The Rest Is Politics - 536. Is Trump’s Corruption Machine Reaching New Extremes?

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Has the scale of Donald J. Trump’s corruption become too big to prosecute? Is the US Constitution now a roadmap to tyranny instead of a protection against it? Why do 72% of Gen Z think things will only get worse, and can mainstream politics win them back? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Emily Kent Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. Is Donald Trump the most corrupt president we have ever had? Trump's corruption is about flooding the zone. There's so much of it going on that one can barely keep up. It's the scale of it that I think is making people feel they just don't know how to handle it. The corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront. As usual with Trump, any single one of these things would have been enough to lead to the resignation of a leader in any other country. He really genuinely doesn't seem to care how anything looks. He will brazen all of it out.

And the challenge to Americans is, are you prepared to change your constitution? Because if you keep this constitution going, you're on the high road to tyranny and corruption. This episode is brought you by Fuse Energy. has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings clarity and a bit more control. And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter. Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict, and certainly can't control, still find their way onto your bill. And if you're on the wrong tariff,

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Loops get closed. With ServiceNow, you can do the parts of your job you're best at and delegate the rest. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Welcome to the rest of the policies. I'm with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Today, we are going to begin with a really big story, which is, is President Trump the most corrupt president ever? We're going to do a little bit of history of corrupt U.S. presidents, but then we're going to look into the mechanics of how Trump's corruption works, where the money's going, why it's different from any corruption before and how it relates to the U.S. Constitution. And then in the second half, we're getting on to Gen Z. We're going to talk about how Gen Z is voting. And we're trying to look at, many, many young women voting for green, some men going towards reform. We're looking at how cost of living is affecting people and how it's affecting what they're looking for from politicians and how they vote. So a great deal to get through and looking forward to it. Alistair. So answer the question, is Donald Trump the most corrupt president the United States has ever had?

Yes. There's some close run presidents. I believe Warren Harding. Yeah. Ulysses S. Grant. But this was small time. Their people were corrupt. They didn't end up rich. And it's also pretty small-time stuff compared to what we're talking about with Trump. But I also think that what Trump has done, he's demonstrating a type of corruption which has almost never existed before because there's two things coming together. There's a complete transformation in the whole economic structure of the world, which provides potential for corruption that never existed before.

And then there's a transformation in the US constitutional structure driven by conservative justices who are giving him freedoms that previous president struggled to attain. often when one thinks about corruption, one's usually thinking about people looting the government. So traditionally, a bachelor in Nigeria literally took all the money from the central government budget and put it in a Swiss bank account. Or when you talk about nepotism, you're normally talking about giving your relatives government positions so that they can get government salaries or you're fiddling around with government procurement. Now, that isn't primarily what Trump does. It's a little bit of that going on, but that's not primarily how he's making out like a bandit,

because Trump has spotted something extraordinary. He's spotted that government is now tiny compared to the private sector. You know, you look at the magnificent seven companies. They've got a market cap of about something like, I don't know, 17, 18 trillion, which is many multiples of the budget of the U.S. government, federal government. And if he can get his hands on private sector money and international money, it's both much more lucrative. He can make many more billions.

But secondly, it's much safer legally. It's much more difficult for people to pin him in the way that they would if he was simply stealing from the government budget. So what he's doing, and we can get into all the depths of this, but one of the big things he's doing with nepotism is not putting his children or relatives into government positions. In fact, what he's doing is putting pressure on companies and foreign states to put them on boards or invest in their companies or bring them in and co-sponsors or give them concessions. Yeah, I mean, I think he has already definitely won the American title. He's definitely the most corrupt. Sometimes people talk about Nixon, but he was morally corrupt. He actually died relatively poor for somebody who'd been an American president. I think the question is whether Trump is one day going to be in the running for the world title. If you look through the history of political corruption, generally the podium is probably headed by Sowato, the ex-president of Indonesia. He was reckoned to have made off with about, somewhere between $20 and $40 billion. Marcos in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos,

whose wife's shoe collection became very, very famous, and he was maybe in the $10 billion. And then there was Mabutu in what is now the DIC, was then Zaire. And then I think you could probably give a mention to Mugabe in Zimbabwe, probably Chowcestershire in Romania. And of course,

corruption is often easier if you're accompanied alongside it with your own authoritarian rule. And on today, I would say Vladimir Putin is probably the leader on the corruption scale. And that's not that you can point to bank accounts and say, there's all his money. It's the way that he controls. You create the oligarchy networks. You have massive hidden wealth amongst the elites.

You suppress anti-corruption investigations. And of course, you know, if you go to the ultimate extreme, you take out people like Alexei Navalny, who made his name by exposing that level of corruption. I think if there's an American to compare with Trump, I have to go back to somebody. He wasn't president, but this was a guy called William Tweed, whose legacy is that Tammany Hall, which is what he ran,

is now a byword for corrupt politics. And this was a guy who died in jail. So, you know, he was eventually they got him. But he stole what today would be in the, you know, it was tens of millions back then, but it would be in the billions. if you put it up to date. Now the reason why we're talking about this, the reason why this question was being asked and is being asked in the American debate as well, whether he is the most corrupt

president ever, is because of this very live debate about this slush fund issue. So Trump, who loves a frivolous lawsuit as a sort of source of funds, he sues the IRS, the kind of taxman for allegedly leaking his tax returns or lack of tax in his case. So this is a case of Trump suing his own governments. He's got two sets of lawyers. He's got Trump lawyers on this side and Trump lawyers on this side. And the government lawyers, they sent a 25-page memo to the Department of Justice explaining that this lawsuit is never going to stand up in court and it would lose. And then they decided to settle for the historically significant sum of when was the United States founded, Rory? 1776. It's the name of one of Trump's Children's Hedge Fund.

