The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Donald Trump's Oval Office tirade and Mark Carney's threat to Israel

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard and Janice open the show with Donald Trump's Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, where the US President accused his guest of genocide against white farmers.  Was this an open display of racism in the White House? And why has the public reaction to this been so muted? Rudyard and Janice agree that Trump - right out of an authoritarian playbook - has created a permissive structure that allows for the breakdown of societal norms and civility. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to Canada where Mark Carney released a statement with Keir Starmer and Emanuel Macron criticizing Israel's withholding humanitarian aid to Gaza and threatening consequences should Israel not change course. Most notable here is that the statement did not align with US policy, showing that Canada is moving away from America and building stronger relationships with European allies. And finally, Janice and Rudyard wonder: How are changing demographics within these countries - Canada, France, and the UK - informing policy towards Israel, Gaza, and Palestinian statehood? To support the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 23rd of May. I'm Rudyard Griffiths in studio with my co-host, Janice Gross Stein. Nice, great to have you here. Great to be with you, Richard. We're dry and not high. Well, I have to complain about one sunny day thus far in May.

That is deeply unfair to any Canadian. I know, and it's across the country. It's not just you're in southern Ontario, the center of the universe. Bad weather from coast to coast, but we're warm and cozy in our Monk Debates studio and just want to dig into a week that was. lot to unpack. Let's begin, though, with this extraordinary meeting that happened in the Oval office between the President of South Africa and Donald Trump. So many different places to go with this. What was your reaction to a presidential performance that almost, I would say,

rivaled the bizariness of his confrontation with Zelensky not even two months ago? Oh, Rudyard, I thought this was much worse. for two reasons. First of all, to be blunt, this was racism. This was open racism. There's no other construction you can put on this. And it's beyond dismaying to see that and hear that

from any presidents of the United States. Secondly, if any of us had any doubt that Zelensky was set up, look at this where he has a video of dubious origin. Let me put it you that way, and it's transparent that he was setting up the president of South Africa. And in many ways, that is an extraordinarily awful message to all other leaders who come to the White House. You can be walking into a trap. You know, on any measure that we can talk about it, this was a disgrace. I think what I've found surprising about this, Janice, was not that the president often,

has these bizarre proclivities seemingly cultivated from an overuse or consumption of kind of fringe media, right-wing media in the United States, this whole kind of idea that white Africa and are citizens are the subject of black violence and killing in South Africa, which there just is no evidence. Evidence. There's no statistical evidence. There's no there there. I guess what I wondered, Janice, is the impact of this on.

the conversation about race in America, I think back to Barack Obama's pastor when he was running for president who made a few in comparison innocuous remarks. And this required Barack Obama to give a major address in Washington, D.C. I believe he did it at one of the major kind of houses of worship in the nation's capital. It was all hands on deck. National media attention. How would Barack Obama respond to this. Here we are not only 15 years later, and we have, in a sense, a president, ostensibly representing all Americans,

who is hawking a lie of kind of white victimology. I just, Janice, I just think of how black Americans would see this, how they would react to this, what they would think about, Donald Trump. And I'm surprised that debate really hasn't boiled up in the pages of the news media. And it goes back to a broader theme that we've been discussing for, you know, a number of weeks now. A strange kind of normalization of the president's behavior by everyone, not just corporate America, which you could somewhat understand because of their business interests, but just almost American culture, the media, others seem unwilling or unable to,

recognize just how utterly shocking these types of moments are. Are we becoming endured? What's the right word? Inured. Inured to this president. And what does that mean? Well, I think that's the most disturbing part of the story. And I did think back to Obama as I was watching this.

So let's again say explicitly, there's a double standard. If you're a black president and somebody says something about race in America, it's your issue. You have to own it. You have to respond. You have to clarify that you're the president of all the people. If you're Donald Trump and you are white, although Donald Trump does not speak for the majority of white Americans, let me make that clear. And you engage in openly racist behavior, which is what he was doing, you don't have to explain and nobody holds you to account. But there is a bigger story. here, that so many of the sectors that would speak out against this are exhausted by Donald Trump.

