The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 143. Iraq, Trump, and America’s Slide to Authoritarianism (Congressman Seth Moulton)

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

How did Congressman Moulton keep fighting the Iraq war when he thought it was a mistake? Is there anyone who can stop Trump, or is he an absolute monarch? Have substandard politicians used military service as a get-out-of-jail-free card? Rory and Alastair are joined by Congressman Seth Moulton to discuss all this and more. Visit HP.com/politics to find out 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] Social Producer: Celine Charles  Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: 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 therestispolities.com. That's therestispoletics.com. This episode is sponsored by HP. Now, Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year. It is, and something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to be stop supporting some of those old laptops of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example.

It would be like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock. So it's time to move on and HP are making that refreshingly straightforward. Yes, they are. HP's latest business PCs comes with Windows 11 Pro as standard. They're faster, more secure built for the AI tools, which are already reshaping the way we work. And you don't have to figure out all in your own. HP's business advisors help you pick the right kit, so no baffling jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restis Politics listeners get 10% off business PCs at HP.com using the code Trip10, term supply. So unlock efficiency and innovation, upgrade to Windows 11 Pro PCs with HP and get 10% discount. Visit HP.com slash politics to find out more.

Welcome to the Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we're very lucky to have with us today, Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Congressman Moulton, I have known, I guess, almost 20 years on, and I guess maybe even on three different continents. He was a very talented student at Harvard who then decided to join the U.S. Marine Corps after 9-11. He served with real courage and distinction and some very tough postings in Iraq. he was there with the US Marine Corps commanding his platoon as they advanced immediately after the invasion 2003 and then he found himself in some very tough fighting on subsequent tours in Iraq.

And then he took on the bigger challenge of standing for the US Congress. And during his career, he has not just served with successor congressman. He also was a presidential candidate against President Biden. and he is somebody who I think has got a very, very interesting perspective on global politics, on the United States, on the Democratic Party, and much more. So welcome. It's great to be here. It's always good to see you. Great to see you. I'm going to start off, though, in saying, what's this journey been like? I mean, are you able to step back enough from the day-to-day political communicating to sort of think about the shape of your life?

life. And maybe for listeners who are interested in politics in general, what does it feel like? What's the difference between being a Marine Corps officer and being a congressman? What are the, what's better about one job, worse about the one job and vice versa? Well, those are great questions. And I think in many ways what shocked me is how similar the jobs are, because the sense of service and purpose that I find in my work to day is what I had in the Marines. And that's ultimately what drove me to be in politics. In fact, there was a day in 2004 in the war. It was a tough day. And a Marine in my platoon, a young corporal looked up at me and said, you know, sir, you ought to run for Congress someday so that this stuff

doesn't happen again. He used a marine term for stuff, but you can understand what he meant. And I had no plans to go to Congress whatsoever. In fact, when I got out of the Marine Corps and went to business school and I got a couple graduate degrees, the first job I took was in Dallas, Texas. And I guess you don't have to be a political expert to know that if you want to run for office in Massachusetts, you don't move to Dallas. So this is really not where I expected to be. It's not what I planned to do when I grew up. I didn't study politics in school, had no political connections in my family, no family money, none of the prerequisites that people think of when they imagine someone preparing a life in politics. But when I was in the Marine Corps, I got this sense

of the importance of service and the amazing impact you can have on the lives of others, even in a war that I disagreed with. You know, I voted against George Bush twice. I didn't support a lot of his policies. I spoke out about, about what I thought was going wrong in the war, writing even an op-ed in the New York Times as a lieutenant, saying, you know, we're doing this all wrong. And yet every single day in Iraq, I was able to have an impact on the lives of other people.

Often, as you know, Rory, over questions of life or death. And that sense of purpose I found really missing from my life when I got out of the Marine Corps and went back to school. It's a great honor to go back to Harvard, but it's a kind of self-serving endeavor. You're just making yourself a little bit better educated, a little more marketable or whatever else. And ultimately, I thought back to what that corporal in my platoon told me

and decided that at a time when we had never had fewer veterans in Congress in our nation's history, it was time to do my part there. And although I don't have quite the same sense of, purpose in Congress in the sense that it's not over questions every day of life or death. You do get that impact on people's lives. I'm going to jump in. We'll come on to Iraq and we'll come on to your views of that decision and also some of your, I want to talk about some of your personal experience as well in relation to mental health.

But you've provoked me right at the start to read back to you something that you said. you said this. When I went through Officer Candidate at school, you could fail a test, you could fail an academic test, an athletic test, like they give you a second shot. But if you lied about anything,

you were gone. Pack your bags, you're out. And by the way, when you fall out of OCS, you don't go into an enlisted Marine, you just go home. That is how important integrity is. And I just wonder what it is like for people serving in the military today

when you've got a guy, who is their commander and chief, who lies all the time. And I think now has a vice president, who is a former Marine, who lies an awful lot as well. And what does that say about America? And what impact does that have on the people who are serving in America? It's embarrassing. And it's painful, I think, as a veteran, a veteran who upheld that promise during some incredibly difficult times in the war. I mean, circumstances that Vance never faced in his service in the Marine Corps, but of course, Trump never faced because he didn't even volunteer to serve. In fact, he lied about a problem with his foot to get out of going to Vietnam,

allowing some other American to go in his place. And sitting in Congress today and having the commander in chief, the person who in many ways is like the pinnacle of your job, right? The CEO of the company that you're in. Having that person not only get away with lying but thrive on lying, it's pretty disillusioning. And I think the worst part is that this virus is spreading. And I see a lot more lying among my colleagues now than I did before Trump came on the scene. Is that happening on both sides, would you say? Or both sides of the aisle?