Correct. So they settle for 1.776 billion to pay to alleged victims of Biden justice weaponisation, such as the January of the six writers. The fund to be overseen by a five-person commission appointed by Trump and his attorney general, his former personal defence lawyer, Todd Blanche, operating with no oversight, not much transparency, not yet defined standards. And here's two really interesting things. Trump, as the President, can fire any of the five at any time that he chooses, and the money has to be spent by the end of this term. Now, even some Republicans are saying, this is a bit too much. Well, let's, let's, let's, I mean, there's so many extraordinary things. There's that, and there's also the suggestion that as part of the deal, the IRS has said that they are not going to pursue any of their existing audits against the Trump family. It's not a suggestion. Sorry, they've stated this. Sorry, they've stated that, yeah. It's a statement, a statement by Todd Blanche, and this will be forever.

There's a bit of debate about the forever, but it certainly seems as though it's forever for Lottom, because anything they've started, they can't continue. And that's most of the investigations. Just remind people, though, of the bigger picture here. So Trump's corruption is partly about flooding the zone. There's so much of it going on that one can barely keep up. I mean, as usual with Trump, any single one of these things would have been enough to lead the resignation of a leader in any other country and they would have a net popularity rating

terrible and they would have been forced out by their own cabinet and Congress, any one of them. But there are, I would say, I'm just trying to count through them. I got up into 20, 30, 40, 50 examples before I gave up. But just remind people quickly, there's the basic protection racket which he runs against other countries. So that's essentially signaling that because he's the US president and he gets to control whether or not you have US bases or US missiles to protect you. So that'd be relevant, for example, for a Gulf state, you know, is America going to protect you against Iran or not? Your control over tariffs, you know, are you going to hit Vietnam or Japan or Switzerland with 37, 40% tariffs? Are you going to launch legal prosecutions against the president of the country, Vidae, Venezuela, Colombia?

are you going to disable somebody's access to Google and Microsoft, which is what he did with the president of the International Criminal Court? So incredible range of different things that he as the US president can do to other people. So people begin paying protection money. And it's a really interesting type of protection money because it's not – I mean, this again is one of the reasons why it's a new form of corruption and why it gets around the US courts. The US courts in a terrible, terrible recent ruling determined that you needed to find a specific, gift and proves a specific official act created to that gift. And this has reduced the number of prosecutions going to corrupt politicians in the US by a huge amount. This is a case called McDonald. So Trump, on the basis that he gets famously, by a plain worth $400 million from

Qatar, a UAE fund, very close to the UAE government, invests $2 billion in crypto associated with Trump, and it appears in return then gets permits to get US chips, the best Nvidia chips in the world. You have your whole story around the Board of Peace, where you're paying a billion dollars for membership, and where Trump has personal perpetual control for his whole life over this stuff. You've got the amazing actions against media companies and universities in the US where he sues people, and it has a double whammy. One of them is. he sues and they pay him. So just to make the law case go away, you get big American media companies just writing him checks for $17, $18 million. And in the future, being very, very careful to do

anything that might annoy him. Of course, he's suing the BBC at the moment. And then you have all the other things that are going on, which we haven't talked about, which are the incredible sums of money that his children are making. Now, his children are not that able. It's very difficult to quite understand how one of his sons has taken a fund which was worth about 300 million a year ago that is now worth 1.3 billion. If you invested your money in his fund, you quadrupled your money. Just though not very able, our US colleague, Mr Scaramucci, describes them as dumb as a rock. The extraordinary thing about this, of course, and this is what gets to your point about when you've gone through 40, 50, 60 cases, you just want to go away. David Frum said in the Atlantic, the corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront.

But I think that what was extraordinary about this hiding in plain sight, Trump did an interview where he claimed untrue, but he said, I prohibited them, my sons, from doing business in my first term. I got no credit for it. I didn't have to do that. And it's really unfair to them. I found out nobody cared. I'm allowed to. He even made this extraordinary claim that as president, you're allowed to have one desk for president, one desk for business, complete nonsense. And it's the scale of it that I think is making people feel they just don't know how to handle it. Crypto is a big part of it. And of course, when you talk about the law, regulation around that, he's making it, you know,

crypto is just a very, very hard thing to get your head around from the kind of slow legal systems. We've got to remember as well that if we're minded to give him the benefit of the doubt, we shouldn't ever forget, but because he floods the zone we do forget, he is the first ever convicted felon to be president, 24 counts of falsifying accounts. And really corrupt leaders, the ones that we talked about in the kind of league table of global corruption, there is almost always an involvement of family, particularly sons that they want maybe to take over from them when they're done. But I was speaking to somebody over the last couple of days who's involved in a campaign in the States for campaign reform.

