The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 57. Tucker Eskew, spin doctor to George W. Bush and Sarah Palin: Why I'm voting Democrat

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

What does President Biden need to do to defeat Trump? What went wrong in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign? Did Republican figures like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich pave the way for Trump? Rory and Alastair are joined by communications expert and political strategist Tucker Eskew to discuss Donald Trump's chances, what it was like working with Sarah Palin, polarisation in the United States, and much 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] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen 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 the restispolities.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And I think it's fair to say that of all the many, many elections happening in the world this year, the American presidential election would be the one that is most closely watched around the world. And I think today's guest will be able to give us a very interesting perspective. He is a lifelong Republican with politics in his blood, graduate in political science. He became a press secretary,

aged just 25 to the governor of his native South Carolina, and I think you'll enjoy his South Carolina draw. He's worked for American presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, and with two pretty remarkable Republican Party strategists, Lee Atwater and Kempwater and Carl Rove. He worked on John McCain's losing campaign to Barack Obama in 2008 when he had the onerous task of looking after Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate. Now, I got to know, this gentleman, when he was a media advisor to George Bush Jr., George W., when he was seconded to work alongside me in Downing Street when we were seeking to coordinate the global response to the September 11 attacks in New York of 2001. He was a very, very good colleague, and despite our

pretty major political differences, a very good friend. Now one other big difference, I don't do God and he does. That also, I think, gives him a very interesting insight into what is happening inside the party to which he has devoted most of his life and yet which last time around for the first time in his life he voted against. Tucker Rescue, it's fair to say, is not a fan of Donald Trump. So Tucker, thanks for joining us. I would maybe like to start with that. What was it like for you as a lifelong Republican putting you cross against a Democrat presidential candidate? Well, it started in a sense in 2008, Alistair, and Rory, thank you for having me. I said after that election that I was a recovering Republican. I tell people now I'm a recovering Politica. I don't do campaigns. I've made one

exception here or there, but I help other companies and causes take what I learned in politics and apply it to the Civic Square. So in 2016, I found myself writing in. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. I certainly couldn't vote for Donald Trump. You get fast forward to 2020, the stakes are that much higher and the chance of Trump being reelected that much greater than I had thought his chances were in 2016. So I got a call. I'll set the same. I'll set the same. I'll set the scene for you. It's August 2020. My friend, Tim Scott, a senator from my home state, calls me up to tell me that he has been chosen to speak at the Republican convention. I put air quotes around convention because they ultimately held it in the south lawn of the White House,

an abomination of those of us who revere that as a political ground. And he was quite proud of this, and I was pleased to give him some advice about that speech, but I wanted to tell him the truth. And I did at the end of that conversation. I said, Tim, I have this year voted in a Democratic presidential primary for the first time in my life. And I hope it's the last. And I'm going to vote for a Democratic candidate for president in the general election in 2020 for the first time. And I hope it's the last. Tucker, thank you for joining us.

And great to hear from you. Let's take you back to your beginnings. You're somebody who began your political career in South Carolina. And that's unbelievably relevant because of where we are at the moment, right? We're about to go into a primary in South Carolina. Nikki Haley, who's the lead container against Donald Trump, was governor of South Carolina. Your friend Tim Scott, the senator for South Carolina, has been a key figure in endorsing Donald Trump. I mean, South Carolina really seems to be absolutely at the heart of everything at the moment.

Tell us a little bit about South Carolina. Why does it count? And then let's move on a little bit to why Nikki Haley isn't going to sweep South Carolina. There's a good bit of history there, Rory. It goes back really to 1980 and the Reagan campaign in which a person who went on to become a mentor to me in an early period in my career, Leah Atwater, whom Alistair just mentioned, along with Carol Campbell, the man who became governor of that state. So two leading Republicans helped position the state so that its primary would start to take on significance.

Talk, can I interrupt for a second, because a lot of our audience are not Americans, presumably it really matters how early you are. I mean, we've all been concentrating on Iowa in New Hampshire with these tiny voter bases, and a few hundred thousand people voting make a huge difference. How do you get to move up the line? How do you get to have your primary before other people and get the headlines? Well, primaries are not governed by the law. There are state laws that do apply to primaries, but parties often sit in the driver's seat and in South Carolina. That was the case. It was an extra legal arrangement where the party ran its own primary so it could change its own dates. So I know that's a novel system. You have both talked recently on your podcasts about

how odd this system is and how unchanged it is despite all the many changes around us. There have been little adjustments to the calendar, but yes, South Carolina comes early. And yet, if you want some more recent history than 1980, go back to 2000. George W. Bush and John McCain came barreling out of New Hampshire, a very important early state, as you have already covered in previous discussions, and came to South Carolina. There were not quite two weeks to work between the New Hampshire result, which John McCain won, and the South Carolina primary. This year, we have a month. Let's take us back to that so we can understand the context of how this normally works. So McCain came out of that leading. How had he done in Iowa? How did it look then? Because we know

the end of the story, which is George W. Bush won that race. But had McCain dominated in Ireland, New Hampshire and then South Carolina became the place to turn it around? George W. Bush won Iowa. McCain wrestled back the momentum by winning New Hampshire with his straight talk express. And then we came to South Carolina and we beat McCain. We beat him. It was a hard fought campaign. There were allegations impropriety. South Carolina is known for tough politics. Not as tough as the allegations put forth, but it was a tough hard fought campaign. George W. Bush was the victor. McCain stayed in the race after that, and there were further primaries for a number of weeks, but not too many weeks.

