457. Is Trump Planning Regime Change?

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1:15Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastasia Campbell. And Rory, let's start with George Layton in Leeds. please could we have a little explainer on what's going on in Venezuela? Is the US gearing up to invade? There's very little in the news about it other than the targeting of drug boats. From what I'm hearing, says Georgian Leeds, the Trump administration is framing Maduro as the leader of the cartels. I'm not sure how much truth there is in that. Just wanted to get your thoughts on what's going on and how this could affect the wider region. Well, let's start with Venezuela.

1:51If people want more detail on Venezuela, we actually did a podcast looking in depth at Venezuela. But of course, oil-rich Latin American state, famously associated with Hugo Chavez, a general who led a populist revolution, now run by President Maduro, who on all accounts stole the last election and has created an authoritarian state. Big focus for American administrations, partly because there are hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States, partly in this case because Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has long been committed to the idea of getting rid of the Venezuelan government.

2:28Fast forward, the US hit a Venezuelan boat, blew it up, destroyed it, and has now done it a number of other times. A number of these boats have now been destroyed. As we said at the time, it is a sign of a Trump government that is no longer remotely interested in international legal guidance. The American government has been pushing the boundary on international law since it began using drone strikes against terrorists. But at least when it did that, it had congressional authorization to do it. And the congressional authorization was to protect the United States against terrorist attack, and that justified them using drones in Pakistan.

3:08In this case, these are vessels carrying drugs. There's no clarity, in fact, where these vessels are going. It seemed from Rubio's statement that one of these vessels was actually going towards Venezuela. So they're killing foreign nationals in foreign territory on the ground. They're carrying drugs. To push it to the extreme, literally nothing would prevent them sending a drone over Britain, blowing up a bunch of people in the British streets and claiming they're drug runners and they're taking them out. And they provide no evidence whatsoever of who these people are. There's no legal process at all.

3:40Along with that, the US military have now deployed eight warships, several Navy surveillance planes, MQ-9 Reapers, which is a type of attack drone, and an attack submarine to the region. They've beefed up their F-35 fighter fleet in Panama. There are thousands of US Marines now there. A$50 million bounty has been announced on Maduro's head. And people in Venezuela are absolutely convinced that this is a prelude to regime change. And Marco Rubio is often hinting at this. The idea would be either to do what they did in Iran, which is literally send in missiles and just kill Maduro in his palace, or send in the Marines and abduct him in order to generate regime change.

4:27Why? Well, very strange thing to do, given that we know that Trump is very suspicious of regime change and these kinds of interventions. One theory is that it's because he's trying to expel hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants from the States, and he's using an executive order which is designed for getting rid of illegal aliens at a time of war. And therefore, in order to justify his expulsion, he needs to declare war on Venezuela to do it. And he's also thereby creating two of his favorite dividing lines. One of them is, again essentially what he's saying is look are you are you for dealing with the war on drugs or you're not because these are people who are bringing in narcotics into our country they're part of the drugs trade therefore we're entitled to take them out are you with us or you against us and that's basically where he likes to be and then the second issue is this thing called tps which is temporary protected status so you've got over a quarter million venezuelans in the states and they're not winning everything in the courts.

5:30And one of the most shocking things that happened this week, not directly related to this, but was the house of a judge who had stood in the way of one of Trump's decisions, literally going up in flames. Terrifying. The judge with her family still in the house, apparently, this house literally going up in flames. So this is about basically signaling another dividing line because, of course, a lot of these people came in during the Biden regime. So it allows him basically to say, we are dealing with problems that we've inherited. And he then adds the point, and I said I would. So he's sort of giving himself the cover by saying, I said I'd do this when I was running for office.

6:11I'm now doing it. And basically the details of whether I need approval, whether it's leading or not, you're either with me or against me. I'm really beginning to sense how much people's giving up on basic ideas of law, the rule of law. I had a friend who's a Harvard graduate from a liberal family, an American, came over to see me last week. She said to me, Rory, why are you so upset with what he's doing? Because actually there have been reports that there was some cocaine floating around in the water after they hit the boat, so they were guilty. And I'm thinking, what the hell has happened here?

