The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 119. Tommy Vietor: How Democrats can fight Trump

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

How did Barack Obama become President? What was Hillary Clinton's huge mistake in 2016? How corrupt really is American politics today? Pod Save America host and former Barack Obama speechwriter, Tommy Veitor, joins Rory and Alastair to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producers: Alice Horrell Video Editor: Josh Smith Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the Restispolities.com. That's the Restis Politics. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And really delighted to be with Tommy Vita, who looks 18, but is in his mid-40s. And goes all the way back to the start of the rise of, the, the rise of, of one of the most remarkable political phenomena of recent times, which is Barack Obama. A trailblazer, Rory, in our world of podcasts, Tommy was one of the founders of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, still really deeply involved in American politics, American Democrat politics in particular. So lots and lots to unpick. Couldn't be better time to talk to you, Tommy, because I know how you're feeling, and we're feeling a British version of what you're feeling about just the stuff that's going on in your country right now. And we'll get on to that. But first all, just give us a brief kind of, you know, early years of Tommy Vita and how Tommy Vita became

one of the youngest kind of campaign spokesman and then one of the youngest operatives in the White House under Obama. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. I'm a long-time listener, first-time participant. And I know it's a special day for us because Trump just announced his plan to annex the Falkland Islands. And I think, you know, hopefully that won't drive us apart. That's a joke, but it could be real. Just kind of run that one back. We like conflicts from the 70s and 80s. Listen, luck and timing is it was everything for me.

I fell backwards into a job on Barack Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, worked for him in the U.S. Senate as a young spokesperson, and then got shipped out to Iowa for the Iowa caucuses, which is the first part of our interminably long primary process, but was really the place where I think Obama proved that he could build something and win and defeat Hillary Clinton and win the election. And fast forward a couple of years, I worked in the White House press office for a couple of years under a guy named Robert Gibbs, who was the first press secretary for Barack Obama. And then after two years, I got promoted over to the national security staff where I was a national security spokesman starting in around 2011 and then left the White House in early 2013. So it was a fascinating time. I think you could write a book about that time period and how it disrupted the world in mostly bad ways.

Tommy, just bring us back to that moment with President Obama and how young he was as a senator. I was friends with Samantha Power then and was in Harvard. And I remember conversations with her where she was trying to work out whether or not to jump on the senatorial campaign and how early to get in with him. And it seemed very, very uncertain. And you were quite unusual from, I guess, the kind of democratic establishment. And I guess, allying yourself to Obama so early to just give us a sense of how improbable it felt, even if with hindsight, it now seems inevitable. Yeah, I mean, listen, I was young and stupid.

So it was easy for me to take the leap for this, you know, go work for this guy named Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama in 2004. Actually, I'd worked for another presidential candidate in 2004 named John Edwards, who later ended up being John Kerry's vice presidential nominee. But when we lost to John Kerry, I got offered a job on the Kerry campaign and turned it down because I wanted to work for Obama. I'd read his book. I was excited about everything.

he stood for and did something very stupid, which has turned down a job on a presidential campaign. But yeah, for someone like Samantha Power, who's a good friend of mine, she spent some time working in our Senate office. She wanted to work in foreign policy, right? I mean, she led USAID later in the administration. And when she decided to work for and support Obama in the presidential campaign, she was getting calls from people who were in the Hillary Clinton orbit saying, if you do this, you will never work again. You will never work in D.C. again. So there was real pressure. I mean, this is something we don't often hear a great deal about party because Alistair is very, very fond of the Clintons and admires them immensely. But there's a little hint there of a relatively

ruthless machine running with Hillary Clinton. And I'm sure you've become very fond of over the years. But give us a little sense if you were going to give a sense of the sharp elbows and the ruthlessness of that campaign. Yeah, I mean, it was a brutal campaign. So in, you know, We won the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, 2008. And I celebrated that night. It was this big accomplishment. And then I got a call from my boss back in Chicago who said, you need to get back to Chicago right now. We need you doing rapid response when John McCain gets the nomination.

We secure the nomination because we need to kind of kneecap him early. And so I left all my stuff in my apartment. I left my car. I abandoned my truck that I purchased somewhere at a gas station. and I got to Chicago as fast as I could. And then, well and behold, took six months of brutal fighting and brutal campaigning against the Clinton machine to finally win that nomination because, you know,

she's got some sharp elbow operatives, people like Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson, the communication staffers who were very good at what they did. Let's put it that way. Tommy, you said kneecapping there, which in a United Kingdom, particularly the Northern Ireland bit, is a troubling insight. But we'll come back to that.

But listen, you said something really interesting your answer before that, you talked about the impact that Barack Obama's book had. And we live in a world where too many politicians frankly think that, you know, it's all about TikTok, it's all about Twitter. That book really made a difference in his rise, didn't it? So Barack Obama wrote the book, Dreams for My Father, was his first book. And he wrote that well before he got into politics. And it was very candid about personal feelings, his father, drug use, a lot of things that politicians usually wouldn't put in writing. But I also think it gave you a window into who he was and his values. I mean, just sort of a core set of beliefs that for the nine years I worked for him were consistent

and helped us when we would go to him and say, sir, there's a question from a journalist about this new issue. You could just tell he had like an internal compass that helped dictate what he wanted to say and where he wanted to go on issues. And I think that was incredibly valuable because he'd done all that thinking throughout his life in that reading and writing those books that got him to the point. I mean, this is an unfair question because you're a very good friend of his and you're very loyal to his, but can you give us a sense of looking back what you think his strengths and weaknesses were and what you missed during that administration and whether some of those things contribute to the problems we're in now? I think one thing Barack Obama was

incredibly good at that is a bit of a lost art is, I mean, look, he was the first person I hear say, we need to disagree without being disagreeable. I think he stole the line from a senator named Paul Simon, who was this legendary Illinois political figure. But I think Barack Obama, Obama truly believed in trying to persuade people and then the value of that persuasion. And I think Democrats sometimes forget how important that is because we convince ourselves that we can win elections just by turning out the base. And I think that's a bad strategy in a divided country and especially in one where the other side is kind of chipping away at your base. And I also think, you know, at the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, like his youth in normalcy was a huge asset. And by

