The Bulwark Podcast - Alastair Campbell: Trump Is a Wanker

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

The Irish are protesting in the streets over the price of fuel, Qatar's GDP is plummeting, and heating bills are skyrocketing in France. And today, every world leader and every CEO of every major corporation is having to address the consequences of this war of choice on Iran—and Trump couldn't care less. Instead, he's working on a new distraction to get the media to talk about something besides his and Bibi's catastrophic error. But European leaders are finally starting to hit back against Trump, and Xi is trolling him on a genius level. Plus, Vance can't stop making a fool of himself, a debate over the merits of Europe v. the United States, and a healthy serving of fresh British insults to try on for size. Alastair Campbell joins Tim Miller.show notes Tim’s livestream Wednesday at 7pm ET on YouTube or Substack Alastair's podcast, "The Rest Is Politics"  Alastair's recent interview with Zelensky  ON SALE NOW: Bulwark+ members-only presale for Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and LA through TheBulwark.com/Events Tickets for these shows go on sale for everyone else at Noon PT on Friday Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BULWARK at https://www.oneskin.co/BULWARK #oneskinpod

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Up next, we've got Alistair Campbell from The Rest is Politics. Very excited. around for it. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome to the show for the first time somebody from across the pond. He's a British writer, political strategist, and co-host of the rest is politics. It's Alistair Campbell.

How you doing, sir? I'm very well. Love is to be here. Let's just do a little first date stuff first before you get to the news. You know, tell us your backstory before you came a podcaster, favorite oasis song, how you take your tea. Oh, okay. Tea, milk, no sugar.

favorite oasis song, probably all around the world actually, all around the world, love that. And backstory, born in Yorkshire in the north of England, but very Scottish family, play the bagpipes, wore a kilt when I was a kid because my dad made me. Wow.

And went to university, did languages, went into journalism, through journalism, political journalism, and then got into politics. And that's when I ended up working for Tony Blair, did that for about a decade, and since then I've been doing lots of different things. There you go.

For Tony Blair, you achieved the job that I never did, right? You're his communications man, his flack. Yep. Basically. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah. All my candidates lost.

So I never got that job. Well, we did a lot. We won three in a row. No Labor leader had ever won two full terms, let alone three. Yeah. I mean, it's nice when people sort of say things like, you know, I was the architect of this and invented new labor and all that. The truth is, Tony was an extraordinary candidate and an extraordinary policy.

So it wasn't like kind of, you know, working with somebody who wasn't really good. Are you guys still chat? Maybe you work with people who weren't great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you considering like a future career? I'm not sure about his board of peace. Yeah. I was going to say, communications director for the board of peace maybe might be a future role for you after podcasting.

I think that Donald Trump's people might check out a few of the things I've said about him on the podcast and that might make it quite difficult. Yeah. So you're not a big fan. of our president? I'm really not. I was not a big fan of him during his first term, but it feels to me like the second term is even worse. It's a lot worse. I just think he's completely amoral. I think he's corrupt. I think he's amoral.

I don't think he thinks things through. I don't think he cares about other people or other countries. You know, last week in Britain or the BBC, the main news in the morning, five days out of seven led with the word Donald. God. It's too much. Get out of my head. Get out of my life. It's too much.

I know. It's consuming my prime years of my life. It's very sad. I guess I'm a little bit disappointed. One of my favorite thing about the Brits is the creative insults that you have in general, but also Trump's, you know, the Oasis guys are good at that. And you didn't offer any of those right there. I want you to call them like a numpy plonker or something.

The thing is with that, okay, what could I call him that would maybe kind of get your American-British juices flowing. He's a total, complete Wazek. A Wazak. He's a Pillac. He's a Wazak. You've never heard Wazak? I don't know that one. Wazek is a kind of, there's another great world.

I'll give you an Irish word, Langer. You know what Langer is? I don't, no. He's a Langer. Basically a wanker. Basically a wanker. The other thing is very funny because you know Antiniscaramucci does the American version of our podcast. And he can't get over the fact that the C word in Britain, is kind of used a lot.

American men are very jealous about this. Yeah. We're jealous. We'd like to be able to use it as much. Well, he and I did it in the United Island recently. He was using it a lot because he just felt liberated.

He's like liberated. Yeah, it's just like all those guys who said we wanted to get Trump back in there so that we could say pussy and the R word again. You know, it's kind of like that. There's something in the male nature. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. nature. Yeah. Well, as we go through, I'll try and think of some more colorful Anglo-Saxon phrases that suit you. Have a couple more. We'll get to J.D. Vance towards the end. Yeah, okay.

He is particularly not in favor among either of us. He's so obnoxious. He's the worst. He's the worst. I'm going to talk about the Iran War. Before we get into like the status of the negotiations and stuff, I'm just the view from Europe, I've been trying to get my head into like, the, mindset of kind of an average person in Europe and just how like frustrated and gobsmacked

they must be about this. I mean, it's causing real economic harm already and it seems like it's going to cause more. He didn't talk to you guys. It was not really expected that he was going to do this. It's kind of the opposite of what he said he was going to do. And then he then he yells at you and berates you for not putting your men and women at risk. It must just be it. It really, raging. I mean, I know that Trump was not popular before, but I have to imagine in this moment, it must be particularly acute. Well, I saw some polling the other day. I think it was down to 3% of Danes had a positive image of him. I think it was about 13 in Britain, something like that. I also read yesterday the Arab barometer, which tracks opinion in the Arab world, where he

seems to be an overtaken by both Xi Jinping and Putin. And even Kim Jong-un, I think, is kind of creeping up on him a little bit. I was speaking at an event this morning with some business people. And I think in the first term, when you talked about things like the Jesus post, where he

now pretends that he was just being a doctor, term one, people found it moderately amusing. I think the reaction now is that it's just sick. He's really sick. So I think, yeah, people are really angry about it. But also, I think, feeling a bit helpless because the truth is, between them, Trump and Netanyahu, and it's them, they have unleashed this war, which is taking every single

president and prime minister in the world today and every single CEO of every single major corporation is at some point today addressing the consequences of that decision through the decisions they're having to make, whether it's the Irish government who are talking about putting the army out to quell these protests about fuel. I was in France yesterday and somebody was telling me that their heating fuel that the cost has doubled in seven weeks. Qatar talking about 14% drop in GDP. Wow. And he doesn't care.