You mentioned that there were allegations at the time. Tell us a little bit about what the allegations are, what the worst things that can happen in primaries are, what the history of South Carolina primaries, and whether any of this could be true this time around two. Well, Lee Atwater is known in American political circles for a tough, dare I say, knife fighters approach to politics. He was associated with the term wedge issues, a wedge being something that would cleave one part of the electorate from another part. And Lee was masterful at understanding human motivations.

And I think his reputation took on almost mythic qualities, some of which he encouraged, some of which were probably true, some of which were not. And, you know, we'll leave it to higher powers, Alistair, to determine what's true and what's not true in all of that. South Carolina politics is tough. American politics is tough. And yet we had never until Donald Trump had anyone as transgressive, as brutal, as personally derogatory, as norm-busting as this. So some people would say South Carolina is the perfect territory for him. But let's remember, it's a state that elected and re-elected Nikki Haley. And it's been 10 years since she's been on the ballot there, but I know she has wanted to take the campaign into her home territory where she faced some terrible allegations about personal behavior. And I'm not going to give airing to the sort of

sorted stuff that can come out. But I will say she persevered through all of that, was elected and reelected. And I think she wants to get on home turf. It's not especially friendly turf, though, to her and to the idea of non-Trumpism. I won't necessarily call it anti-Turf. But, I won't necessarily call it anti-Trumpism. But just the, you folks have defined it. There are people who are always Trumpers. They're the maybe-trumpers and the never-trumpers. And she wants some of all of those, but mostly the maybe-trumpers and the never-trumper's. And at this point, they're not enough. Chuck, can you see any way that Donald Trump isn't the Republican Party presidential candidate? Well, we keep going back to higher powers, but an act of God could stop that. It's very hard to

see how anything short of that keeps him from the Republican nomination. There are surveys that show a significant minority of the Republican electorate would not vote for him, or he convicted in a court of law. Sadly, Trump has a way of defining deviancy from the norms downward, and I think there's a chance that that too could fade just as being indicted might have killed presidential candidates' chances. Sadly, it has locked in some of his base, who have gotten quite accustomed to defending what in any prior period of American history would have been indefensible. So what does it say about your country that this is happening? I mean, I think that were Trump a British politician, I think he'd be finished by now. But as you say, these scandals and these court cases and these

indictments, they seem to help him rather than hindrance. So what on earth has happened to the party that you support and also the country that you're so proud of. And I am. You know, demography, sociology, psychology, and pathology. You really have to understand all the different forces that led us to this moment, but the fact that Donald Trump is one of a kind with shamelessness as his superpower means that people who might have been unhappy or angry about some circumstances in 2015 and 2016, people who are caught up in his charisma, and he's got it in enormous amounts.

It's a kind of dark charisma, of course, but it is entertaining, and it attracts people's attention in an era where attention is the greatest commodity out there. You take those unhappy people, you take a rapidly changing society, and even those voters who had doubts about him had more reason in 2016 to vote against Hillary Clinton, doubts about the Clinton era and all that came with it and her weaknesses as a candidate and legal issues that were raised in that campaign. And so people began to defend, as I said, the indefensible. And over the last years, they have become quite accustomed, so much so that even when they defend it, they start to believe it. And I think there's a kind of cognitive

dissonance here where people are defending things they never would have before because they've put on a higher pillar their allegiance to Donald Trump. And Tucker, we absolutely understand that you're now a fervent critic and opponent of Donald Trump, but am I picking up that in 2016 you actually voted for him? And if that's true, could you talk us through the kind of psychology then of how people felt in 2016 about Hillary Clinton and about Trump? I wrote in Evan McMullen's name. Don't know how it works in the UK, but we have the option on our ballots of writing in a name.

