The Rest Is Politics - 552. Trump's Red Card Saga and Germany's Far-Right Machine

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

What does Trump's shocking red card intervention reveal about how he wields power? Why doesn't his corruption seem to hurt him politically, despite adding $2.2 billion to his wealth in a single year in office, while so many Americans struggle to get by? Is Germany's firewall against the far right about to fall – and is the billionaire owner of the Telegraph pushing it over? Join Alastair and Mehdi Hasan as they answer all these questions and more.  __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Ben Rhodes by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. 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. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. 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. Sponsored by Lloyds. Get the account that offers more. You've earned it. See how Lloyds can help you make the most of your money. Search Lloyds Premier. £15 per month fee refunded when you meet the eligibility criteria. T&Cs apply. UK residents, aged 18+. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Kieron Leslie Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are seeing two very different Americas right now as the USA celebrates his 250th birthday, which is the real America and which will endure. Will it be Trump's America, a country being reshaped in his own image in pursuit of naked self-enrichment, where a man who has blatantly never actually watched a real football match in his life can abuse his presidential power to try and succeed in getting a red card suspended? Or will it be the country that the American people are showing off to fans flocking to the US from all around the world? They're welcoming, friendly, loving the internationalism and getting behind their national team so which America will endure. To answer that question with Rory on his silent retreat this week, I am delighted to be joined by the Never Silent Anglo-American Medi Hassan. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to two. 200 pounds below the off-gem price cap. Plus, they've just launched a new referral offer that can bring your bill down even further. What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get 50 pounds towards your next bill. So it starts with one conversation. No price draws, no chance, no complicated reward scheme,

just the power of one smart recommendation that rewards you both. And remember, energy prices are more volatile than ever, but don't wait for rates to spike again. Switch to fuse in just three minutes and move to cheaper energy designed to help you and your friends cut bills. So don't just listen to another price cap story. Switch to fuse, save up to £200 and get trip plus free with code. Politics at fuseenergy.com slash politics. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year.

Someone else said that last year too. A round of Jamison, ginger, and lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. Added Jameson to your match day lineup.

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and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Aleister Campbell. And I'm Mehdi Hassan in Washington, D.C. Mehdi, thank you so much for being there. we are going to talk about Washington, D.C., or more generally about the United States,

250th anniversary since independence, and also this extraordinary round that Donald Trump has created within the World Cup. And then we're going to talk a little bit in the second half about something you and I talk about a lot, which is the relationship between media and politics. And we'll be looking at in relation in particular to a lot of the stuff that's happening in Germany. But first of all, let's kick off with football, no pun intended. And it is such a pleasure to be able legitimately to start on football. Because this is a subject that my regular podcast partner freely admits he has very low down his list of priorities. Now, last week I said I was genuinely surprised that Donald Trump had engaged so little, barely at all,

with this World Cup since he started. Well, I spoke far too soon. Their star player, Valara and Balagan, gets a red card. Trump cannot resist getting involved. More typically cannot resist telling everybody that is involved, and he's asked his FIFA pet and his Peace Prize creator, Gianno Infantino, to take another look. Q the whole world, enraged,

Q. Belgium destroying the USA 4-1. And even my partner Fiona, who rivals Rory in her lack of interest in football, came up with a belter this morning when she said Trump has made Belgium great again. Yes. So, Medi, what do you make of a vote? it. And is Trump actually getting any of the blame for the defeat, as I believe he should? No, Alistair. The Trump faction will never blame him for anything. They didn't even understand why the world was upset. For the last 48 hours, most American pundits on the right commentators,

trolls, etc. were doing the nonsense about, well, you know what? We're the post-powerful nation. We managed to make it happen. Who cares what Belgium thinks, not understanding or not caring that the rest of the world were outraged by this ridiculous intervention from Donald Trump. And I think, you know, I had liberals defending the Trump intervention because when it comes to stuff like this, the patriotism takes over. And I am an American, as you introduced, about Anglo-American. I'm a British American. I'm supporting the England football team, as I have done for 40 years. But I'm also, obviously, I also sat down to support the U.S. men's national team last night on Monday night. And it was bad.

It was not just bad on the pitch. And there's a whole debate to be had about whether Trump got inside these players' heads. It was their worst performance of the tournament by a country mile. But also the mockery, Alistair. I mean, Trump, as ever, makes a mockery of the United States. And you see the Belgian team's Twitter account putting out a picture saying overturn this, the Belgian team dancing to the ridiculous Trump dance. And as Fiona says, make Belgium great again, forced Donald Trump basically forced the world to support Belgium.

Who the hell ever voluntarily supports Belgium? But in this case, people did because they were annoyed about the clear. corrupt intervention from Trump. Yeah. Rick Wilson, Alist, the former Republican strategist, never Trump are now. He wrote a book a few years ago. And the title of that book, I believe, sums up the Trump phenomenon more than anything else.

The book is called Everything Trump Touches Dies. And I think that is the phenomenon. Anything he gets involved in, anything he touches, anything he's around, gets ruined. He ruins it for everyone. Well, look, you and I, we must be very careful not to passionately and aggressively agree about every single thing. But we both have pretty profound Trump derangement syndrome. or we're very, very proud of that.

But I like to call Trump discernment syndrome. Fine, fine, or realistic Trump assessment syndrome, maybe, something like that. But the reason why I'm serious about whether he gets the blame is because Belgium have not actually been playing that well. He definitely, as you saw from the dancing, as you say, and all the rest of it, he added to their motivation. And it is quite something for two things. One, as you say, virtually the whole world supporting Belgium, right?

It's not like Brazil. It's Belgium. And secondly, Sep Blatter, with whom the monification of football is so closely linked, him coming out and basically saying, this is an outrage. Quo Vardis FIFA, as he said. And you mentioned the thing about everything he touches. My algorithm at the moment is just endlessly sending me pictures of pictures of Scottish football fans, Norwegian football fans.