But when I say he doesn't, earlier, he doesn't care. He just doesn't care about any of that. What he cares about is himself. That's it. Nothing else. And so, yeah, people are pissed off. And yet the politicians are still very, very cautious about really going for him. I see Maloney's gone for him today.

Why is that? Why is that? Because, well, let's just take Ukraine. I mean, the thing I really worry about with Trump is Ukraine. And, you know, the vile J.D. Vance yesterday was doing that pathetically attended event for Turning Point. I don't know if you saw the pictures. It was like a lot of empty seats. Oh, yeah, we did.

It was like a kind of, you know, lower league. In fact, no, lower league football matches in England get bigger crowds than J.D. Vance got at his turning point thing. But he said he was proud. One of the things he was proudest of was stopping. have this audio. Let's play it. Let's play it. We've got this for you. Okay. Okay. And it was actually during a Senate event that I had done where I had somebody who came up to me, and I'm sure a great person, like a wonderful person. It was a Ukrainian American in Cleveland, Ohio. I was campaigning for the Senate. There are a lot of Ukrainian Americans in Cleveland,

Ohio. And this person got really agitated at me because I was saying we should stop funding the Ukraine war, okay? And I still believe that, obviously. And it's one of the things I'm proudest that we've done as administration is we've told Europe that if you want to buy weapons, you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine anymore. We're just out of that business. So a very good thing. I mean, it's like mind-blowing on so many levels of that, because, you know, politicians talk a lot about what they're proud of doing.

Like, you know, I was very proud to work with Tony Blair in the Northern Ireland peace process. I was very proud of what we did to sort of spend more in schools at hospitals, was very proud of Scottish Parliament being established, very proud of a minimum wage, to be proud of the fact that you've stopped funding a democracy which has been invaded by a dictator on the doorstep of Europe when NATO is meant to be the transatlantic alliance between the United States. It just makes me think, I don't understand what goes on inside the guy's head. I don't understand it.

So that's what worries me about Iran. And, you know, I talked to Zelensky recently, and he was saying that he's worried about American support was being pulled anyway. And let's be honest, since Trump came back term two, the Americans, the stuff that they're doing on the intelligence side and Ukraine does not want to lose that. But now lots of the kind of missiles that they were using for air defenses, they're having to go to the Gulf. Yeah, that's the stupidest thing about the J.D. Vance being proud thing. I mean, obviously it's insulting and it's gross. And these people were invaded. They did nothing.

And he's like, I'm so proud we abandoned them. Like, that's disgusting on a moral level. But just on a, even on a practical, like realpolitik level, it's like, okay, we're not purchasing weapons and sending it to Ukraine anymore because we care about America first. And here we are. We've started a war of choice in Iran where we're like using up our stockpiles. We're losing way more in weapons and material in the Middle East in the last month than we did the entire Ukraine war. And the thing that gets me about Vance, and I'm afraid Rubio's in the same boat now, is that

whatever it is that Trump says, on that particular day, that's what they go out and defend. So at the moment, we're very down on Ukraine. Now, to be fair, not to be fair, but Vance has always had that position. So what he said yesterday is entirely in keeping with what he thinks. But we also know he's been against the Iran war. But when Trump tells him to go to Islamabad and basically make a fool of himself by thinking you can solve this. I mean, he comes out and talks about a marathon, right? 21 hours, whatever it was. we spent 22 months on the Good Friday Agreement. Bill Clinton spent nine months getting Arafat and Rabin to shake hands.

Nine months of bringing them together to do that. And this is a thing, I talked on the podcast recently about this amazing essay that was written by a Scottish historian called Dennis Brogan during the middle of the Korean War. And the headline was the illusion of American omnipotence. And that's what we're seeing at the moment. they think that because they're America and because he's Trump,

whatever they say is going to happen, that is what is going to happen. And guess what? It doesn't happen because other factors come into play. But your point about why the European leaders are still so kind of mealy-mouthed. Is that a good British mealy-word, mealy-mouthed? Yeah, we do that.

We use that one here, but that's okay. Oh, do you use that one? Okay. We got on. I'll tell you what, I'll give you a really good one for Vance. Okay. It's a Scottish word. Do you know the word sleek it?

Sleak it. Sleak it. Sleak it. Sleakit. Sleakit. It's a Scottish word. Vance is sleek it. Vance is sleeket. Yeah. You wouldn't, whatever, whatever he's coming out of his mouth is not what's in his brain. Got it.