6:47I mean, all of us were sort of supposed to be brought up from childhood to say, I can't go into the streets in Britain, shoot someone with no evidence, no arrest warrant, no legal process, and then say, well, anyway, some drugs were found on the thing, so it's all justified. The fact that a liberal Harvard educated person is now beginning to buy into that narrative, it effectively means there is no limit at all on what they do abroad and at home. I'd love to do this with you maybe in more detail next week or the week after is to look at what's happening with ICE. $160 billion has now been voted for immigration enforcement.

7:29The budget of this ICE body, this crazy immigration... You've got a middle power defense budget. Yeah, it's higher than any military except the US and China annually is the new calculation. These agents are masked, completely unaccountable. No civil cases can be brought against them. Basically, no criminal cases can be brought against them because that would require Trump's Department of Justice to go after them. Advertising with full-on white nationalist mid-19th century stuff. One of their advertising posters represents the white American angel with a brute of settlers chasing off Native Americans off their land with protect the homeland, protect the heritage.

8:14Wow. Yeah. And I mean, I'm trying to spend a lot less time on social media with some success, I have to say. But whenever I do go on there, you're seeing relentless videos of someone the other day of literally two and you've got to be careful because you never know what's fake and what's not but it was two people i think in portland where he says they're at war they're at war in portland which managed to run a very successful marathon the other weekend with tens of thousands of people taking part in this war but the two protesters standing there face to face with a couple of ice people one of whom suddenly just got out a pepper spray and sprayed in the face.

8:50Lots of people just being dragged out of buildings. And I think we talked about Kemi Badenok on the main podcast. I think she made a mistake in saying that this deportation plan that she's talking about is going to be modelled on ice. I don't feel that Britain is quite in the place to accept this sort of stuff. And the other sort of Trumpian crossover to our politics was Kent County Council this week, saying they're going to have to put up cancel tax because hey guess what it turns out that all this wasted money that they said they were going to find they've not been able to find it that's quite a jump from to from ice going no because what it is what it is and farage saying we're going to model our approach on what trump has done ice and doge right well life is more complicated the doge myth yeah so just to reinforce why you're completely right on ice and why nobody should ever vote for any party in Britain that was modeling itself on ICE.

9:48They are now on a recruitment drive. And to get people in, they are recruiting people who are excited by videos of ICE agents throwing people at the back of vans, going around with masks on. They are now arresting people who are turning up for their legal hearings. One of the easiest ways that they get people is that they're turning up for their asylum cases. They're targeting people on the base of their IRS records. In other words, if you are somebody who's come to the united states who's doing what you should do turning up to your court hearings and paying your tax you're now being particularly targeted by the ice agents and as you say it's the theater of cruelty they're videoing everything that they're doing yeah putting it up yeah i guess the other big thing happening in the states this week was the government shutdown melissa bell wants to know what we think of the government shutdown and who do we blame melissa why do we have to blame all the time why can't we just analyze this from a non-blame perspective?

10:40Well, first thing, big plug for Restless Politics US. So, Katike and Anthony Scaramucci did a good show on the details of this lockdown and the way that a lot of this is about Democrats trying to protect Medicare and Trump weaponizing it and saying they've shut down the government in order to help illegals access the health system. And no rational conversation about what the costs are of stripping out medicare and driving people into emergency rooms instead and another shout out a fantastic analysis on russell vote done by the new york times daily yeah the officer management budget guy extraordinary account this kind of man who was part of trump's first administration tried to do a lot of the things first time around didn't succeed went into the wilderness spent four years brooding and working with Project 2025 to develop his entire legal strategy so that he came in with Trump too, just firing on all cylinders with all the executive orders ready to go, all the legal moves ready to go.

11:45And Trump's been putting out videos of him as the grim reaper walking through Washington. I think the blame game thing that the question highlights is it is a big part of what's wrong with American politics right now. And we've got something similar here, but I think there it's on a different level. We talked last week about, you know, Trump had the meeting with the Democrat leaders from Congress and immediately put out this AI video of them ridiculing them, basically. So that, you know, they're blaming Trump and saying he doesn't want the government to carry on because it means it gives him an excuse to cut budgets.

12:24And he does, he talks about, you know, these, I call them Democrat layoffs, they're Democrat layoffs, they're causing it so it's it's absolutely as this is a consequence as well as a cause of polarization the way that trump talks about these it's almost as if all government spending is bad um unless it's something that's one of his little pet projects but and of course there's the other thing you've got so many times when he was on the record when biden was president of him basically saying if the government ever shuts down, you've got to blame the president. Because now that it's him doing it, it's very, very different.