Today it's all Belgian stuff, right? And one of them was a guy, an American guy, in the crowd, in the stadium yesterday. exactly doing what's saying what you've just said. He said, everything Trump touches, turns to shit. You did this, Trump. And he sort of raised his little finger. We've interviewed this week, Roy and I are leading. We've interviewed Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's former foreign policy speechwriter. And he posted this, in fact, he's written a sub-state, but I'll just read you a very short extract from it, written in the wake of this. The failure of powerful actors to play by the rules and the absence of guardians to enforce the rules is why the world is in the chaotic mess that it's in

right now. That is why we run competitions like the World Cup, which is supposed to be a respite from the harsh realities of our time, a competition where a victory emerges within an agreed amount of time with agreed rules. Now the World Cup feels like, well, the world that we're living in, where corrupt and powerful people make opaque deals above the heads of the people and the US tries to dominate anything in its way. And even better, Mary Trump, member of the family, he casts a shadow over everything. He can only win if he cheats and he thinks that applies to everyone. I think that Mary's point, I know Mary and Ben well, I agree with Ben's geopolitical metaphor. This is a metaphor for the US right now, clearly. The president comes along and decides to bring his brand of

politics, intimidation, corruption, thuggery, intimidation to the World Cup as well, because it's the only way he knows how to deal with any kind of problem or challenge. And I think, you know, when Sep Blatter, a man so associated with corruption, says you're too corrupt, that is a problem. I mean, Sett Blatter is banned from attending any World Cup games until 2028. When he comes out and says, this is too much even for me, we've got to ask questions about the current FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who, as you say, is Trump's pet, the man who created a peace prize for him. But the Mary Trump point is very important about the casting of the shadow and the undermining. I think it's really, really important about understanding that he doesn't let people live in peace. This is my biggest. People say to me, why are you obsessed with Trump? Somebody on Twitter said to me yesterday,

why'd you have to make everything about Trump? It's the exact opposite. I spent my life wishing to get rid of him from my public and personal lives. When he lost in 2020, some people thought he was gone. After the insurrection, people had written him off, his career's over. The idea that he's back now and that I spend my waking hours and sometimes my non-waking hours thinking about this man, what he's doing next, how he's harming the country and the world. It's not a good thing. It's not something I want. I don't want him to be involved in the World Cup. I don't want him to be involved in the Olympics. Sorry, folks, just to remind you all, he's also got the Olympics. You know, luckiest man in the world comes back to office and gets to 250th birthday. The World Cup and the Olympics all on his watch,

kill me now. And he's ruining the Olympics. So the World Cup, he will ruin the Olympics too. Thankfully, the US team's out now, so he'll pay less interest, but he's still going to turn up at the final. And as you say, the idea you said, you know, last tweet you thought, ooh, he's not involved yet. He was always going to get involved. But the funny thing is, number one, he does not watch football. He actually says in the press. conference, I didn't even know what a red card was, which is classic Trump, but he shouldn't have got one. And number two, the bragging about the fact that you did this, there's always been corruption associated with FIFA. Multiple governments have pressured FIFA and used FIFA.

I just did a series for Zetao called the Dark Side of the World Cup. We looked at Mussolini in the 1930s, the Vidal regime in Argentina in the 1970s. This is not new. Corrupt authoritarian governments using FIFA as a fig leaf for sports washing, all of that. What is new, is they never did it out in the open like this. Trump just is happy to be brazenly, openly, authoritarian, crooked, corrupt, whatever word you want to use. And I think that is the fundamental problem here. This idea that he can just come along and to go back to Ben's point, say, who cares about the rules? It's all rigged. By the way, one last thing, Alistair, he said yesterday, if we lose, we'll just say it's rigged like 2020. Yeah. And he did it with that sort of little smirk.

The other thing, we're going to talk lots about the press, because that's kind of your world, the media, in your world and part of my world as well. Just on that thing about what he said in the White House yesterday, is there no journalist there who's ever going to just say, sorry, excuse me, how can you pretend to know about football when you've just said you didn't know that if you got a red party, you're banned? Or, excuse me, have you just said that if America lose this game, we'll just say it was rigged?

Why do those people never interject in a way that pushes back? Can you explain that to me? No, I cannot explain it, Alice. It's the bugbearer of it. It's the bane of my life. I spent decade criticizing here in the United States. I criticized it when I worked within mainstream media, NBC News and MSNBC. I criticize it now when I'm independent media, Zetaio. It is deeply frustrating. It's why journalism and journalists have such a low rating, not just on the right who say they're fake news, but amongst liberals. It's why so many people

tell me they cancel their New York Times subscription to become Zetao subscriber, because people are frustrated that the media has dropped the ball again and again with Trump. You mentioned that press conference. I tweeted the same thing. I tweeted the same thing yesterday, saying, why is no journalist asking him about Balagan being a birthright citizen? Is that obvious question to ask the president? You say he's our best player, Mr. President. But under your rules, he wouldn't be playing tonight.

He wouldn't be an American. His mother literally was a tourist, birth tourist. She didn't even have the intention of giving birth. She came on holiday to New York with her husband, a Nigerian couple from England. Flight attendant wouldn't let her on the plane. She was seven months pregnant. She gave birth to flow in New York,

flew back when he was three months old, I think. grew up in England, never grew up in America. Under Trump's rules, had the Supreme Court not stepped in, we would not have a future balligan. So no journalist on this, ask him that question. No journalist asked him, do you know what the F you're talking about, as usual? You know, no one ever asks him, Alistair, his lack of knowledge. No one ever asks him a question, yes or no question. What's your opinion, Mr. President? No one ever asks a question that exposes his fundamental lack of knowledge about anything that he's commenting on. And finally, on the cheating point, yes, it goes to the heart of it. All the media is. has moved on from the 2020 election interference from the insurrection. It's seen as old news. And yet he dredges it up every time. He brings it up out of no way yesterday and says, we'll just say we cheat. Somebody could have said, oh, so you accept them that the 2020 loss was a loss because you're saying if they lose fair and square in the football, that'll be rigged as well. One last thing, I'll remind everyone. People say, oh, you guys on the left are obsessed with Trump and his election claims. It's not just the left. When Donald Trump lost to Ted Cruz in the Iowa

caucuses in 2016, his reaction was to say, say Ted Cruz rigged the Iowa caucuses. He's never accepted defeat at anyone's hands. The point about Balagan as well, his story is extraordinary. Because I mean, and, you know, he's quite low-proven. He plays for Monaco. He's not kind of, you know, he's a very, very good player, though he had a terrible game against, well, a poor game against, Belden. He was barely in the game. But I was, somebody sent me this morning, an American friend sent me this morning, a stack of clips of people on the right addressing this issue of the, the birthright thing. And including Stephen Miller, and we'll maybe talk about him when we get on

to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's book, Stephen Miller is essentially saying, these people are the scourge of America. If you're going to come on holiday and you're very, very pregnant, then if you drop your baby when you're here, you're never going to be in America. And if you're doing it just so as you get welfare, and we should probably put in the in the newsletter a clip of Balligan speaking. because, I mean, is he straw to this World Cup, either to do very well. But if you think that they could and should have had him and the Lise, you know, but there is, he sounds like a South London kid.

That's what he sounds like. I mean, he could have played for England or Nigeria, but he chose the US. Yeah, yeah. The middle line, by the way, just for listeners in the UK, viewers in the UK, to understand how bat shit crazy the American rights. I think sometimes people don't quite get it.