I couldn't find myself. Hillary Clinton had in 2016 given me a center-right, lifelong Republican, no reason to vote for her. And admittedly, many, many Americans just didn't conceive that Donald Trump could win. Tell us about, because we've interviewed Hillary Clinton on the show, and Alastair and I are quite sympathetic towards her. And I guess most of our listeners would be, could you explain what the case is against her? take us back to 2016 and why people like you didn't feel that you could vote for her? Well, I won't make it personal at first. I'll come back to that. I would say at the start, you have a candidate with poor candidate skills. No one would question her intellect. I wouldn't

question her love of country. I think there's certainly things you can say very positively about Secretary Clinton. But the country had Clinton fatigue. There was a sense within the Democratic Party, certainly, going back to 2008, that they needed to change. Obama, I think he put a knife in Joe Biden's political back by supporting her. I think there were a lot of people who felt that she could do the job, but she was not likable. She didn't really have a strong plan to match the moment in the eyes of a majority of voters. But I still think she could have gotten elected, Rory, had there not been those last minute issues, you know, one. One of which was the leak of those stolen emails, right at a moment when Trump was most on his heels after the leak of the audio tape that was really so awful.

And the narrative, as we talk about in politics here, and I'm sure you do there, suddenly shifted. We'd had shifts between James Comey and the FBI saying, yes, no, maybe, no, about whether or not there were legal issues that deserve federal investigation involving her private. private email server and Trump relentlessly pounded those things, the media, certainly which enjoys conflict and changing narratives. They like the narrative, they create the narrative, but they also like to see it change. And when there are circumstances that force that change and a candidate, who, by the way, was weakened in closing days by an illness and there was videotape of her sort of slumping into an automobile after a hot day in the sun, normally you'd think there might be some sympathy for that. I think it conveyed weakness at a time when strike needed to be conveyed. You

put all of that together. And Trump capitalized and I think stunned the world. Now, Tucker, let's just imagine that you did want to run another campaign and the phone went and it was somebody in Joe Biden's team saying, listen, you may think that Joe should step down, but he's not going to do that. He's going to fight. How should he fight Trump? Well, one thing is don't play his game. you cannot put out that fire with gasoline. So I think Joe Biden has to be true to himself. I'm one of those who believes steady as she goes, conveys strength. Biden doesn't really earn a lot of points for strength,

but I think in an era of a slightly improving economy, there's evidence out this week of consumer sentiment rising, certainly the stock market, which is an unreliable gauge of the American political, sentiment, but there's some positive signs certainly there. I think if you're Joe Biden, you convey stability, you convey strength. It's not his strong suit to make and articulate a clear, concise cutting argument. So I think produced television will matter a lot. I think they think very carefully about whether they do debates. I think they put their vice president in places only

that address the base of that party. And I think you pray for Trump to become even less stable and even more incoherent over the course of the year ahead. And I still don't feel great about the chances. This is a risky election. Okay, Tucker, Rory, let's have a quick break.

Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Zavrick 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 Alastair 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. 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 grimest 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. Tucker, take us back to two questions that we often get asked. One of them is, why is Joe Biden running again? Why doesn't he step down and let somebody else have a go? And I guess the second question is,

given that he's running again, Can you help international listeners understand why he didn't replace his vice presidential candidate? Yeah. So your second question, Rory, I really had thought, and maybe it was just wishful thinking, that Biden might do to his vice president, in effect, what his president Obama had done to him. Presidents have to have a kind of ruthlessness. Leaders of Western democracies ought to appeal to our better angels, but they have to be tough as hell. And I think if you were tough as hell and you really knew what the landscape was in front of you, you would take a demonstrably weak running mate and replace her with someone who satisfies some of the needs of the base of that party and take the hit.

There would be all sorts of awful protests and do it far enough in advance to where that becomes history. And you march forward with a stronger running mate and you give people like me a sense that, He's got someone a heartbeat away from the presidency I'd feel very comfortable with. There are a lot of people who do not feel that way about Ms. Harris. And she's had chances to prove herself with me and other people. Some people would never, of course, come around. But to your first question, Biden, you know, the threshold characteristic that you've got to have to run for president is almost a defect. You've got to have this ambition and sense of self that is so overweening that you actually

think you can be leader of the free world. That's a phrase that may not go down well with all your listeners, but certainly the way Americans see it, the president is that. And to assume yourself in that role in this era with these challenges, with these stakes, is to be, by definition, almost effectively convinced in your own abilities. So he's got that. That's a threshold matter. And so if you've got that, it's pretty hard to pry, you know, the keys to the front door of the White House out of your hand. I shared the question. I asked it for the last year or two of my Democratic friends and partners. And I think he and Mrs. Biden believe that they were the only campaign that could have beaten Trump in 2020.

And I think they're probably right about that. And they carry that forward to 2024. And I'm not at all so sure. There are at least a half dozen governors in this country, center-left, Democratic governors who would, you know, they'd have to fight it out. They'd be a longer primary. Some people don't like that. They get nervous about it. They could have really produced a superb Democratic candidate for president, and they didn't want to take that risk.