Look, I think most Democrats are trying to hew to the principles in the institutions in American politics. But it's absolutely fraying on both sides because people see that it works. It's a sad state of affairs when lying gets you ahead. But a lot of politicians these days just see that they can get away with lying. And I think that there's a combination of factors, including a less professional press corps as the media landscape has fractured that doesn't hold people accountable for these lies anymore, that just makes it easier to get away with that crap. And Seth, this question of veterans, the military, is something that's really interesting. As an outsider looking at this,

and I felt this slightly in the House of Commons, on the one hand, there's the huge admiration for people who've served. On the other hand, it can become a little romanticized and sentimental tour and allow, I felt with some my colleagues, people who weren't awfully good to get away with talking endlessly about their military service. And we saw a little bit about this when J.D. Vance was attacking Governor Walts during the presidential election, you know, people calling different people's military service. I mean, what is this whole story? How do you find a good way of talking about what you're proud of about the military, it's good about being veteran without sort of making it a kind of get out of jail-free card, JD Vance served and therefore everything's fine,

or I mean, I don't know, these kind of issues. No, I'm glad you're asking this question, worry, because this is something that fellow vets actually talk about, but it's hard to, I think, explain to everybody else. There are a few unwritten rules. The first is that you should always be modest about your service. And candidly, I can't stand the handful of veterans who do the exact opposite. They exaggerate what they've done. And there are a few prominent veterans.

I won't use names in American politics today who do exactly that. The second thing is you don't talk about your medals. I mean, the Boston Globe ran an investigative piece on me to see what I was hiding about my service. And what they turned up is that I, you know, hadn't talked about any medals I'd won. And the reason I didn't is because I know that the system isn't entirely fair. I know that there are a lot of people who get medals essentially just for showing up as higher ranking officers. And I saw very junior Marines who did not get properly recognized for true heroics.

And I wasn't going to be a part of that cabal. So anytime I see a veteran politician with his medals listed on his or her resume, I just, that gives me a bad taste in my mouth. You should talk about your military service because it informed. your principles or your perspectives are on policy on decisions that you have to make that affect other people's lives. But you shouldn't be there to be a self-promoter about your own service. You have talked, Seth, about some of the impact of your military service. And I read a very moving story that you've told before, but I'd be grateful if you could share it with our

viewers and listeners about an incident involving a five-year-old boy who you see, you see, pretty much every day. And I just wonder whether that, whether you're speaking there to what we would define as PTSD or whether that was something simply that really shook you and has stayed with you ever since. And I hope that's not too personal, but I'd love you to tell that story. Well, for a long time, it was too personal, but I decided a few years ago to share this story as an example of how I dealt with post-traumatic stress after the war. And the reason I did that, Alcara was because I was inspired by the example set by some Marines I served with a little younger than I, who started sharing their own stories of mental health issues with the rest of our platoon.

And I realized I should set the example. And I perhaps should set it not just for Marines I served with, close friends of mine, but given my position in the Congress for a lot of other Americans. So I made this decision that I thought could be the end of my career in politics because so many people throughout history have been drummed out of politics because of mental health issues. And I chose this story that has haunted me to just give people a picture of what myself and other veterans deal with coming out of the war. We were on the road to Baghdad. We're in the front ranks of the invasion. There was just one recon unit up ahead of us at the time.

And they shot up some vehicles coming towards our lines because we had been taking attacks from Saddam's forces, regular and irregular forces, including the Saddam Fedellin as we got closer to Baghdad. and the battalion was pushing forward and as my armored vehicle came to this car that was shot up and sort of spun out to the side of the road it was pretty obvious that a driver and must have been his wife were were killed but then there was a boy about five years old lying in the middle of the road, rising in pain. And I wanted to do nothing more in the world at that moment than stop the advance, stop my vehicle and everyone behind it,

and get out and just try to save this boy's life. And yet I'll never remember just the feeling as the driver of the armored tracked vehicle jerked us to the left and back to the right, so that we could go around this boy and continue to push north. It was the right military decision. I mean, stopping would have held up the entire convoy. It would have put a lot of Marines' lives at risk as we advanced against enemy forces.

It would have denied support to the forces in front of us. And candidly, we didn't have any, you know, advanced life support facilities or anything in my vehicle. Those units were following behind us. So from a military perspective, it was the right decision to keep going. But from a moral perspective, it just killed me. I mean, it just absolutely broke my heart. And I spent years thinking about this boy and wondering whether he survived and, you know, whether maybe now he's a, you know, 20-year-old or whatever, young man in Iraq.

Did your colleagues feel the same? Or do you think that was just something about you in that moment seeing that boy? Is it something you talked about with them afterwards? Or are you just then on to the next thing that you've got to do? Because of my particular position, the troop commanders hatch sitting essentially atop the armored vehicle. I think I was the, well, I don't know, the only one, but I was certainly in the best position to see what was going on and really understand it.

