463. Question Time: How Truth Became Optional In Trump’s America

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2:15Welcome to the Rest of the Spongebob. It's a question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Schutt. First question for you. Mordecai Stones from London. I'm often amused and delighted, well, that's quite flattering, at your insightful commentary around Donald Trump's psychology and decision making. Without lapsing into hysteria, considering the background of the January 6th, 2021 capital attack, how closely do you feel that Trump's demolition of the East Wing speaks the likelihood of him not leaving the White House come 2029? Well, he's already been musing. He was musing again on his plane to the Far East that he would love to have another term.

2:52He didn't like the idea of being the constitutional trick of being vice president for one term and then coming back. Or, you know, the president, Vance, presumably then sort of stepping aside and he would then constitutionally take over. He thought that was too cute, he said. but I find this and bear in mind as well the demolition of the East Wing is another breach because he said he wasn't going to change the architecture of the White House I think what it all speaks to is the sense that he feels he can do whatever the hell he wants in whichever way he wants more worryingly to my mind is the way that they're talking up the troubles that they expect around the midterms, more National Guards going to more cities.

3:42And, you know, Mordecai mentions January the 6th, 2021. I still can't for the life of me think why that wasn't a complete, you know, end of the road, career ending moment. But the fact that it isn't means that we should be very, very worried about some of these other things that he's doing, which I know you want to talk about. Yeah. And I think the career ending, not just for him, it should have been career ending for all the senior Republicans that supported the big lie about his apparent election win and got behind him after January 6th. And yet they are now the dominant figures right across his entire administration.

4:18All of them have signed up to the story that he defeated Biden. And of course, all the senior Republican leadership. We talk a lot about the international stuff and we are struggling like the rest of the world to get the right balance on how you describe this strange mixture that he does abroad of kind of gangster-like extortion. You know, I help you in Ukraine if you give me$500 billion worth of minerals or let my friend Bolsonaro out of jail or hit you with 50 % tariffs and I'm going to bomb you or I'm going to let someone else bomb you. And then I'm, oh, and by the way, give me this. I'll have a$400 million plane.

4:54Thank you very much. But domestically, it's more difficult because it is about the erosion of constitutional protections and the rule of law and the way the Department of Justice works and the way the FBI works and what he's doing to universities and what he's doing to the media, what he's doing to law firms and what he's doing with ICE agents. And we're creating a culture which I think is fundamentally about Stephen Miller, particularly Trump's deputy chief of staff, but actually pretty much Vance and Trump too, believing in the end that what matters is power, force and violence, not laws and process.

5:35And that's the kind of big overall theme that we see again and again. And a couple of examples, and maybe sort of hand back to you. One of them is, of course, what's happening in the Department of Justice. So the Department of Justice, since Watergate, since the 1970s, for the whole of my life, has operated with norms that basically says it's supposed not to be a political tool. It's supposed to look at cases on their merits and the prosecutors then pursue them and they don't do it with huge press conferences and they don't do it on a partisan basis and they don't use it to settle scores and they don't comment on the cases.

6:13Trump has ripped all that up. He stopped them pursuing the case against the mayor of New York, big corruption case involving the Turks, and he stopped it because the mayor of New York was his ally. He's accelerated cases against his enemies, including the former director of the SBI, Comey, including now John Bolton. He regularly says, I'm going after this person. And then he, of course, being Trump, he then changes to, well, I'm not going after them, but I hear people are going after them. And probably if they're going after them, they're because they're very bad people. And in the center of this is this figure Edward Martin, who is basically acting as the interim attack dog who's out there all the time, he went after the interim New York Attorney General, basically turned up outside her house in a very threatening way with all the television cameras and then said, oh, I was just looking at some property around this area.

7:06And because of the lack of norms, because it's not like Britain, where the Crown Prosecution Service is independent of the government, the Department of Justice is increasingly becoming a weaponized instrument of Trump's state. Over to you. Yeah. No, the other thing, don't forget, while he's talking about this sort of massively expensive ballroom, at a time when we're into the fourth week of a government shutdown, we're only one week away from it becoming the longest shutdown in history. He was speaking to the troops in Japan, and they're having to get some sort of, you know, multi-billionaire business guy who's actually simultaneously involved in all sorts of legal things, which presumably will now get cleared up because of his generosity, who's helping to pay the military.