Take the university sector in America right now. You know, the object of sustained attack the flagship university under an unprecedented assault, they don't have the bandwidth or, frankly, the courage right now to speak up, but any issue that's not directly in their court. So many of the other or the press. You mentioned the press. Well, we saw what two of the biggest newspapers did even before Donald Trump was elected. So in many ways, the most worrying thing about this is the definite silence that this was met with, the willingness to move on and just to deal with the issues that affects each sector of society.

I will say that if this pattern repeat itself, Donald Trump will triumph because by the time it's obvious to people that you have to resist, it's too late. Yeah. Because again, I go back to what happened when Cyril Ramaphosa was in the White House. He was interrupting the South African president. A black aider of Ramaphosa's woman tried to. interject with the president. Please forgive me for forgetting her title and position, but as senior official in South African government, the president ignored this woman, who also happens to be black.

And then there were a series of white South African golfers that the South Africans clearly brought because they thought, my God, if we're going to talk to this guy, then we need people that he's going to pay attention to. And sure enough, the whole president's demeanor changed. He became patient. He stopped interrupting. He listened to these golfers, even though they were in a sense more critical than Ramaphosa and the other Africans were in the room vis-a-vis their interactions with the president. And I look, I'm not American. I haven't grown up in America.

What do I know about America? But what I've read and experienced here from Canada. But I thought the issue of race was in a sense the third rail in American politics. Yep. And that in this instance, he touched the third rail. He grabbed the third rail in front of everybody. And again, there was this bizarre moment of this ambush where he brought the lights down and showed this kind of... Such a setup, Richard.

Such an open set. Like a game show almost, turning meetings in the Oval Office with other heads of state into a version of, you know, survivor. Mark Brunette's, you know, iconic reality television show. But he grasped the third rail of race. And I haven't really even seen black Americans come out in a way that I thought they would respond to this as just an outrageous act of at worst chauvinism. And you called it. I think a demonstration that he harbors, you know, deep biases towards people. who are not white.

Yeah. I mean, this is the epitome of white privilege on display. So Janice, what the heck is going on? And why?

Why on the issue that just critical issue that has woven its way through American history for 200 years? Is he able to allied, I think, the firestorm of criticism

that would have descended on Joe Biden? Imagine what would have happened to Barack Obama if he had chastised a white foreign leader in a similar way in the overall office. It would have been the end of his presidency.

So again, I can't find another word for this. Rudyard, an open racism, nakedly racist behavior on display. And part of that, when a society tolerates that, is the double standards that you and I have just been talking about. there's a bigger question here about why so many parts of America are not yet responding in a vigorous, organized way to this precedent. And I think it's the most deeply worrying trend that we're seeing in American society. There's almost this turning away this.

Well, just kind of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It's so bad that I'm simply not going to acknowledge it because when I don't acknowledge it, it doesn't exist. That's right. And it's a company, by the way, with this, and this is what I hear the comments from a lot of Americans. Well, it's only another 18 months till the midterms. And this unmoored belief, frankly, that the midterms will take care of the problem than it's Donald Trump. Well, there's many reasons why they might not in the way that people expect. But what's for sure is if there isn't organized opposition to this from the media,

from civil society groups, from business. Roger, this is the fifth anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, right? The same day, five years later, after George Floyd was murdered, you have this. display by the president of the United States. And deafening silence, frankly, and moved on. And I'll be honest here, the chattering classes within 24 hours in America focused on the attacks on Harvard. Yeah.

Right? Yeah, I want to get to that in a moment. But just to end this, Janice, are we mixing up, you know, symptoms versus like the primary moving force? In a sense, we often attribute to the president that he is the primary moving. force that that in a sense this wasn't an instance of open racism on display and people reacted to it in the way that we described. They don't want to see it. They don't want to acknowledge it. So they move on. They turn the page. But I guess maybe the more troubling question to ask is,

is the president in fact the symptom, maybe not simply the symptom of longstanding biases and racism in American society, but the symptom of a civil society that has, become numbed. Numbed by its polarized politics, numbed by its addiction to social media, maybe increasingly dumbed down by AI. There's all kinds of stories now that people who are consuming and using AI

excessively lose their critical thinking skills, their ability to, in a sense, reason on their own. That's just one pinprick, so to speak. But when you put this all together, you kind of worry that American society itself and its culture may have passed some tipping point of self-awareness, of self-reflection, of self-criticism, and instead is out the other end into a very different phase and maybe a very different state of its democracy and what, in a sense, America is. And the president is simply the representation of this.

