432. Trump, Starmer, and Gaza: Is The Tide Turning Against Israel?

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Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell, and me, Katty Kay.

Not Rory Stewart, clearly.

No.

Rory Stewart, as I said last week, is in Colombia, and so uncontactable is he that even though there has been this massive event in Colombia this week, the conviction of the former president, Uribe, who's been convicted of bribery, trying to stop a former paramilitary testifying against him.

I cannot get even a reply from Rory.

So, Katya, I'm very, very grateful that you've joined us from the Rest is Politics family.

Rest is Politics US no less.

Now, those of our listeners who don't know, just tell us a little bit about who you are, what the Rest of Politics US is, and how it relates to us.

Well, first of all, congratulations to Rory for being on holiday and being uncontactable in this day and age.

That's an impressive feat in and of itself.

Yeah.

I'm going to take a leaf out of his book.

So I host, along with Anthony Scaramucci, The Rest is Politics U.S., which we launched just over a year ago to cover all things American politics and these days all things Donald Trump in particular.

I guess we think of ourselves as your little sibling.

We're the kid on the block, right?

I mean, you know, you're the big guys and we're the little kids and we follow in your wake.

I think that's how we think of ourselves.

Well, I suspect you may, but I suspect Anthony Scaramucci does not.

But there we are.

You're no doubt used to dealing with very large egos.

You're high table and we're low table.

Let's put it like that.

Okay, very good.

Well, listen, thank you anyway.

It's lovely to see you.

And we're going to talk about Gaza a lot.

I think it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

We're going to talk about Trump in the greatest country on earth for a few days.

He was in Scotland.

He still is in Scotland.

Oh, I thought that was Switzerland, the greatest country on earth.

Oh, please do me a favour.

Oh, I see.

Okay, all right.

I have to revise my geography.

All right.

Scotland is the greatest country on earth, and Donald Trump has been

a very strongly held opinion by many people.

But he has been there giving Scotland a lot of publicity on his various golf courses.

We'll talk about all the stuff he got up to, trade deals, windmills, all sorts of stuff that went on there.

And I think if we've got time, we should also talk about President Zelensky, who's been an amazing leader for the last few years, but had a little bit of a faux pas,

as we we say in France, where I am right now.

And we'll talk about that as well.

But let's start with Gaza, Katy.

And you said on trip US yesterday that you felt it was breaking through in America in a way that it maybe hasn't been of late.

And I mean, just develop that a little bit for me.

Why do you think that's happening?

And also, I guess,

why has America been so, I susense, behind the rest of the world in terms of the public anger and revulsion at what's actually happening in Gaza right now.

It's been interesting being over in Europe this summer quite a bit.

And early on in the summer it was clear that there was just much more focus on the situation in Gaza in the UK and in Europe than there has been in America.

It comes up occasionally in moments when we see the images, but really not much else.

But what these photographs of the children specifically that we've seen in the last couple of weeks have run on the front pages of American newspapers.

And whilst the American press is pretty monolithic and pretty inward focused, particularly the political press, which has been able to think about nothing but Jeffrey Epstein for the last two weeks, those pictures are so powerful, Alistair, that even Americans who are thinking about their summer holidays and thinking about the price of gas and thinking about Jeffrey Epstein, they can't have failed to notice them.

And what's made me think that it's broken through is that I've had members of Congress reach out to me to tell me that their constituents are calling them about this.

I spoke last night with Senator Angus King from Maine, the independent senator from Maine, and he wanted to call me.

He wanted to talk to me.

Now, often, you know, as journalists, as you know, from being a practitioner of politics, we're the ones calling you, right?

It has to be something important for you to want to reach out to us, that you want to get your message out if you're a politician.

And Senator King was very keen that I should see a very powerful statement that he had put out

on the situation in Gaza.

What he was saying is that America should suspend all aid to Israel of any kind as long as there are children starving in Gaza.

And he's very firmly putting this the responsibility of the Israelis.

I spoke to him on the phone after he sent me that statement.

He is saying that this is a disproportionate response by the Israelis.

And he points to Donald Trump, who even says, look, Donald Trump has changed his position.

Three weeks ago, there was Donald Trump saying, bibi Netanyahu could do whatever he wanted with Gaza.

And now we have him.

We'll talk about that up in Scotland and what he said yesterday about the fact that there is starvation.

So if politicians are starting to get their constituents make phone calls to them during their summer recess, they're all back now at home, right?

All these members of Congress, all these senators are back at home now.

And their members, their constituents and voters are calling them saying that they're outraged by this.

Now, maybe this is an independent senator and it was a Democratic congresswoman that I spoke to.

I think there's probably less response from Republicans at the moment, but it's breaking through.

I mean, how can Americans ignore those photographs?

You know, many Christian voters, how do they ignore those photographs?

The only thing I'd say about that is that it does feel like it's becoming more and more difficult to ignore, and yet it has been ignored substantially.

I was talking the other day,

my only real experience of famine was back in the 80s when I was on the Daily Mirror, and I was in Ethiopia.

And I can remember talking to a guy there who worked for the Red Cross.

And he made the point, because you get there, and of course, there's a little bit of the sort of, you know, the white saviour arrives, and now we're here, or we know what to do, and what have you.

And he was making the point that actually it was already too late.

And I worry that that's where we are now.

There's a thread which I think we should put in

our newsletter.

A guy called Jeremy, I don't know how to pronounce his name.

I'm going to go with Jeremy Conyindik, and he's the president of Refugees International, and he used to be the USAID lead for disaster relief.

So he knows what what he's talking about in this sort of situation.

And I have to say, when I saw Donald Trump sitting alongside Ursula von der Leyen in Turnbury Golf Club, complaining that nobody had said thank you for the £60 million worth of dollars of food that they'd sent.

None of the European countries, by the way, gave.

I mean, nobody gave but us.

And nobody said, gee, thank you very much.

And it would be nice to have at least a thank you.

This is the guy who was slashed, demolished with the help of Musk, USAID, which prior to that, in these circumstances now, would be one of the lead organizations in this.