You guys have your Farages and your lows and your Kemi Badenov. I don't think you quite get how unhinged the American right is when the birthright citizenship decision came down from the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court said, actually, we're going to go against Trump, very narrowly, by the way, and say that actually birthright citizenship is explicitly laid out in the Constitution. If you're born in the U.S., you are an American. The reaction from the right led by Stephen Miller was so unhinged that one prominent right-wing commentator suggested, suggested as an option of compulsory sterilizations of foreign women to avoid them from giving birth in this country. Miller himself was asked on TV, should we start checking women coming into the country to see if they're pregnant before we give them a visa? This is the insanity on the American right. Now, on the 250th anniversary more generally, I assume you weren't invited to any of the big events, but you follow them.

Not like Nigra Farage, I did not get an invite. No, Nigel Farage. That in itself is quite interesting that these people on the right in the UK are so keen to celebrate the independence of America from Britain. Rupert Lowe was in Texas doing a show and he was putting out pictures saying, Happy Independence Day. Exactly. Yeah, if we did that, if, Alist, if you and I did that, went to France or Germany or India, if I went to India and celebrated Indian independence with my family, extended family there,

it would be like, oh, go back to India. That's where your loyalties lie. Yeah, or you're obsessed with this sort of colonialism, a shame of your history, etc, etc., etc. But just on the general sense of how that felt, as I said right at the top, you know, it does feel like there are sort of various Americas competing. And the America of Trump, the one that he set out in his speech at Mount Rushmore, where clearly he wants to be seen in the same bracket as Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, the four that are carved into the rock there. That America feels dominant and powerful because

that's what we see. But when you're living there as you do, and I know you're in that world, so maybe it's an unfair question, but is the other America that I talked about, is that still real? Do you still feel that it's there? Is it still got a presence and a power? Oh, yes, very much so. I do unfortunately live in D.C. in the belly of the beast, so it's all very up close and personal, but I spend a lot of time with non-political people. And the beauty of the United States, why somebody asked me recently, are you more hopeful about the US and the UK? And I said, yes, weirdly, even though the challenge against democracy is much bigger in the US than it is in the UK, even though the threat of political violence and the proliferation of guns much bigger in the U.S. than the U.K.

I would say I'm still more hopeful about the future of the U.S. simply because of the vastness of this country. It is very hard, again, to explain to people who have not visited the U.S. This is a continent of a country. It's just such a big place that you travel up and down the country as I do regularly, and every state is like a different country. Every community is doing its own thing. And therefore, Washington, D.C. and Trump still doesn't at the local level have the same poll and the same impact. as, for example, Westminster or London do in the United Kingdom, where it's very much focused on

the capital city, and it's a much smaller, more crowded, congregated place. So the US has space, which allows people to do what they want to do. And there's a lot of resistance to Trump. Even now in his second term, his poll ratings are at their lowest ever. He's now more unpopular than he was, even the day after January the 6th, according to some polls. So, you know, 60, 70% of the public are against him. So just in sheer numbers, the majority of Americans do not agree with what's going on. The big issue is, are the people of power against him? And that's the fundamental divide right now. It's not about fundamentally left and right. It's about the powerful versus the powerless, even liberal institutions, which stood up to him in his first term, in the second term,

we've decided to roll over, the big universities, the big media companies, the big law firms. They have all kind of bowed the knee to Donald Trump. And that has, obviously, Silicon Valley at the front, the big tech firms. And that's the real challenge. But ordinary people, no, ordinary people, I don't think have changed. I think, you know, There's a small minority of Trump voters, MAGA voters, whose brains are being rotted by the day because of the algorithm, because of social media. I think Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have a lot to answer for. Historians will, if we have historians in the future, we'll ask questions about what role these tech bosses played in manipulating and brainwashing and inciting the public. You see, the other thing I was looking at some polling on the issue of corruption. Huge issue.

But it strikes me as almost beyond belief that it's not damaging even more than it is. you know we learned last week that he made 2.2 billion added to his own wealth in his first year of his second term and his own son saying well in the first term he tried to play by the rules brackets even though he didn't and he got no credit for it got all the heat so let's just sort of let's just do it and then i saw a poll that said 68% of americans think that trump is corrupt okay that's more than two thirds that's a lot of people still a third who clearly can't believe the evidence of their own eyes But then I saw in the same poll, when I read down a bit, 85% think that Congress is corrupt.

So Trump is less corrupt than Congress. So he's benefiting from the sort of both sides are as bad as each other view of the world. Now, is that shifting at all? Or are the Democrats still in as deep a mess as they were? The Democrats are certainly in a deep mess. In terms of the both sides and that is a media phenomenon, I do fundamentally blame the United States media for approaching it in that way. It was an old-fashioned kind of knee-jerkers.

response from the media to always treat politics as a sport between two teams and you're the referee and you're kind of trying to be neutral in between the two teams. But, you know, the example I give both to Democrats and to the media is if one of the teams is openly cheating, is picking up the ball. If you've got a football match, and I mean football, not soccer, if you've got a football match and one team picks up the ball and starts running with it in defiance of the rules, A, the other team is under no obligation to keep just kicking the ball. And that's why I say to Democrats, you've got to fight fire with fire if the other side is doing, you know, breaking all the rules. And B, the referee's job is not to say, well, both teams are to blame for this. No, the referee's job is to call out one side. And I think the media struggled to do that. And that has allowed the American public to carry on with this, you know, plague on all their houses. Alist, you know, there's a populist moment, there's a popular moment,

all sorts of issues have led into this populist moment. People don't like the people in power, incumbents across the Western world. And it's very easy to do a kind of, they're all at it. They're all corrupt. And look, by the way, there are lots of corrupt Democrats, money. in politics is ruining politics across the board here in the United States. But the idea that both sides are the same is fundamentally absurd. One side is openly anti-democracy. The other side for all its many faults is not. One side, for example, let me give you a very current, pertinent example. Graham Platner, who is a Democratic candidate in Maine. As we speak, I don't know, by the time we finished taping, he may have pulled out of the race. He's the Democratic nominee for the Senate in the crucial swing state of Maine, a state that could go Democratic in November. It could be the key state that gives Democrats to Senate. He has been critical.

incredibly accused now of sexual assault. Every prominent Democrat, including top former supporters of him, have come out and said he must stand down from the race. He probably will stand down for the race. It's a matter of when, not if. That doesn't happen on the Republican side. On the Republican side, the president of the United States was elected after being found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of his peers in a civil trial in New York City. And yet he was elected for a second term. So this both side's bullshit is really causing a lot of problems when it comes to America. And corruption, By the way, just one last thing on corruption. I think it's partly the both sides of them.