And he went, it was interesting, he said, the best definition of politics of corruption in politics is the use of public office for private gain. Okay. And he said there are seven key areas you need to look at. Are they personally becoming richer? Well, there's no doubt about that. He's already, according to Forbes, added several billions

since he's been in power. Do they abuse executive power in the pursuit of that? are they ever involved in bribery or graft? We can come on to that. Are they ever involved in the obstruction of justice? I think you could argue that the weaponisation of the Department of Justice answers that. Are they ever involved in election misconduct? Do they pursue policies of patronage and cronyism? No doubt about that. And do they violate democratic norms? Now, I think he pretty much ticks all seven. And there's something we should put in the newsletter. I read it. It's a 41-page document written by a group called Campaign Legal Center,

which is a non-partisan organization that's trying to change the way politics is done in the States. And I had exactly the same feeling as you. After a while, you just thought, I can't take any more of this. So you mentioned Jeff Bezos. Did he really think that the Melania film was worth $40 million? I don't think so. That is corrupt. Several cabinet ministers, the people that he sits around that table with on major donors. Lutnik gave him $11 million. McMahon, the Education Secretary, $20 million. Chris Wright, the Oil and Gas Energy Secretary. He was a donor.

Ambassadors, including to Paris, Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, who became very, very wealthy, son-in-law to Trump during the first term. Kushner, the father, was jailed for tax and other offenses. Trump pardons him. And the other thing, the pardons, Rory, the pardons is like an industry. There are some really serious people who've committed very serious offenses and been jailed, who have either through family or through self, have made big donations to the various elements of the Maga Empire. And lo and behold, they get a pardon.

And one of the things that will come out of that is he will almost certainly pardon himself and his own family before he steps down. thus conferring complete immunity on himself and his kids. It's kind of what Todd Blanche is doing, isn't it, by saying that you can't pursue them for past misdemeanors forever. He's kind of, he's preparing the ground for that. The thing that Trump represents is something that's been developing in politics around the world for a very long time, but has finally reached its full culmination with Trump.

And it's basically the way in which politicians and liberal democracies are now becoming a wash with cash. And it's very striking when this begins. And when Truman stepped down famously, he went off on a train to live on his military pension. George Washington refused the salary. You know, Atlee lived pretty modestly. There was basically a very strong tradition in most countries that former politicians would try to behave. And it was considered a little bit shabby to try to make colossal fortunes. Now, that began to change. That began to change in Britain.

So John Major made a lot of money. Tony Blair made a lot of money. And Bill Clinton made a lot of money. And President Obama's been making a lot of money. And George W. Bush has been making a lot of money. So there's been this beginning of this story of people making very large sums of money. But in the US system, I like you, go to these funny conferences quite a lot.

And these are often, you know, going back in the day, I remember what they used to be. I'm talking here about the Bilderberg Commission, trilateral, these kind of big American conferences, which are often done by tech bros, etc. Back in the day, if I go back 25, 30 years, the politicians were much, much more important. They were on the main stage. They were speaking more. It felt more like Davos or the Munich Security Conference. Now, basically, you see former prime ministers, senators, heads of major countries, sitting in the sort of middle to back rows, listening politely, while the tech bros and the business people hold forth. The whole power thing has been

inverted. And you've entered a world in which people can make money now, and this is what Trump is in this world, for doing very little. I mean, it's always been true that the relationship between how much work you do and how much money you make is weird. When one of the Trump's children now makes the speech somewhere in the world, they are being paid up to a million dollars to make a speech in the Balkans. One of them was paid, I think, 150 million just to attach his name to a new crypto product. And then the stuff that we see in the Balkans where I've seen in the Gulf, which is suddenly they're turning up and they're getting prime real estate in the center of a city to build their hotels, prime beach fronts to build their properties. Flynn,

the disgraced formal national security advisors, hopeless and inept brother, suddenly gets a contract to build a huge pipeline through the Balkans. Flynn, who, by the way, Roy, is a previous recipient of the sort of money that's going to come from this weaponization fund. I think he got over a million for the alleged mistreatment of him. Just on the point you make about the president. So, you know, you're right that more modern presidents have maybe made lots of money. Tony Blair, as he say, makes a lot of money. But I would argue he does a lot of good through the work he does with the TBI, the Institute. But just a couple of things to go back. Don't forget, Jimmy Carter, got rid of his peanut farm, lest it be thought that he could benefit from government policy. I was listening to a podcast with a guy called Norma Eisen on Pod Save America. He was Obama's so-called ethics czar. And he stopped Obama from remorgeting his home in Chicago because it was at the time of the crash and he worried about, you know, people would think, well, this just looks bad.

Whereas what Trump does, he doesn't, he really genuinely doesn't seem to care how anything looked. he will brazen all of it out. And the thing is that it's almost in every area you want to look at. We've covered most of them. If you just go through this business of the pardons and the lawsuits, you mentioned some of the lawsuits of the media, these were entirely frivolous cases. To get whatever it was, $15 million, I think, for his presidential library

because of some bad, what he saw as bad editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. Absolutely ridiculous. It's totally frivolous. He got 25 million out of meta in what was seen as a frivolous lawsuit. And just on the pardons, I mean, just going through in this document by this campaign organization, you know, a guy called Shangpeng Zhao, CEO of Crypto Exchange Finance, jail for money laundering, face multi-million fine, puts a bit of money into Trump crypto, he gets a pardon.

