491. Trump at Davos: Rory and Alastair React

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1:30It's Alistair here. We've just watched President Donald Trump speaking at Davos. I'm sure you're aware that President Trump was in Davos today. We thought it was worth giving you our instant reaction, having been in the room 10 rows away from where he was speaking. So question time will be with you on Friday morning, where we discuss whether Europe should boycott the World Cup. If he carries on with all this nonsense about Greenland, we can talk about Robert Jenrick's defection and we talk about Syria and more. Welcome to The Rest is Politics. Davos special with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell.

2:04I'm not convinced it's that special, Rory. You're pretty glam, aren't you? That was one of the most horrific events I've attended in my entire life. So just to explain to listeners, what you're talking about here is the speech from President Trump that we just heard in the main congressman. So put in context, I was queuing outside for, I guess, 12.30 to 2.30, like two hours. Alistair being Alistair let me queue for quite a long time and then came and claimed to be my husband or something. I did not claim to be your husband. Join me on the line. I said, I pretended. I had my phone. People were very grump.

2:34I've never seen such a big queue apart from when we did the O2, obviously. Anyway, yeah, so we queued for a long time. You managed to get to the top of the queue by jumping up next to me. We got in, set down. We did have prime seats, so I saw you. We were sitting there behind Marco Rubio, Al Gore. I think the first thing that we need to convey, though, to the audience is that the very odd thing about it, which you're not expecting, right? If you're me, the language in many ways is, if you look at the words, it's very fascist, very populist, reminds you of kind of brutal acquisitions, Mussolini threats.

3:07But the delivery is very flat, often very boring, very rambling, very mild mannered. I mean, the contrast I think that struck me most is that if you were a sort of 1930s leader making these statements about these countries have done nothing for them, all we want is this, that you would be much more aggressive. But he has this very odd demeanor, doesn't he? Yeah, but I think that's part of his humiliation and cruelty of all those people there. Your friend, Daddy Rutter, who you gave a little name check and his daddy here. And as you say, I saw you tweeted while we were there saying, does Marco Rubio really have to sit through this?

3:40I would probably use the SHIT word, day after day after day. But I'll tell you what, no, The reason why I'm so kind of horrified by it, partly the content, which, you know, it was the stuff we've heard a million times. We'll come on to talk about Greenland because obviously news-wise, that's the most important bit. But the rest was his greatest hits, Ramble of Lies, Misrepresentations, Sleepy Joe Biden, and all the stuff that he does all the time. And by the end, people were looking at their phones, they were chatting. Now, Rory, at least for the sake of my friends in the Lido queue who were saying to Fiona this morning, please make sure he heckles.

4:14You did a bit of heckling. I've tried. You did a bit of Hagan. I was surrounded by… I booed at Somalia. Yeah, when he said Somalis, it's, you know, what did he say? It's even higher than their IQ, lower than their IQ. At which point you said, boo, rock. I booed. And then people talked, shh, shh. And then occasionally you were like, no, it's not. That's wrong. And you lost the election. You didn't win a Lancet. You lost to Biden. But I sensed it because we were just behind all these world leaders. And they kept turning around and looking at us as though we were eating crisps in a theatre. Exactly.

4:44But also they kept chuckling at his little horrible jokes. Now, I found myself, actually, I caught myself and you caught me laughing at one of them. And partly is that what he does is he says things which are so outrageous and self-satisfied. I mean, so the moment I caught was he said, people came up to me and they said, you know, Mr. President, you know, every single military operation you've done has been perfectly executed. And I said, I know. He said, I know. Right. And the whole thing is so, and he delivers it like that. So he uses his vanity as part of his shtick, as part of the joke that he lets the audience in.

5:18And then he's always saying, you know, I don't think we'd do such amazing things in America in a year, perhaps a year and a month. But the people who've been seeing him day in, day out, they say he's telling this stuff. It's just rambling. And it's been true since 2016. I talked to someone who sat around the table with Theresa May and him on his big visit. And he set off on one of these things, which he talked for about an hour. He's with all his stuff. And literally you can see all their heads kind of collapsing like this. And finally, he turned to one of his senior staff and he said, so what do you think?