The other reason Alistair Trump gets away with this is because he cultivated this image as a corrupt dude to begin with. So a lot of people kind of price it in. They say, well, that's who he is. You often hear that's the best defense from his supporters. They don't just deny the claims. They don't deny he's lying. They don't deny his crap.

They say, that's who Donald Trump is. And that's why we voted for him to shake things up. He's a businessman. That's the kind of nonsense defenses they offer. The good news is that's not transferable. I don't think J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio will get the similar pass. And I think it's sui generous to Trump. The other area where we see this both sides thing is the erosion in both sides and the confidence in both sides through Trump's continuing obsession with you already mentioned it, the election denial.

So just recently we've had 260 FBI investigators have gone into Fulton in Georgia. You know, they're reviving the idea that the election in Georgia was rigged. And there's a guy I was talking to says that, and I hadn't really thought about this. In doing that, they're sowing doubt in a way that actually helps them more than it helps the Democrats. Because the Democrats come out, they're being accused of rigging the election, the Democrats. But then the Democrats attack Trump for what he's doing. Thereby, they're saying that these elections are being rigged as well. So you're both sides in the end conspiring with the lie that people rigged elections.

think that and you so when you say fight fire with fire, I think this is where it's so, so difficult. And, you know, we're going to talk later about you, you interviewed Maximilian Kriar, the very, very, very right-wing German politician. When do you get to a point where you actually say somebody that I wouldn't have platformed before, now I will? When do you get to point? Let's take the issue of election denial. I've talked, I've heard you before saying, I will not give a platform to somebody who denies. the election. Right. That means you can't talk to Republicans, presumably, because most of them. Which is why I had to drop that. I held on to that for about three years, Alistair.

I had that as a hygiene test when I was a host at MSNBC. I told my team we're not going to book any Republican who's an election denier, which means you basically can't book Republicans. Right. Because they're all election deniers now. The few who were not have been cleared out from the party. Donald Trump reasserted his control. Maybe if Ron DeSantis or someone else, Nikki Haley had won the primary in 2024, they might have been able to move on from it. But Trump has an iron grip on the party. It's now. a condition for being in the party. Every judge they nominate, Alice, I don't know if you've seen the hilarious, well, not hilarious, but, you know, black comedy hearings on Capitol Hill

when a judge is nominated and a Democratic Senate says, did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? And they refused to answer the question. A judge. Someone going for a judgeship will not answer because they're scared that Trump will pull their nomination. So this is the America we live in now. Yes, I can't have that hygiene test anymore because I'm a journalist who needs to interview people and there's, you know, no one left if you kind of have those hygiene tests. And you're Right, but just to go back to your point about fire versus fire, I'm not saying that Democrats should break the law. I am saying that you need to forget about norms. For too long, the Democratic Party was the party of norms. We can't do that because we've never done that before. There's no precedent for that. That would be violating the norms and the decorum and the decency of our politics. It was Michelle Obama, who I'm a great admirer of, going and giving that speech and getting huge applause and saying, when they go low, we go high. No, no. When they go low, you go lower. That is what we have to do in politics right now on the left, because the right have no standards left. They're not following any norms. Alist, let me give you one obvious example. When the Democrats, when Biden was in office, there's a thing called the filibuster in the

Senate, which allows the minority party to block the president. And the Republicans used it to block much of Biden's agenda. And a lot of us said to Democrats, get rid of the filibuster. It's not in the Constitution. It's not that. Get rid of it. No, no, we can't do that. It's part of American democracy. It's part of our heritage. It's a convention. And guess what? Now they're not in power. Trump and the Republicans are threatening every day that they're going to get rid of the filibuster. So this idea that you, this idea that you, you can just kind of play along and everyone will respect the rules. Trump has made it very clear. His understanding of politics is a mob boss understanding of politics. His understanding of football

is a mob boss understanding of football. And you have to respond in kind. The other thing that really struck me again this week was the issue of pardons. Pardons, it strikes to the heart of the sort of corruption of the American soul in so many ways. So he pardoned a load of people this week. Some of them not serving very heavy sentences, but they're all for offenses against the Clean Air Act. Now, the Clean Air Act, as you know, is a big part of the American sort of fight against the climate crisis. Of course, he wants to reverse all that. But he actually said that these guys were jailed for trying to fix their car. Okay?

In other words, they were jailed for pretty serious offenses related to emissions from exhausts, okay? Yeah. But on a kind of industrial scale. Jailed for trying to fix their car. And then he also pardoned another donor. And, you know, I checked with a friend in the States that it didn't even make the media. another donor gets a pardon. It doesn't even make the media anymore.

You're probably the only person covering it right now. He is the master fabulous. He's the master at making up stories. He makes these excuses up. He bullshits. He gashlaps. This is the problem. And the corruption story, the pardon story and the corruption story are inextricably linked, right?

So we've had lawyers now tell the media publicly. There's been stories recently. Lawyers saying in our circles, white-collar lawyers know, If you pay a million, two million, five million, you'll get a pardon. Right. It's just an accepted system now. And again, the pardon power is corrupt on a bipartisan level. Presidents of both parties have done dodgy things. With pardoned, I wish we could amend the Constitution and get rid of that pardoned power. The public don't like it. It's abused all the time. But Trump's taken it to a whole different level. He's pardoned over two terms, 70 fraudsters. On day one of his presidency, he pardoned every single January the 6th rioter insurrectionist detainee convict.

Even his own vice president said he should only pardon the nonviolent. ones, Trump said, F it, pardoned them all, right, according to Axios. And he pardoned everyone. So this is the abuse of the pardoned power. He's pardoned people who have donated to his campaign. He's pardoned he's pardoned friends of his. He's pardoned. He's pardoned. But who have business links with friends he does know. And then when he's asked about it, to go back to the point you and I raised earlier about why don't people ask you about the red card about him not knowing about football? When he was asked about the binance guy, the crypto guy who he pardoned from China. I forget his name. Trump said, guess what? I don't know the guy. I don't know anything about the case. All right, then why'd you

Pardon him? Answer, because he does know him. And he's really got big into crypto. And crypto accounted for 1.4 billion of the 2.2. Isn't it funny that it's crypto that's at the forefront of the corruption allegations against Donald Trump and Nigel Farage? I mentioned the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swamberg. Fionno and I were in France last week, and we were on driving, listening to it, is one of those books. It's a very good book, and it's clearly very, very well research. But you have to stop. You have to keep going. for maybe half an hour, then you say, I can't do this anymore. You've got to stop. And the thing that really struck me, there is not a single nice person in his orbit. They're all, when you read it page after page after page after page, event after event, hour after hour, the kind of nastiness, the trivia, the horribleness of the lot of them, there's no niceness in it. And I just, that's what I find so sad, because this is the America that's being projected to the world. And then as we said earlier, there is this other America.