13:01Okay, Alice, a question here for you from Alice Palmer. And I'd love to hear from you on this. What are Macron's options now his prime minister has resigned after 26 days? Can you give us a brief explainer on what the hell is going on in French politics and try to keep people up to date? We did interview on leading one of the longest serving one of Macron's prime ministers, Gabrielle Attal. And then we also interviewed another one of his prime ministers, Michel Barnier. But at the speed at which they're going, it's quite difficult for leading to interview every French prime minister at the moment.

13:32Well, this guy's called Sébastien Lecornu. He was the defence minister. He was appointed 24, 25 days ago. And people thought he was making progress because he wasn't announcing a government. And he was appointed after the resignation of the man who wanted to introduce the cuts. and he said, I can't get my 44 billion euros of cuts through, I'm resigning. Correct. But also the parliament wouldn't pass it, so he had to go. And so Lacornu is basically thrown in the towel before the vote because he's basically worked out he's not going to get it through. But why can't you see this in advance? I don't even get this.

14:09He must have taken the job knowing that this was the deal. I mean, Macron must be pretty annoyed with him. The guy took the job knowing the electoral mathematics, knowing what these parties were. He spent his 25, 24 days, whatever, going around, talking to all the parties, trying to get them to sign up to something. And he obviously thought at certain points he could and other points that he couldn't. It seems that the kind of right wing, the more traditional right wing party, not the Le Pen party, pulled the plug on him fairly late on. And he realized he wasn't going to get it through. But the point is, it's actually, it will go down in history as the shortest serving government ever, because he didn't name a government during that period.

14:49He was obviously, i think holding back the naming of a cabinet so that if and when he got to the point of thinking he might be able to make a deal his cabinet would form part of that picture he could use the cabinet positions as a carrot to make les republicans vote for the bill give them a give them a seat or whatever and then what happened is this guy bruno he pulled out um and that's when he realized that his jigsaw was falling apart so he goes to macron he says look this isn't going to work i'm really sorry uh and the and the fundamental problem is that you've now got these three separate blocks in the parliament you've got the far left you've got the centrist and you've got the far right and they're not giving each other anything and you can't make a majority because they're roughly a third each yeah you need at least two of them or or half of one of them you need to be able to get some support from the parties that you're of which you're not a member Now, Macron has clearly got – we said this when he appointed Beirut.

15:49I think I said, look, he maybe has to take the risk of appointing somebody from the left. He's tended to try to go on the right. He's all about fiscal responsibility and cutting spending and getting the deficit under control. Is that why? Partly that. But also, I think he just hates the left. He hates the sort of Mélenchon left so much. Added to it, he probably thinks he can never agree with them. Right. But he's now really only got – he's running out of options. probably where this is going he's basically said to lakornu by the time this question time goes out lakornu will be near the end of the 48 hours he's been given to try again oh so macron has said to him i get where you're coming from but i'm not accepting your resignation try again i'll give you to give you two days and and get to i don't understand why does macron not take responsibility and try to form this government himself why is he delegating all this to his prime minister because that's the job of the prime minister.

16:41The only option he's then got left after that is actually for him to throw in the towel and have presidential elections ahead of time. And you think he'll be pushed towards that if he keeps losing prime ministers at this rate? That's where the left and the right are trying to push him. I don't think he's going to go there. You don't think he will? Because I'm beginning to think that maybe it's going to become increasingly inevitable if he loses them again and again and literally can't do anything. The demand for him to hold the election will be almost irresistible. It may be. It may be. But that absolutely is the kind of operation cataclysm for him.

17:16This does go back, and fair play to you, you said it right at the start when he had the snap election, that you thought it was madness. now he obviously thought there was a chance that the country would face up to the to the warning that if you don't elect a decent strong government now we are in le bordel absolutely in the mess and he took that gamble it didn't work and every time since then essentially it's become when i did this fundraiser the day on the back of um the the the killings in Manchester, somebody asked the question, is Britain becoming ungovernable? To which my answer was very strongly, no, Britain is not ungovernable.