And Jeremy was making the point that we've now probably passed the tipping point and that we are now almost certainly going to see mass-scale starvation mortality, even if people do now get more food in.

And he was saying that, for example, he was saying that we're now in a kind of Sudan, Somalia-type situation, or Ethiopia, as I was in the, where I was in the 80s.

And he said that when he was in charge of these operations, you have to tie these things together.

Food aid, obviously, you have to have that.

Treatment for malnutrition, which doesn't just involve feeding children.

Healthcare, because he says that disease will now kill more of these people than starvation.

Clean water and sanitation.

And the Israelis made a big thing in the last couple of days of their switching back on one of the water supplies.

I mean, who switched it off and why?

I worry that this reaction, whilst welcome, I still worry it's too late.

And even yesterday watching Trump Catty with Keir Starmer, and

we'll talk a bit about these incredible sort of rambling, rote,

sort of crazy press events that he does.

Well, and the awful position he puts those other leaders in.

Absolutely.

But yes, we'll get to that.

But the point I was going to make is that he was there saying, yeah,

they look really hungry on TV.

Based on television, I would say, not particularly, because those children look very hungry, but we're giving a lot of money and a lot of food.

And it's like,

how has he missed that?

Does he only could he only cope with things on television, not the warnings that have been given for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks?

I mean,

obviously, there's a gap, right?

A delta between something breaking through and the action that's taken and whether that action is effective.

And we haven't really got to the action part of that yet.

But I think it is worth noting,

perhaps for particularly for people who are listening around the world who aren't kind of steeped in American television in the way cable television as a public service, I do this for you.

For Gaza to be on American television networks is in and of itself different.

It's not there very often.

I do this morning show, Morning Joe, that I'm on two or three times a week.

We've had the situation in Gaza and the starvation on on every programme, leading the programme in the last couple of days.

That is a sea change, Alistair.

And yes, has Donald Trump understood fully what this implies and what needs to be done and how much pressure it's going to take on Prime Minister Netanyahu to do what is needed?

Probably not, but he's in a very different position.

Now, Donald Trump could say something today and then change his mind tomorrow.

We all know that.

But what he is saying, the point that these members were making to me is that he is saying something different.

So yeah, he arrived saying, why haven't we been thanked?

You know, we gave 60 million and we haven't been thanked.

And I wish somebody would thank us.

But there he was with Kiostama the next day or a couple of days later saying, yes, there is starvation.

So you can see even in the course of a couple of days that there has been a change in his language.

Now, if a change in language leads to a change in American policy, he got there late.

And it's ridiculous to say that starving people should be thankful.

Clearly, they're starving.

They have nothing to be thankful for and they shouldn't be, you know, have to grovel to the United States or some benevolent benefactor to say thank you.

But the important thing is whether there are results and whether there's a change in American policy, right?

And that comes from people calling their members of Congress, from Donald Trump saying there is starvation, from it being on the nightly news and the morning news, as people are waking up in the morning.

And that has changed in the last week or two.

You see, what I find very depressing about that is that, and I mentioned the fact that Trump said, you know, you can see on the television as if that's the only reality.

If you do have organizations like USAID, if you do have a State Department that is functional, if you do have

you listen to the people who actually know what they're doing in relation to delivery of food and medication in disaster zones, then it wouldn't, you'd be ahead of the media.

Whereas what you're describing to me is a political and media culture where it only kind of matters if the media are talking about it.

And then once they're talking about it, how do we get them to stop talking about it so as we can get them back focused on something we want to focus about?

And that to me is a kind of utterly dysfunctional political leadership, which ultimately is going to fail.

Yeah, I mean you get to the point I know we had a conversation last week, you know, when we were talking about this show, Alistair, about the institutions, and you're right, there's been such a degradation of American humanitarian and international institutions, I mean, globally, but also within the United States.

And the level of sophistication of understanding of what's needed is not reflected in what Donald Trump is saying.

I mean, this idea that you could just airdrop enough food in.

Clearly, that's never going to happen.

That's pretty performative.

It's not even, as you said, it's not just food at this stage.

But there is some understanding.

A member of Congress sent me a video of an amendment and a speech she made on the floor of the House in which she is laying out all the steps, the nutritionists that would be needed, the nutritional paste that would be needed.

So

there are people in Congress, you know, on the foreign affairs committees who understand what is needed.

They've got backgrounds in this.

They've seen the experience of what's needed.

But you have to, I mean, in the end, what you have to have is a political will to push the Israeli government, right?

And that's where even, okay, so he sees it on television.

And yes, he also said, yeah, it's coming down the wires.

I mean, I don't know, nothing's come down the wire since I was a rookie reporter in Japan in the 1990s.

I mean, just like it doesn't happen like that.

Donald Trump is out of date.

We know this.

But if he's moving towards a position where he's more willing to put political pressure on the Israeli government, then that is probably the best chance we have, precisely because, as you said to me, the international institutions and organizations, both American and foreign, that should be doing this have been degraded.

Because it's not just that USAID has been degraded.

All of the Save the Children Fund, UNICEF, Mercy,

all of the aid agencies that were reliant on USAID funding have also been degraded because of the actions of the Trump administration.

Right, and that's been that my point is that's been a deliberate strategy.

So we talk about the international community.

The international community is a combination of governments, of the United Nations, of international organisations, of the aid agencies in this context.

They have been deliberately undermined.

And one of the things that I find so troubling, and I don't, you know, I understand why they do it, but when you watch von der der Leyen operate the way she did, Keir Starmer operate the way that he did yesterday, where frankly you would have thought, if you were looking in from outer space, you'd have thought, well, this is Trump's country here.

He's the host of this.

You know, he's the guy, sort of, he's even got an American flag on top of his Scottish hotel.

He'd probably agree with you.

It's the greatest country in the world because it's a Trump country now.

When he's there, he thinks it's one of the great countries in the world.

And that's where his mother came from, of course.

But

the thing is that they've, between them, for different reasons, Trump and Netanyahu have got us to a place where they think, frankly, theirs are the only voices that count.

And that's why we have to sort of try and nudge Trump and cajole Trump.

And what you said there about his discussion with Kierstama, where yes, he appeared.