Now, this is an impossible question for you to answer in one way, but what do you think Ronald Reagan would think of what's happening in the Republican Party and the possibility of this guy coming back? They'd be sickened by it. What this person does is tear at every norm, every pillar of our society. Ronald Reagan could pick at the media, which picked it him quite a bit. And yet he would defend the rights of the free press to the end of the earth. Ronald Reagan defended, believed in, and actually read and internalized the United States Constitution. It's like an alien life form to Donald Trump. He has no idea what it is and yet wields its name as a, a hammer against his opponents. So I have no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan, much like the Bushes who succeeded him, would have no use whatsoever for this. Help us understand a little bit how radically different Trump is, because it can feel as though there were people out there

who prefigured him. So, for example, people like Newt Gingrich seemed to be leading a certain kind of assault on Congress that we can see some elements of today. People like Ross Perrault in different ways were populists. Sarah Palin, who you were the aid to during McCain's campaign, often seemed to be that kind of populace or a lot of people very shocked that she became John McCain's running mate. Tell us what is different about somebody like Trump compared to figures like Sarah Palin that certainly seemed pretty terrifying at the time? You could call Ms. Palin almost proto-Trump in some sense, very charismatic, very good at bumper sticker length labels and attacks. But unlike Trump, she did not have the ends of the earth confidence, the sense of overweening, overwhelming confidence

in herself. She'd been placed in this position by John McCain's choice, not through her own efforts and say what you will about Donald Trump. He envisioned this. He called it. He executed against it and he did it. And I think that sets him apart. There are any number of strains of of politics that contribute to the rise of Donald Trump, individuals whose actions. And I condemn every single one of those to the degree it contributed to making Trump palatable, acceptable, reasonable, or within bounds. But of course, you can't forget. It was Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, who were elected in the era leading up to Trump. So the Republican Party has plenty of very responsible leaders who, like their Democratic counterparts, have their

strengths and weaknesses, but who nonetheless played within bounds. And it is a sad commentary on all the rare circumstances that weave together into the moment that created Donald Trump. Just on George W. Bush, Tucker, that was when you and I got to know each other because you were part of his media team in the White House. I was in Downing Street. We were trying to coordinate things after September the 11th. Just give us your take on George W. Bush, because I think it's fair to say that his image, particularly when he was president, his image and reputation outside America was not, I think you got a sense of this when you worked in London. You couldn't quite figure why he was seen in the way that he was. So give me your take on George W. Bush as a

leader and as a president. Well, you remind me of a moment, Alistair, when I landed in London to come work with you in Novertin and at the foreign office. And I had some spare time. I sat in a coffee shop in Piccadilly and watched a demonstration go by. This is, remember, this is fall of 2001. And I was struck by the unambiguous condemnations of George W. Bush, even in the wake of 9-11, and even support, or at least signs that nodded in the direction of Osama bin Laden. So I got to the got a sense of how he was perceived, at least on those fringes. And yes, reading the daily papers, working with you on messaging, knowing that it presented a challenge to you. Many Republicans, Ronald Reagan, the cowboy, had faced similar. I think we had a unique moment. We had a unique

man, remarkably big-hearted man who could sit in front of a table at the White House and take visitors on a world tour of what he was seeing and analyzing and understanding. And that did not always convey through a television screen or even off the printed page. And yet, a remarkably charismatic and bright man who suffered from those attacks without thinking too much about them. He let those arrows bounce off of him as best any politician can and did to our repeated assertion stick to his beliefs. He stuck to those beliefs even when the facts that were presented to him were not correct. And I think conviction is an absolutely essential quality in a president. He had it and he had the love of country and the Western Alliance in very challenging times. I'll finish this by just saying, you're president on 9-11. There is no playbook for what has just happened to your country. And Londoners and others there can identify after the attacks in London, which came later.

But there was nothing that really had been put in play for a series of steps to take after that kind of asymmetric attack. And I think he did his very best over and over again and gave his all for eight years to the cause of freedom. What do you think when you got the call saying get your wife, get your family, you go to London, Was this a wonderful surprise for you? Well, as I've told the story, I had a colleague who worked with me, Greg Jenkins, and he and I were going to leave the country and helped set up these coalition information centers, and I drew the short straw and sadly got London, and he got Islamabad. So as difficult as those times were, it was an incredibly broadening experience.

My wife had lived in the UK during a summer internship, in college. I was delighted to get to know the city and it brought me back as recently as just before Christmas this year and I still love it. Tell us what differences you found between the US and UK systems. I mean, I spent quite a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq and I was always astonished by the difference when I went to a presentation from a US general compared to a UK general, the scale, the professionalism, the depth of stuff going on in the US compared to what things felt like in Britain. Give me a sense of how it felt in terms of scale. expectations. What surprised you in the first few days when you turned up and Downing Street?

Well, aside from being in a place where there was a great deal of sympathy for the United States, and yet there was already the sort of counter-effect, we hadn't at all gotten to that place in the United States. So you knew, to borrow a term from American entertainment, that Dorothy was not in Kansas anymore. We were in a new place, a different place. And yet one that we have deep roots and deep affection and alliances. So I felt at home, but a new home and thoroughly broadened by living in an environment that included many people of Arab descent, including Muslims, a place that was remarkably international. On Downing Street itself, in terms of the resources, the way that it was run, the building itself, how did all of that compare to the White House? And try to be frank,

I know you want to be polite, but your honest reaction when he first turned up, did you think, whoa. this is a nice little three-star boarding house. Its scale is quite different. You know, we call the land and the compound, the White House is on, the 18 acres. That's its nickname. There are no 18 acres. So you know the scale is different. But you sit in the lobby in a smaller welcome spot, and there are seven newspapers laid out in front of you.