5:46And the guy was like, huh? Woke up. Think about what, Mr. President? You know, what do you think about? And then insert the thing. And the guy said, I think absolutely nothing about that, sir. And Trump was very pleased with that. Safe, safe. But I think also, so the stories he told, which he probably told a hundred times about when he phoned Emmanuel Macron. And the thing about the glasses as well, he probably knows that Macron had a burst blood vessel. What the hell's going on with that? So I think to step back for a moment, one of the things that makes dealing with Trump so tricky is this sense that he begins to sort of, it's a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

6:19You become kind of accustomed or habituated to this stuff so that when you're listening to it, you and I and many, many other people, 95 % of the material is familiar. And you almost lose the energy to fact check. I said to you, he's saying they spent 350 billion on Ukraine, which is a really that 350. So figure it's off the side of the bus during Brexit. In fact, the real figure is probably 75, you could get it up to 200, but it's never 350 billion. Then he had this whole speech about how they don't have any wind farms in China. It's all a sort of hoax and the Chinese just want to sell them to suckers around the world.

6:57And the whole reason why we're so weak is because we have wind farms, right? Then he had a story about how Britain in the North Sea was sitting on 500 years' worth. Well, we claim that the oil reserves are depleted, but we don't know because we haven't drilled down. But he knows. He knows that if you were to drill down, you would discover there's 500 years' worth of reserves. So at some point, one just ceases to factor. Because I think I probably could have identified 75 statements which were not true in that. And then the question is, what is the point of statement after statement? He claimed, I think, at one point that he was spending$150 trillion on the US military.

7:39And presumably, he's got his trillions and billions. Well, let's just get through. Let's just say on the big picture, because we know you and I have now, in person, very close up, seen a total narcissist, okay? People are doing very well. They're very happy with me. Well, the polls actually are not good for him right now. His stuff on living standards was untrue. He said, quote, it's virtually no inflation, extraordinarily high growth. No country has ever seen anything like this before. Not true. secured commitments for record-breaking 18 trillion investment, never done before, not even close.

8:05And even the White House own website does not have that figure. It has 9.6, probably not true. I think the bigger question is, amongst all of this stuff, is to dig down to the fundamentals. And the fundamentals was astonishing contempt. America has done everything for the world. Nobody's done anything for us. One statement he kept repeating is, I don't think NATO would ever help us. Well, at that point, I shouted 9-11. Right. Because, of course, actually, when the United States, the only time Article 5 has ever been triggered, it was triggered by the United States. And we all deployed to help the United States after 9-11.

8:39And Denmark lost more soldiers per capita than any other country. So this whole framework, which is, we saved Denmark from the Germans. You kept saying you'd all be speaking German and Japanese, if it wasn't for me. And people, that was, you know what, that was the turning point from the chuckling into the either total silence or a very, very small number of people like me who couldn't sort of contain themselves. I was getting so many messages. The thing that stopped me, you know, we bumped into Al Gore, good name drop, on the way in. He was sitting right up at the front. And I said, you know, you've got a great place to heckle from here.

9:10And he said, I don't know. I don't think that's the way to go about it with this guy. So he put me off my stride. Yeah, Al Gore. Why did he think that was not the way to go? I think he probably thought I was thinking about him doing it, but he was just saying, I don't know, that's the way to deal with this guy. But I honestly felt, because I'll tell you what will happen. Somebody, the guy sitting next to me showed me the Wall Street breaking news headline from the speech. And it was something like, markets rise as Trump rules out military force for Greenland. He didn't rule out anything. He just, as part of his rambling on Greenland said, I don't need to use military force.