So that's sleek it. That's true. He's sly. So Sanchez in Spain, he's no holds bard. We now consider Mark Carney and Canada basically to be a European. So we've come. up to him as a European. He's, yeah, he's no holes barred. But if you think about it, say, from Keir Stama's perspective, one, Keir Stama is not somebody who likes getting down and just being

rude about people. He's quite a nice guy. Do you remember the famous shot of Trump dropping the papers on the floor and Keir Stama picked them up? And it turned out there was actually nothing in the papers at all. It was just Trump holding a folder to look like a president. Oh, really? And Keir picked them up. And people were saying how pathetic, how humiliating, and what have you. And this part of me thinks Trump did it on purpose. But what he showed basically is Kirstam was quite a nice guy who knows that this guy is very old. His knees probably aren't very good. I'll pick up these papers for him. So he's not a rude guy. So he's tried to craft this positive relationship with Trump. You know, I have a letter. Here it is. It's a letter in the king. This has never

happened before. Another state visit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he gets nothing in return. I think we're reaching the point where Europe is going to start hitting back a lot harder. Lord. Who knows? The domestic politics of this feel unpredictable. You mentioned those stats about the energy prices. I mean, we're going to be coming to a period of shortages, probably. And there's already kind of this populist wave happening through the airport we can talk about. And so, I know, it seemed to me that the right thing to do is get in front of it and make Trump the booge against it because like this pain is you know even if they magically figure this out in Islamabad in a week which I find hard to believe that who knows we can talk about that but like

the supply chains and all this is coming all the economic pain is coming no matter what I mean Sanchez in Spain he has decided yeah he's just going to go for Trump and he's not holding about Maloney today and interestingly the Italian parliament yesterday or today the opposition leader got a standing ovation because she came out in favor of Maloney and attacking Trump. Now, the only thing is, you take it from, let's just say in the UK, we are still very tied, intelligence, defense, all that stuff. We're very, very locked in. And I think what they're worried about, all of them,

is that Trump, who probably isn't following the day-to-day of who does what, where, and what have you, but the Americans are still doing a lot in relation to Ukraine. Europe is trying to step in, but you've just got to maybe try and keep locked in a little bit. So when I interviewed Zelensky last week, there was lots of little digs. There's lots of little digs. He said, for example,

I don't think it's a good idea to send JD to campaign for Orban. And, you know, little dick. He nailed that one. 100%. I think, you know, he didn't have to be a genius political strategist to work that with that. But he nailed that one. But also he said in terms,

we have shown the Americans that Russia has been sharing intelligence with Iran, including on where the American troops happen to be hanging out, okay? And the Americans don't seem interested. Now, that's quite shocking. But what Zelensky doesn't say is, and that's really shocking. Yeah, you asked him directly, I thought it was interesting. You asked him directly if sometimes he wonders of Trump's on Putin's side. and he was very diplomatic and response to that.

He didn't say no, though. He didn't say no. I don't ever wonder that. He didn't say no. He didn't know. He didn't say that. I can't remember who first said it, but it's, you know, you see this quite a lot. People say, well, I don't know if Trump's a Russian agent or not.

But if he was a Russian agent, he's doing everything that a Russian nation would do. Right. It's like, you know, and I have reached a conclusion. And it's a pretty big thing to think in a way. is that, okay, on his side maybe is the wrong thing, but when he has to choose between do I believe Trump, do I leave Putin or do I believe Zelensky, he believes Putin every time,

which is kind of weird, because the guy has built his entire political machinery and his dictatorship on kind of lying and fear and intimidation. And I think my theory about Trump is that he's jealous of Putin. It's not that Putin has necessarily got anything on him, which he may have. I don't know what he got up to in the past and why have you, but he may do.

But I think it's just that he's jealous of him. And he wants to be like him. He wants to be as powerful within his own country as Putin is within his. He is probably a little jealous. He also is the cowardly bully. You know, he likes to pick on the weak. And maybe he doesn't realize how weak Putin actually is. But there's this jealousy.

I noticed this morning he posted this on truth social. he did another all-night bleeding rant last night between like 11 and 2 a.m. They did like a dozen posts. We're concerned about his mental health. And he woke up and said he was God's chosen one again in a different meme this morning. But this was one that caught my eye this morning.

China is very happy that I'm opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm doing it for them also in the world. This situation will never happen again. They've agreed not to send weapons to Iran. President Xi will give me a big fat hug when I get there in a few weeks. weeks. We are working together. Doesn't that beat fighting? But remember, we are very good at fighting. That's just all not true. China is helping Iran. There's an FT report this morning about how China's

giving Iran satellite images and that has helped Iran attack our bases in the Middle East. The straight is open to China. We let their ships go through already over the weekend. And, you know, Trump threatened to tariff them for providing stuff to Iran, but is now backing down off that. He's too scared. He doesn't want that big conflagration, right? He doesn't want to take on China and Russia. He wants to take on the weak little countries and bomb them and feel tough, I think. Did you see the comment that Xi Jinping himself made yesterday? Oh, here we go. So this is Xi Jinping yesterday, setting out propositions on safeguarding and promoting peace and stability in the Middle East. Number one, stay committed to the principle of peaceful coexistence. Number two, stay committed to the principle of national sovereignty. Number three, stay committed to the principle of international rule of law.

Number four, stay committed to a balanced approach to development and security. That is Mensa-level trolling. It is absolute genius trolling. But what it's doing, this is the kind of really weird thing. I did an event this morning with some British business people, okay? and I asked this question at a lot of events that I do. The question was we had those instant polling apps. Which of the two superpowers is currently the greater threat to global stability, USA or China?