Another guy, Imar Zuberi, 12 years for various financial and obstruction of justice events, sentence commuted. Trevor Milton, four-year fraud, denotes, pardoned. Another guy, 80 months in prison, while he's in prison, his mother's donating, suddenly he's pardoned. I mean, and then cases that are dropped, you know, people who are in the system, and then suddenly their case gets dropped. Now, I just think this is of a, as you said earlier, if this had been any previous president, they'd be gone. So what's happened to the culture? What's happened to the morality in American politics? So there's the morality point. I think values are collapsing everywhere. I think all our societies are becoming more and more money focused. I was just at the funeral and then at an event last week for Robert Skidelsky, who just died. And Robert Skidelsky wrote with his son, I would a book called How Much Is Enough that I've been reading. And he points out that John Maynard Keynes, about a hundred years ago, gave a talk in which he predicted that by now our standard of living in Britain, would have increased fourfold, and he predicted that we would be working much less,

you know, be working two, three hours a day and be able to spend our time and leisure. And he was right, our sound of living has gone up fourfold, but we're working more than ever. And one of the questions is how much is enough? How have we become a society which doesn't behave in the way that, I guess, you know, your father would have predicted or Keynes would have predicted it, which is they would assume that when people achieve what they would have thought of as a reasonable middle class professional life, they would kick back and stop earning. And we're part of the same problem, Alice. I mean, you and I are racing around the world. We're doing podcasts. We're giving speeches. And we're part

of a whole weird new global culture where everybody is becoming sort of insatiable. So I think that that's one problem's values. The second problem, though, is the US. I think the US Constitution is unbelievably dangerous. Yeah. And weak. And there are, three things that are so strange when you're British looking at America. The first is his ability to personalise prosecution. In Britain, the Crown Prosecution Services and the Attorney General are kept very, very separate from the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister cannot say, this is my political enemy. I want you to go after them and prosecute them. This was stuff Nixon tried to do. He'd go after Jane Fonder and try to audit her tax, or he'd try to go after Ted Kennedy and put

frivolous litigation, but after Watergate, America slightly got back onto an idea that you couldn't do that. But these Supreme Court justices have gone back to a much older idea that a president is like a sort of medieval king. And he has full executive power, and he can basically appoint his own head of the FBI, launch investigations against anybody he wants. So that gives him the ability to run these protection rackets. The second thing is this thing that you talked about, which is his ability to pardon, which again, has no acquitted. It's completely mad. James Madison set this up, I think, in the federal papers, in order to deal with a very extreme case, such as pardoning people after a civil war. He said sometimes, you know, for civil dissent reconciliation, let's say you were thinking about, I don't know, the Northern Ireland peace process or something, the president should have the ability to pardon people because it's the only way of bringing society together.

it was not envisaged as a way of pardoning your friends, your relatives and yourself, particularly not yourself, right? I mean, that's completely against the rule of law in Magna Carta. And then the third thing I think is this whole question around immunity from prosecution and the way in which he's able to achieve that personal immunity from Supreme Court cases. So there was the Supreme Court case that said anything he does in an official capacity cannot be prosecuted. And this extraordinary McDonald case, which we haven't talked about enough in 2016, where this guy McDonald, who was a governor, managed to take Rolexes, borrow Ferraris, stay in Beach House, it took $180,000 of cash from a donor. And in return went around desperately promoting the donor's dodgy tobacco products, trying to get

people to take them up. And the Supreme Court ruled it didn't really matter how much money he'd take and didn't matter how much effort he put in to trying to promote the guy's products. because ultimately the state didn't actually adopt those products, he wasn't guilty of anything at all. There's a couple in this document that I don't think have had any attention at all. And it just shows that some of this stuff's happening that's very, very big. And some of it's happening that's maybe just sort of a bit more small scale. But so, for example, Asserl Mital, big steel company, they provided the steel for Trump's famous ballroom that's being built.

and possibly unconnected, I don't know, but a few days later, the tariff regime was changed. Had it benefited them and their sector very, very well. There's another guy, a donor from one of the big oil companies, who gave some of those $6 million, and he became the first guy fully to benefit from the new deals that started to be done after the capture of Maduro in Venezuela. Now, they could argue, well, that's just the way that business works, but there's just such a pattern to this that's kind of so staggering. And I've read a very interesting interview with a guy called Brendan Ballou, who's a former Justice