I should say if we'll go to the break, many, we've had our trip reporter. I don't know if we have, this podcast has its own reporting team, obviously. She's called Izzy. She's been in New York, and she's been speaking to people from across the country, asking on this 250th anniversary what they think about Trump and the state of America. And she actually had people crying to her about the state of it. She had Latinos who were scared to give their names,

and she had others who were describing the demise of the state of the state of it. the American dream. My favorite quote about the American dream this week was from Yen Stoltenberg, former Prime Minister and now Finance Minister of Norway, who said that the American dream is more alive in Norway today than it is in America. And I think there's something in that. I saw that. That was in Nick Christoph's piece, I think, the former NATO chief. Correct. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And he's got a point. And Scandinavia definitely has more upward mobility and meritocracy than the US under a corrupt Trump. The Haberman Swan book is a phenomenon. I interviewed Jonathan recently about it. And you're right, that is a key distinction between the first and second

terms. In the first time, he at least pretended to have some quote unquote grownups around, people who might know what they're doing who weren't just MAGA ideologues or grifters. You know, your Jim Mattis is who was Defense Secretary and a few others, handful of people. I remember writing a piece for the new statesman ahead of the inauguration or just after the inauguration in 2017. And I called the Trump administration at the time a cackistocracy, government by the worst people. And I feel like I was a little uncharitable to that administration because it's really this administration that is truly, truly cacistocratic, Cash Patel, RFK Jr., J.D. Vance, go down the line, Stephen Miller, just the worst people, Christy Gnome, just the worst people he

surrounded himself with. And I said this when I was at MSNBC years ago, that the fundamental divide in American politics today is not just left versus right or up versus down, rich versus poor. It is decent versus indecent. Are there any decent people left in American politics on the right? I don't see any. They will hopefully emerge if you're right that we should be more optimistic about the United States than the UK. Well, I didn't say I'm optimistic about the right. I don't think they'll emerge on the right. Okay. They'll emerge elsewhere. I think the right is a lost cause, especially with the algorithm. Okay. Now, I also received a fascinating text from a mayor after we briefly discussed, Roy and I devolution on the podcast last week. And Vicki

Spratt, who presented a brilliant miniseries on Gen Z for us. She's going to be writing. about that this weekend in our Sunday read to get the newsletter pieces. You sign up to the newsletter via the link in the episode description. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about Germany. Country, you and I are both very, very interested in, some really interesting things going on both in the political scene and their media landscape too. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Premier. Life for many people is very complex and the political goings on in the world do not make it any easier. Trust in institutions, trust in politics, trust in business. It's hard to find. It's terrifying, isn't it? I mean, if you think about what could Trump suddenly wake up and do

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For just 499, try our new 30-day beginners pass and uncover generations of family stories. No experience necessary. You've got questions? We've got ancestors. Offer ends July 22nd, 2026. Visit Ancestry.ca slash beginners for details. Terms apply. Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

And me, Mady, Husser in Washington, D.C.? Now, Medi, Deutschland, I mentioned in the first half that you interviewed Maximilian Krah. Now, just to those who don't follow German politics as closely as you and I do, Maximilian Kra is a major, a senior figure in the alternative for Deutschland. But he's also, I think, one of the more, tell me if you think I'm right or wrong, I think he's one of the more intelligent in that he understands there is a risk to the survival of the AFD if they go so far right that a constitutional court says, sorry, you guys are against the Constitution. And there is a case pending or a case being developed against people like Bjorn Hucker in Turing,

in Turingia, against some of the young alternative Deutschland people, some of whom have just been elected to the board of the AFD. So let's just talk a little bit about that. First of all, how long and hard did you think before you sat down and interviewed him for Al Jazeera? This is in your head-to-head program. Yes.

And secondly, what did you make of him and what do you make of the strategy that they seem to be pursuing, which is, we've got to admit it, is being successful in electoral terms and also being successful in splitting this view that the firewall that keeps the other parties well away from the AFD may be fracturing, not least under pressure from senior figures in the media that we'll talk about in the minute. Yeah, so the big question of whether to interview him, to go back to our early discussion about election deniers, and this is so depressing, isn't it, Alist, that we live in a world now

where you can have to drop all these hygiene tests and walls as a, as a, as a, journalists as I am and have to ask questions of people you don't really want to have to platform. But yes, I mean, years ago, I've been presenting head-to-head on Al Jazeera English, I think for about 14 years now. We launched it in 2012 with Richard Dawkins, if memory says me correctly. And we discussed with teams over the years. I've had discussions with producers. Should we have someone on from the AFD? And we always said, no, we don't want to platform this party too close to neo-Nazis, too far right. Why would we do that? We don't want a platform fascist. But it came to a point where the AFD, whether we like it or not, are so now in the German mainstream, are so, you know,

enshrined in the political system of Germany. They are leading in the polls, sadly. They are leading in the polls for the Saxony-Anhalt big state election later this year. They're the second biggest party in the Bundestag, in the German parliament. So at what point do you say, you know what, we need to actually hold them to account, just like everyone else? The old system of saying, we'll just ignore them and hope they go away. That hasn't worked. Now, that doesn't mean, I think you should platform them everywhere and anywhere. I don't think you should be having chummy interviews with them on breakfast TV. But I do think if you do it, you've got to do it in a sustained challenging interrogatory way, which is what head-to-head was built for. So we

kind of slightly arrogantly said, okay, if anyone's going to do it, we should do it because we have a format, a one-hour, sustained interview with, I have a very good research team that helped me prep, very in-depth questions. We have a panel of experts to support me. We have a live audience, which always holds a politician's feet to the fire in a way that even journalists cannot. And so we're there, let's have him on it dead. And he agreed to come on. He was actually a last minute change because the previous guest from the AFD, Marcus Froenmeyer, had just come back from Russia and had got into a controversy in Germany as being too close to Putin. And he pulled out of our show and then Maximilian Cry agreed to join our show. Cry is an interesting character because

he's part of what is basically a neo-fascist party. But he has a smile. He has a charm. He has a sense of humour. He has a handkerchief in his pocket. Yes, very stylish. Says, I have Muslim friends. I love the Turks. Very, you know, in that way, very Trumpian. In fact, he's been described and as described himself as Germany's Trump. He's not the leader of the party. That's Alice Vidal, who is a very interesting person herself. She's a lesbian co-leader whose partner is Sri Lankan. And again, they wheel out her partner to say, we can't be racist. Our leader's partner is brown. But this is a party that is very racist, is very Islamophobic. He didn't have any response to my questions about their Islamophobia other than to try and kind of pretend he hadn't

heard about it. But it is a very dangerous moment for Germany, because as you mentioned, for people who are not aware, the German system post-war allows for the constitutional court to say this party, this movement can be banned as neo-Nazi as a threat to democracy. And the German intelligence service said the AFD is an extremist group. And when they gave that label, the AFD went to court, the court stepped in and paused it while they investigate that label. So right now we can't call them a far-right domestic extremist group because the German courts have put that classification on hold while it's being investigated. But I would point out, 72% of Germans think it's an extremist group according to the polls, but they might end up in power.