But to be honest, it's a great example of something that I found too difficult to talk about for a long time. And it's been helpful to be able to share that story. And how did you feel when you saw Elon Musk kind of taking his acts to some of the military mental health programs as part of this doge campaign? You know, so many Americans, but especially the kind of people that a draft Dodger like Donald Trump hires just have absolutely no understanding of what it means to serve and no understanding of the burdens that many veterans bring home. I mean, candidly, one of the reasons I didn't share these stories, I didn't talk about post-traumatic stress. It's because I didn't want to take resources away from other vets at the VA who I felt needed. them more than I. Because I was haunted by scenes like this, but I wasn't suicidal. I wasn't having difficulty holding down my job or, you know, going through divorces or whatever else. I mean,

so many veterans suffer so much more than I did. But the message I realized that I had to share is that mental health challenges are okay. And you can deal with them if you're willing to talk about them and deal with them. And while I thought this this revelation to my constituents, to my family, I mean, to some of my closest friends who had no idea that I had experienced this, although I thought it might end my political career. Instead, it actually opened up a whole new path forward on mental health. And I've heard from a lot of people, not just veterans, which you'd expect, but people who've never served, who said, who have come up to me from all across the country and said,

you know, Seth, thank you for sharing that story because now I feel like I can share mine. I remember a veteran in Las Vegas who said, I've been struggling with this since Vietnam, but I'm going to go to the VA and get help now. I remember a kid who served on my team in politics who said, you know, you just allowed my family to have a discussion that we didn't feel like we could have before. But if you can share this, Seth, in your public position, then we can talk about our stuff now. Seth, can I move on to a difficult question?

Why does so many people vote for Donald Trump? And I guess a lot of people in the military, a lot of people that you know will have voted for Donald Trump. What happened in that election? What is it that's appealing about him? What does it tell us about the world or about America? There's a couple of things we've talked about, which is that lying works.

You know, he says he'll do a whole bunch of things that he doesn't do. He promises things there aren't true. There's a piece of that. But there's also a sense that the opposition party, we Democrats, have really got to look ourselves in the mirror because it's inexcusable to lose to someone like this, to someone who's so immoral, so unprincipled, who promotes policies that are really good for his rich buddies and not very good for most anybody else. And I think a lot of what happened in the last election was that people felt Democrats were out of touch. A Marine I served with who's proudly independent,

proudly well informed about politics. He told me a couple weeks before the election. Seth, I don't want to vote for this guy. He's crazy. But you Democrats are so out of touch. You just don't get it. So I think Democrats, first of all, lost a lot of credibility. You know, we said there wasn't a problem at the southern border when people could see with their own eyes that there was. We said, don't worry about inflation when they could see with their own pocketbooks, the prices were going up. And then we said, Joe Biden is totally fine.

There's nothing to see here. You know, your eyes are fooling you. He's just fine to run for reelection. And of course, that wasn't true. And Donald Trump, for all his, for all his lies, actually. comes across as a truth teller because he's just not beholden to the normal strictures of politics. But I think the second thing that happened is that this was another change election. And Kamala Harris got up there and said, I'm the status quo candidate.

I'm going to keep doing what that old guy you just submed me in for was doing. You know, you might have switched him out, but I'm going to keep doing the same thing as him. And Donald Trump said, no, I'm the candidate of a revolution. And guess what? A lot of Americans are not happy with the status quo. So one of the things that you did is you were quite early out there saying we cannot run Joe Biden. He's not fit enough. He's not well enough to run again.

And my sense at the time was that was not very popular in the Democratic Party. It wasn't exactly as though you were massively embraced. And in fact, the people who were rewarded within Kamala Harris's team and things were people who'd been insisting to the very last moment, absolutely everything was fine. I mean, what does that suggest? there you are trying to point out something which in retrospect is completely obvious to everybody. And actually what it's doing is not helping but kind of damaging your position in the party. Well, it tells you that political courage is hard. But it brings us full circle to that question you asked about integrity.

Because I just said to myself, I can't keep this, keep supporting the charade when I know the truth. And the truth is a lot worse than people think. And there's a quick story here that's worth telling. My staff helped me draft a statement because I said we had gone for days after that horrific debate performance and basically said nothing. And I said, no, I can't remain silent anymore. I have to comment on this. And my staff helped me draft a statement that essentially very politely said, you know, Mr. President, you've got to make some changes here to show that you can win. and I showed this to my best friend who's a Marine.

And he looked at it and he said, what are you trying to say here? I said, well, I'm trying to say that, you know, we've got a problem here and we've got to make some changes. What do you mean by changes? I mean, basically, I'm saying that, you know, he should probably get out of the race, but, you know, I don't want to make this too bad or whatever. And he said, well, then just freaking say it. And I thought about that. I pushed back. I gave him good justifications for why, well, you know, you're actually more likely to get him out if you kind of ease him out as opposed to force him out.

I mean, and then overnight, I slept on it. I woke up the next morning and I said, nope, nope, he's right. I should just say it. And that morning on an NPR interview, I just said he should get out. And that's when the avalanche of criticism came in from fellow Democrats. But you know what? I think most Americans appreciated the candor. They're like, yeah, we just want you to be honest.

And at the end of the day, that's all I was doing is I was just being honest. I guess what the public was seeing was you telling, you, the Democrats, telling a different kind of lie to the sort of lies that Donald Trump does, and thereby saying, these guys are all the same. And that then sort of drags the whole of the whole of politics. The other time when you got a fair amount of criticism was when you said some stuff on trans rights. And this was at a point where you were trying to make the point that the Democrats had been far too focused on what you called minority issues, one of which was trans. And the debate here is pretty toxic on trans, but I get the sense that it's even more toxic in the United States.