So, for example, I've just been looking at the American papers.

They're all saying Trump recognises starvation at a time that Netanyahu denies that it exists.

Fair enough, that's a shift.

Is that a shift?

Because it's what he's with Keir Starmer and he's kind of just moved a little bit towards what Kiers Thama has been talking to about.

And tomorrow, if he's on the phone to Netanyahu, he can go back to a different place.

It's so unpredictable.

And

if you get to a point where the only voices that matter are Israel, who are conducting the war, and frankly, with a communication strategy that

you have to be very, very wary of, and Trump, who is so kind of volatile and unreliable.

And meanwhile, UN, nowhere the big international aid agencies frankly feeling completely frozen out and this this Gaza humanitarian thing this foundation I mean

I hope people wish again we should put in the newsletter an interview Jeremy Bowen did in the BBC with a guy former American special forces who was there as part of it and says he has never seen anything so shambolic so amateur and so dangerous as what's going on at these food centers and Trump didn't really seem to know what was going on there at all.

Yeah, I mean, even when he describes it, right, he says, oh, well, there are the fences.

He repeats it.

He's very visual.

We know this about Trump, right?

It's not like he's read a brief on Gaza and the humanitarian situation and why there isn't enough food and why the food is not getting to the people.

He hasn't got the data on that, but he's seen pictures of fences.

And somehow in his mind, he's thinking it's the fences are the problem.

And that if there weren't these fences, all this food would get out from these compounds.

Now, I've been to food distribution places, a bit like you in East Africa, in famine situations, and you do actually have to protect the food in some way.

There has to be some sort of systematic thing, otherwise, you're going to end up with more people dying in stampedes.

The people who know this,

I don't know this, but the people who know this are the people who run these aid agencies and who run humanitarian aid programs.

The people who used to work for USAID knew how to do this.

The bigger problem here is that

we're reliant and kind of in this sort of

weird world of what Manouche Shafiq in the Financial Times over the weekend called G minus one world.

Kind of, it's not G seven, it's not G twenty, it's G minus one, it's the world without America.

We're reliant on policy being made by somebody who is who is volatile, who can change his mind, who responds to sort of on a slightly whimsical nature to what he's seen.

Now, I actually think Donald Trump, there have been several times that Donald Trump has responded to pictures of children.

He doesn't like pictures of suffering children.

It does, it has an impact on him.

It did during his first administration when the children were being separated from their parents in the family separation policy at the border.

He said very positive things about the kids who were brought into the country illegally by their parents, but brought in when they were very young, what in America are called the dreamers.

There is something in him, there's a kind of, there's a sentimentalism.

around children.

But so it doesn't surprise me in a way that he would see the photographs and respond and, you know, want this to be, he wants those photographs to go away.

He doesn't want to see those photos anymore again kathy it's interesting because you're saying that he he's very sensitive to pictures of the suffering it's not the suffering that matters it's the images upset him yeah yeah but that's he is upset yeah i know i get i get what you're saying yeah that's the wrong way around

it's kind of like you know what about trying to think about how do we address the suffering as opposed to how do we stop having to look at a picture of the suffering it's a very different thing and look at the difference in language that you know there was kier stama saying we are revolted.

Many Brits are revolted by what they see.

Donald Trump didn't use that language.

Not close.

He said they looked very hungry.

They looked very hungry and you can't fake it.

I mean, he's so conscious of media, right?

And images, again, is that idea that these photos could possibly have been manipulated.

But I think if there is a change, I mean, contrast this to what Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham said over the weekend on American television on Meet the Press, where he said, you know, the Israelis should bring Gaza down and do to Gaza what the Allies did to Dresden and Japan in the Second World War.

That's the opposite extreme.

And that's where some people on the American right are at the moment.

The very strong pro-Israeli lobby on the American right is there.

So Donald Trump is not where Lindsey Graham is at the moment.

He's on a different page.

You mentioned, though, the

pro-Israeli lobby.

Can I just ask you about it, but you obviously know these people better than I do.

So the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, these PACs, okay, that sort of fund politicians without them

contravening any sort of law.

You know, the third largest political action committee is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

And only 33 members of Congress did not receive funding from pro-Israel donors in the 2022 election cycle.

And interestingly, a lot of that money is going on centrist Democrats defeating progressives in primaries.

That accounted for 42% of all the spending that was there not long ago.

Right at the start of post-October the 7th, I remember having this really difficult row with one of my children, Callum, my son, and he kept saying, you know, what you people won't accept is that

the pro-Israel lobby is a massive thing and it's incredibly powerful and it stops people telling the truth about Israel.

When you see those figures, you start, yeah.

So, what is, how would you define the relationship between an organized lobby pro-Israel?

How much of it is driven by Israel?

How much of it is driven just by Americans who support Israel?

How well connected are they?

And how influential are they?

I mean, all of the above, really.

Yes, very, APAC is very influential.

It is a single-issue lobby group.

And there are not many.

I think it's the...

one of the biggest single-issue lobby groups.

And it is also, I think, the biggest single-issue lobby group that supports members across both sides.

So you've got very powerful gun lobby groups, for example, but they tend to support, give more money to Republicans than they do to Democrats.

APAC is different.

Its munificence is equally distributed between the two parties, and they are very strategic.

So the reason they're starting to support the centrist Democrats is that APAC is reading the American polling very clearly.

And the American polling, as Anthony and I were talking about on the episode we put out yesterday of TripUS, shows us that younger Americans are much less pro-Israel than older Americans.

And that's actually true of younger Republicans as well as younger Democrats.

There was a poll before October the 7th, about in the spring of before October the 7th, so four or five months before October the 7th, that showed that actually for the first time, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 were more sympathetic towards the cause of Palestinians than they were to the cause of Israel.

That's a huge shift in American public opinion.

And that predates October the 7th.

It predates the images that you and I have just been talking about in Gaza and the destruction of Gaza and the devastation there.

So if you're sitting in Israel, you realize what's coming.

Because as Senator King actually said to me last night, when those younger political act voters become political leaders and become members of Congress, American policy towards Israel will change.