It was 91 to 9, okay? And that is Trump gifting. That is crazy. It's crazy. I mean, it's true, but crazy. So you guys here in your pinstribe suits and your British accents and all the rest of it, you see the USA is a greater threat to global stability than a country. which is an out-and-out dictatorship that has no free press that suppresses so people that has

got the Uyghurs in concentration camps, that steals our intellectual property, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et et cetera, et cetera. And the answer is, yeah, because this guy, Trump, is actually causing far more instability than China. He's unstable. He's chaotic. It's a weird thing thinking about our domestic politics is he has a lot of supposed China hawks in the administration, people who, you know, when you looked at like the papers they put out for their security strategy and what the geopolitics. You know, it was basically two things, right? It was like, we're going to care more about our hemisphere, the Don Roe doctrine, and do more to counter China decouple. But Trump is the opposite of that. And Trump has done more to empower them and emboldened them than any president since Nixon

went there. Well, did you see the front cover of the economists last week? I don't know if I did. What was? What did it look like? I see a lot of things. Let me show it to you. Hold on the floor. Okay. That is perfect. I love that you have the economist right there. It is on brand. It's right by my foot. So there you go. Yeah. Never interrupt your enemy when you know he's making a mistake. Oh, I did see this. That is really good. Right. So that was Napoleon.

Okay, that's Napoleon. But that is kind of what's Eugene Ping is doing. Trump is gifting. He's attacking his allies, left, right and center. So like UK, France, Germany, Italy. he's whacking them left, right and center. He's created mayhem for the Gulf. These Gulf countries, I read a thing yesterday, Qatar's GDP, looking at a 14% drop, okay? So these countries in the Gulf that have created this sense of security, stability, investment, tourism, they're losing $600 million a day at the moment in the Gulf, okay? How did they build that sense of stability?

Through the close relationships with the United States. was the key to it. And he has single-handedly blown that up and then expects them just to still want to be his best friends. And if you take it to the Iranian guys, this is what's some kind of nutsville about the way that Vance behaved at the weekend. Because he talks of the Iranians, as though they're not really human beings, just try and put yourself in the mindset of a guy who's now the new Ayatollah, that we don't have to like him, to understand, that he's been given quite an important job. He's clearly badly injured, which is why we haven't seen him.

He's lost his dad. He's lost some of his kids. He's lost his members of his family. Okay. And Vance thinks he should just turn up and say, right, we've won. Therefore, we get everything that we want to ask you to do. And they think, no, that's not how it's going to work. And they don't understand.

Back to the illusion of omnipotence. They don't understand that in negotiation, there's always another side. All right. We've talked about our friends at One Skin a bunch and how they stand out as a skincare company. You know I'm a passionate advocate for straight male skin care. And One Skin is the brand to turn to because it's not just hype or fancy packaging. It's real science. The founding team are longevity researchers who asked a deceptively simple question.

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I was listening to talking your show about going back to those negotiations in Northern Ireland you had mentioned earlier. And just like how these processes usually work and like the value of the optics and the handshake and how different. In addition to all of the other ways in which J.D. Vance, the vice president, going to Islamabad and having to call Donald Trump 12 times and BB a couple times, like as weird as that is. It also, they did nothing to kind of demonstrate any rapprochement to everybody else, right?

Like, we didn't see any pictures of it. We don't really know what is happening. We don't know who the counterparties are. J.D. Vance has two people with business ties to the Middle East. This is two wingmen, not any experts. I mean, the contrast between how this stuff usually works is pretty stark. And that says to me that they weren't serious about it, that they either don't know how to do this stuff.

And I think there is a problem with, you can see every time Putin meets Wittkoff. I mean, it's like watching a baseball fan meet, you know, whoever, I don't follow baseball. Who's the most famous baseball player in the world right now? It's like that. It's like... Not Mike Trout anymore.

It's the Japanese guys and the Dodgers. I'm football and basketball, baby. Can we do basketball? Okay. It's like a football football. fan who suddenly bumps into Christiana Ronaldo, right? Is that better? There you go. Yeah, sure. Okay. I was talking about American football and like Patrick Mahomes, but that's okay. No, that is not football. That is not football. And by the way, I'm boycotting the World Cup as well,

so that's another thing. And I've just, I've just read. Here's no thing. The whole thing's painful. The whole thing's painful, watching Infantino and Trump turn it into kind of, you know, I nearly said Berlin 1936. Oh, I did. So I think that the, where was her? No, I just laughed. What we're talking about? I just laughed at the Nazi comparison. We were talking about Wikov and Putin. You're talking about Wikov and Putin

and just how strange the Islamabad negotiation act is. And did you notice in the interview that we did with Zelensky? Zelensky is saying that Wikov didn't want to see him. You know, he was going to see Putin and then he was going to see Putin. Then he went to see Putin. Then he saw Putin again. Then he saw Putin. And they keep saying, when was it?

Was it after Alaska that Trump said there's going to be a trilateral meeting of the leaders? When has that happened? Yeah. It's not happening because Putin doesn't want it to happen. This is what makes you think he's on his side. You know, because he does have a lot of leverage over Putin if he wants to use it, but he clearly doesn't want to use it. You know, not to, that's trigger you.