So again, what was the position that you took? Why did you take that position and what was the reaction to it? Well, first of all, I'm very proud to be a Democrat, the party that regularly stands up for minority rights and has for a long time in American history. Yeah. But we still have to be honest about what exactly this means. And I think more importantly, we have to at least be willing to have a debate. And there is an honest debate to be had about whether trans women or men who transitioned

to become women should be playing in women's or girls' sports. And I just said in the aftermath of the election in a rather long New York Times interview, that this is one example of where Democrats are just seen is out of touch. Most Americans think there should be rules around this. Even the Olympics has rules. And yet we seem to be beholden to this absolutist position that there should be no rules at all. So I just said speaking as a dad, you know, I don't want my daughters to get hurt by a male or formerly male. athlete playing on a women's sports team. And I got a 200-person protest in front of my office

within days and an enormous outpouring of support from just about everybody else, especially fellow Democrats in Congress who said, you know, I don't even know if you're right about this issue, Seth. I don't know exactly where to draw the line myself. But we've got a real problem if we can't even discuss this without facing so much backlash from our own ranks that they literally try to protest us out of office. And just more generally on your party, Roy and I follow it pretty closely and we talk about it pretty much every week on the podcast, but I don't get any sense of where a genuine post-mortem of your defeat is coming from. And who's leading that. We're seeing plenty of Bernie Sanders, AOC, now got a Mamdani in New York, who seems

really impressive and is making a lot of impact. But I don't see what lessons that your party as a whole is learning and how that's going to be, they're going to be applied into the future. You don't see it because there's a very small group of us that I informally call the reformers who are having these conversations behind the scenes to try to really understand what went wrong. but we're surrounded by the vast majority of Democrats who either don't want to change or just can't even admit that we screwed this up. And that's a real problem for going forward. Now, this is chorus now emerging that says, you know, we shouldn't be talking about the past. We just got to be focused on the future.

But how are we going to fix these issues? Well, especially when they're, in my opinion, issues of fundamental trust. You know, you don't regain trust with voters by ignoring the issues you lied about. You have a mea culpa. You come and you say, no, you know what? We were wrong. There was a problem at the southern border. We don't like the way Donald Trump's handling it, but here's our vision of how to fix that problem, not ignore it.

You know, here's our vision of how to make sure that we do get new blood in the Democratic Party. You know, here's our vision of how we ensure that we hear you when you say that price are going up and we're not doing enough to help. I mean, that's, that's what Mondani's campaign was based on. It's just basic affordability, but people didn't hear Democrats talking about that. I remember campaigning in, in Pennsylvania, and there were these very beautiful signs for Kamala Harris from, I think, one of the same artists who did those epic, almost heroic paintings of Obama back in the day. And then there were signs for Trump that just said one thing. They just said, Trump, low prices, Kamala, high prices.

Now, the economists, the Goldman Sachs economists were saying that that was wrong, that Kamala's economic program was actually going to be better for working families than Trump's, but Trump's message was so focused and clear. And in Democrats, we've been really missing the boat. So another thing that the Trump campaign senses, is a sense of impatience, a desire for action. I guess part of what Elon Musk was about in a completely damaging, exaggerated, cruel way was a general sense that governments gummed up, nothing gets done. People have lost energy. We can't reform. We can't change. We can't drive stuff through. And hence

he comes in with his chainsaw. And that definitely resonates in Europe, a sense that our democracies had got so complacent, so bound up in process and law and unable to get anything done. Everyone would agree with you. I mean, that's certainly the sense in America. And Democrats are the party who's so often defending government. And yet we haven't had a program to reform it and make it better really since Clinton and Gore. But Clinton and Gore did show how we can do this. And it's a model, I think, that bears repeating or at least emulating going forward.

because what Trump and Musk are doing is blowing everything up, tearing everything down, and really saying that this revolution, remember I said Trump is the revolution, the change candidate, this revolution should be backwards looking. You know, we need to go back to some mythic time in the 1950s when everything was better, which of course is true if you were a white male in certain respects. But the opportunity for Democrats is to say we do need to change. The status quo is not acceptable. We were too focused on the status quo and the bass.

We've got that message. We're hearing you. We're listening to voters. And we want to change, but it's going to be a change looking forward. We're going to tell you how we can tackle the challenges of AI and be there for you if AI takes your job. We're going to not just rebuild the Department of Education that Trump and Musk tore down brick for brick.

We're going to rebuild it to meet the needs of the new economy. You know, when we need more vocational education, when people are worried about getting automated out of jobs, when people know that an education system just built on books is not sufficient for the internet era. So there's a huge opportunity here for Democrats to really show how to lead. But you're right, Rory, it has to be leadership based on change. People are impatient. They're frustrated with the status quo, and they know that government as we know it, hasn't been good enough. Okay, Rory, Seth, quick break in them. Bavour. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarik 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 Restis 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, a 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. You said something very interesting, though, when you talk about this, you said you've got this small group,

you call yourself the reformers, but you're working very quietly in the background. Is that because the Democrats, in a sense, have lost their confidence about what they stand for? You're actually having to dig really deep to find out what you stand for. And also how you tackle an opponent that, as you said earlier, any decent Democrat Party should have been able to beat. So why do you have to do this in secret? Why is there not a big public debate going on about what the Democrats should be?

Well, because it's not coming from party leadership. We're not just putting reformers in positions of party leadership power. And so therefore it has to be more behind the scenes. But I think many of us would like to see these ideas catch on. And we're talking about them in forums like these. you see some prominent senators. Chris Murphy comes to mind as someone who's putting ideas out there. I don't know that I agree with all his ideas, but at least he's having this conversation.