And AIPAC realizes that.

And people in Israel who support APAC financially also realize that.

So I think there must be a certain amount of fear in Israel, there's a certain amount of fear in AIPAC, there's a certain amount of fear in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, and that's why they go particularly for, for example, centrist Democrats, many of whom I know and have received funds from APAC, because they need to try and stop the progressive wing of the Democratic Party from taking power as much as they can.

But even that's not going to be enough if these numbers hold across both parties.

So APAC is powerful, but not more powerful than a shifting demographic in the United States.

I just wonder what

is what do you think does work in terms of bringing pressure on Trump and also in terms of bringing pressure on Netanyahu.

Netanyahu right now seems deliberately fairly oblivious to anything that is not America.

So for example, even with Putin, you occasionally after a while get, you know, well, Macron puts pressure on Putin with phone calls saying so-and-so.

The E3 come together and say something about Russia.

You read and see and hear very little of people directly saying, we're putting pressure on Israel.

They're pushing pressure on Trump to put pressure on Israel.

So what do you think, from the Americans' perspective, what is the best way to put pressure on Trump to put pressure on Israel?

I think it's what we've seen.

in the last week.

The ceasefire they've been working on, they have tried, right?

I mean, he has sent Witkoff out there multiple times.

And the last time they gave up when they came out of Doha a couple of weeks ago and said, this is just not getting anywhere.

We can't work with Hamas.

So they have actually tried.

Donald Trump would love to have a ceasefire, and he'd love to have a ceasefire that holds because he thinks that's another of the things that he could put in his list, as he said this weekend, of the things that he's achieved on the world stage in terms of peace.

But in the short term, let's just focus on the kind of crisis of the moment, which is the starvation, and particularly the starvation of children.

I think it's what we have seen.

It's more, I mean, this is just awful.

It's more of these photographs on the front pages because he won't like that.

He won't like those images.

And there will be enough people in the kind of evangelical voting block that also won't like that.

People will start hearing about this in church on Sundays.

Members, Republican members will start to get phone calls from their constituents.

And you build a groundswell you know god i'm old enough to remember how bill clinton changed his mind eventually on bosnia and it was because night and after night it was on the television screens in american households yeah the snipers in sarajevo and that's what changes you know this i mean this is your field this is how communications campaigns work and uh as one member of congress said to me yesterday the trouble is we're only seeing what we see the israelis aren't letting international journalists in there and there's a heartbreaking statement statement from the AFP about how their journalists are starving.

So guess how many more photographs potentially there might be and how many more people are in this position, children are in this position.

I think that's what it's going to be.

It has to break through for Trump.

It has to break through visually and it has to feel personal.

It can't be somebody going to him and saying, this is a

policy around nutrition paste and nutritionists, and here's the data.

Yeah.

I must give a shout out.

I've already mentioned Jeremy Bowen, the interview that he did with the guy, the X Special Forces guy.

Jeremy Bowen did a really interesting piece last night because, and I think he's a, you know,

he's a really remarkable journalist, Jeremy.

And he was, you know, with these airdrops.

So the Jordanians and the Emiratis are doing some of these airdrops, and Britain is involved in that as well.

So Jeremy was on the plane that was doing the airdrop.

And it would have been so easy and so tempting for him to have done, you know, a piece to camera hanging out into the air and sort of watching this go by and here we go, help is on its way, et cetera.

Instead of which, he did a very, very measured rapport.

He used the word that you used earlier saying there's something performative about this.

You're seen to be doing something and that's good, but actually it's not really going to address the problem.

This whole plane only has as much as you could put into one lorry and there are these dozens of trucks that are waiting to get in, say they can't get in because of bureaucratic and security obstruction.

But he then made the point, he stood by the windows in planes, and he stood by them, they were covered.

Why were they covered?

Because the Israelis had said they did not want any filming from the air of Gaza.

And Jeremy Bowen described what he saw looking out of the window.

And it was really interesting because television, Trub, as you say, it's all about pictures.

And he was describing what he couldn't show you.

And he said, they don't want us to see what's happening on the ground and they don't want us to see it from above either.

And he was saying, these are places that I know, places that I've been to, and it is utterly raised to the ground.

And it's a horrific thing.

And I thought that was a really powerful way because when you talk there about Trump and pictures, am I being too Machiavellian in thinking that that is one of the reasons why Israel does not allow foreign media?

into

Gaza.

You know, there's part of me thinks, well, they don't allow them because they don't want us to see what they get up to.

And of course, in war, all sorts of stuff happens you don't necessarily want to see.

But I wonder whether actually they're thinking, you know, down the track, it's all going to be about the pictures.

And if Trump's sitting there and he doesn't like what he sees, then we're under greater pressure.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's a

when you phrase it like that, I don't think it's just Donald Trump.

I do think Netanyahu doesn't want anyone to see.

the level of starvation that there is in Gaza at the moment.

And we know that they've been playing FTSE, opening the border up, shutting the border down, opening the border up, allowing a couple of trucks in, not allowing trucks in.

So

the government's own policy to fixing this

has been completely inadequate.

And I think they realize that if anybody sees the pictures, there is some, anybody in the outside world sees those pictures, the risk to them on having to open up those borders and allow those trucks in.

And then for Netanyahu to have to respond, as Ben Gavir said this week, you know, this is just a hoax by Hamas.

We're just, if we allow more aid in, we're just capitulating and giving in to Hamas.

And he doesn't want that, right?

He doesn't want anyone to see it.

But I'm sure, I mean, look, Netanyahu has read Trump very well.

He has, he brought him along with the Iranian strikes by having a success of his own that Trump then wanted to be part of.

And in this position, it could...

It could well be that when he doesn't want people to see those photographs, the person he doesn't want to see those photographs is Donald Trump.

Final point, interview I saw with a guy called Dr.

Ahmed Al-Farah, head of pediatrics and maternity services at NASA Medical Complex in Khan Yunis.

He said there is not a single viable can of infant formula left in Gaza.

And he said some of the cases we're seeing resemble what humanity saw in ancient times.

And he said that there are the consequences here for an entire generation, including those who survived the immediate crisis.