Would you, for example, would you do an interview with Björn, who's the leader in Turingia, who said actual Nazi slogans? Where a court has said you actually can describe him as a neo-Nazi. Would you platform him? It's a tricky one. Probably not unless I have to. let's say he's on the verge of becoming Chancellor of Germany and I'm offered an interview with him. Would I take it? Yes. But I think we've got, as journalists,

we've got to decide when and how is the right place and the right peg and the right location to do these interviews. My worry is that you head down an American path where you just platform everyone all the time and treat everyone the same. I think that's a mistake. And even in the British media,

you know, there's some interviews who do tough interviews. There's some who don't do tough interviews. And if you are going to have these very controversial figures on, you really have to be prepared. My problem is a lot of journalists aren't prepared for interviews. So if you're going to, you know, I would advise against a random British journalist just turning up to interview Carr, because he'll run rings around you. He knows the subject better than you do. You won't be prepared for all the, you know, the gaslighting.

Do you think he left that interview with you feeling that he had achieved his objectives? Because I felt, I watched it the other night, and I felt he, I abhor what he stands for, but he did quite a good job of pretending that the things that you said he stood for, he didn't really stand for them. and you can't hold him responsible for everything that every member of the AFD has ever said. And I thought you did it quite cleverly. I agree. I agree.

He's a very clever guy. And it was an interview. There's some interviews I walk away from, Alistair, where I'm like, yeah, that was a slam dunk. It was very easy. And that clip goes viral because the guest made a fool of themselves. This clearly wasn't one of them. He's clearly a smart guy. And it's interesting, I asked my team later, I wonder what a Marcus Froen might interview would

look like, because he doesn't have the charisma or humor. And this is the thing about fascists. The funny, charismatic ones are the really dangerous ones. The reason why Donald Trump is still a singly more dangerous figure than J.D. Vance is because Trump, whatever you think of him, has charisma. He's able to make people laugh. He's able to dominate a room. JD Vance has the charisma of a wooden chair. So I'm less worried about J.D. Vance as a threat to American democracy. Even though he's more plastic chair. He's not even wood. He's not even wood. So cry definitely has that charisma and that enables you. I mean, my defense of

that interview would be to say, what I was able to do, I hope, was to put on record what the AFD actually stands for, rather than what they think they stand for. So, for example, there's an exchange in there that people can watch where I said, well, what do you think about the fact that your manifesto talks about Muslims the way that Hitler talked about Jews? And he said, oh, you can't just bring up Hitler. I said, yes, here's the evidence. I bring receipts. Your manifesto says Islam is an alien religion. Muslims don't belong in Germany. This is exactly the language that was used about Jews in De Stürma in the 1930s. And he said, oh, I don't know anything about that manifesto. I'd never heard about that manifesto. So it was very important moment there to put that stuff on the record.

And again, this is about appealing to the broader public. I'm not going to change his supporters mind or his mind, obviously. And you mentioned the firewall with Mertz. I mean, that is the big question. Will the German mainstream political establishment say, well, actually, the public loved the AFD? So we've got, we just got to get on board with them. And I think some of us has to resist that and say, well, actually, 72% of Germans think

the AFD is an extremist group. They are polling number one, but they're polling at what, 30% in a, in a PR electoral system? In the east, even higher than that in some places. Let's just turn to the firewall, because this is the other big story that's been going around the German political scene in the last few days. So there's a podcast called Venzi Wusten, if you only knew. And they reported that Mertz in March had had a meeting with the CEO of Axel Springer, big media group, which now owns the Daily Telegraph, a guy called Matthias Dupfner, who I think sort of fancies himself as a bit of a German Murdoch, but he doesn't want the baggage that goes with the sort of Murdoch label. But he's very, very interested in his own views and pursuing his own views.

They bought Politico. He regularly writes in Politico. And what this podcast, Venzi Wustin, what they alleged was that Mertz and Dutfner had a huge route because Dufner said was pressuring Mertz to drop the firewall, essentially to say, you're not going to be able to fix our economy unless you work with these people. because, et cetera. And according to this report, Mertz said, once is enough, meaning we had this back in the 1930s. And then the meeting ended with Duffner saying, you're going to regret this. Now, denials, some of them a bit in the sort of non-denial denial kind of phase, but very strong denials from Dupner. So I've been looking into this guy, and I've been looking in, I read

built and I read Velt fairly regularly. I don't think you need a podcast revealing that he has these views. You can see it in the newspapers. I then watched a podcast that this guy, as I say, has his own podcast. He interviewed Nigel Farage. Now, Nigel Farage is a British political figure. Nigel Farage, for various reasons, best known to himself, doesn't want to come on the rest is politics. But he goes and spends, he goes and spends an hour talking to this guy who's asking him questions like, do you think you're ready to be Prime Minister? What would the relationship with America be like if you were Prime Minister rather than Kirstama? Sneger, snigger, snigger. And so I then, I'm starting to think this guy clearly is the sort of person who probably is

pressuring Mats, even though he's denying it. And as I say, there is, this is a special interest I think now because he's got this British newspaper, the Telegraph as well. But then I read some of their editorials, I think they're pushing in this direction. Now, they're entitled to do that, if that's what they believe, but say you believe it, say you believe the firewall has to go. Don't sort of, you know, do this behind the scene stuff and have, they had a poll of their readers, a survey, and it looked to me like one of those where you had to kind of, you had to volunteer to give your view. And a very large majority said they thought the firewall had had its day. So I just wonder what you think is going on in the mind of somebody who's a major media owner in Germany,

now in the UK, and how difficult that might become for a German Chancellor who's not very strong right now. Well, first of all, to be careful what you wish for when you say they should just say openly, I think they will very soon. I think they're building to that moment where they will just very openly mainstream the AFD and say, why wouldn't we do a coalition with them? This is what the public wants. And I think we need to have a broader conversation as well about the role of mainstream liberals and conservatives in mainstreaming the far right, whether wittingly or unwittingly. You know that in Marxist political thought on the left, there is this line, a derogatory line, which is scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. This idea going back to the Weimar

Republic in the 1930s that it was mainstream liberal centrists who welcomed Hitler and the Nazis into the political system thinking we can control this guy. And I think, you know, you don't want to repeat of that, obviously, where you think Matthias Dopfenan and Frederick Merit think we can control Alice Vidal and the AFD. I'm not saying merch should do it. I'm saying, I'm saying if that's what Dupinber believes. Yeah. And if that's what he wants his newspapers to do it, fight for it.