But the honest truth is that there are a lot of Democrats in positions of power who are just happy with the status quo. And I think that's part of why they don't want to admit what you just said, which is that this should have been the easiest election of our lifetimes. And therefore, even though statistically we might have lost by a little, you know, there was a you can cite the popular. vote margin between Harris and Trump as being, you know, historically low or whatever. But the reality is we should have crushed him. We should have crushed Republicans across the board with this guy at the top of their ticket. And when you don't, when you don't win in what should be an easy election, then you got to look yourself in the mirror and ask some tough questions. And again, if we do that, if we are honest about our mistakes, then I think we have a tremendous opportunity going forward. You know, we should be the

party that Americans trust on the economy, the most fundamental issue in any election, because Trump is in the process of wrecking our economy. We should be the party that Americans trust on national security, even though they've really seen Democrats as weak on national security for a long time. We're the ones who believe in alliances, who believe in a globe where we're partners with democracies and enemies of autocracies around the world, the exactly opposite of what Trump is doing. So there's huge opportunity for Democrats. right now. I mean, I'm actually very excited about our prospects going forward, but we've got to have an honest conversation about what happened first. Seth, one of the things that really is disturbing

us, particularly in Europe and elsewhere, in fact, is the sense that President Trump is weakening and punishing his allies. So we've just seen 25% tariffs announced against Japan and South Korea. The European economies, which are struggling, and it's absolutely right, they've not been contributing enough to defense, but as they are forced overnight to lift up to 5% GDP spending on defense, that is their welfare budgets, their health budgets being driven to the edge. And at the same time,

he seems to be considering lifting sanctions on Russia, etc. So there's a very, very odd pattern happening. I mean, if you were thinking, who were you going to put tariffs on? For an American president's thinking, I'll put tariffs on Canada and I'll lift sanctions on Russia, is a complete reversal of kind of 100 years, or more of the way that America thinks about the world.

So how do we repair this? Because so much trust is being lost, it's such a bewildering world for what were American allies unquestioning American allies since the Second World War. It's a tough position to be in, Rory, because it takes a lot of work and often a lot of time to repair trust. That's why when you break that trust in Marine Corps training, they don't give you several weeks to try to rebuild it.

They just send you home. and I think that there are a lot of countries that are looking at their partnership with America and saying, just send it home. We're done. We can't trust them anymore. You told us the first time that Trump was an aberration, but here he is back again, and he's worse than before. So this is tough. This is a very difficult situation. What we're trying to do in Congress and trying to do this in a bipartisan way is meet with our allies, overseas. We go on congressional delegations, especially from committees like I serve on the China Committee and the Armed Services Committee and meet with our allies and say, here, here are Democrats and Republicans sitting together telling a different tune than you're hearing from the White House. The problem is we just don't bring as much credibility as we used to, and we certainly don't bring the credibility we would have if we were backed by the administration. But I had this conversation recently with Vietnam, one of our most important allies.

against China. It's an amazing story of how Vietnam, 40 years after the war, became such an important U.S. ally. But what are we doing to them today? We're cutting their funding for USAID, for health programs, and slapping tariffs on their exports. And sitting in Hanoi with Democrats and Republicans, watching the Republicans try to just tap dance around what they know is a terrible policy, But they're so scared of some word getting leaked back to Trump that they weren't loyal. They're very careful about what they say. But the point is we're trying to show at a little bit lower level than, you know, at the presidential level, that we still want to be with you. And we need to weather this storm with Trump and repair these relationships.

But you're right. It's going to be hard. You said back in 2016, Seth, that you made the Trump-Hitler comparison talking about his rise. to power and Hitler's rise to power and certain parallels. And I think there's a lot in that. But as you just said there, this is far worse than term one. And you mentioned Chris Murphy there. And we talked about Chris Murphy a fair bit on the podcast. If you're talking to him, by the way, we'd love to talk to him as well. But whenever I see him and he does some great stuff on corruption in particular. And another message I read that you sort of put out there the whole time is we can't

just hate Trump. Okay. No matter how much material he goes. I sometimes say, you you're coming over as very kind of measured. I sometimes with Chris Burphy, he kind of wants to take Trump and punch him and, you know, really kind of chop his head off kind of thing. I'm interested in the psychology of how you fight this sort of enemy, how you fight a campaign like this. If I was sitting in Vietnam with a bunch of Republicans

who were kind of indicating to me they think Trump's a complete loser and awful and the policy is terrible, but they don't have the balls to say so because they're worried about word getting back, I'm finding hard. finding it quite hard to deal with these people. It's very hard because they're just cowards. That's what they are.

They're really just cowards. Because what they say in private, what they say in the skiffs, you know, where we're supposed to talk about classified information, I guess unless you're Pete Heggseth and then you, you know, text your wife about it. But when we have meetings in private confidential spaces like that, the Republicans, I mean, they disparage Trump left and right. And they know so many of his policies are stupid. And yet they're so scared.

They don't have that fundamental integrity to go out and say those truths in public. Where do you think we are on the authoritarian scale? Where are we? Let's say that, you know, over here is Scandinavian democracy and over here is authoritarianism. Where do you think we are on that path? Well, we're certainly sliding towards authoritarian. authoritarianism, you know, exactly where we are at the moment is hard to say. But what Trump and Mosque have been doing is slowly chip, actually not so slowly, pretty, you know, aggressively chipping

away at institutions. And a lot of this is quiet. It's behind the scenes. It's just, you know, ruining the integrity of the FBI because it's run by a bunch of jokers and they're firing all the good people. Some of my closest Marine veteran friends work at the FBI and they're just appalled. by what's going on at the top of their organization. The same thing's happening at the Justice Department. Other entire institutions have been just completely basically put out of existence. Ted Cruz just cut a bunch of funding for weather forecasting at NOAA, the sort of big weather climate organization, just before all these poor kids died in Texas floods that

were not adequately forecast. So the internal damage that's being done here is very serious. And you might not actually see the real signs of authoritarianism until there's some big story or for some big tragedy. But we're certainly moving in that direction. And there are so many people in Washington who see this happening and are just not willing to stand up and fight. So the other thing I don't understand is that a loss of the stuff that the president is doing, I didn't think the president had the constitutional power to do. So first time around when he tried in his first term to put tariffs on against Canada,

I remember Gary Cohen saying, Mr. President, this is going to take 180 days, you need congressional approval to do this. We now soon invented a universe where he just gets out of bed in the morning, sends some message on truth social, apparently the entire federal administration, as opposed to get behind bombing Iran, putting up tariffs. I mean, where's the separation of powers? I mean, is there anything that he can't do? Does anybody have any power in the system left?