So I guess we all have to hope it does stay on the American front pages.

Can I just ask you, though, something, Alistair?

Because you raised to me last week this idea that international institutions have been degraded and that was the strategy and that has left the response inadequate and I think that's right.

But isn't there more that Europe could be doing, that the UK could be doing without Donald Trump in this situation?

Or are you right that we really are dependent on this one guy whose positions can be a little mercurial when it comes to policy?

I mean, are there things that Europe could push Israel on further?

Definitely, definitely.

And I think actually we've all got media and politics, we've all got far too sucked into playing Trump's game.

Very interesting example.

We're going to talk about this after the break, but I'll just say this now about his meeting with Ursula von der Leyen.

When Trump sat there and said, we've given $60 million and nobody's thanked us and nobody else has given anything, she could actually,

to my mind, should have said, hold on a minute, let me give you the facts about how much Europe has been putting in to support this.

But where you're absolutely right, I think, is that Netanyahu, who

may feel is in a position where what Britain says doesn't matter, what France says doesn't matter, what Japan says doesn't matter, what Germany says doesn't matter.

But I think they were impacted by that foreign minister's statement.

Didn't change their view, but they they didn't like it when 28 foreign ministers came together-Australia, Japan, South Korea, most of Europe came together, Germany accepted, and said, This is an outrage, this has to stop.

These things, I think you have to keep doing them again and again and again.

And I think we've far too much, all of us, bought into the idea that Trump is the only guy that can move this.

Because if you are reliant upon Trump, you're basically accepting the international order has failed, the international institutions don't work.

The international institutions I feel really sorry for in this context are the aid agencies who are desperate to try to help and they just can't operate in the way that they should.

And maybe final word from my guy who's, and I must speak to him so as I can say to him, Jeremy, how do I pronounce your name?

So, Jeremy Kay, he makes the point, he actually did another thread.

He said that Gaza is not in crisis because it's somehow uniquely more complicated than other

conflict zones.

He said he's been involved in

the delivery of aid to places like Yemen, to the DRC, to Tigray, to Iraq, to Sudan.

It's always difficult, but we have not really seen that much in the way of famine for some time.

Sudan, Somalia, then you go back to others.

We're now seeing a famine, he argues, because of unprecedented obstruction of aid by the Israeli government.

Now, I know the Israeli government won't like to hear that, but this is somebody whose expertise and whose opinion I trust on these issues.

And I honestly think the Israelis to come out and say there is no famine.

It's all down to Hamas.

The food is there.

I mean, you know, get real.

You do not help your cause by

industrial scale lying about what's actually happening.

So shall we take a break?

Let's take a break.

And then we'll come back and find out why you think Switzerland is a better country than Scotland.

Well, that will take a while, but it's very clear.

Speak soon.

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Welcome back to the rest is politics UK.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, sorry, that still sounds weird.

No, no, no, Katie.

The rest is politics, US.

No.

The rest is politics.

Correct.

So I try, you called me out on this because when I'm on television in America, they started introducing me as The Rest is Politics US.

And it ended up as The Rest is Politics Us.

The Rest is Politicus, which actually was the best.

I thought that was quite good.

So then I realized these poor morning show hosts, I was just asking them one thing too many.

And in the end, they stopped using the name of the podcast at all.

And so I thought, well, we'll just make it easy for them.

It's six in the morning, poor guys.

It'll be the rest is politics.

And I do realize I have, I should, you should have patented the name or something, or you could sue me for, you know, taking over your title or something like that.

But anyway, I apologize.

It's fine.

But I thought the rest is politicus was quite good.

It sort of had a nice erudite feel.

Kind of felt very Latin.

Somebody else could go for that.

No, but I think this is the rest is politics.

We don't need to say what country we're from.

And also, because you actually do the whole world a lot more.

So this is the rest is politics of the world.

Anyway, welcome back, guys.

We're going to talk about Donald Trump, who has been up in Scotland this week, meeting the Europeans and meeting the British Prime Ministers, Keir Starmer, in these, what I think were these rather...

Can we just talk first of all, before we get into the content of the visuals and what it tells you, Alistair, of these leaders?

And they weren't, as we said in the first half, it looked like this should have been the Oval Office because there he was greeting them as if he owned the place and it was his country.

But they come in, both of them, Ursula van der Leyen and then Keistama, sitting there kind of, and you can see their minds working at a hundred miles an hour to think: how do I make sure I don't get derailed here?

How do I make sure this doesn't end up really badly for me, for my constituents, for my position with my constituents, whether it's European countries or British voters?

And Trump, meanwhile, is sitting there totally relaxed.

He doesn't really care what they think of him.

He's kind of freewheeling.

I mean, he may have decided in advance that he wanted to use the word starvation in Gaza.

But otherwise, he's going to say what he wants to say.

If he wants to lay in to the mayor of London, he's going to lay in to the mayor of London.

Doesn't bother him.

But they are sitting there like, I mean, supplicants is not really the right word because they're, it's sort of more.

It's like these.

overworking brains trying to think how do i do damage limitation here how do i avoid the car crash that could come my way from actually crashing And I found it excruciating.

I find it really hard to watch.

I find it very hard to watch as well.

And what was interesting, so let's just work a little bit through the planet.

Okay.

So, I mean, I've been involved in a lot of American presidential visits, not with Trump, but, you know, there is a sort of, there is a scale to the presidential visit that other leaders just don't have to deal with.

I think one of the reasons why Keir Starmer and today John Swinney, Scotland's first minister and von der Leyen on Sunday, will, as it were, have gone there rather than, so for example, Fiona said to me, Well, you know, why didn't Keir say, Let's meet in Holyrood, you know, or let's meet in one of the Scottish palaces, or let's meet at Balmanywhere.

And the thing is that you've got to visit.

So, Trump comes over uniquely mixing business and pleasure, bit of golf, bit of this, bit about talking about his mum, opening a new golf course, and what have you, and meanwhile, doing lots of phone work, Thailand, Cambodia,

von der Leyen, big trade deal.

But the security costs and implications are massive.