normalcy, I mean he hadn't been in politics for decades like a lot of his rivals had been. Like, they were not rich. I remember going to their condo in Chicago in 2004. I staffed the first interview with Obama and Oprah Winfrey. And it was early in the morning on a weekend. So my boss didn't want to do it. So they sent the young guy. And it was a modest condominium. And I remember the photographer for Oprah like didn't like the space. And they made a shift from an indoor photo shoot to an outdoor photo shoot that didn't really look nice enough. And I tell you, that story because it was a reminder that they were like struggling to pay bills and they had student loans and they were in touch with your average voter in ways that, you know, other Democrats more

recently have not been. And the weaknesses? Well, I mean, the weaknesses, I think, it's less weaknesses that I think about, Rory, it's like it's mistakes. And I love, your thoughts on this. I mean, I've come to believe that the decision to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan in December of 2009 was a colossal mistake. And, And that the Pentagon sold us on this coin strategy idea that was always doomed to fail. And that if, you know, frankly, Joe Biden had been listened to at that time and it would shift to more of a counterterrorism focus, we might have been more successful. Now, ultimately, you know, I think the Taliban takeover probably happens, right? I just don't know that there was any process in place to set up a government that actually felt legitimate.

People saw it as corrupt and illegitimate. And the more you read about military operations in Afghanistan over the many years, it seems like, They had the end goal of radicalizing populations against us, but I'm curious what you think. I was very much against that search. And I was sitting in the states at that time, meeting Hillary Clinton when she was the Secretary of State, working with Richard Holbrook, and trying my best to convince them not to back that search. It made no sense at all.

And I was really hopeful a few weeks out that President Obama wasn't going to back that search. And then somehow against all his kind of better judgment, he started saying stuff. I remember his speech. Maybe you wrote it in which he said, in order to catch Osama bin Laden, we need to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan. And I thought, where on earth is this coming from? In order to catch Osama bin Laden, you've just got to catch Osama bin Laden. What did all this stuff about winning in Afghanistan, stabilizing Pakistan come from?

So can you tell us a little bit about how it feels to be trapped? What is it that traps you? Is it your rhetoric? Is it your deference to the generals? Is it your lack of confidence in foreign policy? I mean, how do you end up doing something that should have been clear to him, given everything he'd believed about Iraq? Should have been clearly idiotic.

Right. I mean, well, if you look at his campaign rhetoric, he talked about the Iraq war being a mistake, the need to end it, the promise to end it. But he also referred to the war in Afghanistan and the war against al-Qaeda as the war we need to win. Now, that doesn't mean you need to switch to this coin strategy, massive influx of U.S. troops into areas that they hadn't been before, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think, you know, if you remember that time, Roy, there were a bunch of leaks

from the Pentagon about their needs. There was this famous kind of infighting with General Stan McChrystal and Obama fired him. And by the way, I think Stan McChrystal has proven himself to be an incredibly honorable, thoughtful, decent man, not that he wasn't at the time. But some of the underlings like Mike General Flynn, who became Trump's first national security visors, kind of a crazy ideologue. But I do think there's this bureaucratic pressure that squeezes you in these jobs. And there's also a can-do attitude from the military that is admirable in one sense, but I think can lead to hubristic decision-making and another. Tommy, did you feel at the time

that it was a mistake? And was Barack Obama somebody who you were able to, you were able to, you be very, very frank with, because the presidents I've seen close up, I often feel that there's a kind of such an aura around them that sometimes the people who are close, even the people closest to them are not always very, very frank with them. Yeah. So what Obama did was he tried to set up a process where there was this series of very high level national security meetings about the issue, where what he wanted to do was not just decide, okay, how many troops we send in boys? It was like, let's pick at all the underlying assumptions. about this mission. Like what, what is our goal? Who are we trying to defeat? How can we get there? The

development assistance, the intelligence picture, et cetera. And I think in that process, I think there was candor, like Joe Biden, I think, was famously candid in some of those meetings about his opposition to the surge, about his feeling that, you know, any sort of major military operation in Afghanistan was doomed for failure. But I don't know. I think he was sort of sold on this idea that you could surge troops in for a shorter duration of time, kind of give it your best shot, and see if that leads to a better outcome through all this training, which clearly just didn't work. There's a very interesting interview that Barack Obama gave to the Atlantic, where he talks about Russia and basically seems to be saying in about 2014 that Russia isn't really much of a threat

because its demography is going in the wrong direction. Its economy is the third, smaller than that of the United Kingdom. That isn't really the place we need to be focusing. We need to be focusing on the Pacific, tilting towards Pacific. And then, of course, there's the call's strange, sort of slightly reluctant call in Libya, and then the refusal to uphold the Red Lines in Syria. Put together, you begin to wonder whether actually that foreign policy vision quite stacked up and whether the problem wasn't. And I sometimes wonder this, when I see him in those early days doing these seven-hour seminars

on how to save the Detroit car industry, that he's trying to do something he can't do. He's trying to rethink single-handedly through some sort of academic seminar every element of U.S. foreign policy. And inevitably, he's making confident calls that are slightly going awry. Well, Russia prediction doesn't wear well over time, doesn't. I mean, back to 2012 being an interesting year, right? I mean, that was the year when Dimitri Medvedev handed the reins back to Vladimir Putin. Now, Putin clearly was in charge the entire time, but I used to read the transcript of every single phone call between Barack Obama and Medvedev, and it was not the Demetri Medvedev you see today. This was a thoughtful lawyer who would

give on issues, who would work with us at the United Nations on various Security Council resolution. So it was a different time. 2012 was also when Hu Jintao was succeeded by Xi Jinping. So again, an incredible inflection point. But I mean, maybe the best place to dig in, Rory, is on the red line decision because I was there when Obama drew the red line. August in 2012. I was sitting in the briefing room right next to him. This is about the use of chemical weapons. Yes. We had intelligence at the time that Assad might be moving around or planning to use chemical weapons. And those comments were designed to be a deterrent. It worked temporarily, but then a year later, and I left the White House by this point, there was that large-scale

sarin gas attack. Fast forward a bit. Obama decided not to immediately respond. He sought congressional authorization, did not get it ultimately. The UK, the British Parliament, voted it down and there was no military response. A month later, Russia, Syria and the U.S., they cut this deal to get 1,300 metric tons of chemical agents out of Syria through international bodies, but obviously not as entire stockpile. Now, I will fully concede to you that when the President of the United States says something, they should execute on that. And I think it would be far easier politically to just fire Tomahawk missiles into Syria and say, look, I enforce the red line. But I do think people talk about that refusal, and I agree it was the wrong decision and a

failure, like it would have had some major impact on the course of the war. And I think that there's some strong evidence that that's not the case because Trump did exactly what we're talking about here in 2017 when he fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria and nothing changed. And so I think the question is there's often this extrapolation from that event that the refusal to enforce the red line is what drew in the Russians two years later. But I guess I wonder what the evidence is for that, and if you've seen information that I haven't. Can I just jump in there for all the answers that, Tommy? It was really interesting that you referred there to the UK Parliament voting it down. And I can remember in the buildup to the Iraq War when obviously Tony Blair and