9:40Why? Because I'm going to do a mafia shakedown. You either do what I'm saying and I'm happy or you don't and I remember. And of course, because this is Davos, everybody's obsessed with the markets, right? So the markets were down two and a half percent and everyone thinks, okay, he's going to come in. And in fact, we got that from a very senior Democrat senator said he's going to be worried about the markets and he's going to turn the thing and change markets. So what he said is, I'm not going to take it by force, but we want Greenland. And the point is that repeatedly Denmark has said you are not having Greenland.

10:12the European Union has said, you're not having Greenland, right? And instead of coming and in any way changing the posture, he just reinforces. He could not have said more frequently, we're having Greenland. Except he didn't just say we're having Greenland. He repeatedly said, for much of the speech, we're having Iceland. We want Iceland. Now, I don't want to get too deep into the weird psyche of Donald Trump, but that concerns me too. Where is this Iceland thing bubbling up from maybe a sip of the tongue. But I'm slightly worried this guy is looking at a map and thinking, well, if we get Greenland and give us Greenland, and we realise the truth, which is that we think Europe is completely pathetic, totally impotent, can't do anything at all.

10:53They've got no options. Whatever we do it to them, they'll lap it up. Well, why don't we have Iceland too? I think because I mean, there is, you know, there is the case to be made for a sort of quite a lot of senility going on there. I think that's another observation I made sort of just watching the whole thing. No real sense of how the audience was feeling or reacting. I think that was a slip. You could be right. I think he meant Grimland. I would genuinely... But that is terrifying. But remember, the US ambassador to Iceland made a joke saying he was going to be the governor of the 52nd state.

11:21So this Iceland thing is bubbling away somewhere in the back of these people's minds. And I think this is the problem with the appeasement strategy. Because the appeasement strategy, if it's all about performance, if it's all unbounded, And he thinks this is my number one chance to expand the territory of the United States. Which he was clear about. There will never be a better chance in world history. America is more powerful than it's ever been. I'm the only president with the nerve to do it. Why not go for a bus, get as much land as you can? Yeah, and just interesting on the appeasement, because as I was coming out, I was grabbed by a journalist and said, what do you think?

11:51And I just said, sort of, not a lot. And he just sort of shrugged and went. It was kind of appeasement in the hall, wasn't it? Interesting. So there's one point where Trump actually, remember, he sort of insulted a group of leaders. There's those guys there, they're sitting there, they can't decide whether to look at me. And he was suggesting they were scared of it, which of course they probably are. So there's that sort of public humiliation going on. And I thought if that had been a British audience, which talked recently about totally bled big slow hand clap by the Women's Institute. I think if that had been a British audience, they wouldn't have taken it.

12:23No, they would have walked out. I could be wrong. But then of course the other thing which maybe the audience aren't aware of and I wasn't aware of until we got here today is, and of course I've been with American presidents and I've seen how big the operation is around them. But this was of a different scale. And I think a lot of that's performative, making people queue for two hours. The whole sort of having all these dozens of overflow rooms, most of which probably don't have anybody in them. Walking back from the main Congress centre to here, it's amazing that we left before we finished. I mean, it was by the Q &A beginning, people were falling asleep.

12:53And so I just feel, I feel terrified that that is the person to whom the rest of the world is pandering. And then finally, I think what the speech is, is a reminder of his worldviews. So on tariffs, a strong reminder that a lot of these tariffs are personal vindictiveness. So he said that the Swedish prime minister had not been polite to him. Swiss. Sorry, Swiss prime minister had not been polite to him. And so he just knocked up tariffs. He said that he had this whole theory about any form of trade deficit was the United States being ripped off. He had these extraordinary stories about industrial investment and a very, very simple narrative.

13:33And the narrative effectively seemed to come down to because sleepy Joe Biden was fooled by the green scam and started investing in wind turbines, energy prices got too high, the American economy collapsed, uncontrolled migration, and he has defied every expert in the world to find the real secret source. Secret source is high tariffs, forget about renewable energy, push all migrants out, secure the borders, shake down and threaten all of America's allies in order to get as much money into the United States as well. And this will be record economic growth and the thing for which he will be remembered forever.