So for him to have landed in Turnbury and then said, Keir's to say, right, let's meet at the, let's meet in Glasgow, let's be at Edinburgh, more cost.

So they probably say, no, let's just, let's go and see him there.

Also, wouldn't he, he would want that.

He would want them to come to him.

100%.

And they want to do what he wants.

Right.

I think that is the dynamic that people find a bit troubling.

And then the other thing that happened yesterday was that Keir's wife, Vic, who's a wonderful person, and she goes there.

But of course, because Milani is not there, that picture looks a bit strange because there's Trump goes in the middle.

Well, if you're the person in the middle, you're the dominant one.

So there's Trump in the middle.

Starmer there.

And then you had this weird thing.

And I'd love to get to the bottom of this because, as you know, Katie,

I'm a player of the bagpipes, the greatest instrument of the greatest country in the world.

The guy who was playing, so normally, if I was involved in the planning of a media opportunity between the president and the prime minister and the prime minister's wife happening to be there, as it were, I would kind of make sure that there wasn't bagpipe music playing in the background, much as I love the bagpipes.

Added to which, the guy, I don't want to be too critical, but his high A was off.

That was

that's that is what Alastair Campbell took away from that meeting.

The high A was off.

Quite on it.

But what it meant was it was sort of surreal that Trump and Kirstama were talking about Gaza

whilst this bagpipe music was playing in the background.

And then fast forward to after the meeting,

sorry, this, I think it was 75 minutes it went on.

Kirstama sitting there.

Now, the other thing I know is about seating, right?

If you look at the Oval Office,

when Trump does a, like with Zelensky or like with Macron, and we've seen lots of them, Modi, etc.,

where does Trump sit?

He sits on the left looking out, okay?

If you see similar situations when Kierstam is doing these in Downing Street, he also sits on the left, okay?

That means that when you're planning those things, well, that is the president's seat.

That is the prime minister's seat.

Now,

so that immediately says, I'm in charge here.

Okay.

And then, of course, with von der Leyen, what was really interesting was that if you'd had a fact checker in von der Leyen's earpiece, they would have been kept quite busy.

But she just decided, I don't necessarily like the deal we've done.

I know I'm going to get criticized by German business, by the French prime minister.

It's come out really strongly against it.

The Italians are going to be a bit iffy.

The Spaniards are going to be worrying about pharmaceuticals.

So are the Irish.

I know that.

But I have had to make a judgment that rather than get hit by 30 tariffs 15 is better i'm going to swallow it and just sit here and i thought the the one the bit of wrestling that was really kind of almost bullying was when trump at the end said i could say this is the greatest biggest deal in history but i'll let you do that and he sort of leant out to shake her hand as if to say this meeting is now over that is the main point i blah dang but I'm basically saying it's you that's going to say that.

Yeah, and she's, I mean, she really, even more so, I felt sorry for her because clearly, as you say, the European deal, you know, I know from conversations with EU officials in Washington over the last few weeks that they did put together this plan of retaliation.

And there were member states that wanted to be much tougher.

And she has to bring together all of these member states.

So, you know, God bless her.

She's in a nightmarish position.

But she had chosen to go in there.

I mean, she's a tough woman, former German defense minister, had chosen to go in there and completely marshal all her emotions in that instance in order, and decided to swallow it.

She was going to swallow whatever Trump threw at her.

And in a way, I mean, when you said earlier, why didn't she push back on Gaza?

Trump, because of the whole trade war and the threat of these tariffs, has everybody, maybe not Mark Carney and maybe not the Chinese.

Let's see what happens with that meeting in Sweden and subsequent meetings.

But he has everybody in a position where

they're walking on eggshells because they're terrified of 30%

as opposed to 15%.

And they don't like 15%.

And we don't actually even know how much the details, my understanding from talking to business people in Ireland and

is that very vague.

And how much of it actually holds up, how much of this investment really happens.

But she doesn't want to be, she can't say by the way we've spent X on Gaza.

She can't do anything that might in that moment piss Trump off and potentially change the deal going forward because she can't do that for her European businesses.

Yeah, the only thing I'd say about that, I think there's more, look, it's a tricky, it's a really difficult position to be in, don't get me wrong, really difficult.

And she's flown in there.

All the hard work's been done.

They've crunched the numbers as much as they can.

She knows that he's not going to go over the detail.

He's just interested in the headlines.

Headlines are 15%,

700 billion on this, 650 billion on this.

You're going to buy loads of Boeing's planes.

You're going to buy loads of our gas.

And of course, you know, let's be frank, 15%.

They were going to buy the gas anyway.

And, you know, the planes, let's see.

Correct.

And they were going to buy a lot of the military stuff as well.

Yeah.

If I think one of the things that wasn't maybe brought out in a way that it might have been, one good thing out of this is it does actually facilitate the flow of a lot of military stuff from the US to Ukraine with the help of European Union rearmament.

I'd say that's quite a good thing in the Ukrainian context.

And maybe that's something actually she could have said.

I did think at the time that is something she could have said.

She could have said, and we're very excited that Europe is going to be working closely with the American defense sector, you know, to help our friends in Ukraine.

Yeah.

And of course, with the Kier Starmer thing, of course, my good friend Jonathan Powell, who I spent years working with Tony Blair, and Jonathan was sitting there next to Starber because he's now his national security advisor.

And I know Jonathan so well.

And I could just imagine what was going through Jonathan's mind as he went from windmills to Sadiq Khan to nuclear reactors to golf to this to that.

And it's like, you know, Jonathan's very much a sort of get to the point.

Let's get to the point.

But I'll tell you the other thing that I thought she could have done.

You see, he kept, he's obsessed with this idea that if you put a tariff on a country, that country is somehow paying a bill to America.

Whereas, as you know and I know, the tariffs imposed on European Union imports, they are going to hit American consumers in the pocket.

Eventually.

Eventually.

So far, they haven't been doing so, but eventually.

Yeah, but the other thing that does happen is that countries that are hit by the tariffs, they can diversify their markets.

And there's a bit of that going on as well.

So I think, listen, I'm not denying it is in Trump's own terms, this was a win.

As with everything, he overstates it.