I mean, look, this is a guy who, just to give context to your viewers and listeners, this is a guy who sent text to his senior editorial staff ahead of the 2020 election, saying we should all pray for Donald Trump's re-election, right? This is a guy who runs Politico, which is kind of in the U.S. I know you have Politico in the UK now as well, but in the U.S., it is seen. as the gold standard of kind of impartial Westminster Beltway political journalism. He bought Politico in 2022. He writes in Politico's staff have objected internally to him turning their outlet so partisan and going out and giving these partisan statements about politics, about Islam, about Israel.

I should also point out to your listeners and viewers that if you work for Axel Springer, one of the core values, it's called one of the essentials is to defend Israel's right to exist. you must support Israel in that way. Otherwise, you're encouraged to resign or you're fired. And I think we can't ignore the role of Israel right now in the German political debate. We've seen German mainstream politicians act in a very authoritarian way towards pro-Palestine protesters, towards Jewish Germans, anti-Zionist Jewish Germans who've been protesting to genocide. I don't know if you've seen us to the horrific scenes of German police dragging nonviolent,

unarmed people, women off the streets. That kind of authoritarianism. You know who that helps in the long run? It only helps the far right. same thing in the UK with Palestine action. When you act in an authoritarian way as a center-left or center-right party, the ultimate beneficiary of that is the far-right, because that's where the political spectrum moves towards. That's where the energy and the center of travel goes towards. So in Germany, it is very worrying that they're on the rise. It is very worrying that this media mogul who owns

the telegraph, owns Politico, owns, I think he owns built as well. He has this power to kind of set the political agenda in these places, is backing Nigel Farage. And Alist, if you look at all these far-right parties, you will find these billionaire media and tech moguls behind a lot of them. You will find Elon Musk backing the AFD as well. You will find Rupert Murdoch with his fingers and a lot of these pies. You will find Matthias Dophener now supporting a lot of these groups. He's obsessed with Islamism. He's obsessed with Israel. And that is not, you know, and that's why he's supporting a lot of these far right parties. I should point out, a lot of these far right European parties traditionally have been very, very anti-Semitic. But in recent years, they have reconfigured themselves as super pro-Israel.

Before we leave Herr Dupfner, though I think we'll come back to him because it'll be very, very interesting to see whether he plays the same sorts of games in the Telegraph, which is fair, you know, well to the right, I would argue, of the papers that he's in charge of in in Germany. But the other link, which you may or may not be aware of, is that his son, and I know you shouldn't, you know, dobb the sons in with the dad the whole time, but his son, Moritz, was chief of staff to a gentleman by the name of Peter Thiel, who I think you'll know very, very, very well, and that Peter Thiel is now investor, a big investor in Dutfner Jr's big startup. And it is interesting how this guy has, I think, changed. I mean, he used to be, somebody you see very traditional German business in terms of the way he dressed. He now dresses very much in the kind of Silicon Valley, Andy Burnham, black vest type mode. I think he now sees Musk-Tiel Bezos as his milieu, as opposed to, you know, the kind of the German business class. So I don't think he like the kind of German Murdoch label, but I think that's kind of what he's becoming. Do you think he wants the German Musk label?

I mean, Musk has interfered a lot in German politics. He's spoken at the AFD rallies, just like he spoke at Tommy Robinson rallies. Peter Thiel is a deeply disturbing figure. Also, former PayPal ally of Elon Musk, part of the quote-unquote PayPal Mafia in Silicon Valley. Teal spoke at Donald Trump's first Republican convention in 2016, a gay right-wing tech boss who is very Christian, talks about the Antichrist all the time. thinks Greta Toonberg may be the Antichrist, just to get a sense of our nutty Peter Thiel is, had dinner with lots of white supremacists that came out a few years ago, wrote an essay about 15 years ago saying, I've come to the conclusion that freedom is incompatible with democracy.

He's a libertarian, he's one of these guys who wants to build a colony on Mars or in the middle of the ocean where there's no government and no regulation. And these are the guys, unfortunately, running a lot of our politics on both sides of the Atlantic, worryingly. Somebody got hold of some of these sort of, you know, private comments, which included free the West, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riffraff. The Aussies, that's the East Germans, are either communist or fascists. They don't be in between disgusting. I'm all for climate change. We shouldn't fight climate change, but adjust to it. And again, to go back to my point earlier, we can't talk about this stuff in a vacuum. When you read out that quote at where he's going

after Muslims and he's obsessed with Islam and Islamism and Muslim immigration, again, that is a mainstream issue, right? Mainstream politicians have entertained and promoted that idea as well, have said Islamophobic things, both Democrats and people in the Labour Party. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of us, not just for moral reasons, do you have to stand up to bigotry, but also for political reasons, because all you're doing is you're helping the Overton window move further and further to the right. I know this goes back, and this goes back to unfortunately your time in government as well, Alistair, where the Labour Party's position was, well, you've got to try and appease these people on the right. That's how you win them over. And it doesn't. When

you meet a fascist halfway, all you do is emboldened that fascist and the fascist narrative. And that's what we're seeing across Europe right now. I mean, on that, though, do you think, so for example, you and you and I, on kind of as we're both sides of the fence with politics, but it is interesting. So, you know, this podcast, we have this motto disagree agreeably. And we did. When we first mentioned, for example, that we, you know, might like to have Nigel Farage on, now, as it happens, it's never come about because he's not, he's not. he's not agreed to do it. But lots of our listeners said, no, we don't want you to do that. We don't want Nigel Farage. And then we said the same about Rupert Lowe. I threw out an

invitation to Rupert Lowe. Likewise, he said I was a traitor. Don't know what I've done to be a traitor, but I'm a traitor. And therefore, he didn't want to do it. But likewise then, lots of our listeners and viewers said, no, we don't want you interviewing people like Rupert Lowe. But I'm kind of with you on this. I think you have to engage. I'm not, you know, and the Björn Hooker thing is very, very interesting because I think I would like to sit down with it. But Alistair, how, though? That's the question. And I do no disrespect to your podcast. And I do a podcast, but I do think we live in an age of podcasts. And a lot of politicians do enjoy the fact that we live in an age of podcasts. Just look at what Donald Trump did in the last election. He avoided a lot