Department Special Counsel. And he said the slush fund that we were talking about earlier, he described it as the most corrupt action in American history. We could have an argument about that. He's now representing police officers who were injured during the January of the riots because you imagine you're a policeman who's or you're the family of somebody who lost their life in those and now you have your taxpayer your tax dollars being part of a fund that Trump wants to pay to the people who took part in that riot is completely insane and there but this guy says

something very interesting he said his worry is that this money is going to be deliberately used to fund these violent people who are going to be loyal to the president come what may and even talks about the funding of paramilitary organizations, that this is sometimes like it works in authoritarian countries. You have the law enforcement agency, then you have people outside who are able to do exactly what they want. And some of the people that are saying that they're going to try and get money out of this fund, you know, the proud boys that we used to talk about a lot, a guy called Andrew Paul Johnson, who describes himself as an American terrorist. He's since been found guilty of molesting children. These are the people that Trump wants his all to

are heroes. He's crazy. My conclusion, the U.S. Constitution is broken. It's not fit for purpose. What we've discovered is that if you get a president like Trump and if you enter a world of private sector, crypto, globalized growth, the U.S. Constitution is no protection. In fact, the president can worm his way like a termite into every nook and cranny of it and the Supreme Court will back him because they will say that his ability to prosecute his enemies is part of the executive power of the present in the Constitution. Yeah, yeah. They will say that his ability to pardon his cronies is part of the executive power of

the president in the Constitution. They will say that his ability to grant himself immunity is guaranteed within the constitution. They will say the ability of people to flood the American political system. with untold money. I mean, hundreds of millions, billions, stuff that Trump himself in his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, when asked about it, said, yeah, that's how it works. I gave all these people money. I get favours two, three years down the line. All this stuff is guaranteed by the Constitution, and the challenge to Americans is,

are you prepared to change your Constitution? Because if you keep this Constitution going, you're on the high road to tyranny and corruption. Maybe just briefly touch upon how this relates to the UK. When you talked about the way that Trump is able, as it were, to suborn the Constitution in the way that he's doing, at least in the UK when we had a character as disreputable as Johnson, who was doing all sorts of bad stuff and preroging Parliament and all the kind of stuff that people know about the Johnson did, eventually, albeit over a completely different issue, but the system worked it out and said, no, we're not having this.

Now, okay, we ended up with this trust, which, you know, we can argue whether that was better or worse. But the point is, it sort of worked. But the reason why I've been so agitated in recent weeks that this issue of Nigel Farage and the five million pound donation has not been getting the attention that it merits and not being getting the media focus that it merits, even though some of them are trying, is because I genuinely worry that if somebody like Farage and Tice and Yusuf and all these people who are, you know, very much about money and very much about, you know, they projecting themselves as men of the people who I think are actually very much driven by wealth.

And this story of Farage and the $5 million donation, I mean, he literally keeps changing the story. We're now expected to believe that he's the victim in this story because he's claiming that the Russians, of whom he actually is quite an admirer, hacked his bank account or hacked his phone and briefed the Guardian. I mean, it's so sort of ridiculously unbelievable. But this is Trumpian. You just sort of say something that gets you through the day

and eventually people get bored and move on. Okay, well, I think time for a break, and then once we come back for break, we'll move on to a very different subject. Welcome back to The Rest This Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Aleister Campbell. And we're joined for the second half of this episode by Vicky Spratt, who many of you will have listened to her excellent mini-series on Gen Z. And on the back of it, two things to report. The first is that she spent the morning with Alan Milburn to talk to him about the NEETs review that's coming up. First part's happening soon and the sort of what we're going to do about it is coming later.

So we'll talk about that. But also we've done some polling or Ipsos to do some polling on Gen Z. So just on the polling, Vicky, what were your main takeouts of what you took from the polling of this generation? Just to remind Pit Roy, because you keep forgetting, Gen Z is? Let's see if you remembered. Oh, it's people, oh, is it people sort of aged between 15 and 30? No, so close, Rory, so close. 14 and 29.

14 and 29. Very close, very close. There we go. Nearly. Yeah, nearly got that. We're really lucky to have had this exclusive polling done for us by Ipsos, and it ran between February and April, so it gives us a really good snapshot of what was going on for Gen Z at the start of this year.

I think the thing that really jumped out to me at first is the favourability. ratings for leaders of parties and would-be leaders of parties. So some of this might not sound surprising. Andy Burnham came top of the polls. He's the most favourable leader or would-be leader. We'll think he might quite like to lead the country. And after him came Zach Polanski in second place. Now, that might not be surprising. Zach is getting a lot of press at the moment. And that also ties with what we're hearing about how young people, this generation of 14 to 29-year-olds, consume their news, mostly online. And if you are on Instagram or TikTok as I am, you will be reading a lot about Zach Polansky. And in third place, a bit more surprising,

Nigel Farage. Kirstama comes in sixth place after Ed Davy and Kemi Badenok. Now, in some ways you'd expect that, sitting prime minister. tend to poll pretty badly. They've got a tough job. But he really comes in even below Kemi Badernock, who you would not expect Gen Z to be looking upon favorably. But when you dig in to this data, it's not as straightforward as Andy Burnham, Zach Polanski, Nigel Farage, good to go, walking on water. There's another question that was asked, which was about satisfaction with those leaders. so not just who they think might be a good leader, but how satisfied they are with them. And actually, Zach Polanski had a satisfaction rating of 37%.