17:59But you get the feeling that France actually is right now. So it may be that is where we end up. And that, of course, is an absolute gift to the far right. One thing that some people say is that it's to do with the design of the Republic and the Constitution, and that this whole constitutional model is mad, that this sort of super powerful president who's completely detached from the realities of parliament. But what would be actually involved in creating a sixth republic? You'd have to say that the constitution is broken and that we're going to get a new one. And is Macron tempted to do that or any of these parties tempted to do that?

18:32I don't think Macron would be allowed to do that. I think he's, and the extraordinary thing, of course, is he's still going out there in the public and making big statements on foreign policy in particular. But no, this is an absolute mess. And it's quite hard to see how he gets out of it. I think just having another prime minister, unless he does something very, very bold and does say, I go left, I go right. But he's not going to do it. He's not going to do it. And it's heartbreaking because it means that at exactly the time when Europe needs to be stepping up in the age of Trump and speaking up for the rule of law and sorting out its defense and security, We've got a very, very weak Macron who doesn't seem to have the right kind of relationship with the German Chancellor.

19:19And somehow, you know, Starmer's obviously made a lot of positive steps, but we simply do not have that sense of kind of unified momentum, UK, EU, big grand vision of how they work in this world. No, this is a real mess. So it's either going to be a new prime minister, new elections, which will probably produce a similar result, or nuclear option is he basically says, hands up, time's up, got to go. And then heaven knows what happens. He'd probably do the elections first, wouldn't he, before he recesses? I suppose so, yeah. Okay, final one before the break. Jill Hart, TripPlus member, Melbourne, Australia.

19:57Hi, Rory and Alistair. Massive fan of your work. Just finished watching The Hack and was pleasantly surprised to see Alistair's cameo. For an Aussie who was aware of the news of the world scandal, but not much else about the hacking, could Alistair give us a rundown on what happened to him in relation to the hacking scandal? And then Phil Davis, TripPlus member from North Wales, following on from Alistair's surprise cameo appearance in ITV's The Hack, Leveson 2. Yes or no? If not, why not? There we are, Alistair. I think the fact that Phil Davis is a TripPlus member and you just skipped over the name of the place that he comes from in North Wales.

20:32Why was that, Rory? Why did you skip over Penman Mawar? Can't imagine, Alistair. Can't imagine. Anyway, at least I tried there, Phil. Yeah, The Hack. Have you watched The Hack? No, tell us about it. It's quite good. So it's a dramatization of the phone hacking scandal and also the murder of Daniel Morgan, which was this very long-running unsolved murder. so it's looking at sort of press illegality press and police corruption um and the the main the star other than my very very brief caveats myself the star is david tennant as nick davis the guardian journalist and toby jones plays alan rusbridger the guardian editor which is really it's really really interesting shows you what a great actor can do because he doesn't look remotely like Alan Rusbridger.

21:25Alan Rusbridger is as tall as I am. Toby Jones is very short. And yet he captures him somehow really well. But I think I watched it in a, you know, it's quite a few hours, but I watched it with Fiona and I got quite angry by the end. My role, funnily enough, is this very, very, is one line in my diaries that Jack Thorne, the writer, wanted me to deliver. okay and the line is when it was when stephen byers was um on the receiving end our transport minister was on the receiving end of the kind of tabloid treatment over an affair and i wrote this line in my diary it's like when they they set out to kill you and then when they've killed you they get a bit bored and they're missing something so they try and kill the corpse okay so that was my line so david tennant marches in as as uh nick davis and then i deliver this So you're acting with David Tennant.

22:18I mean, that's... My co-star, yes. You've made it to the very big stuff, yeah. Yeah. But funny, we had an example of this this weekend. Well, are you acting with a major acting star? No, of them wanting to kill the corpse. Oh, right. Which was Angela Rayner. Angela Rayner has been, you know, driven out of office over the stuff to do with her stamp duty. And yet several of our newspapers led at the weekend on this complete, total non-story about the fact that her boyfriend was spotted in in her car her government car um but you know that that sort of hammered home the point that even though they've managed to sear off they want to kind of knock a few nails in the in the coffin um by the way i think she'll be back so yeah what i found anger making was that it brought it back and the question was you know what happened to me I mean, I was one of many, many, many, many people whose phone was hacked and got some money for it and what have you.