I'm the son of a newspaper man. I was so excited to be in a newspaper. culture, so I love that. I was amazed to get secret information in a brown paper bag that was handed around in the foreign office. That was very striking to me, notwithstanding Donald Trump's transgressions with secret documents, I can assure you prior to the Trump era, documents were distributed, maintained, burned, and shredded with a care that is extraordinary. the pre-Trump era and will be again someday if it isn't already underbide. So there were differences.

It's this hutch. It's this Warren of offices without quite the same sort of reason. You know, the White House has been added to with the West Wing, which is what most of us really think of when we think about the White House. But the residence, as we call the building that you see visually in your mind, is grand. It's massive. Everything's painted in white. There's a brilliance to it.

is quite striking. And then next to it is the Eisenhower office building, this almost baroque old structure with huge columns and it's got weight to it. It is substantial. So I didn't quite feel that. Tucker, I think it's very revealing that Rory asks you to describe what Dowdy's like and you ended up describing the way house. We get the message. It's not the same. It's not the same. It's not the same. I mean, what else would I say about that? You had the time of your life. You had the time of your life. Every day started with Alistair, you know, ripping into either a spokesman or a newspaperman or a woman in a room with 15 other people, all either because they have that sense of humor or because they were dutiful minions laughing uproariously. Well, it was very,

very good to have you. Let me just ask you something else about, I mentioned this in the introduction, this whole thing about religion. So I can remember George. W. Bush and once asking me, you know, why I didn't believe and he sort of obviously saw it was kind of quite a defect. You're a committed Christian. And I was, during the Iowa primary, I saw this extraordinary television report inside a church in Iowa where the guy in the pulpit was explaining why people of God have to vote for Donald Trump. Now, again, I don't understand what's happened to the American psyche. So give me your analysis from the Christian. Christian perspective of what's happening in your apologies.

The evangelicals all seem to be so much behind Trump. I don't get it. There is a cottage industry in trying to determine what is really going on in the evangelical movement. I belong to a mainline Protestant church, Episcopalian. So we nod to the Archbishop of Canterbury while having very local control of churches. And I belonged to a church where two weeks ago, we actually talked about politics in what we call an adult forum, not the pulpit, not the church itself, but in a separate room where I was

allowed to speak to the idea of depolarization and an organization called Braver Angels and some of the civic reform movements going on in this country. Not every church is like that. It would be impossible to overgeneralize about the Christian church in America. There are many strains of the faith, but any strain of the faith, which puts politics above faith. and the tenets of the religion. I have a partner, Mike Shannon, who says very wisely that if you're orthodox in your Christianity, you should be unorthodox in your politics. And sadly, that has not happened in too many of the evangelical churches in this country, not all. I think this is something I'd love to develop more. What is it that those churches say to justify

their support for Donald Trump? I mean, obviously we look at him, we see him as this kind of philandering, lying kind of moral abomination. And you've got preachers saying this person is there some sort of, I don't know, messianic figure. How do they pitch it? What's the spin? How do they convince their readers that such an improbable person could be a Christian candidate? I think the sense of grievance and being under assault and look down upon by your betters, so to speak, drives a great deal of this, and a sense that the way it was, which includes, includes tenets of faith, but much more than that in terms of patriotism, society. I don't believe that it is demonstrably or overwhelmingly racist. I don't believe it is demonstrably or overwhelmingly

fueled by hatred, but I do think there is grievance, and there is a sense that our betters look down upon us, and the changes that have occurred in our society are too rapid, too destabilizing, and we're encounter to what we in our group, our in-group, considers the norm and Donald Trump's a fighter. American politics is very, very dominated by particularly Christian religious rhetoric. I guess every president talks about their faith. Joe Biden talks a lot about his faith. And it's not true in Britain. But America's changing. I mean, when you were born, I guess 91% of people acknowledge themselves as being Christian. When you and Alistair were working together, it was 75%. It's now down to 61% pretty quickly. the number of people identifying as agnostics or atheists is growing all the time. Do you think that this is going to change, that there's going to come a time when actually religion won't feel essential, when every politician won't have to wear their faith on their sleeve? I could foresee that. I could also foresee a reawakening. It's happened in the church before.