I've Bill Crystal on the podcast every Monday, so every once in a while I've got to needle him about Iraq, so you're going to get it too. The difference here is also just pretty stark. I'm going back to this like view from Europe, right? For all of whatever, like the questions and, you know, anger. that ends up bubbling up both here and in Europe, you know, over the Iraq war. Like on the front end, everybody understood kind of why it was happening, right? There was at least a period of time of the allies negotiating, of explaining it to the public,

of making the case for why it's important. And like, none of that happened here. And so I'm just curious for your kind of perspective on like the compare and contrast from your time with Blair versus what we're seeing now. Let's just say, you know, the United Nations. One of the most extraordinary meetings I was ever at was at Camp David where George Bush was basically using Tony Blair to try to persuade Dick Cheney

that it would be the right thing to do to try and take this thing down the United Nations route because Cheney didn't want to do that. Now Cheney, who now, not least because of his daughter, I know he's dead, but he was seen latterly as a kind of moderate conservative, who called out Trump and what have you. But at the time, he was like a kind of, he was like a bogey man for most Europeans. Well, it's because Cheney was a moderate because he was for the rule of law domestically,

just not for the rule of law anywhere else. Right, okay. So that's the moderating force. The point I was making, though, is that George Bush understood the broader political ramification. And he was reluctant as well. He felt that America had the right to do it. But yeah, if this guy, Tony Blair, saying that the UN's important, let's kind of, let's give

it a go. And he gave it a go. Congress. Okay. Congress now, I saw a wonderful comment the other day. Somebody said, I'm so glad that Congress isn't alive to see all this happening. Because it's like, you at least had a sense that Congress had a voice and the president took the Congress voice seriously. To this day on social media, I get relentless grief about Iraq and so does Tony Blair. And, you know, that's fine. But the point is that. the reason why we get so much grief is because we were actually trying to share with the public the intelligence that was making Tony Blair more concerned, not less. So we were trying to build an argument, and we put that argument to Parliament,

and Parliament voted in favour. Now, I know that lots of the people who voted for it now say they wish they hadn't, and that's their right. But the point is that when you're saying compare and contrast, I think those are the big ones to me. We went through the democratic institutions. We tried to engage and involve the United Nations. And we built an alliance.

That was why people got so offended when Trump said the thing recently about, you know, oh, they'll say they sent a few troops, but they stayed back from the front line. Because actually, there were people from Australia, from Denmark, from different parts of Europe and different parts of the world. So I think they're the big differences to me. Yeah, also the ramifications. This is why I just, I think that people are not prepared for the degree of popular unrest and upset over this, especially if it continues to go on. Because of those cases, of that part. On the economic stuff.

Yeah, because A, number one, the case was at least made on the front end. Some people agreed. Some people disagreed. Some people disagreed, probably voted for it, right? So there was at least a period of, I think the natural human reaction is, okay, let's give these guys a chance. And then they end up getting upset because it doesn't go well, right? In this case, they didn't even do that part. and the pain that they're going to feel is real.

The Strait of Formuz didn't close during the Iraq War, right? I mean, there was obviously the troops that went there and there were ramifications, or certainly ramifications here at home, but the scale of the ramifications across the board among the European populace. Across the world. I was in France yesterday,

and this guy was telling me, so his heating bills have gone up double in seven weeks. In Ireland, they've got the police and the army out dealing with protests over fuel shortages. in Australia, the haulage companies are saying that they can, you know,

they're going out of business because they can no longer afford the fuel. You had every single stock exchange in the Gulf the other day just going like that. You know, of all the many,

many crazy mind-blowing things that have come out of Trump and Hexas and Vance's and Rubio's mouth recently, the one that really, really shocked me was when they basically seemed to say that they didn't ever imagine that the Iranians

would shut the Straits of Hormuz. and then Trump the other day, Trump the other day, came out and said, you know, these guys have got no cards apart from the Straits of Hormuz. Well, there's quite a big card. Yeah, maybe the ace card. Maybe the ace. The other crazy thing about this is just as far as the security risk, at least in Europe, somebody could make a plausible security risk that, you know, the long range ballistic missiles that Iran had could reach some of the European. mainland, they can't reach Orlando. Are there any hawks over there who are like, hey, this is actually good, this was a real

security threat for us, we should be helping more? If there are, they're not shouting very loudly. I mean, it was interesting on the day that the war was launched and Kirstama came out and really upset Trump by saying, you know, we're not involved in this. and both the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badock and Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who's our kind of right-wing populist guy, they've dived straight and saying,

we've got to be alongside Trump. They have pulled back from that very, very, very, very quickly because they realize there are so few people who think this is anything other than a mistake, a catastrophic error. Now, none of that is to say, and of course what Trump does when you say it's a catastrophic error, as he's done with the Pope,

is to come out and say he's proud, Iran. You know, I'm not pro-Iran. I've never been pro-Iran, but the reason why previous presidents, who've been under the same pressure from the Hawks to do something, quotes do something about Iran, one of the reasons they've held back is because they did think they might play the straits of Albu's card. And it would have a massive effect on the global economy. But you get the feeling with Trump that, you know, I remember talking a while back to Michael Wolfe, and he said, Listen, the thing you've got to understand about Trump is he's not a conventional politician like you and I might be used to.

He's always a reality TV star and every day has to be a new story. And I think that's the only way you can think of him because every day is a new story. And when the story's not going well, he invents another plot line. So things are going badly the other night. I know what I'll do. I'll do a tweet basically saying, I'm Jesus. That'll get them talking about something else. and away he goes. And that's the story for the next half news cycle and there's

something else. There's no way to run a country. On the question of decoupling, I was talking to Michael Weiss about this yesterday. And the Europeans, obviously this was, you know, kind of almost a ridiculous suggestion in the Trump first term, the idea that maybe they'd be better off going at it without as much cooperation, reliance, relationship with America. Now that conversation is both. bubbling up a lot more. Is it even possible? Does Europe have the economic capability to go it more alone? How are those conversations going? Well, where you're right is that the conversations are happening. Even in Germany, I mean, like Chancellor Merz, he's a pretty traditional,

conservative sort of figure. And Merkel always used to say the three fundamental pillars of her foreign policy, you never attack Israel because of our history, you always stay close to the United States and we're a proud, you know, member of the European Union. And I would say that two of those are fraying somewhat in the German public debate. Chancellor Merz has actually been quite critical of Trump on several fronts in recent days. I mentioned Maloney. I mean, Maloney, and of course Trump has gone for her. And so I think what people are seeing is that this, this guy is just not reliable. They have to try to keep things as calm as they possibly. possibly can for the reasons that I mentioned. But I think that that debate is being had.