14:12Well, the only other speech I've actually been in the hall for was Mark Carney's yesterday. And I thought it was very interesting that Trump today, his tone about Carney, said to me that he takes Carney a lot more seriously than these guys who are pandering to because he basically, he talked about, we're getting Greenland for the golden dough, okay, and that's to protect America, Canada, and the West, okay, and he put them in like that and then said, I watched your speech, Mark, and you need to remember the next time you speak that, you know, we've done a lot for Canada, but in terms of the sort of scale of nastiness of the leaders and the countries that he was talking about, I felt that felt that he'd taken a bit of a hit yesterday, and something had sort of embedded.

14:58And that, I think, is what the other leaders have got to learn. You're not going to get on with this guy, I don't think, by pandering to. And the difference is unbelievable. So some of the Middle Eastern states falling over themselves, to be super polite. President Sisi of Egypt in his speech basically was not talking really about the interests of Palestinians at all. Massive praise of President Trump again and again and again, just laying it on. Got that from some of the Gulf. But what's so shocking is the extent to which so many of the American businesses, so many of the big tech companies, so many of the European leaders, these texts from Mark Rutter, suggest that it isn't just authoritarian states that believe that the way forward is just to flatter and grovel, but that all America's allies, these people who used to, I suppose, see themselves as part of a multilateral alliance.

15:54But that sure is why Mark Carney's message is right. You've got these two massive powers, America and China. They think they're the big threat to each other. And we thought we were part of this. And Mark Carney was the best symbol this week of we may have to adapt quite a lot. But he's surely right that if you put what he called middle powers together, there is a lot of power. Right. And then the question for Keir Starmer and the question for the European Union is, are they prepared to line up together? Because together you stand, divided you fall. And exactly what Trump tries to do is divide people.

16:32That's why he's putting different tariffs on different European Union member states. It's to try to separate people off from each other. And What we need is joint statements, not, well, you know, Macron may have said this, I'm going to say something else. And the European Union needs courage, right? The problem is that this is the moment where the European Union needs to think about what do they do for Iceland? Is this the moment to accelerate membership for Iceland? Yeah. Is this the moment to really think, let's, and maybe this is what Trump's changed in 12 months. Maybe instead of waiting for all those countries in the Western Balkans to tick every box over 10 years, flip it around the other side.

17:09Do enlargement now, say your members. And when you tick the boxes, you get different bits of the membership package, but you're into the EU. And that's what I'd love to see Starmer trying to do. See that imagination, that sense of a multilateral picture. Why does he seem so timid? Why does he seem so overly cautious? Why is he unable to think this is a new geostrategic moment? Because I think he thinks that if he goes down the route that Mark Carney's gone down, that we will get punished far more. And even though he won't sort of reverse the whole Brexit madness, we are much more isolated because of that.

17:42So I think he thinks he has to go the path he's going. Though while we were in the queue, I was just following it. I got the sense just from reading what people were saying about it and reading the BBC sort of instant coverage of it. I got the sense that he'd been tougher in terms of the message about Greenland, but equally pushing back on the idea, I think against Ed Davey, that he needs to be more Macron, more Carney. So he's in that place now. I think it's a very vulnerable place. I actually do think sometimes when you're in the room, you can feel the power of a speech and an argument. The great thing about Carney's speech, it was an argument.

18:16It was a worldview. And written by Carney. Talking to his team, who I try to give them credit and say, well done, and they've absolutely pushed back and they said, no, he wrote 100 % of it. And one of them also told me, and somebody I know, said that they have been, because they've been to Qatar and China, they've been on planes for 26 hours and he worked at his desk for 22 of them. He didn't look exhausted, like you and I look and feel. I thought that was a real moment. I didn't think today that was a moment. I thought that was the same old Trump and the world has got to get its act together in understanding, as Carney said, this is not a transition, it's a rupture and he's the guy who's doing the rupture and this is a blithering slightly senile flaccid loose dishonest but it's an account of basically what people like vance believe of what steven miller believes a lot of the maga base believe and and therefore let's not just think we just wait out trump get to the midterms everything's going to fine except that this monster is inarticulately rambling his away around things that is believed by, I don't know, 30-40 % of the US population and an entrepreneurial Trump successor could win again on this mad message.