I also think that other, particularly the Abrahamic religions, offer something to a diverse and changing America that could show patterns of growth. I'm not saying we've hit we, meaning the church, broadly defined, has hit bottom. It could go lower, and there are fears that it will. But whether through faith or DNA, I have some hope and optimism, and I do believe it's a country founded on some principles that are quite consistent with the church, but live well beyond the walls of the church grounds, and have been deeply influential in an enlightened world, which may be going through some very dark times and could get darker. But I try to keep my eye on the long game and believe that this country is a beacon of hope and that we can restore some of the luster to our Western

ideals and work together with our allies to advance freedom and flourishing, even in very troubled times. I'm a strong internationalist who's fearful of a crumbling alliance around Ukraine. I am a pro-Israeli, small D Democrat who believes the people of Gaza need an awful lot. And that's not that far out of the American mainstream. I want to remind you all that there is in this country, and I think in much of the Western world, the perception gap, where the people on the polls for the various ideologies believe that the other is just far worse than they actually. actually are. And there's numbers that back this up in this country. So what I'm trying to be part of is better conversations that lead to open discussions that don't all end in the mushy

middle. We're still going to disagree, but to disagree better, more smartly, and within the framework of a wide ideological spectrum that nonetheless rules out the rise of authoritarianism and socialism run amok. Tucker, one thing that we used to agree. agree about. And I discovered when we met in London a few weeks ago, we maybe aren't necessarily on the same page. Going back to when you worked in London, you were pretty much, just as I was kind of 100% supportive of Tony Blair, you were 100% supportive of George Bush. But I get the feeling from talking to you that you maybe have a lot of worries now about the strategies that we pursued at that time, and in particular maybe the Iraq War that followed on from the Afghanistan War.

Now, Rory and I had a very long podcast discussion last year on the anniversary of the war, and so we don't need to rehearse all of the arguments. But I'd just like to get your sense of how your kind of mindset on this may have changed in recent years. Well, I'll start by saying that I am on the record over and over again defending President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, particularly while I was still in the government left in early 2004. And I think with the passage of time, I recognize that Twitter.

the end of his administration, George W. Bush made some long overdue, very helpful changes, which were later undermined as our government swung in a different direction. I think there were nothing but the best of intentions for our country and our alliance and the West and peace. I think there was, as I've said, no playbook for contending with our enemies in a post-9-11 world. And I believe that Those who've accused Blair and Bush and others of lying are doing so willfully, knowing that they are wrong, knowing that a lie is about intention and not effect. I think there were very damaging effects from mistakes, but a mistake is far different from a lie. and in the way that George W. Bush held true to supporting our troops, trying to defend our country. I believe he did the best he could, and he will let history judge him. But he didn't lie,

and yes, he's human, and there were mistakes. He made mistakes. I made mistakes. And we're all living in a post-9-11, post-Iraq, post-Syria, post-h. We're in tumultuous times. I was waiting for the butt, which didn't quite come, so I'm going to give you a bit of an opportunity for the butt because the truth is, you know, I was in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Iraq, you know, when I was there last year, it is absolutely astonishing. You spent with your allies three and a half trillion dollars on those wars. You now drive from Baghdad Airport into the capital city and you see signs praising Saddam Hussein Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, attacking American terrorism. You have Iranian militia groups celebrated on every mile on the road to Mosul. Afghanistan, we invaded to topple the Taliban government. We spent a trillion dollars, and we quite literally handed the country back to the Taliban again.

So talk me through this. I'll talk you through this. Joe Biden led that debacle of a withdrawal from Afghanistan. I and countless other Americans began to go very negative on Joe Biden as soon as that happened and have held to that ever since. We live in an era of changed expectations and dramatically greater problems. And I think we've got to all have the will to do the very best we can. I think there are enormous problems in this difficult, at times decaying world.

And yet, all we can do is what we can do. And I'm committed in my own way, outside of elective politics, of doing what one newsman said to another problem solver in this country. My friend Alan Miller was trying to engage a journalist, Ted Cople, some of you would know, in the cause of fighting disinformation. And finally, Cople said, but Alan, it looks like you're trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. And Alan took a deep breath and said, yeah, but what else are you going to do? And I think we've all got teaspoons.

And yes, the ocean is boiling in spots, Rory. What are you going to do? Would you say that? But what can I do? But what can I do? What a book. What a book, Tucker. Thank you. And I saw that you mentioned that in your church. I saw the video when I was looking into your recent pronouncements. Is there a part of you that thinks that some of this decaying and disorder that you talk about was, in a sense, directly flowing from some of the decisions that we made we were part of back then? It reminds me of Rory's question about, you know, did New Gingrich, did Sarah Palin? You know, I think history's a big ocean and there are a lot of rivers that have fed into it. So I couldn't single out any one thing except to say that when you are fighting on really high stakes ground with the eyes of the world upon you and mistakes lead to enormous expenditure treasure and lost lives, that's bound to have unstable.

destabilizing, destabilizing, rather, effects. And it has been the case that too many destabilization events have occurred in the last 25 years in America. And we need to get back on more solid ground. So the time when you were in politics, the time when you were working with Alistair was the end of a period of enormous optimism, an American dominance, more and more democracies, more and more prosperity around the world, more and more free trade, in fact. We've now entered an era where since 2014 every year it's been getting more dangerous. Extreme poverty has been going up in Africa. There's a lot of violence and trade is diminishing.