And to me, the most interesting part of the chat we had with Zelensky last week was when he said that he wanted Ukraine, UK, Turkey and Norway all to join the European Union on the same day and for the European Union to become a kind of military alliance as well as an economic alliance because, you know, Turkey and Norway and us and Ukraine have got maybe more military heft than some of the other European countries. Are we sure we want Turkey? Well, it's a big thing, isn't it? It's a big thing. I mean, Turkey's a member of NATO. Turkey's in NATO. I know. That's a concern, I think. It's on the, NATO might already be a walking corpse, but an Israel-Turkey conflict, which seems probably likely eventually. It might be the death and all of it. Listen, Turkey is definitely

one of those countries that's got a lot more heft than it did. And the question is where you want to see that half being used. I think the point that Zelensky was making is that, Europe does have a lot of military clout, but it doesn't organize itself well. And European defense is very, you know, it's chaotic. You guys have, you know, because it's the United States of America, you've got very kind of simple procurement systems. We've got very, very complicated procurement systems country by country. Crazy. This is where my old former Republican element comes in, thinking about the European

red tape and regulation and stagnation. You know, you guys, we'll just start with the UK first. You guys are a mess economically, even before Donald Trump caused an energy crisis. I saw a chart the other day that said Poland was going to pass the UK and GDP per capita coming up here in about the next 10 years. That's not a great sign. What can be done to reverse that? And I think that as much as the military strength is an issue for Europe, you know, having

that economic base that we. have here, you know, that's something that is a problem in UK, but also across the EU. Okay. Well, I can push back in, let's imagine you're still a Republican, okay? Yeah. I can argue that some of the reasons why- Can I be a Tory? Do I have to be a Republican? Can I be a Tory? You're now Tory. You're now Tory, right? And so, so basically, what you people did, so we went through the global financial crisis, right? And And the conservative response was austerity. And that was a big driver of inequality.

And basically the message to the people was, the guys who caused this global financial crisis, we're going to bail them out, right? But we're not helping you much. You're going to pay a big price, okay? And that in part led to Brexit. Brexit was driven by the right, by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage,

these people who told the public, if only leave the European Union, one of the reasons we're not in a strong shape as we should be, is because Brexit has taken a gigantic chunk out of our GDP. Some people say 5%, some people say 8%. Whatever they say, it's not insignificant, okay? Then we had COVID, and we didn't come out of COVID well. We had a total charlatan, Trump's friend Boris Johnson, as prime minister at the time.

So we've had these kind of these shocks, then the Ukraine war, and we just haven't come through them well. Now, I would argue, you're still a Tory, I'm still Labor. go back to the sorts of levels of investment that we were getting into the economy when Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown, were in charge. And I think that's just a far better approach. Harder to do now because the pressures on the public finance are so great. But I still think Europe could become much, much more competitive than this if it actually followed some of the policies and the initiatives that it's been trying to promote for the last,

God knows how long. Okay, if I'm going to have my Tory hat back on, I would say, hey, look, there are a lot of these business guys, the guys in the pinstripe suits you're talking about. They don't wear as fancy-looking suits in America. A lot of times they've stopped wearing suits altogether, and they're in like hoodies and stuff. But these guys... To be fair, a lot of hours up, yeah, a lot of them. These guys, they're at least, you know, some of them have thrown in with Trump, of course.

There's another category that's quiet right now. And they're looking at American instability, and they're seeing the same thing that the British businessman are. And they're like, you know, maybe I should diversify. Maybe we should be putting, you know, another office or another plant or another whatever in a European country. And they're held back from doing that because of the red tape and the hassle and the fucking rules. Yeah, but listen. You know, and maybe this could be a moment for Europe to say, hey, we're going to bring in a lot of investment into Europe because the Americans are so fucked.

And so maybe we should relax some of our, some of the European. nonsense. Well, I think the nonsense is overstated. I think the MAGA right have created a massive industry on saying that, for example, London is a complete hellhole, and it's a basket case, and Europe, you can't cross the road without getting permission from an official and all this sort of nonsense. Europe is, I would argue, particularly now, but I would argue even without Trump, Europe is a better place than the United States of America. I'm sorry to break that to you, but it's more beautiful, it's more cultured. You don't even have dryers.

How do you dry your clothes? You're still using a hanging line for drawing your clothes. They don't put ice in the drinks. Sorry, I will argue anything you want about Europe. Europe is Europe greater than USA. Okay. Where you're doing really, really well is in stuff like tech. And, you know, yeah, great.

If you want to have Elon Musk running your economy and you want him to be completely free of any sort of regulatory oversight, then fine. But I think what you'll find, I saw Kirstama recently, and he did agree with the point you just made that we are over-regulated. There are too many regulations and too many areas of the economy. What you can't do is lose the values that we've got. The fact is, let me give you another thing, our food is better than yours, because we do have higher standards of what you can put into. In Britain? Yes, in Britain. Listen, don't give me that Republican-looking face either. I was in Manchester last year, and it was hard to find a good meal, okay?