George Bush were kind of, you know, very closely locked together in so many ways. But the Americans did at one point say to us, listen, we can do this without you. You don't, don't feel you have to be there for this. And I just wonder whether when it came to Syria, why Obama felt that it was so essential to have particularly the UK support before he could actually go ahead. I think what it reflected was a broader hesitation of feeling that U.S. military intervention more often than not has led to bad outcomes rather than good ones. A frustration in the United States that it is easier for a president to start a war than to end one, as we just saw with Joe Biden in Afghanistan, and just a feeling of not wanting to get dragged into a slippery slope. Because if you enforce that red line once,

and again, I fully admit it was the wrong decision. Doing something at that moment would have been right. But if you enforce that red line once and you take a military strike into Syria, what if Assad tests you again and uses chemical weapons again or uses chlorine gas? Are you then obligated to strike again? And at that point in the war, there were two challenges. There was the Assad regime, but there was also this growing ISIS threat. And so the focus, I think, over time pretty quickly shift to that ISIS threat rather than Assad. I'm going to take a big bold leap. Please.

Leap forward. The great supporters of President Obama, and I think this is fascinating, but I guess we want to get on, I'm afraid, to the terrible fact of Donald Trump. And just as our root into it, can you set up for us what it was about? Barack Obama's time in office about Hillary Clinton, more recently about President Biden or Kamala Harris that creates the possibility of Trump winning twice? I mean, I think there's something very high level and basic where American politics are a pendulum and we tend to swing back and forth. And after eight years of Obama, eight years of a black president, the fact that you could see this backlash that led to someone like Donald

Trump getting elected who began his campaign with a over-eastern. racist speech about, you know, Mexicans sending rapists. I guess with the scope of history, kind of of the United States, it probably shouldn't surprise us. I also think there was some frustration in 2016 with the status quo, with, you know, economic inequality, with a feeling that government wasn't working for people in a variety of ways. And the democratic response in that moment was to say, we nominate Hillary Clinton, someone who most voters had known and associated with kind of business as usual in Washington for decades. And the Democratic. Whereas Trump comes in, and he's the ultimate disruptor.

I don't know if you tracked the Republican primary as closely as we did in 2015, but I remember canceling plans with friends to watch Republican debates because Trump was just, he looked and he sounded so different. I mean, you'd walk in there and you're expecting a conversation about education policy, and he's just telling Rand Paul he's ugly or whatever, you know, crazy insult was happening. And it just felt so new and shocking that I think people wanted that disruption. Did you think it would be effective? No, I was naive and wrong, and I thought American voters would ultimately reject it.

I think 2016 was unique in that a lot of people weren't excited about the race, and they kind of sat it out, and they thought there was no chance Trump could ever win, in part because of pundits like me who said as much and were just catastrophically wrong. Would Obama have fought a different campaign to the one that Hillary fought? Because I think you're right that it's the uniqueness and the disrupting nature of Trump that makes him such a difficult opponent. It's very hard for me to look back at Hillary's campaign and think, well, should have done this, should have done that. It was a pretty traditional Democrat campaign, wasn't it?

It was pretty traditional. I mean, I think, you know, that they didn't go to certain states where she lost, like Wisconsin. Yeah. You know, there were some massive polling errors in some things people just didn't see and missed. I think Obama was a better communicator. He had higher favorables. He was just better able to reach people. So I do think, I don't think 2016 was the best run campaign.

I'm trying to be kind and judicious here, but I don't think it was perfect. I can tell. I can tell. Tommy, then it seemed at least in 2024 that people had learned a lot of those lessons. My goodness, people spent a lot of time in Wisconsin. My cousin was turning up at doors in Pennsylvania, where she was the sixth camisor to turn up in two days at people's doors. I mean, you know, kitchen sink was thrown at this thing. And, you know, people like Jake Sullivan, you know, spent years in the wilderness trying to get their head around what had got wrong.

and they kind of reimagined a foreign policy for the middle classes. And Biden had a big vision on how he was going to get, you know, big borrowing, big spending, get the U.S. economy off the ground. So it wasn't quite as sometimes people imply that the liberals didn't learn any lessons. I felt people like Jake and indeed the whole Biden team were desperately trying to learn lessons from what they thought had gone wrong with Hillary Clinton. Am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong that they tried to learn lessons.

And I know Jake well and I respect him and I think he's a brilliant guy. But I think, you know, the framework of foreign policy from the middle class was less likely to get heard if you're an average voter than, hey, we keep sending all this money to Ukraine to blow stuff up. Why are we doing that? You know, I think the last mile problem is the hardest one in politics. I think Democrats spend a lot of time perfectly tailoring and crafting our speeches and our messages and it just never gets to the people because the biggest disconnect in U.S. politics is people like me who are obsessed and read newspapers all the time and people who get, you know, three minutes of political

news a month via social media and they probably see Donald Trump working at McDonald's. And so I think the lesson Democrats didn't learn in 2004 was Joe Biden running for reelection was a catastrophic mistake that we will be paying for for decades. Decades. I think the damage Trump can do in four years will spill out for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think that was the primary mistake.