And that is down 10 points on the last time Ipsos asked the question. So even though people are aware of Zach Polanski, they feel good about him as a party leader, they're actually not that satisfied with the job that he's doing. Nigel Farage had an even worse satisfaction rating of 57%, which is down 28 points on the last time, they asked the question. But poor Kirstama coming in right at the bottom with a satisfaction rating of just 18% and a dissatisfaction rating of 75% down 57 points on the last time that Ipsos asked the question. So I think that gives you a more nuanced sense of what young people actually feel about these leaders. They're not looking at Zach Polanski and thinking, great. They're looking at him and

analysing his performance. And then what else have we got? Something that you might surprise you, because it surprised me. The biggest concern for this generation is inflation, the cost of living, the price of everything. And after that, immigration. So cost of living, immigration, and then the third in the top three of their concerns, our economy. So that tells you that Gen Z are plugged in and rightly, I think, worried about what is going on in our economy. But immigration particularly stood out to me because that's not something you associate with young people. We've got a bit of a misconception in this country. That's something that only older people perhaps reading the right-wing tabloids are worried about. And that's just not the case.

And then finally, really, really sad, but economic optimism really, really, really low figures. 72% think that this is going to get worse. One of the things that struck me, and it's the sort of point you hinted at, is that it doesn't actually seem as though the normal story, which is that young men are radicalizing. It's correct. What's actually happening is young women are radicalizing. I mean, young men in Gen Z are not really more likely to vote reform than the general population. In fact, they're slightly less likely, whereas young women have jumped from like 2% support from Green to sort of 23%.

This is the story about the radicalisation of young women. This is it, Rory, and I think this is really, really underreported. Young women are going to the Greens in big numbers, and they are by many metrics of polling, not just done in Britain, but across the world. more left wing than men of the same age. There could be many reasons why that is happening, but the impact on our politics is enormous. The polling also did some stuff on the kind of characters,

and it was interesting that, and I wonder how much this just reflects that what's happening in the media at the time that the polling is done, but I guess if there are two politicians who stand out as being broadly more popular than the rest, is Zach Polanski and Andy Burnham. So does that suggest, was there a genuine appetite

do you think for Andy Burnham, or was it just that people were hearing a lot about him because of all the leadership talk? Of course, Andy Burnham is in the news all the time at the moment, and so is Zach Polanski. But I suppose to challenge your idea a bit there, Alistair, Nigel Farage is in the news a lot too, and he came out on this polling pretty badly. So you could argue that young people were looking at who they were being presented with in the media and making a judgment on them. and Polanski came after Andy Burnham. But when you look at it, there are quite a lot of young people

who also are dissatisfied with how Zach Polanski is doing. Kirstama comes fairly low down the list, but sitting prime ministers always do. And I would have expected Zach Polanski, actually, to have had a much higher favorability rating than he does, given all of the buzz around him and all the social media. So it's quite interesting that, Andy Burnham came above Zach Polanski, I think.

And Vicki, just give us the sense. I mean, let's step away from the figures at the moment, maybe back to the sense that you get from talking to people, what Alaston might call a focus group. Give us a sense of what's behind these numbers, what people would say, I mean, it's difficult to generalise, but give us the sense of what Gen Z might say about these different people. So making this series for you guys,

one of the things we did was poll, the rest is politics audience, 12,000 responses, 6,000 of them were members of this generation that we're talking about. And they're so hopeful but disillusioned at the same time. And I think what they've seen growing up, what they told us is we see people promise change and then the change doesn't come. We see people say they're going to overhaul the system and the system stays the same. I still can't afford a house. I did everything right.

I did a degree and I'm working in Costa and living with my parents and thinking about the tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt that I've got. And there was one reader who wrote in and said, the only people that really seem to speak to me, Isaac Polanski and Gary's economics, everybody else is just fighting amongst themselves and saying the same thing. And I think they feel really let down by politicians and like they've not been listened to. And now that these problems they face, the fact that jobs aren't paying them enough to move out of their parents' houses or buy houses of their own, were avoidable. I saw other polling companies are available, and I was looking at some UGov polling. And this question was fascinating. Do you feel lucky

to have been born when you were? And it asked all age groups from 18 upwards. So if you were born 18 to 24, so that's, you're now aged 18 to 24. 34% said that they feel lucky to have been born in that era. That's pretty low. 25 to 49, 46% feel they were lucky to be born in their era. 50 to 64, which I regret to tell you, Roy, that is now your era. 59% say they felt lucky. My generation, 65 plus 67%. Now that's quite a depressing finding. If you think that the older you get, the happier you are with the world that you're entering, and I do worry with all the challenges facing the Gen Z generation and now hopefully going on to produce the next generation, if that trend continues, we're going to have a very, very unhappy British population. Absolutely. And this idea that the

Baby boomer generation are the luckiest generation in history. When you look at the statistics and you look at what was possible for baby boomers when they were younger versus what's possible now, moving out, starting a family of your own, buying a house, getting a job, moving up the career ladder, moving up the housing ladder. You know, it's hard to argue with this idea that they might be the luckiest generation in history born at a particular time when our economy was changing and home ownership was on the rise for the first time in history and the world was opening up. Global financial markets were opening up. And then you've got what's happening today, which is wages that haven't really gone up since 2008, historically high house prices, student debt and a contracting

jobs market. And one of the things that the younger trip audience told us was that they do feel unlucky. We asked them to describe themselves. And unlucky was one of the words that came up the most. Vicki, one of the odd things is that in real terms, house prices are lower than they were in the past. And it hasn't had much effect on people's views. Now, that might be because house prices got so unaffordable that even now that they're lower in real terms, it still hasn't got anywhere within anybody's income. But some calculations suggest that actually house prices in real terms in many sectors of economy were higher in 2008, than they are now. And that many of the things that people talked about over the last 15 years

about dropping the price of homes has happened. Many people will find that they can't sell their houses for the prices they bought them from. But that isn't somehow getting through. Young people continue to believe that house prices are higher than ever. Well, that is true. And particularly in London, real house prices have fallen and don't I know it because I am affected by this myself. but the statistic or the bit of information you really need here is what's called the loan to income ratio. And because we had that epic house price inflation after 2008, when interest rates were nailed to the floor, but wages weren't really going up as much, we're now in a situation where even though we've had those real terms falls in recent years, particularly, what you need to be earning to be able to afford a home has been stretched.