He's not the cause of it. So I'm a little more optimistic than that. And the reason is I think there are some very smart people whom I profoundly disagree with around Trump who have designed a strategy, Richard, which is overwhelm, overwhelm. You know, every day, another shock. It's a shock and awe strategy.

That's the best description of it that is a very familiar in military history. What's the purpose of shock and awe? It is so destable. that's what is designed to be, that it disrupts the opposition and you can move forward on the battlefield. That's what I see these five months, almost five months, since Donald Trump has become president. I have more faith in Americans. To thank just a second, I was in a discussion about Tocqueville last night with some colleagues.

who wrote the classic book on American Civil Society. And he worried about what he called populist democracy, right? And that's what you're describing. There's another side to Americans, which I think both of us have seen, they don't comply. They're much less differential than Canadians are. I think there will be a tipping point, and I don't think Americans will comply.

And as soon as there's noncompliance, it's a house of cards. Yeah, fair enough, James. But look, we had this meeting in the Oval Office. It was the same day that he accepted this $500 million plane from the Qataris, which ostensibly will then go to his private foundation. And he says he's not going to use it. Come on. His son concluded a $5 billion golf resort deal in the UAE.

He just hosted a massive dinner. for investors and his family's cryptocurrency. You say that Americans are going to have a moment of wake up, whatever you want to call it. Janice, there are now like five or six major events in the last 30 days that would have, in any other previous presidency, would have caused the music to stop in the media, in the culture, and in the politics. So I hope you're right. But what I'm seeing, observing the facts here, is that we haven't simply opened the Overton window on bad behavior, or in this case, outright racism expressed by a president.

We have torn the Overton window out. And it seems as if there are wide sections of American society that are enjoying the permissiveness that comes with these types of moments. And you know this as a student of history. And again, this will enrage part of our audience. Fair enough. But if you look at the rise of other dictators and other times in the past, what they do, Janice, is they create a permissive structure for specific ideas and mores and behavior to emerge that previously would have to be considered abhorrent or certainly way outside of the battle. in the confines of normal. I would venture that America is in one of these moments

where the normative structure of American society is being obliterated. And yes, some people are resisting this. But I think other people are from the highest echelons of the tech barons in Silicon Valley to who knows, you know, small business owners in Ohio and how they now have to deal with their six unionized employees, there is a there's a sense of okay I'm no longer bound by these norms that we agreed on

civility largely understood has been washed away I can now do what he's doing and go after what I want it's a kind of a moment of the id that rises up in a culture and you know in history that this happens yeah this is a pattern there's first of all there's nothing outrageous about that, right? It's accurate. What you just described is accurate. And that is the authoritarian's path that you just described. So there's a race, right? And the really big question, I think, for all of us is, is Donald Trump able to consolidate his authoritarian regime? Do we have a four-year problem or during that four years? Does he so weaken civil society and institutions that we America in fact makes a fundamental turn.

But I would say does he change Americans values? Well, beyond that, you have to do more. Because in Germany, between the 1920s and the 1940s, a whole set of values on the part of a people fundamentally changed. But they also weaken the institutions. Yes. So you need both, right? You need both.

And that's the race we're in. And that's why my colleagues, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, are saying over and over again, don't wait until it's too late. Don't wait until the institutions are so weak. If you don't resist now, by the time it's obvious that you have to do it, it's too late because the institutional infrastructure is destroyed. And I think that's a big question for the United States. I remain optimistic.

As I said, for a funny reason, Americans are lawbreakers. They're rule breakers. They're not differential to authority. At some point, all authoritarian's require compliance. I just don't believe Americans will knuckle under. But it's a toss here. Yeah, a jump ball.

Let's take a quick break, Janice and say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. When we convene on the other side, we're going to keep knocking here at the big pitches of the week in terms of news. We're going to talk about this statement that Canada joined vis-a-vis the UK and France to condemn the continuing Israel incursion into Gaza and the lack of humanitarian assistance that has been seen on the ground in the last month or more. So that juicy, juicy story, important story for you right after this short break, please consider becoming a member to get the full-length editions of this podcast in beautiful audio and video.

So here's that bye-bye. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents an episode and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at Triple W Monk Debates, MUNK, DebateswithanS.com.