Or is he a kind of absolute monarch? I don't get what's happening. The issue is that Congress has ceded all its power because under Republican leadership, we can't do anything without the Speaker of the House essentially allowing it. So, for example, we should just vote on whether the President should have these tariff powers. And if all these Republican cowards want to just give away those powers, then fine, vote that way. But the Speaker of the House won't even allow us to have that vote.

Another example. I mean, these civil servants work in USAID. They get contracts. Congress approves money to these organizations. They're supposed to be protected as civil servants. And turns out he can just turn up on day one. He can fire them all. Again, you know, he appoints people like Elon Musk to positions where they don't seem to go through a proper hearing before they get appointed. I mean, I remember I sat down, I'm talking to you in this house where you've been and I remember talking to Rosa DeLoro here when she was running appropriations. And she was. saying to me, no, no, no, there's a lot that he can't do because we have congressional power over this. We've voted for this money. We've made these decisions. But that doesn't seem to be true anymore, right? This is how weak the Republicans are. I think Speaker Johnson will probably go down in history as the weakest Speaker of the House in American history, because he has just ceded all this power to the administration. You can make a similar case for the Supreme Court, which is now heavily conservative, just ceding so much power. These are the checks and balances in this tripartite government system that we have. That when one branch gets out of line, the other two keep it in line.

But when the Supreme Court is basically just doing Donald Trump's bidding after Mitch McConnell and others use some questionably constitutional means to get certain justices elected, Brett Kavanaugh blatantly lied in this confirmation hearing and yet was still approved by the Senate. And then you have a Congress that just ceded all its power. So as much as we Democrats can stand up and scream and send letters, which used to be a way to keep the administration in check because they had to respond to these letters, I mean, they just throw them in the trash now. So there's very little that we can do without some courageous leadership. And these Republicans are just so scared. So scared that one of the biggest champions of USAID in Congress was Marco Rubio, Senator Marco Rubio. And he got in these vicious fights that have been reported. behind the scenes with Elon Musk's cuts.

And yet at the end of the day, he likes his job as Secretary of State too much. And so we're just going to do Donald Trump's bidding. That's this slide towards authoritarianism that's happening throughout the country. So you've got to win the midterms and you've got to win them well. We've got to win the midterms and not win with a whimper. You know, there are some of these establishment Democrats who are saying, oh, just lay over and play dead, just purely run on reaction to Trump, Trumpism, that's not leadership.

That's not a plan to take the country forward. That's not a plan that says to Americans, we're not happy with a status quo either. So I am optimistic about our prospects in the midterms, but we've got to make some big changes to show that we can lead if we're going to win big. Can I take you back to Iraq and Afghanistan? First of all, on Iraq, so you were out there. I was sitting alongside Tony Blair, who was clearly one of the sort of key decision makers in the whole thing. And I just wanted what it was like for you to be engaged in something, whereas you

said both at the time you felt was a mistake and you felt that even more strongly subsequently. So that's my first question, how that feels to be serving in operations that you think the big picture is a mistake. And secondly, how you felt when you went out to Kabul at the time of the withdrawal and what you saw there and how that made you feel about it. American power as well. Well, first of all, to be fair, in the earliest days in Iraq, look, we all thought they legitimately had weapons of mass destruction. I mean, we were invading in chemical weapons suits. So we were really being lied to, and I didn't know enough to be an outspoken critic at the time. But as the war dragged on, and I saw lots of mistakes being made, I'll tell you,

probably the hardest question I've ever gotten from anybody in my life was from young Marines in my platoon saying, sir, why are we here? Why am I risking my life for this? And as someone who had become quite critical of many aspects of the war, it's a really tough question to answer. But what I fell back on is that sense of service that we may not be in a position to make United States policy, but someone else is going to have to go in our place if we're not here. And that's, you know, at its core where someone like Donald Trump is just so different than everyone who serves. Because he said the opposite.

He said, I don't agree with Vietnam. So I'm happy to have someone else go in my place. Some other American can take that seat on the airplane over to Vietnam. And, you know, I'd love to know if that American who took Donald Trump's place in Vietnam ever made it home. And then look, going to Kabul, I mean, we were trying to get answers from the administration that they wouldn't give us. And we tried for months, myself and other veterans. I asked tough questions of Secretary Austin, for example, in our committee hearings that he just wouldn't answer. And we were facing important policy decisions. There was a group of lawmakers who wanted to deliberately delay the withdrawal, force it on the administration. And we didn't have any idea what was going on on the ground. So myself and a Republican, probably the two people who would spend the most time on the ground in Afghanistan, not just with a military unit. So we kind of knew how to navigate the place.