7:52So this is kind of, on the one hand, this, as you say, this global peacemaking, spread the love, America will do this if you do this and all that. Back home, it's this policy of creating division, creating hate, building a sense that he might go for a third term, that the midterms may happen, may not happen, depending on the outcome, blah, blah, blah. It's so sort of profoundly un-American. But it does say to me that, you know, when he says just the demolition of the East Wing, speak to the likelihood of him not leaving. He's creating not just a new Trump in term two and a new White House and a new politics.

8:35He's kind of creating a new America and he's using it to try to create a whole new world. Now, maybe overreach will get him before too long. But I find it very, very scary. There was a question from Christine Doyle, who's a Triplast member from Oxford, getting back to this question of whether America is headed for civil war. And one of the things I'd love to get your sense on is whether oddly having thought, you know, I thought maybe the real threat is civil war. In other words, all these American institutions would resist Trump and the country would be torn apart as people fought back. I'm now beginning to worry that actually these American elites are much less self-confident and much less good at standing up to them than people thought.

9:18The universities haven't really stood up. The media hasn't really stood up. The financial community hasn't really stood up. I mean, despite this crazy stuff he's doing with the American economy, with tariffs now at an average of 18%, with the employment figures looking dubious, with very strange moves affecting the international trade system. the markets are continuing to fly upwards people are making a huge amount of money they're not pricing in the trump risk almost nobody from finance to or certainly congress seems to be fighting back what's your sense of the fight back in the u.s well i think the thing to look forward to in the next few days of course is the election in new york zora mamdani who he had this extraordinary huge crowd almost as big as our o2 crowd rory turned up for a rally that he did with aoc and Bernie Sanders.

10:04Now that's, if you like, the left, okay? I think we're the more maybe centrist and left voters. I think where you're right that the institutions are not fighting back, but my God, those marches last weekend, the No Kings marches, they were big. They were big. And a lot of them were happening in places that you would not expect people to be turning out against a Republican president. And of course, he then just comes out and says, well, well, Mamdani's a communist and he's a loser and AOC has got a low IQ and all his usual insults. And he also says these marches, they were all losers. They were all, you know, and they weren't very big crowds.

10:40He just goes straight into the fake news, polarization stuff. But I think the Mamdani election will be really interesting. Of course, it speaks to what we talked about in the main podcast. Why has he cut through in the way that he has. Now, they can try to identify him as a communist. I think by British standards, he'd sort of, you know, is he even as left-wing as Jeremy Corbyn? I'm not convinced. But what's interesting about it is that he has cut through. Yes, he does all the attack stuff, but he doesn't go on about Donald Trump the whole time. He goes on about what he wants to do for New York.

11:15He's got a big, bold, positive agenda, and that's what seems to be getting people out on the streets for it. Can I just bring you to this amazing series that you've done on Rupert Murdoch, which is a members only series, which I think we're now just getting into the fourth episode coming out on Friday. And the fourth episode focuses on this relationship between Murdoch and Trump, which I guess is sort of part of the story because Murdoch, in my understanding, thought that with Fox News and with his amazing position in the media, he could almost decide whether Trump got through or not. And maybe we'll have thought at one stage in his life, he could kind of block Trump and thought Trump was a bit of a loser.

11:57And yet somehow Murdoch lost to Trump. Is that right? I mean, tell us about this episode and what you've found. Well, we're getting very good feedback on the Murdoch series. And again, to those who want to listen to these members only series, you just join up at rustispolitics.com. um michael wolf with whom is my sort of my rory stewart on this series he is of the view that without murdoch there is no fox news and without fox news there is no trump and what i think trump did and this is where you have to understand how instinctively smart he is as a politician by his own lights, achieving what he sets out to achieve, he basically decided he had to become the most important person inside Fox, not Murdoch.