And also, from the European perspective,

15% is better than 13%.

But as Chancellor Mertz said, it's still damaging to both.

And by the way,

I was looking at reading the German media yesterday.

I mean, Mertz

was the more positive of the German voices.

The German business organizations, they were almost like the French in terms of saying this is really, really bad for European business.

So, and the other thing to remember, of course, is that Trump can do what he does.

Rory and I talked recently, and I've heard you talk about this as well, is whether he even has the right to do all this tariff stuff, because it's not a national emergency and it's not a security issue.

Where is the role of Congress?

But, of course, she has her an even more complicated equivalent of Congress, which is these 27 countries, some of whom, like Orban, are desperate to destroy her.

Yeah.

But even just from the American point of view, in the long run, you wonder whether these tariffs aren't self-defeating to kind of what the project that J.D.

Vance has laid out and Donald Trump has signed up to, and it was interesting that Stephen Miller was the other person that was sitting there, right, in that row of people opposite Jonathan Powell.

Who was it?

It was Stephen Miller, who is the most powerful person pretty much in the White House at the moment and is fiercely anti-European and very opposed to helping Europe anymore, and very opposed to helping Ukraine anymore.

But you've got Mertz, who's trying to organise for the rearmament of Europe, the financing of the rearmament of Europe, reform the German economy, deal with

his own population and their qualms about doing that, and his own taxpayers and their qualms about doing that, and the German car industry.

And then Trump goes and puts the weight of a trade war on Germany as well.

I mean, he's making what was already a very difficult thing for Europe to pull off, and that he once says he wants Europe to pull off even harder because of the tariffs that he's just put on them.

But the two things he has done, the one thing,

two things he has done, he's got NATO countries to spend more, European NATO members to spend more on defence.

And now he has

set in train the rebalancing of the trade relationships.

You mentioned J.D.

Vance there, Katy, and partly because Rory and I did this sort of, we've now done six parts and the latest one that's out is me talking to David Frum about Vance.

Very interesting interview, by the way, Alistair.

I thought that was great, that interview.

Well, listen, let me just tell you what J.D.

Vance said about.

You see, you could have imagined if J.D.

Vance was this big, powerful figure.

I know it's a sort of golfing weekend or what have you, but maybe he should have been there with von der Leyen.

But this is his one contribution to this debate so far at a time shortly after Donald Trump had posted a meme of Trump in a police car and a very fat J.D.

Vance in another one chasing Barack Obama, who, as we know, is a traitor to America.

Brackett, Tulsi Gabbard.

This is Vance's one contribution so far.

A post on social media, the entire European press, this Europe that he hates, I don't know how he manages to read all our press, is singing the president's praises right now, amazed at the deal he negotiated on behalf of Americans.

Tomorrow, the American media will undoubtedly run headlines like, Donald Trump only got 99.9% of what he asked for.

What is with this victim mode that they want to do the whole time?

Why can't they?

It reminds me of the Brexiteers in Britain, you know, you won, get over it.

Why do they have to play the victim?

Because that's the whole point of populism, right?

It's us against them.

And you have to be in permanent fight mode, which means you have to be permanently under attack.

I mean, we see this in populists all around the world.

I thought what David Frum said, by the way, about J.D.

Vance isn't, this is not just an American phenomenon.

To think of J.D.

as an American phenomenon is to think about it this wrong.

It's actually you've got to think of this as a global phenomenon.

And the whole point of populism, the whole, actually almost the whole point of populism is that we and you together are under attack.

We and our voters are under attack.

And so you have to be permanently under attack by the media, which also has the added benefit of undermining the media and telling MAGA supporters, well, you can't believe anything you say in the media because we've told you you can't believe anything you say.

And we tell it to you repeatedly.

There's one guy talking to victim, Arnaud Bertrand, is a French entrepreneur of some standing, and he's in a very, very, very long, detailed thread, which ends, this is Europe's century of humiliation.

He says, this deal is an insane transfer of citizens' wealth from Europe to the United States.

Now, I don't know if his figures are right or wrong, but there is a, particularly in France, this has had a really, really negative reaction.

And von der Leyen, how she now plays it, because it does have to, you know, the 27 countries will all have their say.

I think that this is the other thing we have to watch is that these things can unravel in the detail.

I think the, yeah, I mean, look, we're seeing that with the Japan deal, right?

That was announced a couple of weeks ago.

There's clearly lots of holes in that, and lots of that is unraveling already.

We don't even know all of the details of the UK deal yet, and that was the first one to be announced.

But my understanding is that von der Leyen

was going back to, or she would have had the agreement.

She wouldn't have turned up in Scotland and announced this 15% deal without having had the agreement or of all the 27 countries.

They might not like it, but they knew what she was going to Scotland to announce, didn't they?

I mean, talking to EU negotiators, there was a constant, she would talk to the Americans, talk to the constituents, talk to the Americans, talk to the constituents.

Doesn't mean they love it.

No, no, I'm not sure about that.

I think sometimes you have to...

She would have been in that position.

She'll have had a broad sense of what they would take.

But then what you're seeing at the moment, I think, is that she's perhaps in some of the respects gone gone further than some of them thought she would.

She was also in Beijing last week for a trade summit with Xi Jinping, which didn't go very well.

Xi Jinping refused to go to Brussels, which is where it was meant to be.

They cut it down from two days to one day.

They're very angry that Chinese banks and companies have been included in the EU's latest wave of sanctions on Russia.

And again, it was very...

And I don't know if you saw the thing.

I don't know how this happened, but when they arrived, she and Costa and the team arrived at the People's Hall,

and the big red carpet was laid out, and they arrived in what looked like a mini-bus.

She got

these things shouldn't matter, but I don't want my leaders sort of traipsing out of mini-buses looking like they're just, you know, about to get on an easy jet flight from

you wouldn't get Donald Trump stepping out of a mini-bus.

I mean, that is not going to happen, is it?

I don't know if Donald Trump's ever been in a minibus.

You get the beast.

I mean,

he's been on golf buggies.

Yes, that's true.

22 golf buggies falling around.