I'm not comparing myself to you, Rory. You blow us out of the water. But in the United States Congress, the bar is pretty low. And myself and Peter Meyer, we had that experience. We thought it was the right thing to do. We were incredibly careful to make sure we never disrupted operations or took a single spot of someone trying to. to get out of Kabul during the evacuation. But we got on the ground and we did realize things were not what we thought back in Washington. And, you know, we could go into the details, but besides

directly saving dozens of lives ourselves on the ground there, we were able to affect policy coming from Congress in Washington in important ways that made a terrible situation just maybe marginally better. One of the things that I think makes this little different is you're a bit younger than me, so that when I got to Iraq in 2003, I came having been working on Bosnia and Kosovo, very much part of that kind of world of the 90s, which was at a time pretty optimistic world. Richard Holbrook, US power, getting involved, bringing peace, regretting the fact that we hadn't gone involved in Rwanda, rules-based international order, international criminal court, and the whole shebang. And that world feels.

a very, very long way away now. I mean, the idea of American, as a global policeman, seems to have faded, the very idea of the rules-based international order is fading. How do we think now about order America's role in the world going forward? What are the lessons you've learned from the last 20 years? Well, America goes through cycles of being heavily involved and being quite isolationist. And usually throughout history, when we're isolationists like we were in the 1930s, it doesn't well for us. So I think that there are thoughtful Americans, including, you know, several veterans in Congress who are really trying to help strike this balance and figure out what the lines should be for when we get involved, that we're not afraid to use American force, that we're not afraid to

invest in foreign countries, that diplomatic programs and even military presence can have their role, but we don't want to start big ground wars in the Middle East again. You know, we don't want to go to war with China. We want to prevent war with China. We want to stop Putin, but we don't want to have to resort to American troops on the ground in Ukraine. Striking this balance is something that I think thoughtful leaders in America are really trying to do. It's when you get reckless leaders like Donald Trump who make decisions on a whim, you know, who are attacking allies like Zelensky one day and then supporting him the next. or literally trumpeting Kremlin propaganda, something that must make Ronald Reagan roll over in his grave.

The recklessness of Trump's foreign policy is the problem. You know, every once in a while he can get it right. A broken clock is right twice a day. But the recklessness and the unpredictability is not helpful to anyone. That more steadfast leadership is what we need. And I hope you'll see that more. with future leaders in America. I've been to the Pentagon a few times, and you get a real sense in there of America's power.

You really sort of, you feel it. And, of course, the closer and closer you get to the top brass and the Secretary of State's part of the building. You feel it ever more. You've already mentioned Pete Hickseth. Again, what does it say about America that he is there in that role? And what do the senior, you don't have to name name, I wouldn't expect you, but what do they think about this? And how do they cope with this guy being there?

Hague said has just no respect. I'm sorry to say. And it doesn't make me proud as an American to say that we have a Secretary of Defense, one of the most important positions, not just in the country, but in the world, who has zero respect. He lies every day. He's the most unqualified secretary in history. And all the top rass are afraid that he'll just go ahead and fire them if they disagree.

So you can't even have any debate in the top ranks of the U.S. military. So there's total dysfunction at the Pentagon right now, and that chaos is not good for anybody. Pete Hankseth, of course, is not respected by the troops either because he breaks all sorts of rules, laws that would get a private thrown in prison, like sharing classified information. And yet he thinks that he's completely above the law and can walk off Scott Free. So what Pete Hankseth shows is what Donald Trump is all about. And it's dangerous for the country in the world. And what do Marines think of the Marines think of the vice president? Well, I mean, look, I can't speak for every Marine.

Look, every bit of service is important. Everyone has a role to play. And when I was on the ground in Kabul, I saw absolute heroism for Marines who were wading out into this of thousands of people to find our allies and bring them to safety, knowing full well that they could get blown up at any minute. And when several Marines did get blown up, they went back out there a few hours later. But right on those front lines are just behind, like right inside the gate, were State Department workers who were heroes as well.

They were the ones who had to do the immediate vetting when these Marines brought these Afghans in to check that they were the ones that we were trying to rescue because they had worked alongside us for years in that country. And so there are a lot of important heroic ways to serve. But the vice president shouldn't exaggerate his service. He should especially praise those who did more heroic things than him, because that's the modest, respectful way to treat your record as a veteran. I'm going to finish with a final question, Seth, which is to invite you to be a little bit more reflective. I mean, you talk understandably, and, you know, obviously, when I was a serving politician, I too would have put

huge emphasis on the positive and the public service. But my experience at least was that the job can be quite tough, can be quite tough with families, can be quite tough in the age of social media. And I wonder whether you could give us a little insight into what modern democratic politics can feel like at its worst as well as at its best. You know, look, at its, and at its worst, you feel like the values that you were taught growing up in an institution like the Marine Corps, the values that have been central to our country, a country that believes in truth and democracy and the power of the people, sometimes it can feel like those values just don't matter anymore because a guy who made his business bankrupting casinos and lying his way through life,

that none of his friends from New York trust that he's now at the top of your game, the top of American political leadership. And that can be pretty disillusioning. And all the while, you know, you're stuck in Washington and a powerless Congress that's voting on meaningless things because no one's actually willing to do our job and uphold our constitutional responsibilities to take on the president

and stop these horrific things from happening. You're just stuck there. And, you know, my four-year-old and six-year-old they're running around at home asking, where's daddy? Why isn't he home yet? Why isn't he home? It's the day before the 4th of July. And I'm down in Washington to vote against the largest transfer in history of wealth from poor Americans to wealthy Americans.

You know, I ran into a guy two days ago who said, this big, beautiful bill is great for me. I got two private planes. I get to depreciate them. But I didn't ask for that. You know, how about helping out my son, who's a very big, veteran trying to buy his first house. So it can be very disillusioning. It's hard on families. And I'll say one other thing, Rory, when people say, oh, gosh, how do you survive in Washington today? It's so awful. You know, is it as bad as a rock? It's not as bad as a rock. Let's put this in perspective.