So in the 90s, it was around four times the average income to get a mortgage. Now it's eight. So this generation that we're talking about, Gen Z, they are particularly impacted by that because they don't have very high salaries. But even with those real terms falls, the house prices are still really, really high. So it's whether they can borrow to buy. That's the problem. One of the most interesting slides in the polo for me was the one that was about what young people see as their key.

issues and what's particularly interesting is the issues are listed and then there are two bars. There's the 18 to 34 year olds who've been polled specifically and then there's the general population. Number one is inflation. Number two is immigration. Number three is the economic situation generally. Then the NHS and only when you get down to number five is it housing. And what really surprised me, education is in single figures. Crime is in single figures. Unemployment is in single figures. And I was all surprised that even some poverty and inequality, just 12% listed it as one of their three most important issues. So it suggested I would have put housing right up at the top, but clearly I'm wrong. Well, I interpreted the bars there as suggesting that perhaps

housing was coming under cost of living for people. Because inflation, the economy was so high up, I wondered whether actually young people were connecting that to their housing situation as well, rather than drawing it out on its own. But I was really struck by the fact that immigration came in the top three concerns, because I would have expected that to be something that older people over-indexed on. But one thing about this generation is they're very worried about their own situations for understandable reasons. And that might be leading to quite an individualised outlook. And that tells you, I think, a little bit about, of course, we've not seen the enormous swing to reform amongst young men that was being reported a couple of years ago. But it is true that

some young people have gone to reform. I was at Reform Party Conference in Birmingham last year interviewing young reform councillors. And their concerns about migration, immigration policy as a whole were very much in the vein of people coming to take the jobs that we need. And I think we could underestimate the impact that that issue has also had on a younger demographic. Vicki, one thing that is very tempting, I don't know, if you're a mainstream politician, labor politician, conservative politician, and you heard that younger people felt that everything was stacked against them

and that the only people who were listening to them and coming up the solutions were Zach Polansky and Gary Stevenson would be to try to argue that Gary Stevenson and Zach Plansky's economic policies don't add up. That wealth taxes have been tried all over the world and they've generally failed

and there's only two or three countries that have retained them, that many of their assumptions about how economics work are unrealistic, many of the promises they're making are not realistic, that solving these issues like housing, even when the price comes down, as you've pointed out, Vicki doesn't actually make it more affordable, etc. My guess is that that wouldn't go down very well. My guess is that if you were to sit with the people you were interviewing and say, no, I'm sorry, but, you know, the economics doesn't stack up and these guys are misleading you. People would feel patronized and insulted. But that, that, That raises a question, if it were true, just hypothetically, that the Labour or conservative

mainstream politician had a point that actually the Polanski-Stevenson economics is pretty out there, and they're a bit doubtful about it. How would you communicate that to a younger person? I think that's the challenge that the current government have got, and frankly, anybody who fills their shoes in number 10 after this, it's not the case that there are quick fixes and silver bullets, right? We have a problem with growth, even though the figures were a bit better at the start of the year. We need to grow the economy. We need to look at our jobs market. We have a problem that's been building, as we've just discussed for a really long time with housing. And this idea that you could just wave a magic wand, abolish landlords to borrow a green party policy,

and abolish freeholders and redistribute the wealth and everything would be okay is for the birds. But at same time, when I'm travelling around speaking to young people who, frankly, like, cannot visualize their life in 10 years time, 25 years old. And they don't know what the milestones of adulthood are anymore because they can't necessarily build their own life. I can see why those ideas cut through. And I think politicians need to find a way of communicating how tough things are, but also finding some solutions that are hopeful. And Alistair and I talked about this with Angela Rainer, you know, the workers' rights act, the renter's rights act,

so much in there for this generation, but it just wasn't packaged up and sold that way. So I think it's a communication issue. When Mike's continuing exchanges with Gary Stevenson, he keeps saying, Rory, that we should get this guy, Gabriel Zuckman, on the podcast because he thinks he does explain how wealth tax can work. But it's very interesting that West Streeting, who is clearly one of the people vying to be the next leader of the Labour Party, the next Prime Minister,

is talking about a wealth tax. And when we talked about policy solutions, Vicky, earlier, do you get a sense that this generation that Labour needs to win back, if they're going to become a two-term government, that there are policy solutions, or is there just a sense that they're the establishment, they've got the wrong vibe, they've got off on the wrong foot, and they're just turning away? or did you, both from your interviews and from the polling, do you take that actually a different approach and a different policy agenda could bring them back? I think it could, and I think that is borne out in the polling

about which leaders are more favourable and Andy Burnham coming up top. I think Andy Burnham is often underestimated. I've interviewed Andy a few times. I've been up to Manchester to see what he's been doing there, and he has focused on young people, the M-back, education focused on training young people in Manchester for the jobs available.

in Manchester. The B network, buses, making it affordable and easy to get around Manchester, his good landlord charter, which he announced before Labor had their renter's rights bill properly moving. Going out with Andy is like, the only other politician I've ever been out and about with that you get the same response to is Boris Johnson. People stopping him in the street, wanting to chat to him, how are you doing, catching up about something they spoke about a few weeks ago. And I think that is because he has done things for the community and people recognize that. And even when you speak to people in the south of the country who you wouldn't expect to be such Burnamites, they really, really recognize the things that he's done in Manchester.