23:15And I've still got another case going on with another newspaper. But the scale of it, and I think what made me angry by the end of it was, so this is pretty high level crime. Okay, it's pretty serious crime that they were doing and they knew they were doing it. And the crime for international listeners is that they basically were often calling your voicemail, guessing what your pin code was, listening to your voicemail messages and using that to write stories attacking you, which could be very, very personal because obviously what's in your voicemail could be from almost anyone. And they first really got onto it through when the royals started to realize that things that very few people knew.

23:54And the thing is, I got damages even though it was impossible to know whether there were stories from my voicemails or not. So it was the fact of it. But the point is, they knew it was going on. It was happening clearly on an industrial scale. And yet they blamed it on one rogue reporter. Right. And the only person I think I'm right of any seniority who got properly punished, as it were, was Andy Coulson. Right. Who went to jail and he went to jail. Really, he became a high profile case largely because he ended up working for David Cameron. Right. And so. But then at the end, there's these, you know, ends with these graphics on the thing.

24:34And it points out that Rebecca Brooks, for example, who was the. uh used the world editor at the time and also sort of you know senior executive in the organization she resigned and got an 11 million pound payoff and then within a year was back in an even more senior job and so you have the whole the murdoch the murdochs there and it leaves a very very bad taste but unlike jack thorne's adolescence which kind of went whoosh and just That sparked a massive national debate. I don't feel this one has. Why? Because the press don't want to be talking about it. So the question, Leveson 2, is there any way back for it?

25:11There should be. This is about corrupt relations between the press and the police, but I suspect that Keir Starmer shows no indication he wants to do it. Because he senses that the media are really against any form of regulation and will punish anyone who tries to push ahead of them. Yeah, although to be absolutely frank, they punish him pretty hard anyway. but listen it's very it's a it's a very good watch and it will bring back a lot of memories for a lot of people and and i think will angle a lot of people and and plug as we go to the break um you've done a great series on rupert murdoch indeed mini series for listeners subscribe to the rest is politics plus become a member and you can hear you discussing this extraordinary man rupert murdoch who i guess is now in his 90s in his 90s yeah and you know it's with michael Wolf who's written a couple of books about Rupert Murdoch.

26:01I think people enjoy it. We both try to be dispassionate, but I think it's fair to say we've both got quite strong views about his influence on the world. I think he's mesmerizing. As I've often said on the show, I'm really struck by how even before I became a politician, he found me in New York and drove me into his newsroom and sat me down with the editors. He seemed like a real newspaper man. He seemed to really want to challenge his editors, get to the story. What are a couple of things that have struck you fresh about him in making these series? Well, obviously, I read a lot before we put it together.

26:42And I mean, a lot of memories came back, to be absolutely frank. His Australian background is important. His father's a very important figure in his life. His father is, I mean, Murdoch is not a self-made man. Yes, he made a huge thing of himself, but he was given a pretty good start in life. I mean, for example, when he first came to Europe, his dad thought it'd be really nice if they could pop in and see the Pope. Well, not many people get to do that. Likewise, I think his first visit to America, Rupert Murdoch met the then president. So, you know, he's operated in those levels a lot of his life.

27:18Presumably, given how old he is, he's met popes and presidents 70 years ago. Oh, going way back. Yeah. And I think Michael and I both came to the conclusion that if you sort of analyze power, I mean, power is a very subjective thing. Okay. So we can have a debate about whether the prime minister of Denmark is more or less powerful than the prime minister of Sweden. we can have a debate about whether the British Prime Minister is more or less powerful than the Secretary of State of the United States. So it's subjective, okay. But I reckon if you go through the last 70 years and give a score to Rupert Murdoch's power in that year, over the 70 years, I think he's up in a pretty high place in a global league table.

28:04But spoiler alert, presumably possibly one of the really big moments though is when he thinks he has the power to stop Trump and it turns out he doesn't quite. Well that is very, of course when we get onto Trump which is you know towards the end of the series, we have lots about his relationships with Thatcher, his relationship obviously with my old boss Tony Blair and how we kind of manage that. We go in some detail into the famous visit that we made to Australia to Tony to deliver a speech to all his editors for which we got quite a lot of flack. We don't gloss over any of the criminal stuff and the phone hacking, what have you.