You know, no one's shooting at me. All right? So I think it's important to have that perspective. But it takes a toll on you personally. It takes a toll on you personally. It takes a toll on your family. That's the part that bothers me most. And yet in the midst of this, you still can do good. And one of my best days, I think, in Congress was speaking to a school group out on the Capitol steps. And they asked, what are you doing? What are you doing that makes a difference in my life? And I talked about passing the bill to establish 988, the National Mental Health Hotline. that I worked on with a fellow veteran, an Air Force vet from Utah, a Republican.

He and I co-authored this bill and actually got it signed into law under Trump, which was a hard thing to do because Trump is not one to support mental health. And I shared some statistics about how many lives this is saved, but I don't think these middle schoolers were very impressed by my statistics. But a lady came up to me, a woman who said, I'm very sorry to interrupts her, but I just want you to know that your bill saved my daughter's life. And then she introduced me to her 13-year-old daughter. And that's why we need good people to keep doing this work.

So my final question related to that is, do you think you'll have another guy at being the presidential candidate? Not any time soon. I think that there's a time and a place for everything. And most importantly, a time for each one of us. us to serve. And a lot of people encouraged me to run, including some very, very successful American politicians and said, we need someone who can take on Trump. And sure enough, I mean, we found a candidate in Biden, but it was a close race. I guess I'm glad I gave it a shot. But you know what I'm

thinking about right now, sitting here today? It's when my two daughters are going to come home from camp and and I do want to spend more time with them right now. That is the top priority in my life today. So we'll see. But the future lies ahead. Okay. Well, good luck with it. And thank you for all your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's an honor to be on here. Thank you so much for having me. So, Alison, what did you think of my friend Seth? Well, he wants critical feedback. He said himself. he wants critical feedback. I saw he was impressive, good at projecting himself.

I think he needs to learn to smile a bit more and loosen up a bit more. I think he's got depth and he's got courage, he's got guts and that's important. And I think his advice for the Democrats was pretty spot on. So I'm not sure I'd see him as a presidential contender, but that's the first time I've ever met him.

But I thought his analysis of the Democrats was good and strong. I thought his account of his own journey through the military and in particular mental health, I was very touched by. And, you know, he absolutely despises Donald Trump. So what's not a lot to like? He's walking that very difficult tightrope that you have to walk as a politician who's right in the active bit of your life. And we find that, I think, when we interview senior politicians all over the world, that we want them to offer enough of a glimpse into their soul, but equally they don't want to give hostages for fortune. And it's a very difficult balance. That's often why I feel that it's easier interviewing people who are ex-politicians

rather than serving politicians. I obviously would have liked him to lean more into some of the frustrations and fury that I guess he probably does feel with the party. I mean, part of the backstory to this, of course, as listeners will pick up, is that I guess he disagrees very profoundly with the kind of AOC Bernie Sanders' fringe of the party, and he feels that it should be taken back much more to the centre when he's talking about things like immigration, cost of living. And he will be a figure that will be controversial. He was very warm about Zora and Mamdani, though. But we often talk about loyalty in politics, and I think he also was completely right about Biden,

but you can imagine, if you think about your time, the Labour Party, I mean the Conservative party, what it's like to have a congressman come out and say the leader needs to basically go because they're not going to win the election. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. The sense that he can be right, but that his colleagues will feel a bit thrown off balance by that. It was interesting you mentioned when he was talking about his group of reformers. He mentioned Chris Murphy. Chris Murphy's name comes up a lot when we're talking to Democrats. And I do like the stuff that he does on social media. That's all I've really seen of it. Yeah, well, we should do that. But particularly since people remember that we've done

two Connecticut congresspeople already, Rosaloro and Jim Hines. So Christmas, you would get our trifecta. So we should push for that. And the other thing I thought was interesting, it must be bloody hard being there right now. I was fascinated by what he was saying about being with Republicans when they're talking in what they consider to be a safe space and their basis of saying, Trump is this, that and the other.

And, you know, there was a sort of visceral anger in the way that he said they were cowards. I suspect that the sort of person that he least respects in the world is somebody who shows moral cowardice, because, of course, if you've done the sort of things and been involved in the sort of operations that he has been in the Marines, he's seen an awful lot of courage, and to see moral cowardice in order to support somebody that he would see is the absolute antithesis of the values that you need to serve in the military, I thought that was very powerful. Well, there's another very uncomfortable thing there, which is he's not making too explicit, which is that a lot of the people that he spends time with and goes on trips with are on the Armed Services Committee, and they're often Republican veterans.

So there's a double disconnect. There's his sense that these are people who've served and who he's expecting to live up to these values. But we, you know, I sat down with an American congressman who you met as well a year and a half ago, who had been in Iraq and in Afghanistan in the middle of the middle of the world. military and who said to me, basically, I agree with you about Donald Trump, but I can't say that because my voters don't agree. So I think what you're seeing with Seth, and he probably is too polite to say this, but he probably thought this about Mike Walts, who was the national security advisor too, who again had done good stuff in the military. What on earth has happened to these people? I slightly felt this, I'm afraid, without going over sore territory on veterans who got heavily behind Boris Johnson, despite some of the military. pretty outrageous behavior yeah anyway and i'm glad we didn't get uh too drawn into revisiting all the debates on iraq but i could see where he was coming from on that one um there we go well thank you thank you allsette see you soon