I was very surprised by how we went from a world in which the conventional wisdom was that Kamala Harris was pretty hopeless. That seemed to be the story in kind of 2022, 2023. Nobody really rated her to suddenly she was the obvious, great successor for Biden. What happened there? I think what happened was her 2019, 2020 presidential campaign went very badly. It seemed rudderless. They didn't make it to the Iowa caucuses before she dropped out. I think they ran out of money. And so it just didn't, you know, didn't reflect well on her. I mean, Barack Obama used to say that in many ways, how you run your campaign is kind of seen as a proxy for

how you would run a government. And if that's the standard by which we're judging that campaign, it was very, very bad. Biden selected her. And I think what happened here is we had that catastrophic debate. It was self-evident that it was unrecoverable. Biden waited a month to drop out after getting, you know, his arm twisted by Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders. And when he finally got out, it seems like Biden just decided he wanted to anoint Kamala Harris. And that might have been the only viable decision given the timeframe and how few days were left and how campaign finance rules work that would allow her to use the existing infrastructure of campaign infrastructure and use money that had already been raised.

I was arguing at the time that I thought some sort of mini primary might be better that allowed us to at least show that it was a contest. But it kind of got end run. Okay. Tommy, Rory, a quick break and then we're back for more. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins.

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about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer research UK.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest history, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's

sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues.

We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.

Last time I saw you, Tommy, was at the DNC. You saw you in person. And I was, I think Rory was as well. We were both kind of quite caught up with what became known as the vibe. We sort of maybe saw in Kamala Harris and we saw in the energy of the event, something really quite exciting and it felt kind of positive and it felt this, I just sort of sensed this is going to be okay. And then I had breakfast with your lunch with you and you didn't seem to me to be sherry that vibe. So what were you reflecting on that maybe came to pass and what should we have been more aware of? I just think that the convention, two, three, four days, whatever it is, is always kind of the sugar high for all of these candidates. And Democrats were certainly excited to have moved on from the kind of will he won't he debate about Joe Biden and his candidacy.

They were excited about the prospect of Kamala Harris and having something to root for, someone to vote for and cheer for. But I just, the headwinds were still there. You know, the inflation, the questions, the anger at Joe Biden, the frustration about his age, the questions about how he could have been allowed to stay in the race that long. I just kind of knew that was all out there. Plus, I mean, had the Butler shooting happened? I mean, that was just such an iconic moment. That had happened before. I mean, when that happened, you know, my reaction was, oh, God, I hope he's okay,

but also that the campaign was over in that moment. What about Tim Walsh, who we were very excited about at the time? Where is he now? What do people think about him now, having been an extraordinary hero for a matter of weeks and then vanished from our screens? It was really weird. I mean, I had Tim Wals in here in February of last year, had a great interview with him. We talked about everything his time, you know, teaching in China, his time as a football coach,

as time as a teacher in serving the army. And he just seemed like a down-to-earth, normal, regular guy. He got the nomination and they kind of bottled them up for like a month. We just didn't hear from them. And I think part of that was debate prep and all the things you need to do in 107 days to have a convention, give big speeches, get prepared, et cetera. But a part of it was Kamala Harris wasn't doing interviews. So maybe he wasn't doing interviews either during that time. And I just don't know that he was used to the best of his ability. And I think Republicans quickly, you know, decided to brand him as outside the mainstream based on a couple of things that happened in Minnesota, like some school districts allowing tampons in men's bathrooms as if a tampon is going

to jump out of the drawer and attack you. And none of us have mothers or sisters and have, you know, seeing these sort of things around. But I think he still has a political future ahead of him. I just don't know what it's going to be. Tommy, you wrote a book in 2024 ahead of the election, or else, how to save America in 10 easy steps. That hasn't aged very well either. No, no, we need an 11th. I mean, number one, step number one was surely stop the return of Donald Trump. So a couple of questions on that. One, what were you trying to do with that book? Secondly, trying to sort of step aside from your own politics and what we all maybe think about Donald Trump. How do you analyze his strengths.

What do you see is that the, what are the qualities that make him the incredible force that he's become? I think that one thing that's remarkable about Trump is his ability

to talk and talk about himself all day long. Everyone talked a lot about that Joe Rogan interview he did. I heard Joe Rogan talking about it afterwards a day later

with some of his buddies about how it went. And Rogan said Trump walked into the studio, didn't ask to use a bathroom, talked for three hours straight, got up and left without using the bathroom.

And that was just a remarkable feat of just narcissism. So he's either got a strong bladder or a bag. That's right. That's exactly right. Well, I mean, Al-Zar, I was thinking about this today in advance of this interview. I mean, we had this horrific plane crash a couple days ago in the U.S. Yeah. Trump decided to just host this freewheeling press conference the day after.

What he said was disgraceful. He blamed the accident on DEI and all these racist things. But it's this new sort of communications strategy that he has where he just, He owns every news cycle, every piece of it, every single day. You know, on inauguration day, he didn't give one speech. He gave a speech, then a speech at the overflow room, and then a speech at this huge rally later that night. And then he did a 45-minute press conference.

Yeah. You know, he is like everywhere all the time all at once. And I think that is a, maybe that's how politics goes going forward. We obviously like half the world are very interesting in this question of whether he's a fascist. How do you think about that? I'm very worried about it. You know, I think you can look to kind of soft fascist.

This is maybe not underplaying it. People like Victor Orban and the path they've taken to fascism and, you know, controlling the courts, controlling the media, controlling parliament through gerrymandering. It feels like in the U.S. were on our way in a lot of senses. I think that one thing Trump is good at is baiting Democrats into being outraged, into using language that maybe sounds hyperbolic. And I worry maybe that calling him a fascist takes us to that place. Remember, Kamala Harris called him a fascist at one.

point, I think it kind of became a thing that I don't know that it worked as well, but I'm very worried about it. Yeah. The thing that I would worry about if I were American, and of course, because it's America, the whole world needs to worry, is this kind of voluntary obedience by people that we know in their heart can't stand him, can't stand his politics, but they're all just kind of bowing down before him. In a way, at least in the first term, you sort of sense there was.

major dissent there. When is that going to kind of come? Because this is so important, these first few weeks for establishing his second term. In 2016, I think the reaction was shock. And it led to a lot of direct action, a lot of protests, a lot of resistance. This time, I think people are not as shocked. They're just kind of crestfallen. And you're right that there hasn't been kind of the same level of activism, but also we've seen the most powerful people in America just bow down to him. You've got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos sitting on the dais. You got Sam Altman from OpenAI kissing the ring. The TikTok CEO was sitting up there next to Tulsi Gabbard, the incoming director of national

intelligence. Not sure. That's kind of a funny seating chart joke right there. But you got ABC News settling defamation suits, meta paid Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit with him. CBS is reportedly in talks with Paramount to settle another suit. So you're right that these powerful, institutions and corporations are kissing the ring. And it is very worrisome.