You should have gone to... I could have given you some good restaurants in Manchester. I really could, yeah. But certainly, listen, London has got better restaurants than Paris now. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. But my point is, my point is that what you call these Brussels rules and regulations, they're not all bad.

They're not all bad. What sometimes happens is there are too many of them and they put people off. But you see, why has the MAGA right got this massive campaign going on to project a picture of Europe as a basket case? Because they want Europe to fail. Because they see Europe as a potential big competitor.

And that's how Europe has to start thinking of itself as a big potential competitor. I agree with that. And look, I do like to tease. And we do have a lot better fresh fruits and veggies here. Then that's wilted cabbage you guys are eating.

But the... Sorry, with all your GMO stuff that pump them up and your strawberries the size of melons and all that's the we got the Popeye Arugula over here. All right out there. But the...

Look, the MAGA right, they're full of shit on the crime stuff, on the migration crisis. I'm with you on that. On the economic part, though, it is just true. Like, we have a real affordability crisis

here that is coming to a head. And it's nowhere in America is it as bad as London. I mean, I have friends from study abroad who are from London, who are middle class, upper middle class, that are really struggling to afford, you know, housing there, you know, young families, rent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a real, like, that's not fake.

Like, the affordability problem in the UK and other European capitals is major. But, yeah, I'm not denying that there is a problem. The cost of living crisis is, real for a lot of people. But I would still argue that if you walk around London or Manchester or any of our big cities, you're going to see fewer people living on the streets than you're doing the United States big cities. You're going to get better health care. You're going to get better health care if you fall ill. So there's, you know, you can pick and choose where I think there's no doubt at all is that on the innovation front, you guys are just a lot better. There's no doubt about that.

And your universities are plugged into that. Our universities are struggling some of them financially. So I'm not denying that Manchester was rejuvenated I should say We should shout out Manchester I was picking on them for the food But it was kind of nice But part of it was because London's so expensive I think a lot of people were moving

Moving there it seems like I was talking to the locals But it is nice Manchester has got a lot of energy A lot of energy And a lot of good restaurants I'm just surprised you didn't fight You're looking like an intelligent guy

You probably just didn't look around enough Or has the right people I was mostly focused on the OASISC I was mostly focused on the pubs Oh is that where you went for Okay that's fair enough Yeah What's your favorite Oasis song?

Ooh, probably little by little. Okay. Little by little. Maybe importance of being idle, I like. They didn't play that one. Rock and Rollstone. Live forever. Live forever.

Live forever. Live forever is pretty good, yeah. And on the cultural front, you're a bigger country than we are, but I think we beat you on culture as well. I will say it was. The Hungarians were singing queen when in the streets after they beat Orban.

And so that's not nothing. Here's my question, though, I guess the serious part of this, and part of the reason why I'm concerned about this is, because if America's unraveling, we need Europe to be strong. And I looked at this poll, you know, it was a collection of polls of kind of the G7 leaders and their popularity. And we've been feeling pretty good here at the bulwark

in the Trump slide in the polls. You know, his numbers are going down, going down, getting worse every day. I felt a little less good when I looked at the comparison into Europe. Trump is minus 19 right now in Fave on Fave. Starmor minus 51, Macron minus 52, Merz minus 54. What is happening? Why are they all so unpopular? It's really hard to. I honestly don't know because I think there's something really weird about it. I mean, Kirstarmer's, look, he's not Barack Obama. He's not Bill Clinton. He's not Mount

Gandhi, but he's not a terrible human being. And he's actually on this kind of Iran thing, He's done a pretty good job in very difficult circumstances. I think partly what's going on is that people's lives are not getting better at the pace that they expect them to. And if you win an election on a mandate of change and the first big change you make is taking winter fuel benefit away from all people. And then you get into some of the kind of, you know, the sense that all you're doing is kind of this foreign policy. policy stuff and people are thinking, well, what about at home and what have you? But Macron's a really interesting example because I helped Macron in his, despite him being, you know, a bit to the right, but I wanted him to win his first term and I helped him in his first election campaign.

And I think the guy's unbelievably clever and an extraordinary politician in many ways, okay? But the French hate him. The French absolutely hate him. Mautz is an interesting one because he's literally just been elected. So what it says to me is that for a lot of people now, it's not just the leaders that they don't like. They don't like politics at all. They don't like any politician. So if you're the prime minister or the chancellor or the president, you're the one who's going to copy it because you're the one who's on TV the whole time. And my message to them all when I see them and speak to them is you've just got to keep going. You've just got to keep going. And you've got to trust in the end that because this isn't just about you, it's about people hating politics, change politics,

change the way you do politics. What that guy Magia in Hungary has shown is, I mean, he fought a very old-fashioned campaign, you know. He had no access to the media. You know, he did his first ever state TV interview last night because he wasn't allowed on the state TV. He just went round village to village, town to town, campaign, campaign, campaign, persuading people. And I think we've got totally wrapped up in the idea that everything has to be on truth social, social media, on the television. People are turning away from that big time. You can do a lot more now, I think, with much more old-fashioned sort of campaigning.

That, to me, is the lesson from Magia. Any other lessons? And obviously, you guys are dealing with this in the UK. I think there's some good signs that we've seen a little bit of the populace way of abating some places. But maybe it's rising again in Britain with reform. but these forces are still happening everywhere. 100% they're still happening. But I think, look, this could be my over-optimistic nature,

which isn't something I normally feel, but I think we've gone through peak reform. Other lessons, I think, from Magyat, one is, and this is definitely a lesson for the Democrats, by the way, he didn't fall into any of the traps that Orban laid. Orban wanted him to come out and say, let's make it all about LGBT. And he didn't.