And for the policies of a mayor to cut through like that, I think that's really interesting. And I think it suggests that he's speaking in a way that resonates with what people are concerned about the policies of someone like Andy Burnham do cut through. And I think one of the mistakes, actually, I think the Tories made this mistake too, is not talking about policy in terms of what it will actually do day to day. I know Labor are trying. I've seen it on TikTok and I've seen it on Instagram. But for some reason, Andy's really managed to communicate that, just in terms of the actions and the words. Look, he's done a great job as Mayor of Manchester. Great to Manchester, no doubt about that. But in a way, the fact we've all

seen in the last few days, he's had to already slightly having to recalibrate message. He had to put out a statement essentially to try and calm the bond markets. And this is what happens when you get you when you step up, you get all sorts of different pressures coming in. But what else have you learned in the last few weeks when you've been doing this about what politics is doing wrong with regard to young people's appreciation of it? Because I see this all the time in schools. there's a real interest, there's a real passion, but there's a disconnect. And I just, and personality is a part of that, for sure. And it's interesting, the three you mentioned at the top, Bern and Polanski Farage,

they're all in different ways, very good communicators. But beyond communication, what is politics doing wrong? It is policy. I know that sounds so boring and lots of my colleagues in the media don't like policy. They like the politics. They like the big fights and the challenges. But young people are way more engaged with what they need to build a life than, I think, older people realize. You know, we heard during this series from young people who had side hustles, multiple jobs, because they were trying to save money and think about how they could get ahead.

We heard from young people who were picking particular degrees because they thought it would get them a job. We heard from young people who were looking at the policies being announced on tax. writing into us about the triple lock. And obviously that is a political hot potato that nobody is in a rush to pick up. But they are smart. They're educated, one of the most educated generations in history. This is not about throwing them something shiny that doesn't really mean anything. They want to know what wholesale reform of our systems look like. Fiki, final one from me before we close. AI is a massive threat to jobs. We're talking today just the moment where Zuckerberger has announced that he's getting rid of almost 10% of the employees at Meta, Facebook.

You will see very, very quickly huge layoffs in call centers and software development, in white-collar jobs, hiring, etc. How are people responding to that? And why was that not number one on the list of people's concerns? It's really interesting that it didn't come up. up in the polling. We're racing towards this iceberg, Rory, with the jobs market, as you've correctly identified. I was in a job centre in Birmingham on Thursday shadowing the youth unemployment team. And what I saw was young people who desperately, desperately want to work, they are looking for jobs, they want to work in hospitality, they want to work in engineering,

and they're applying, and they're not hearing back. And then at the other end of the scale, we've heard from graduates who are maybe working in a temporary job, they won't be coming up in those unemployment statistics, they won't be showing up in our job centres. But the jobs that they're looking for in professional sectors are just not there. And what happens now and how our welfare system copes with it, I think is a huge unknown. And that's really troubling. And that is one thing that the reader and listener response is really flagged. I'm worried about AI. Nobody's talking about it. I can't get a job. Nobody knows how to get me a job. And I think Alan Milburn's Neat's report, that's not in education, employment or training. I think that that's going to do

a lot to highlight the issues with the system. But I was talking to him just before I came on with you this morning. I can share a little preview of what he said, you know, we need a huge system overhaul in terms of supporting people into work, not just managing economic activity. And if more jobs do disappear from the market, I think that the welfare system is going to be hit with a tidal wave that's just not prepared for. And as we saw after 2008, it will be the youngest who are impacted the most. I mean, I graduated in 2010, so I remember graduating into a jobs market where suddenly all the jobs we'd been told we were working towards had disappeared. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that we're about to see that again.

And, you know, the trip listeners know that and they're worried about it. But what is the solution? Vicky, thank you very, very much. Now, we've talked a lot about Ipsos, which have provided loads of fascinating graphs and charts that paint a real picture of how Gen Z will vote. And we'll share all those in our newsletter this week with some writing from Vicky too. So sign up for the newsletter for that. Much more. Just follow the link in the episode description.

our Gen Z series is a member series, but we've created a student subscription, which is £20 for the whole year. Just go to the restispolities.com and enter your university email at checkout. And question time tomorrow. We're going to talk about Cuba. We're going to talk about Ben-Gavir and these horrible treatment of people who are trying to get aid to Gaza. We're going to talk about reform and whether reality is catching up on them. And I am going to finally answer that question about whose is the most evil hand I've ever shaken. and it's not Putin. Very good ass,

look forward to it. Bye-bye. See you soon.