While still talking to talk about free speech. They've curbed their own free speech in order to prevent whatever fear they have that he's going to do to them. Yeah. And in the CBS case, it wasn't even about Trump speech. They just edited an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes. It's a very strange moment, isn't it? I mean, one of the things that surprises me is, as you say, the lack of activism, the lack of emphasis on how many of these executive orders are illegal or unconstitutional. Yeah, the lack of sort of outrage and challenge. I mean, you know, you lay out all this stuff and it's astonishing. There's so much of it. It's like dozens of horrors. I mean, really profound, illegal, chaotic, world disrupting acts taking place. And yet somehow you're not

getting a sense of the checks and balances of the US system, which we were all told was supposed to kick in to prevent arbitrary autocratic rule. I mean, theoretically, your whole system was set up to prevent people behaving like autocratic British monarchs, and it doesn't seem to be working. Yeah, I mean, our system is set up where, you know, the ambitions of one leader are supposed to be checked by the ambitions of the other. And I think one of the challenges right now is the Democrats control no part of the Congress. Trump has packed a lot of the courts. And it seems like so far Republicans in the U.S. Senate are willing to just cater to Trump's will in almost every single instance. I mean, the only nominee that kind of has gotten bounced from consideration was Matt Gates to be

the attorney general. And that seemed to be mostly because a lot of these members of Congress hated him personally. It was done about his qualifications. But you've got, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., going through a confirmation hearing to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he's just lying. This man has spent the last several decades of his career focused on the anti-vaccine cause, and he's pretending otherwise. You've got Tulsi Gabbard nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence. She took this bizarre trip to Syria in 2017, met with Assad, met with Assad's wife, met with them again, met with the grand Mufti of Syria, who at the time had been threatening to send suicide bombers into the U.S. and Europe,

and she pretended she didn't remember meeting the guy at this confirmation hearing. And they just don't seem to care. You and some of your Post-Save America colleagues were on the late show with Stephen Corbett recently. And I can't remember which it wasn't you, but one of your colleagues was saying, and he got a round of applause when he said it, you know, after the midterms, Trump won't be able to sign another piece of legislation. But do you think it's a given that the Democrats are going to come back from this? No, it's not a given.

We have to win the midterms. I mean, I think this is what's so tough about our system is Trump, I think, is going to get a honeymoon for at least 100 days. I mean, if you look at the polling, the Democratic approval is in the tanks, Republican Party's approval is higher than it's been in a long time. He's going to jam a lot of things through. We're kind of betting on incompetence and court challenges and just lifting up how bad some of these actions are in the media. But what Trump is implementing is what Steve Bannon once called a flood the zone of the shit strategy, which is they do a million things a day. you can't focus on anyone. So Democrats have a good chance of winning back the House of Representatives just given that usually there is a backlash in the midterm elections. That has to be our focus.

But the Democratic Party's got a lot of problems. I'm happy to get into them that we need to kind of work our way through. Tell us some. Yeah. What should the Democrats do to recover from this? I mean, I just think we have a gerontocracy problem that was I think most visible with Biden, but is visible across the congressional leadership. For example, there was a very important committee that could have been led by AOC, you know, an excellent communicator, a young dynamic, exciting member of Congress and instead going to be, you know, led by this sort of 70-year-old kind of boring white guy. And I think we need to be thinking about, you know, how to fix that gerontocracy problem and just elevating a new generation of younger, more nimble, more

digitally savvy communicators. I also think there is no one singular leader, right? We have leaders in Congress, but there's no, there's no Obama, there's no Joe Biden, there's no one person that everyone looks to for guidance. And so we're flailing a bit. And I do think we need to be seen as fighting a little harder than we are right now, a lot harder than we are right now. And then I think Trump has taught us, again, that just being out there constantly seems to be what's necessary. And that's particularly true on digital platforms and social media where people are getting news. If you think that just going on MSNBC is going to get the message out, you're deluding yourself. I mean, there's a couple hundred thousand people watching these shows and they all agree with you.

That AOC thing, I guess, maybe points to one of the problems that the Democratic Party is having to sort out. So I guess the people who would back that decision would say, listen, an old white guy just won this election. And the only person who's ever defeated this guy is an old white guy. and actually embracing AOC is exactly the wrong thing to do. And I guess maybe that comes down to your background as having been the extraordinary success of Barack Obama against the establishment that got behind Joe Biden. But that's the kind of fundamental strategic choice, isn't it? I mean, AOC represents presumably, for some people, risk, radicalism,

and exactly not the way to get back the centerground swing voter who voted for Biden and then didn't turn out for Kamala Harris. Yeah, and I should say I couldn't remember his name, which is why I called him an old white guy. It's a guy named Jerry Connolly, Democrat from Virginia. I think the concern with Connolly is, we're talking about a 74-year-old congressman, pretty moderate, who's recovering from cancer,

hasn't been out much, you know, hasn't just been doing things. We're talking about chairmanship of a House Oversight Committee where your sole goal there is to kind of lift up things Donald Trump is doing, show the corruption, show the incompetence, and create a political cost for it among the electorate. And I think you're right, Roy, that AOC might not be the obvious person to run for president,

but I think if you're trying to get attention, she's the kind of person that you might want out there leading a committee that's designed to sort of get attention on things Trump's doing that are going badly. Do you think that there's a danger in the Democrats feeling that ultimately you can only fight fire with fire? And actually, in the end, we're all going to have to create kind of popular sewers and progressive sewers and insult each other of 24 hours a day and lie about each other 24 hours a day. Is there a danger of that politics? Because I always think about, you know, I know how much you admire

Michelle Obama, you know, in a way that when they go low, we go high. And I think it's a great concept, but of course, he won. I feel like the Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high. It's this line that always gets thrown in her face. And she didn't mean we kind of ignore slights or don't fight back or don't give it to them as well as they give it to us. It was like just to be high-minded, think about the people we care for and the things we're fighting for, focus on, you know, the job. And also her communications compass is going to be different than like mine. But to your point, I do think there's a risk of thinking the way to beat Trump is to emulate Trump, to get into the sewers, is to be vicious and mean and cruel. And I don't think that's a winning proposition.