12:49So when Murdoch came along and said, I'm not backing that Trump guy, and he had a time when they were flirting with Ron DeSantis and the ratings just started to collapse. And you had people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity saying, this is a fucking joke. Why are we allowing this senile old Australian guy to decide our strategy when it's clearly not failing. We've got to get Trump back on. And Trump, you know, how many other leaders can actually guarantee fawning coverage by picking up a phone on a dodgy mobile line from the back of a car and saying, put me on the Hannity show. And so he became the bigger voice within Fox.

13:30and according to Michael, Murdoch despises Trump, thinks that he's basically stupid, thinks that he's very dangerous, but the fox became so important to his business empire that he had to go along with it. And so, yeah, it's very, very interesting and I think Michael's right. I'm not sure that without Trump, without Fox, I'm not sure Trump wins. I hate to say that because I don't like giving power to these people, but I think it's true. So if you want to hear the episodes we've already done or the ones still to come, become a member. You do that by signing up at therestispolitics.com and you'll get a free trial.

14:12So if you decide at the end of the day, no, I don't want that, then no skin off your nose. But we are getting a lot of really good feedback on the Murdoch series. We mentioned very briefly in the main episode, we mentioned Millet. So Imogen Phillips, how much of Milley's midterm win can be credited to Trump's bailout? We talked about this a couple of weeks ago because Milley's party did very badly in a local by-election. And we thought if that was followed in these elections, then he'd be in real trouble. Trump comes up with his$20 billion bailout, and he's had a bloody landslide. And bear in mind, this is a guy who had very little support inside the parliamentary bodies, and he's now got a lot.

14:55So it changes things, big time. It's amazing, isn't it? A couple of things. One is, it's a reminder of how unreliable the polls are, and how unreliable consistently experts are. I mean, all the authorities on Argentina, almost without exception, thought Mila was going to poll at about 30, 35. and he came in well above 40 and even mille was astonished by it so and we're seeing this also we saw the study with kefili where everybody thought reform would win and actually plied would win and you know we've seen it repeated again and again and again in fact almost the only predictable election that we've seen was keir starmers where everyone thought he was going to defeat the tories and he certainly did um second thing is is this whole story which you were talking about yesterday with Ireland of independence suddenly being able to come through or people like Mamdani who were not part of the democratic establishment at all.

15:47I mean, Cuomo from this huge political family with tens of millions of dollars is suddenly defeated by Mamdani. And this again, you know, keeps coming back to this question of social media. It's a very unstable world. There was another thing that was picked up in this wonderful Chris Clark article that you raised yesterday. He refers to a piece of American research about the relationship between happiness and voting. And there's a graph that we can share, which actually our producer brought together, which shows that people voting Labour and Conservative in Britain, and indeed people voting Democrat in the US, disproportionately register as being happier than the people voting for the smaller parties.

16:29And in fact, in the US, this piece of research in 2024 said if you want the single biggest predictor on whether somebody will vote for Trump or Biden, it's not whether they have a university degree, how old they are, whether they're white or black, how many immigrants there are in the community. It's whether or not you reckon that you are by and large more happy than unhappy with your life. And if you are somebody who says that you are more unhappy than happy with your life, it's the most reliable predictor that you will vote for Trump, both as an individual and as a county. The other big demographic shift, of course, relates to some extent to class and education.

17:10So some polling I saw last week, people with a university degree and indeed people who were educated at private school are now more likely to vote Labour than Tory. And what Johnson did through the Brexit thing and then his own election is that quite a A lot of working class people who would never have thought of voting Tory because their parents and grandparents would turn in their graves actually decided to vote Tory. And once you've made that shift, you're always, in general, I think the human being in us tends to want to stay with it and find the reasons to stay with it. Once you've made the shift, it's very hard to peel people back.

17:51Okay, well, let's take a break and then we've got to come back and do some relentless plugging of your new book. Very good. looking forward to it immensely. See you after the break.

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21:14Welcome back to The Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Here we go. Alana Phillips. Rory, do you now see yourself more as a writer than a politician? And does that allow you more scope for positivity? And the reason Alana sent that question is because we put out a plea to questions about Rory's new book, which is called Middleland Dispatches from the Borders. Now, Rory, do you want to explain what your book is or do you want me to do it? I'll give you a chance and then maybe we can disagree agreeably about what it's about. What did you think it was about?