19:32Okay, and who will turn on their Fox News news tonight and it'll be the clips where he's delivering the line that's been scripted for him about Greenland. It'll be a couple of the sort of the MAGA attacks and then there'll be shots of people clapping. and what not not fortunately of you and me no there was and also what i thought was very interesting i mean the applause when he came in was i would describe very tepid such that when it came to the end i spotted some of the official american delegation starting to get a standing evasion going and they just sat down very quickly because people was leaving people were just leaving and turning to each other and say god that was as george w bush would have said that That was some weird shit.

20:14So the question is, will Britain and Europe step up? Or are we what America thinks, which is weak, divided, pathetic? Which he couldn't have been clear about. He didn't say a single positive word really about the UK, apart from the fact that his mum came from Scotland. He made that hideous joke, despite his dad being, as he said, being German about, you know, if it wasn't for us, you'd all be German and Japanese by now. That was a moment where people should have said, you know, fuck off. So I don't know. If we don't, I think we're living in a really dangerous mindset. And I just think Carney hit the note absolutely spotting.

20:46And be very cautious of the Mark Rutters of this world who are beginning to say, well, let's not talk too much about Greenland. Let's talk about Ukraine, which is what he said. Which, by the way, he said was a long way above a beautiful ocean. It's not our problem. And cautious of the Boris Johnsons of this world who are beginning to make what they call jokes, saying, well, why don't we give him Greenland in exchange for his support in Ukraine? What support in Ukraine? How can we trust Trump? What complete nonsense? You sell sovereignty, you appease this man, and then what do you get? What do you get?

21:13What guaranteed does Boris Johnson think he's going to get for Ukraine from Trump by trading our sovereignty? I'll tell you the thing, just watching the whole circus today, somebody who follows the circus the whole time and is sort of semi-part of it, I won't name the characters because it's pretty libelous, but he was basically pointing to some of the characters and saying, they'll have been working the markets like crazy. They know what's coming. They know what he's going to say about Greenland. And this whole thing - Somebody who's been right at the heart of the American administration saying also very clearly, these guys knew they were going to take the markets down.

21:46They knew the markets were going to go up. He pointed out that you can see money that was made with the Venezuelan intervention, that they're all trading it up, trading it down. They knew that if Trump said, I'm not going to use force and green, the markets will go up again. And when it suits him and he wants to short it again, guess what? As we said, I know you've got to get back, but let's just to conclude, remind ourselves what in the main podcast about noises, names, three C's, crime, corruption, cruelty. We saw a lot of the cruelty today. And I wish more people in that room had been as horrified as I was.

22:18And in a sense, the performance of cruelty, which is almost more cruel, because it's so half-hearted, boring, dull, inept. And will you at least tell my friends in the Lido Q that I tried? Absolutely. You did. We heard your voice. Even if President Trump may not have done it. I've heard one of them. I've heard the boo. Thank you. Thank you and bye-bye. See you soon.

23:04or on skoda.de Nach der Krise beginnt nicht die Ruhe, sondern die Veränderung. Es läuft wieder, aber anders als früher. Wer scheitert und wieder aufsteht, führt anders. Das zeigen uns Betroffene, Berater und Experten. In Folge 5 von Endstation Insolvenz geht es darum, wie aus einer beinahe Pleite echte Stärke entstehen kann. Jetzt reinhören. Im Podcast-Kanal Gute Geschäfte von Kreditreform. überall, wo es Podcasts gibt. Hello, it's Steph McGovern here from The Rest Is Money. If you want to know why, despite announcing major plans for the rail network, the government keep derailing themselves, give our latest episode a listen.

23:47There's also been another screeching U-turn from the government on digital IDs. And we're talking about Trump, whose fight with Fed Chair Jerome Powell has gone up a level. Has he met his match?