I think there will be some backlash to, say, mass deportations that are going to happen where you're going to see communities ripped apart because, Donald Trump has decided he wants to deport every person who's here without documentation. I think that ultimately what voters want is someone that talks about unity that brings people together. There is some healing. That is a more long-term tried and true political strategy than just kind of the Trumpian slashing. But how do you do it? I mean, I guess we saw Obama and Michelle Obama make those speeches.

We saw Kamala Harris that she and Tim Walts make speeches about healing and unity. And there is a sense in which social media has changed this whole world. And my goodness, it's all going to change now even more, right? Because Musk has changed the algorithms on X. And we've now heard that Zuckerberg is going to change the algorithms on Facebook, which will actually lead to more political hate, more polarization. And we've just come through, and I guess this is what I'm sort of leading into, just comes through something that's been called a podcast election.

And you are, you know, one of the U.S.'s leading podcasters. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what is this social media? landscape. Do podcasts matter? Why do they matter? Was it a podcast election? And is this technology making it almost impossible to be a kind of Obama-style politician? It certainly makes it a lot harder. I think the landscape in the U.S. now is you have all these traditional sources of news, be they newspapers, network news or cable. And all of them are seeing their viewership and their numbers go down. And it's this inexorable slide. Associated with that, for a while now, we've had had a very well-funded right-wing media ecosystem.

You know, that started with Rush Limbaugh back in the day, but over the years, it's evolved to a lot more outlets that your listeners might not have heard of, but are incredibly influential like The Daily Wire, Brightbart News, there's some even more radical ones like the Federalist, the list goes on and on. And often those right-wing conservative outlets are propped up by billionaires who invest in them because they view them as a political weapon that leads to tax cuts and deregulation. then this election cycle was different in that there were all these notionally a political, but kind of conservative, coded podcasts that had developed huge audiences.

Often, you know, there's people like Joe Rogan that are talked about a lot, but there were comedians with really big footprints who just kind of, for whatever reason, decided they liked Trump. And Trump really made a deliberate strategy to go on those shows over and over and over again and leverage those audiences. and I think very effectively targeted young men of all stripes of all races and persuasions and convince them to vote Republican. And that was kind of the new insight this time.

Why does the left not have a, and I know the left in America may be being something a different, but we define as a left, why are we so incapable of putting together that kind of ecosystem, that kind of wrap around? Because this is a global thing now. This is a global, organized, funded billionaire back campaign. And right now it's doing pretty well. Why have we never been able to do that in the same way? Clinton used to talk about this all the time that we're just not as good at it as they are.

Yeah, I've been complaining about this for a decade. I mean, there is, to your point, Alster, you see these, there's an event called CPAC, this conservative conference that happens. Now there's CPAC in Brazil. There are CPAC in Hungary, right? There is this connective tissue between these right-wing parties through, people like Steve Bannon. I think there's a couple pieces of this. I mean, just in terms of the like launching a liberal or progressive news outlet, we tried to do that. We're kind of lonely in this

space. We hope others will do it. We love more competition. We'd love to see more liberal billionaires invest in kind of permanent infrastructure like this rather than lighting money on fire with shitty campaign ads every four years. But in terms of the cultural piece, I think Democrats just lost the cultural piece. And part of that was these voters just didn't feel like they could be for Biden. Democrats, we convinced ourselves that, you know what, he might look old. He might have lost a step physically, but we know he can do the job. We kind of like made it an intellectual problem where most voters viewed it from an emotional level or just kind of a common sense level. And we're like, that guy is too old. And I think that drove a lot of people away.

I guess conservatives listening to this would laugh at this notion that there isn't a massive liberal ecosystem. In fact, their entire beef with the world, if they were looking at the, the United Kingdom as they think the whole damn thing is run by podcasts like us and the BBC. And actually, of course, the liberal worldview, the liberal progressive worldview is very, very powerful. You know, it's really kind of dominated the world since the early 90s. And, you know, if there are these CPAC conferences, there's any number of other institutions all around the world which have kind of taken into their bones, the assumptions of liberalism, progressivism, the world order. That's exactly the elite, I guess, that J.D. Vance is complaining about.

This is what the whole of, you know, the trolls on X are getting infuriated. But they do see in a way that maybe we don't that there's a lot out there, as it were, on our side. The curious question, I guess, is why doesn't it feel urgent? Why doesn't it feel exciting? Why, I mean, the extraordinary thing in the UK, I mean, the word journalists saying, you know, if you look at podcasts, it's the kind of right that's exciting, it's the right that's dominated. Actually, you look at the UK podcasts, the right doesn't really feature very much. tends to be people who are from the kind of center progressive left. So what's going on? Why are we, at one sense, so integral to so many institutions, so much the establishment,

and on the other hand, somehow feel as though we're losing way, losing momentum? I mean, I think there's some truth to the criticism that a lot of journalists themselves have more liberal views. And that was probably even more true, you know, 20, 30 years ago when everybody at the New York Times or the posts or CBS was some white guy who went to Harvard, who was progressive, et cetera, right? So there's a legacy piece of this that had some truth to it. But if you look at the modern media landscape in the U.S., I think it's very hard to argue that it's progressive in any way. People think the New York Times is liberal because they have a liberal opinion page. That was not my feeling practice. Like, I got the shit kicked out of me by the New York Times

every single day for four years, nine years working for Obama. People love, Jake Tapper on CNN, a dogged, tough journalist who held Trump's feet to the fire, again, I would get into arguments with Jake that were so bad when I was the spokesman for the Obama administration that we wouldn't talk for a week or two. They were mainstream, traditional news outlets kicking the shit out of us. But meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch comes along in the 90s, right? And Fox News becomes this 800-pound gorilla in the U.S. media ecosystem. And they not only reach, you know, 3 million people in prime time at night. It's that Fox can drive a narrative and naked, the thing everyone is talking about. That was true for Obama's birth certificate. It was true for

the Benghazi attacks, right? And that is what the left is really lacking. And I think it's now been supercharged by this evolution and purchase of Twitter by Musk and God help us if he gets TikTok too, if Trump can force that sale. So that's kind of what people like me are complaining about. Really great to talk to you as always, but my last question is really about what advice you would give to other leaders around the world. So you've worked for a leader on the national security side. I was at a funeral yesterday and Kirstehrm was there and we were having a chat about this, that and the other one of the things we talked about was how do you deal with Trump? So what's your advice to people like Kirstama, people like Mertz, if he becomes Chancellor of Germany, people like whoever follows Trudeau. How do you deal with this guy?