And by the way, Catty, was that a fake video

of the guy walking in front of him as Trump has hit yet another crap shot, hooked it into the rough, and he's driving his buggy.

And then somebody from the hotel films a guy dropping a ball just ahead of him.

Well, that's the Mr.

Scaramucci's point of view on this is that Donald Trump always cheats at golf and is known for cheating at golf.

And this wouldn't be at all surprising if that actually happened.

And that's how he keeps winning, another of the wins that he notches up.

So he he he thinks the video is quite plausible.

I'm not a golf player.

Are you a golf player?

I'm not a golf player.

I used to play a lot of golf.

In fact,

I have played that course, Turnbury, and the pre-Trump era.

Well, look, Cassie, we said at the start we were going to talk about Zelensky.

Let's do that in question time because you're kindly also staying to do question time tomorrow.

And I mentioned J.D.

Vance there, and I can't let you go without asking you what you thought of the final episode of our miniseries.

I know you've done a couple of these miniseries on Trip US.

You did one on January the 6th, which was fascinating.

You did another one on Elon Musk, where you're both right.

Eventually, Musk has been sort of got rid of,

you know, up to a point.

And we spoke to David Frum.

And one of the most interesting things he said was he said, you guys wouldn't do a four-part series on Donald Trump.

In other words, he was saying he thinks Vance is more interesting than Trump in some ways.

What do you think of that?

Yeah, I thought that was interesting.

I thought his description of Trump as a crocodile who eats things.

and basically fairly simple was pretty good.

I'm not sure.

I think I would do it.

I beg to differ.

I think we would do a four-part series on Donald Trump.

He is sort of fascinating too.

But I did think this idea that he has no core is interesting, that he could have been more.

He could have gone back to Ohio, become, you know, been senator, become governor, built up his own base, and therefore had a core of constituents to whom he felt loyal, as opposed to being this shapeshifter, which he's become and kind of happy to say or do anything so long as it pleases the boss.

I thought

that was really interesting.

I wasn't, when he said that the VP has no power, Of course, the VP's job is to walk the dog and make sure that they're a live body

and stay alive.

And basically, that's the VP's job.

But he does have power in the sense that it puts him in the, and David acknowledged this, in that it puts him in the position of front runner, right?

So he has, JD does have power in the Republican Party at the moment because they're all looking to see whether he's going to be next.

But I thought it was super interesting, very, and it echoed what other friends of J.D.

Vance's from the past have said about J.D.

Vance, that they knew one person and now they see him as a different person.

Yeah.

I also was fascinated by that thing, the story you told told about how George Herbert Walker Bush sat down with Reagan days after Reagan won the second term and said, right, I want to go.

I'm going for it next time and I want your blessing.

And even though Reagan was a bit sort of troubled by it, said, yeah, go ahead.

And of course, Vance is stymied on that.

Vance cannot do anything that looks like he's campaigning to take over for Trump.

Anyway, folks, to hear all six episodes in full, just head to therestispolities.com and there you can join the Restis Politics Plus.

It takes two minutes to get set up.

You'll get the trip plus feed, synced straight into your preferred podcast platform.

Here is a clip from the last episode of the series with David Frum.

Do you think you have to be a bit of a chameleon to operate and survive in Trump's world when you're so close to the top?

I was thinking, for example, when we watched and re-watched that scene with Zelensky in the Oval Office, I was trying to work out, is that really him?

Or is that him doing what he thinks Trump wants him to do?

When he and Usher went to Greenland and he made that ridiculous speech with the troops there looking really embarrassed to be there as kind of extras in the show, I thought, is that really him or is that him doing what he thinks Trump wants?

What's your take on the relationship, watching it through these really strange events?

And I guess the other one I'd throw in is the Munich speech.

I think the Munich speech was a really defining moment in his kind of rise.

Well, I would give you three different answers to those three different examples.

Okay.

So I think the Greenland event was very much about pleasing Trump.

The annexation of Greenland is both so far-fetched and if you could do it, so destructive.

What you're talking about is an American act of aggression against a NATO ally.

That's the end of NATO, the end of the American alliance system.

J.D.

Vance would understand this.

You want to have a bigger base in Greenland?

Nobody would be more delighted by that than the Danes themselves.

They've been pressing for that for a generation.

It's a budget issue.

The United States doesn't spend enough to have enough of a presence in Greenland.

The United States has been a presence in Greenland since before it entered the Second World War.

That's been a welcome.

The Greenlanders are happy about it.

The Danes are happy about it.

It's not controversial, but whereas seizing their territory by force, which is what Trump has in mind, is obviously, so I don't think that's a J.D.

Vance project.

The Zelensky thing, I think, was very much a J.D.

Vance project.

So Trump has no capacity for face-to-face confrontation.

Vance, who for, and we can talk about why this is so, and there's a bit of a mystery here, but who's fiercely anti-Ukraine, fiercely anti-Ukraine, more fiercely anti-Ukraine than Trump himself even.

He was staging a confrontation to cut off Trump's retreat.

Whereas Trump would have avoided confrontation, he precipitated a confrontation to create a Trump or Zelensky stark alternative and to trap Republican senators who like Zelensky and to say, no, there is no middle way here.

You're either on Trump's team or Zelensky's team, either or.

So I think that was very much a Vance move.

I think it surprised Trump.

In many ways, it put Trump into an uncomfortable position, a starker position than he would have gravitated to on his own.

Is that because Vance cares about the issue more than Trump does?

He doesn't want America involved.

Can I say the word word bullshit on your show?

Let us have no bullshit about anti-war, anti-involvement.

They're on the other side.

So, if you enjoyed that, you want the full series, just join us at The Restis Politics Plus at the Restispolitics.com.

You get the full trip plus experience, mini-series, and we're already thinking about our next one, by the way.

Monthly bonus episodes, completely ad-free listening, much more.

Just go to therestispolitics.com.

So, Catty, thanks again.

Lovely to talk to you.

And I'll see you tomorrow for question time.

We're going to talk about Zelensky, as I say.

we're going to talk about Epstein, we're going to talk about violence against women,

we're going to talk about all sorts of things.

See you then.

See you then.