21:50It's Dispatches from the Borders. Rather grandly throughout, you describe these not as articles for the local newspaper, but as letters and essays. So you talked about Chris Clark's article, which in fact was a sort of, I think, a very considered thesis, but you are letters, dispatches and essays. But first of all, to put your mind at ease, I found it very, very readable, very enjoyable in many respects, very interesting. And what it is, just to tell those who haven't heard about the book yet, it's called Middleland. And Rory will explain why it's called Middleland and why that's so important in the context of a book about Cumbria.

22:29But when Rory was an MP, he wrote a weekly article for his local newspaper. And this is about a third of the columns that he wrote with these quite short analytical pieces that sort of, you know, order them around certain themes. And it's interesting, Rory, your personality that has sort of come through the podcast over time, it comes through the book over time as well. There are certain themes and interests that you return to again and again and again. Landscape, farming, history. There are touches of where you're sort of clearly in despair about your life as an MP. So you can see politics on the edge being born within these columns as they go.

23:21I hope you won't be hurt to hear that my favourite bit in the entire book, and there are many, there are many okay but my favorite bit was not written by you it was written by your father um and i shouldn't laugh because it's actually a column that you wrote when your father died um but he left the funeral instructions and i've you've talked a lot about your dad in the podcast but i felt i i must feel i know him a lot better having read this so this is him on how he wants to be funeralised. One, I have no strong views on the subject, but all things being equal, and if legally possible, I should prefer to be buried with my dogs at home.

24:01Two, if however, Sally, your mum, and Rory and the other children would prefer something different, so be it. Three, I am disinterested in whether I'm career-eated or not. Once again, the views of my family should prevail. If there is to be a formal farewell, I should like a piper to play a traditional lament, followed by a bugler to pay the last post in memory of my brother and all my friends who were killed in action at the war. And he goes on, he goes on, to sum up, gaiety, even perhaps song and dance should be the hallmark of the exercise. If the weather is fine, a farewell stripped the willow, ate some dashing white sergeant and gay gordons would not tax the young or the old.

24:43And also I was thrilled, Rory, to learn that his favorite regimental marching song is Highland Laddy, which is the first march I ever learned. Oh, and would your funeral instructions be very different? Oh, I write them all the time. I adapt them all the time. I'm even wondering, Rory, whether I should do the eulogy as an AI version of me. No, I want very similar. I want lots of music. It's interesting. He doesn't mention whether God should be involved. I thought that was interesting. I asked him about God and he said, I'm not so sure about God, but I love church music. Yeah, he likes church music.

25:18And my mum was a great church music fan. But I would like lots of music. I've actually got this idea that a piper should pipe me in, which would be my mate Finlay MacDonald from the National Piping Centre and my nephew, John. and at the end my favorite scottish folk band skip finish i want them to play alive um because i'll be dead but everybody else will be alive um but yeah loads and loads of music no but i thought that was wonderful and i do think you know joking aside i think your stuff about cumbria i learned an awful lot i didn't i didn't know why cumbria was called middle i didn't know this stuff about them being basically more welsh than scottish and i love all this stuff about there's a line in there that struck me about where, and it's true, because you know Longtown, that's in your constituency, I spent, in 1966, the day the England won the World Cup, I was stuck in Longtown, and I watched it there, but you made the point that the accent, literally 200 yards away in Scotland, it is a different accent to what you get in Longtown.

26:26Anyway, really enjoyed it, really enjoyed it well the thing that i was really happy about is the chance to tell a different story about british politics because you know obviously what we tend to do on the podcast is do what we did in the first half you know try trump you know we could have got on to sieging ping milay and its general sense of catastrophe and disaster and even in yesterday's podcast when we were talking about what's happening with labor and the conservatives and reform and stuff But I found in Cumbria, it was a place where it was possible to sort of define what the good life might be like, what it might be like for farmers, what it might be like for people living in towns, what it might be like for the incredible number of young retired people who've moved to Cumbria.