Yeah, I mean, I think Trudeau is an instructive example. Justin Trudeau tried to say the right things. He tried to laugh off insults. He flew down to Mara Lago for a dinner. And Trump insulted him in the most childish ways, called Canada, the 51st state, insulted him, diminished him, and now he's gone. And I think there's a lot of people around the world, a lot of progressives and, you know, foreign ministers or whatever are doing a lot of cleanup on IL2. They're trying to say that their past criticisms or Trump are wrong. I don't know that that's going to be effective. I think he respects strength. He likes Xi Jinping for that reason. He likes dictators that do and say whatever they want. I think you have to be strong in his face or else he won't respect you. I also think, though, that if my advice to the leaders around the world is like just loosen up and let rip, you know, Trump did, Trump's talking four hours a day, he's backtracking on things, he's flip flopping, he's making mistakes, he's flooding the zone. I really think there's a lesson to be learned there about talking like a human being, getting on digital platforms, not, you know, editing a speech for, seven days and then thinking, delivering the perfect 25-minute stem winder at Davos is going to solve your communications problems, thinking about, okay, how do I reach the person

in name your part of the world who doesn't know what Davos is? Tommy, my last one is, what do you think European or British viewers don't quite get about Trump and the U.S. political system? What do you think people misunderstand about the United States when you hear foreigners talking about the U.S. What you guys probably have not caught on to that we have in the U.S. is just how corrupted it's gotten so quickly. I mean, Donald Trump's first term, he installed Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to be his kind of shadow secretary of state.

Jared Kushner walked out of the White House, started a private equity firm and got a $2 billion check from the Saudis. And now Jared, he also got a bunch of money from the UAE in the Qataris, I believe. Now Jared says he's going to stay outside of government, but he's, going to be kind of a shadow advisor on any Saudi-Israeli normalization talks. Trump basically IPOed himself. There's a DJT stock that you can buy on the NASDAQ, I believe. So if you're a foreign leader who wants to pour money into his coffers, that's one avenue for you. In the first term, it was booking hotel rooms at, you know, high rates for months for no reason. And now you can just

buy his stock or you can buy the Trump crypto coin. So I just think we are in a totally new era of of corruption with Trump. And like, I'm not sure. I'm just, we're starting to feel more like how people operate in sort of say Saudi Arabia, right, where you can, where, where you install your kids in these jobs and there's transactions that personally benefit leaders. And I don't know, I'm, more just complaining out loud about how bad it's gotten. But that's one thing that I'm, I'm really worried about. What I don't get, Tommy, is why people don't seem to care about that. I know You care and maybe people in your circles care and lots of people who are very to Democrat care. But it seems to me a lot of people just don't care about that.

They think, well, the guy wants to get rich. He's a business guy. They don't get rich. It's staggering. People just don't care. And, you know, look, I think Republicans raised a lot of fair questions about Hunter Biden and his business dealings and ethical lines that may have crossed. And they just do not care a bit when Trump does it.

And it's just polarization. Well, listen, Tommy, keep saying, keep talking. keep podcasting away and keep in touch. Thank you for having me on. A big fan of the show and appreciate what you guys are doing. Thank you very much. Very best wishes. Bye-bye.

Well, Alistair, thank you for that. I think he's great. I hope people don't feel it's a little too incestuous, given that I've been interviewed on his pod. We're interviewing him on our pod. He's a podcast, so you're a doubt. Dallas Baddivian Infude on his pod. I think it's worth pointing out to people that Pod Save America is a very, very big deal.

I mean, in a way, it's the kind of counter movement to Joe, broken, and it's lovely to hear his voice and his clarity. I mean, what did you take out of it? I like Tommy. I think he's a very smart guy. I think he's a bit of a lost to politics, actually. I mean, I know he's still involved and still engaged, but I think he, I think he's a very clear thinker, but I guess, you know, I think he probably just feels he's, he's kind of had his time with Obama, and it's kind of doesn't feel like that anymore. But I think he's somebody who's pretty frank about their mistakes, pretty frank about mistakes the Democrats have made in recent times and I think he's worth listening to.

One of the things that it struck me just sort of reflecting on that is how at the end he said these completely staggering things about Trump and corruption. Yeah. And how difficult it is at the moment in the US to get the balance right. I mean, you sort of go from sort of quite small things like Trump saying Ron Paul's ugly to suddenly things which are sort of 10,000 times more important. Yeah. Like the fact that he's being corrupted by foreign leaders.

And I guess that's part of the problem, isn't it? Trying to see the wood from the trees and get people to focus on where the really big crimes are, rather than getting dragged down into all his minor misdemeanors. Well, it is this, it is flood the zone with shit, isn't it? There's so many things to talk about. I had a meeting with some of the podcast team, our team today. And they were saying, oh, you know, every time we talk about Trump, the numbers are good, and people are really fascinated by Trump, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, of course, they're fascinated by him. But I think there is a danger at times that we play his game by analyzing every single thing that he does and says, when a lot of it will kind of go nowhere. I think what Tommy's good at is sort of separating out the stuff that really matters and the stuff that maybe matters a lot less. But this is Trump's power. I was looking at the day at, I think it was the BBC and looking at the thing of the top 10 most red, most watched. And it was, I think it was something like five out of three.

