secret to the US. It was broken by some very courageous journalists. I think it's no longer a secret, but initially it was a real surprise for people. But what this was, and we should put it in the newsletics, it's a pretty remarkable piece of film of it was from Korean North Korean state television covering in life, so we were told, the return of troops, North Korean troops who had been killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Now they've now said they're going to send another another 30 ,000, but he put metals, they had pictures of all the soldiers who had been killed.

17:45I couldn't get the number, but there's a lot of them. And he's pinning metals to the pictures. He was hugging the children of these soldiers. And then he was crying. And I don't know whether I was, you know, I don't imagine anything gets put out on the media without them wanting it to be put out in the media. But he obviously felt that this was an appropriate response to seeing these fallen soldiers and their buried families. And he was literally sort of weeping as he watched these coffins come off the plane. Yeah, well, you very kindly did a little plug. So the last episode of my five -part BBC series on heroes and this one focuses on Zolensky goes out on Monday, 9 a .m.

18:29in the UK. As one says, you catch up on BBC sounds, but it's been really interesting getting responses on trying to work out who our heroes are today. You know, what do we make a Trump? What do we make a mask? Of course, dresses like a superhero. Is Zelensky really a hero? You know, people now talk about corruption allegations and in Ukraine and what does it mean to be a modern hero? But I wanted to finish with one last question about one of our mutual heroes, Mark Carney. There seems to be a debate in Canadian foreign policy about whether they should focus, for example, on Ukraine and Hawaii, or whether they should continue to be a big international convener going around with international coalitions.

19:15And I favor the latter. I think Mark Carney is in a very interesting position. He's got the credibility in the international leadership. And I think at a time of Trump, we desperately need Canada to help form these international coalitions with UK, Europe, South Korea, Japan in a way that probably wasn't true in the past and it would be a great pity if Canada said, instead of doing all this international stuff, we're just going to knuckle down and focus on a couple of places. Well, I think the only thing I was going to say about that, he was the world leader that was there in Ukraine for the Independence Day.

19:50I think he's very much of an internationalist mindset and I think he's obviously top of his agenda most of the time is going to be high manages this sort of big, the big bear next door. But no, I think he's, I think he's absolutely stepping up to the mark. And it'll be lovely to see him continuing what he's doing. And you know, as I said, we would have been lovely to see Matt Cross, Stammer and Connie together doing their announcement on Palestine. It would be great now to see Connie really pushing because I think that there isn't necessarily the international leadership there. Yeah. And I think if Canada used to beat itself up a little bit a few years ago because it sort of thought that it was just sort of meekly going along behind a Western consensus that now can really lead the Western consensus.

20:34Agreed. Right, let's take a break. Then we'll come back another hugely consequential leader that you're always very nice about. That said, David.

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23:08Welcome back to the Rest As Politics Question Time with Mirorissiard and me, Alistak Ambal. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. And we're talking about how global politics has a direct link into the energy that you are using and the cost of the energy inside British homes. Wars and rivalries may feel very remote, but when Russia squeezes pipelines or China Titan's supply chains, the ripple effect can be on your heating bill. Yeah, we've had a great question from Kate Maddox from Brighton. Are we just too dependent on imports? And is that why global tensions hit our energy bills so high?

23:45I mean, definitely true. We're very dependent on imports. I mean, it is pretty amazing the story of energy and geopolitics. And people remember 1973, the Arab -Israeli War drove up oil prices fourfold. And if you look at the kind of stuff we're talking about on the podcast, It can all push in very different directions. So for example, if Trump's tariffs go wrong, we could end up with a situation in which global demand drops and the oil price drops. If on the other hand, there are sanctions on Iran and Iran produces a million fewer barrels a day if I got fewer or less there, Alistair. A fewer, that's right.

24:20Thank you. Then the price could go up again. And then there's other questions. Are we going to be able to develop our own domestic supply? there was an article by my old sparring partner, John Redwood, in the telegraph today. I think the combination of John Redwood and the telegraph, gonna give you a bit of a pulse thing. I did see it trailed on the front page. I can't pretend that I picked up to read it. Well, he's pointed out that the government is really struggling to sell licenses for offshore wind at the moment. In its latest auction, it had offered 73 pounds a megawatt hour, and couldn't get anyone to buy it.

24:54It's now up to 113 pounds megawatt hour, and it's still struggling to get people to come in because some of the policy uncertainty and planning uncertainty means it's quite difficult. Anyway, any last thoughts from you on Geo? Yeah, I think it's a great question, and it's true that this stuff has a direct impact on oil prices, the one that people always go to. But we regularly get asked by people, why can't Europe just pull the plug all Russian energy. And the, you know, the honest straightforward answer is that, you know, we've got to keep the lights on. So this stuff really matters. I think we're going to see it matter more because the conflict between Russian Ukraine is going to continue to be a factor.

25:37We've got the rivalry between China and the America, which is influencing supply chains and liquid natural gas flows. And the energy market, you know, you and I both talk to sort people who work in these kind of risk assessment places and political consultancies, they now look at energy flows every bit as closely as they look at the the politics of the countries. This stuff really, really matters. Because in Britain we have this very liberalized system. A changes in global energy prices hit very, very directly into your bills so they can fluctuate pretty quickly. Which of course brings us back to our sponsor, Fuse Energy.