And one of the questions, I guess, is does the U.S. have the appetite anymore? You talked about being leader of the free world. This is a system since the Second World War, which was predicated on, I guess, open borders, free trade, America as a global policeman. All of that seems to be collapsing. And I don't get the sense that either Biden or Donald Trump are really very interested in encouraging Americans to lean into those things again. I think that's a fair assessment.

I don't doubt that we're in a period of enormous transition. I still see the United States coming around to its place. That place will be different from what it was as it changed really throughout the last century. But it is a place that is fueled by innovation, fed by our diversity, a strength. when not bowed to almost in a temple-like fashion by some of the far left. So diversity, innovation, enormous economic strength, and the ability to reinvent itself, those things still exist in the America I live in. I'm trying in my very small way with my very small teaspoon to be part of efforts at the kind of grassroots level, truly grassroots. We need better leaders as well.

And if I have to vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, so be it. But I still be looking for stronger leaders than that. And I think our history proves that sometimes when you most need them, they do come forward. And I hope to be part of making a grassroots movement that demands that that that happen come into being. Tucker, my last question, and thanks for all the time that you've given us. I want to ask you about your sense of Britain, as you say, you've lived here for a time, You lived here for a time, and we've just been involved in these strikes in the Red Sea against the Houthis. There is a sense of, still, I think, of a kind of special relationship, so-called. But I just want you a sense of how you think Britain is seen in the world and how you think Britain is seen by Americans.

Roy and I met some congressmen and women recently, and they, you know, they'd come over a trip to Britain. But some of them, I sense, didn't maybe take Britain quite as seriously as we were taken in the past. And I just wonder whether you think we are the same country that you kind of grew up with and whether there's still that same affection for Britain. I think it is more muted than it used to be. I think it has changed. I think it's deeply unfortunate, but the same forces that brought Trump that were reflected in Brexit have served to, in both cases, in my view, undermine the standing of. our two nations and the highs of the world and really your economic strength, ours. I think you add up COVID, media fragmentation, destabilized world, terrorism, and the rise of

authoritarian. And I think there's a great need for nations like ours. I'm pulling for Great Britain and the United Kingdom and I'm pulling for the United States. Tucker, my last question is trying to understand the motivations of senior Republican politicians and the way they get in behind Trump. You were talking about your friend, Senator Tim Scott, who seems to be, you know, on the surface, a very charming, polite, attractive figure. And he got up on that stage with Donald Trump at the end of that vote in New Hampshire. And he said, I guess you must really hate Nikki Haley because you endorse me. And Tim Scott would have put big grin on his face. And he said, I love you, Donald Trump, right? And then I'm left there thinking, what is happening?

You know, these senior, serious, impressive people, Congress people, senators, all of them, bending the knee to him. What's going on? I have long felt, Rory, that if those politicians in the Republican Party had seen themselves as being on a plane with engine trouble, they could have wrapped arms around each other and 10 of them, 15 of them even, taken the three or four parachutes left on that potentially crashing airplane and jumped out altogether. They might have lost six or eight of them as a percentage, 60 or 80 percent of them. And yet many would live and the party would have survived. And we could have put Donald Trump's political career and his marring of the American landscape to an end

by convicting him during impeachment, either of those two times, but especially the second time. And they failed to do that, whether that was lack of foresight, wishful thinking, or fear of the voters and the electorate that keeps them in office, there's way too much of the latter. It doesn't speak well of the character and ability of the people entrusted by Republicans, at least, to hold office in this country. I think Democrats have many at weak spots in their elected ranks, but I couldn't compare the problems on the left to those that the Republican Party has made, created, sustained, and doubled down on. Tucker, I'm going to cheat and have a final, final question, but it has the advantage that you've got a one-word answer. Who's the

president going to be in two years' time? Wishful answer? A real answer. No. What do you think? What do you think? Yeah, I think Joe Biden. Do you? You don't look or sound convinced. I think we all have a year of a tremendous uncertainty in front of us. Yeah. But I do think there's power in hope. I know I'm coming across as sort of a I've been called by my friend Stuart Stevens is one of those sucker optimists in the Bush world. I think optimism takes action to make it hope.

I do have some hope. I will do what I can to try to produce outcomes that improve the country, but there's not much I can do. I hope many others, and I know many others will join me in the world. that the South Carolina motto in Latin is, while I breathe, I hope, don't spiro, spiro. I do breathe, I do hope, and I do believe that will ultimately make the right decision. Well, listen, thanks for giving us so much your time. It's lovely to see you again. Great to see you, Alistair. Rory, nice to meet you. Thank you, Tucker. Thank you very much. So, Rory, what do you learn from that?