of tough interviewers, but he did a bunch of podcasts. He did, you know, the Joe Rogans and the Theo Vons and all of those guys, the Andrew Schultz, I think he did as well. He did a bunch of podcasts. And a lot of those podcasts, especially the right-wing podcasters, it was all just fun and games, right? And politicians now like doing podcasts overdoing Sunday morning shows or tough political interviews because they don't get asked follow-up questions. They're confronted with a podcaster who doesn't understand politics or doesn't have, you know, a team of people writing forensic questions for them. And I think that is a problem, right? As much as I love independent media, I run an independent media company, I have a podcast team. I do worry, though, with my kind of political

nerd hat on looking at political history, if politicians are able to find these safe spaces, fine, If you had Nigel Farage, and I'm sure it would be a very lively interview. But my worry is if Nigel Farad just pops up on podcasts as a whole, you're not going to get the kind of grilling or investigative journalism that you might get in more traditional mainstream outlets. And that's my concern. I'm for grilling these people. I'm not for kind of quote unquote engagement for engagement sake. And I do think the agreeing disagreeably thing, there has to be a line for that, right? Do you agree disagreeably with a neo-Nazi, with a fascist, with a racist, with a Holocaust denier,

with a climate change, did I? At what point do you say, I can't actually agree disagreeably with you? I can't disagree agreeably about whether up is down, hot is cold, black is white. Reality, right? And I think that's where we're going to have these kind of tortured conversations as the right gets more deranged, more disconnected for reality. What do the rest of us do? And my position is you still hold the people in power to account, but you try and understand and engage with their followers, for sure. You need to understand with ordinary people. Ordinary people who are voting for the AFD. who are voting for reform, who are voting for the Republican Party, we can engage with them and try and understand, are there any legitimate grievances?

Are they, have they been misled? Is there something that actually is powering this populist anger that we need to take seriously? You see, look, I think if I were sitting down to interview somebody, well, let's say Rupert Lowe, let's say Rupert Lowe did it, I would want to give him the opportunity to say where he comes from, his background, how he made his money and all that. and I'd like to do that in a very conversational way.

I think then when it came to what I think he stands for and how repellent I find some of those views, I would want a listener to be aware of that's how I felt, but I wouldn't want that to dominate the interview. I thought you did it well with Krah, to be fair. I'm not just blowing smoke at your back cycles, you're there. I thought you did it well because anybody watching that, nobody would ever think that you were giving him.

giving him an easy ride, nor were you just sitting there saying what you think about him. You were confronting him with the reality of things that he had said and done, the things that other people had said and done. Now, and you were sometimes, because you didn't have time, you were letting him slide away with stuff that you, in your heart knew he was being disingenuous, obfuscatory, etc. You can't cover everything even in a phone phone. No, you can't. And you end up sort of boring ass off everybody because you're just going down sort of a little rabbit hole. Another example I would give when we interviewed Alexander Vuch, president of Serbia. Some people think we were too soft on him. But I actually, I don't agree with that

because if we'd have just, again, just gone at him again and again, I was right about Kosovo, you're wrong about Kosovo, let's revisit Kosovo, what have you? I just don't think that informs debate. You also interviewed the president of Syria, who until very recently was a wanted al-Qaeda leader. Yeah. And look, I'll be very honest with you. Thank you for blowing smoke up my ars. It makes this very awkward then to say this in response, which is there's a lot of people who are going to be mad at me for coming on the show with you because of Iraq, right? You and I fundamentally disagree on Iraq. I think what you did in Iraq was horrific. I think what Tony Blair did was horrific. That's something you and I will never agree on. And if we were having an Iraq debate, we'd probably get

very, very lively now where we'd probably be shouting at each other. And I think that's, but I still come on the show. First of all, I don't think you're a fascist or a traitor, obviously. Rupert Lowe, these people on the right just throw around these ridiculous phrases. But, you know, if I, I wouldn't come on this show to do this show with you if you were just abusing me as a Muslim, right? All I'm trying to say is we all have our red lines and our hygiene tests. And, you know, some people have draw the line here. Some people draw the line there. And I think, you know, for me, I'm in a position now where I was more hard line on my lines, as it were.

But now I just want to talk to as many people I can, within reason, right? Within reason. I still got to, I've still got to have some kind of hygiene test. Like, if you ask me, would I have Tommy Robinson on my show? No, I don't think there's any value in having Tommy Robbins. on for an interview. It would only help him in his cause. It's not like we'd have any kind of good faith conversation. And I do think that's an important criteria when we judge who we're going to talk to. Can you have a good faith conversation with that person without it turning into a grift or just

a shouting match or abuse or without it turning into a vehicle for one of the guests to just push their bullshit agenda? And I think that's a key question we have to ask ourselves. But I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think when people come into the comments of your show or my show and say, you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have done this. I've got that all the time. It's very easy to say, you know, for the armchair pundits. It's very difficult for those of us who are in the middle of this crazy political moment trying to work out. Well, who do we talk to? Who do we ask questions to? What audiences do we address? And I think it's a work in progress, Alistair. Yeah. On the Tommy Robinson point, over in Australia, a guy called Carl Stavanovich. I don't

if you follow this, but he's like a big deal TV presenter for the breakfast program on 9, Channel 9, the Today program. I think Pierce Morgan was on his show recently. I may have seen a No, Pearce Morgan's talked to him recently. Yeah. But the reason Piers Morgan was talking to him is because this guy has had to leave his job on Channel 9

because he did a very tame interview with Tommy Robinson on his own podcast. I missed that. Miss that. Yeah. Medi has been lovely to talk to you. Thank you for saying you still disagree with me about Iraq. I'm stunned to believe that.

I'm sure you were shocked. I'm sure you were shocked to hear that revelation. Absolutely shocked. Although, as I said in our interview with Ben Rose, I do kind of, I still kind of have lots of soul searching about that and lots of other things. But I think this point, I do think, and now I'm glad that Zetio is coming to, you know, you've largely been based in the US, you're now coming to the UK. I do think we need more media that's just challenging, challenging of the media and more challenging of politics as well, which is kind of what we try to do from a pro-politics, pro-good journal. perspective. We do try to do that on the rest is politics, but I think it's good to have more of it around the place, because I do think that I hate the phrase of the mainstream media, but people know what I mean. It's in big trouble. It's in big trouble in part because of economics, in part because of people like Musk and Zuckerberg doing the vileness that they've done,

but also in part because I don't think they've really got to grips with the pace of change in the world and how we all need to adapt to that. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the plug for Zeteo UK, which we just soft launched last month. Great to be on the rest is politics. See you soon.