of 10 were to do with Trump. I then went on to Der Spiegel and had a look, and four out of 10 were to do with Trump. And then I looked at a French size, and then I looked at an Italian one. And this is just a guy with this unbelievable capacity to be the thing that we talk about, to be the thing that we get agitated by. Tommy said to me when we were in Chicago, and he said, this thing about owning the lips, they're never, ever, ever going to give up on it. absolutely fundamental to their strategy. The vulnerability, though, I think, is that if one makes the mistake of attacking him for smaller things or being kind of outraged when he makes a joke, you create a whole ecosystem

of conservatives. And I feel like, obviously, I'm in touch a lot of conservatives who sort of feel that we're crying wolf. Yeah, I agree. They're kind of being hysterical. And I slightly felt that, you know, we got so excited about the back-keeping. you know, he's a felon who'd been convicted for 32 felonies. But actually what in the end did that boil down to, something much, much smaller than him taking $2 billion from foreign

governments. Yeah. It was 32 things, all related, I think, to him. 34 was it? We've already forgotten. There's 34, yeah. But all the 34, basically, were just different variations on him having paid somebody to not kibosh's campaign by saying they'd had an affair with him. Whereas the biggest stuff, you know, upending the world order, ethnic clans, in Gaza, pushing to annex Greenland from Denmark. Scrapping the Petfire program. Right. Bringing an FBI director who's doing terrifying stuff, handing over TikTok to some corrupt

friend of his. I mean, we've got to somehow find a way of concentrating on the big stuff. Because what I'm noticing with conservatives is when you actually get them onto the big stuff, they're like, wow, that does sound pretty terrible. Yeah. I wasn't really aware that he was doing that because they're so flooded with us getting kind of pious and upset with all the small stuff. Yeah, but how can you say the big stuff.

So, like, he mentioned Jared Kushner. You know, I've said several times on the problem because how can it be anything other than the corruption that somebody leaves office, leaves that position and walks straight into multi-billion pound deals. Okay. Now, so when you had the inauguration, because the broadcasters are so sort of, you know, terrified of losing their license, whatever it is, the whole thing. there was no mention of the fact that this rotunda is the place where the January of the six writers, you know, were basically trying to kill police officers or loop paintings, whatever it might be.

There was no mention of the fact that there's, there's Kushner standing there, right? You know, and he's just, and there's Jared Kushner, and there's Ivanka wearing a lovely green suit, and there's Elon Musk looking a bit weird. And it was just, you know, this normalization of something that's totally abnormal. And it was funny. I don't know whether who Toby was referring to when he said that. I don't think Trump's going to respect to all these people who just sort of, you know, recant past statements. Because, of course, one of the things that Peter Mandelson did this week ahead of going to be the ambassador was to say he was wrong to say that Trump was this and Trump was that. Well, no, he wasn't wrong and he knows he wasn't wrong.

But they feel they have to do that. This is interesting. A Syrian friend of mine who I just spoke to said, when are you guys going to stand up to Trump? Right. I mean, he understands strength. Yeah. Britain, European leaders need to absolutely. stand up to this guy, that this idea that we were being sold when we were in Davos by the former

Speaker of the House of Representatives, that all you have to do is go and apologize to him be nice and improve your golf and everything will be great, is ridiculous, particularly when what he's doing is so damaging to the world. Yeah. It's like if I were Denmark and the Greenland thing happened, I mean, okay, Denmark, you know, I think they've handled it reasonably well. But the fact is Denmark is a member of NATO and the member of the European Union. So therefore, if that was me, I'd have been thinking, right, okay, we need to get something out. We need to get something out of the NATO machinery here, saying it is obviously absurd to think that one NATO country would attack another. We need the European Union to say, Europe stands by Denmark.

And, you know, I just think, cow-towing to this guy is not going to do anybody any good. No, no, no, no. And actually, there were little bits of communication from Denmark where they were like, well, you know, The call was longer than people think, and it was politer than people think. And you're kind of getting around the fundamental fact that this man is basically saying, give me part of your territory. Yeah. Because I've got money and I've got troops.

The other thing I think that Tommy said that really struck a chord is when he said what the right-wing ecosystem is very, very good at, is making a story out of something. So he produced two examples, which many people won't remember. One of them is this story that Obama wasn't in a real American citizen. It's the kind of birth-her story. And the other was the story around Benghazi. So there was a terrible attack in Libya where an American ambassador was killed. And this thing, which is, I'm afraid, more normal in international stuff than anybody wants to acknowledge. It's just, sadly, an almost inevitable risk of doing business in difficult parts of the world.

And we've come very, very close to it on many, many occasions, suddenly became this incredible story, which was kind of bringing down Hillary Clinton and getting into the emails and totally changed the way the stand. Department behaved all over the world. Instead of people saying, what a brave man, very, very sad, the whole thing became the scandal. It was a world of scandals and massive overreaction. And I feel it's also recently in the British press. You know, everybody on X is absolutely obsessed with the Rotherham grooming gangs who were horrifying, who did terrible, terrible things. But what's also clear is that this story has suddenly been resurrected, that it's sort of died for few years. These people, many of them prosecuted, many of the events happened before 2012,

and then suddenly bang, it's right up again and talks about it, so, you know, it's happening now under our noses and we're in this existential crisis. So that is a very weird thing. And I'm not sure, I mean, do you recognize that from when you were doing this stuff in the 90s? No. Look, people would exaggerate. There would be lies told about it and so forth. Rumors would spread. But I think there was, there was a sense that the truth could out over time, whereas I think now, funny enough at the funeral, John Prescott's funeral, I was, I was on the talking to Angela Rainer and we're talking about, you know, some of the stuff that was, that was helping reform in different places. And she was, she was talking about how many people genuinely believe now that

Kea Stama helped Jimmy Saville. And it's just, you know, it's the opposite of the truth. But if you are peddling that stuff below the radar and in the sort of, you know, on social media, on the sort of friendship groups and all that sort of stuff, these things can take hold. And, you know, the reason I was saying to Tommy, well, should the progressives, should the progressive side play the same game, I guess I am saying, you know, like if you think of the damage that was done with so many people, there are lots of people in America who genuinely believe that Hillary Clinton and ran a pedophile rig from a pizza parlor.

Now, whoever invented that, you know, it's quite a leap of imagination. I think, well, we can invent this story, and then we can cede it and then cement it and get it into the public consciousness. You know, I don't think we would want to be in a place where we say, you know, let's make up a story that Donald Trump Jr. did this

or if Anka Trump did that, whatever. It's kind of horrible, but that's, you know, I think that's the direction that Trump has sort of dragged, politics. And of course, the problem for politics around the world is it's sort of, well, you know, he won. So it's, I, and I thought towards the end, you know, I thought towards the end, he did say, you know, listen, I'm just complaining out loud now. It's like how to deal with this guy is, is really is the question. But I'm not remotely convinced that whoever you are,

whether you're in American politics or global politics, I'm not convinced that sort of pretending that you think he's a great one, you know, that it's not, it's the way to deal with. Good. Well, thank you for that. See you soon. Bye.