And it's not that he's anti. It's just that he wasn't. he wasn't going to fall into a trap. He was going to keep focusing on the things that he knew really were motivating people. And I'll tell you, I've just done a mini-series on the podcast with a Labour MP guy called Liam Byrne, who's written a book called Why the Populists are Winning and How We Can Defeat Them. And one of the lessons that he has in the book, which Maggiard definitely showed, is you have to listen to the people who say they hate you.

You have to understand what has happened that Kier-Stahmer has gone from a land, And the slide win to the sort of ratings that you just outlined and to people that you meet the whole time saying, I hate that guy. You've got to try and find out what it's about. And it's not in the end personal. It's because they don't like the link between or the lack of a link between politics and their lives. So fix it. Yeah. They don't think the people are listening to their concerns.

No, exactly. I'm totally with you on that. The one other good thing about the Maggarre victory, which we can bowl. just celebrate is that some of our enemies and our relative domestic politics are no longer going to be receiving money from the Hungarian taxpayers. I was dying that on day one, he went out and was like, by the way, Matt Schlapp, that sex pest for America was getting cash from the American taxpayers. We're going to stop that. And I assume that some of your guys were getting it too. That's going to be happening. And, you know, again, I think people,

this is what's happened with Mark Carney. People respond to a sense of courage. So Magyar coming out, You know, Maggi had a meeting with the president of Hungary. This is so good. Will you tell people what happened to him? This is so good. So he had the meeting because he's the president. He's the head of state and he has to sort of anoint him as prime minister's work because that's his kind of constitutional function.

And Maggi goes straight in there and says, you're not fit to do this job. You know, as soon as I leave here, people who expect you to resign. You'll see what happens. But so and likewise with Carney, Karni has shown real courage. when Carney went to Davos, knowing that Trump was there, and made that speech saying, this is not a transition, it's a rupture. That was a big, bold thing to do. So people respond to boldness. The thing you've got to learn from Trump is that people do want the big, bold, bright colors, but they just want them to be related to their values. The reason I think that Trump,

I mean, you tell me, you're in the States, but you look at the polling, you see it, it feels like Trump is on the slide and Vance and people are on the slide. But I think in the end, if you've got no values at the heart of your politics, you know, what have you got? So I think we're seeing kind of, we're in a kind of emperor no clothes setting now. I think that's right. I was hoping again for something at the end besides emperor for no clothes. Like what about J.D. Vance is a minger or Trump is a cockwamble.

A minger? Aminga? A minga. But minga just means ugly. Ugly. Yeah. Well, J.D. has a recess side profile and he's obese.

I came up with a good one. I got a lot of flat, but I did say I called Vance. I said he's an ozempric. Do you like that? Yeah. He's a prick. That's good.

He likes it. And it's quite clear how he's become so thin. So I thought, Ozener. It is quite clear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's quite clear.

I like that. I'm sorry. I feel bad I've let you down though, not having sort of witty. No, this is pretty good. I learned a couple new ones. Sleak it. Sleak it. Sleak it.

Sleak it. Sleak it. I'll listen on the re-tapeep. Sleak it. Sleak it. It's a very harsh, double E in the middle. Sleak it. And Wazook.

Yeah. Well, Pillick. Sleak. Sleak. Wazak. Pillick. Pillick. Pillick.

Pillick. That's good. His shows the rest is politics. It's you and like another, it's kind of like a. me type figure, right? Kind of a never trump, like a former Tory, an ex-tory? Yeah. He's back.

Well, he's an ex-tory minister, Rory Stewart. And part of the dynamic of the podcast is I'm trying to bring him over much more to the left. Are you winning? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. But it's very hard. It's hard to be a Tory.

Reality is kind of setting in is kind of the problem for those of us formerly on the right, you know. Reality is working out. in your favor. You'll feel a lot happy. I think you should come right over, right over. Come right over? Yeah, be like, you know, really left wing.

Labor? You have a lot of parties, though. Couldn't I stop at the Lib Dems? Couldn't I take a quick pit stop at the Lib Dems or something? You could do, but we wouldn't take it too seriously if you did that. Okay. And don't be, don't. We'll talk about it.

I appreciate it. I think you should be a labor. I think you look to me like a labor kind of guy. All the way to labor? Keir-starmer seems fine with me. I mean, I guess I am labor, kind of, because I like Kirshtarmer better than most breaths, it seems like. I see, what do you like about him?

Steady? He's steady. Yeah, look, I mean, he's steady. I wish, I've already expressed my complaints. Like, I wish that there would be a little bit more economic dynamism. I understand, I don't live in London, so I understand people are upset, you know, that, you know, if you're losing benefits right now,

but part of the reason is because there's no economic. economic, there's not enough economic growth to create wealth, you know, and you can only, you know, pass around so much money. But besides that, I want it to be so mad about. And the other options are horrible. I'm very much motivated by, you know, negative partisanship. And if it's like, if my options over there are the Greens or Farage, then it's like, okay, well, Kier Starmer seems fine to me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe I'm later. That's good. Yeah. I think you, I think we should get, you should bring your message to the UK, go on tour and. All right. Send me a hat. We'll see.

Next time Oasis is on tour, I'll come over and we'll do a show as well. Excellent. That'd be great. That'd be great. It's been lovely to Georgia. I'm sorry I haven't come up. I'm going to go away now.

So many witty phrases are going to come into my head and I'm flying off. You did wonderful. It's the rest of the podcast. You can check out Rory and Alastair there. And we'll be back tomorrow with one of our old friends. Looking forward to it. We'll see you all then.

The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.