Well, I learned a lot. I mean, look, I've got American relatives who are going to be as enraged by that as some of your teacher friends were by the Gillian Keegan interview. I can assure you that my in-laws do not want to hear that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were fine, upstanding Americans. So, I mean, I think he's a very sympathetic man. And of course, you know, I'm a left-leaning conservative who broke against Boris Johnson. So I feel a lot of empathy for him. But there will be a lot of my American friends listening saying this guy was allied with people that they would have seen as pretty unpleasant right-wing Republicans who created a lot of the problems that led up to Trump. You know what I thought was really interesting was when you were pressing him about,

I guess about ambition really. I mean, I hadn't really thought of, his answer about why Biden was standing and why some of these Republicans way in behind Trump was really about just this sort of ambition in a sense. And I think at the Trump-Biden level, this unbelievable confidence that they have that they are the right people. Yeah. It's kind of obvious when you think about it. It's such a profound observation, isn't it? Because, you know, it's the same when you ask, you know, why did Robert Buckland, who was on the left, the Conservative party endorse Boris Johnson? Why did Rishi Sunak or Oliver Dowden endorse Boris Johnson? Presumably, it's because politics has become basically a game about making it to the top. It's like

Machiavelli on steroids. And all that really matters to the key Republicans is that they keep their seats and they have a chance of getting into Trump's cabinet. Well, I think we should, you know, I think it was good to get somebody on who's, he's obviously not a leader like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Arnold Schwarzenegger, some of the other Americans we've had on. But I think through this year, we should look to get a few different voices, even at the risk of annoying your in-laws. I mean, I thought he was lovely. The other thing that was interesting, which is very, very American, I think, is obviously his openness about faith, his belief that, you know, Christianity is going to revive. his extraordinary sort of almost sermons on hope that kept coming back again and again. Actually, I should have dug more into South Carolina. I thought he was very good on the motivations of Trump voters, very good on saying that he doesn't want them to be demonized as racist.

But his attempts to try to understand why voters feel so angry, so betrayed, so lost, that they would get behind this guy. We didn't really get time to talk about this organization. He mentioned Braver Angels, which is very much, It's really this kind of disagree-agreeably thing and depolarising. And the book I mentioned on the podcast recently was actually a book that Tucker sent to me, this Monica Guzman, who wrote this book. I hadn't have thought of it that way before.

Because he's definitely changed from the person, in terms of the way that he talks about politics, he's definitely changed. Well, tell us a bit about this. Tell us what he was like when you first met him. He was very like he is, very warm, very charming, very open. But, you know, he would be like me in terms of, look, this is what we're going to do. I had a touch of the Leight Waters about it.

He had a touch of the Leight Waters about him. You do what you have to do to win the argument that you were engaged in at the time. And I think he was always very reflective, but I think what happens because of the polarization that's gone on now, I think he feels we have to come up politics and political argument from a different way.

So he's somebody that would have almost come across 20 years ago as a kind of ruthless realist. Yeah. But now when he's, He sees people like his friend, the senator from South Carolina, getting him behind Trump. He's like there's a limit to the ruthless realism. Yeah, he's thinking around it as opposed to just thinking, well, that's the obvious right thing to do because, you know, that's your team and you're trying to win. He held back, you were right to say when you said, you know, you were waiting for the butt.

You know, when I've spoken to him before, he kind of has been a bit tougher on the policies that we pursued in the aftermath of particularly in relation, I think, to Iraq. But I guess he's also one of those guys. pretty loyal. You know, you would never get him to say a word against George W. Bush's integrity, and, you know, he's still a bit like with me with Tony. He'll speak up for him because he gets plenty of people who don't. And so when you were working with him in 2001, began working in 2001, did you think there was a very distinctive American approach to communication, which was a bit different to the British approach in those first few days and weeks working together? Did you notice that he came from a different context and culture?

I think he fitted in very, very well with what we were trying to do, and we were trying to build these international coalition information centres they were called in Washington, Europe and Islamabad. In fact, the guy that we, he talked about his friend Greg Jenkins, the other person who drew the short straw may shortly be a cabinet minister, because Pat McFadden was, I can remember Pat's, part a lugubrious face anyway. But when I said to Pat, I really think you need to go to Islamabad. His face did fall somewhat.

But anyway, off he went and as ever did a brilliant job. But now, this all started in the context of what we'd try to do during the Kosovo war when we did build in these internationalised communications infrastructure. So after 9-11, I sent a copy of all the papers that I'd done or on the Kosovo situation, to Karen Hughes, who was Bush's communications director, as a result of which we then sort of got these new structures. And Tucker was the guy that Bush sent to come and be his man inside the London hub, as it were. So I think our communication systems were pretty similar.

Well, Alisa, thank you very much for getting on. I mean, I thought it was really interesting. And, you know, strength to his arm, it's really good to see somebody of that seniority taking the fight to Trump. See you soon. See you soon. Bye-bye.