The Real JD Vance: How Trump Ditched Ideology (Part 5)

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Hi there, Alastair Campbell here.

What you're about to hear is a very special QA.

This is not to be confused with Question Time.

This week's Question Time episode dropped yesterday as per usual.

This special Q ⁇ A is all about the mini-series that Rory and I have done on American Vice President J.D.

Vance and all of the questions that we're answering, they're some of the many, many questions that have come in from members of Trip Plus who have been listening to the series.

Now to round off this mini-series in addition to today's Q ⁇ A, next week we're going to be speaking to somebody who knows JD Vance well.

In fact, was once you could say his boss, that's David Frum, the former speechwriter to George W.

Bush, these days one of the most clear-eyed critics of the Trump administration and the Republican family more generally.

He will help us really try to get right under the skin of what Vance represents more broadly in US and therefore global politics.

So if you want to hear the miniseries in full right now, just head to therestispolitics.com for a free trial.

You'll get access to this mini-series.

We've already started thinking, thinking, by the way, about our next one and you will get access to that.

And you'll also get our monthly bonus episodes, completely ad-free listening, members' chat room, and much, much more.

Anyway, enough for me for now.

Hope you enjoy this special Q ⁇ A, which has been made by you.

Welcome to Arestis Politics special Q ⁇ A about our mini-series on JD Vance.

Thank you for all the very kind comments about it and one or two unkind, but you know, take the rough with the smooth.

We've done four episodes now.

This is our fifth in the mini-series on J.D.

Vance, but the difference with this one, it's not just me and Roy talking, it's you, it's members of TripPlus giving us their questions about what they've heard so far.

Roy, let me kick you off with this one.

Jacob Wilkie King, who's a member from London, did the Democrats pave the way for J.D.

Vance's appeal?

And broadens out to say this.

J.D.

Vance's background of incredible social distress, feeling separated from an upper class, very similar to the story of many Labour MPs.

How much responsibility do the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters?

What do you think?

I think that's firstly a really interesting observation because of course if you were looking for people in British politics who've come from a social background like J.D.

Vance, you might be looking at somebody like Angela Rayner, who came from a very, very difficult, troubled background.

Naturally, in British politics, that would draw you to the left because you would have experienced poverty very directly.

You would feel a very unjust, unequal society, and you would be very, very focused on social justice.

And you would perceive the ruling elite as stacking things against you.

And you'd believe passionately that if you could just get rid of these people and bring in people like you, you could create a much more just, equal world.

And I think that that was the sense I get interviewing.

Anthony Raynor, when we interviewed on leading Rachel Reeves or Bridget Phillipson, there's this very, very strong sense that their class backgrounds drive, you know, what makes them labour MPs.

When you were an MP, did you have any Tory MPs?

I mean, I think of John Major, who came from a pretty tough background.

But did you have any MPs in your intake that you would say came from identifiably J.D.

Vance type of background?

We had a lot of MPs who came from much tougher backgrounds than people acknowledge.

I mean, you know, Patrick McLaughlin, for example, had been a coal miner.

There were many, many people in my intake who'd come from very poor backgrounds, grown up on housing estates, come out of poverty, but none of them, I think, to be fair, quite the kind of extreme type of poverty and domestic violence and abuse that Vance is talking about.

But many of them also were people who had felt that their lives had been turned around.

For example, in some cases, narratives about how their family had benefited by Thatcher selling council housing and how they'd been able to buy their own council house.

Many of them had been small business people.

So there was that different tone which you sometimes get in in British politics of people saying, I came from a very tough background.

I pulled myself up.

Other people can do it.

And so you'd have these people talking about how angry they felt going on to housing estates and seeing people's curtains drawn at 11 in the morning when they were up first thing in the morning working.

And that produced, I think, quite a sort of brutal.

uncompassionate attitude towards people on welfare because they had come from those backgrounds and felt that they got away from them.

Whereas strangely, often the kind of more privileged, more Tory wet lot come from more privileged backgrounds and felt how lucky they were and didn't feel that people living in poverty were there because they hadn't worked hard.

Now, to just come back to you on that, because there's a lot in Hill Billie Eller J.

Vance's book where he sounds a bit like some of those conservative colleagues of mine, where he really is pretty contemptuous of a lot of the people he's growing up around.

He blames them.

for not working hard enough, not sorting out their addiction, not sorting out in a way that someone from the left wouldn't.

Anyway, I just would be interested in how you kind of reconcile this odd thing that he comes from a kind of anchoring background and the result is he goes to the right.

I mean, I think what's interesting in the question is partly answered by the interview we did recently with your friend, Congressman Seth Moulton, because he basically says that the answer, how much responsibility do the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters, his answer is a hell of a lot.

He basically says that the Democrats genuinely lost contact with the values and aspirations of traditional working class voters.

Now he pins it, a lot of it, on the minority issues.

I mean it gets identified as woke, but I think what the right did very, very well, and this is a big part of J.D.

Vance and a big part of MAGA, is the weaponization of woke as to mean anything that isn't sort of very traditionally almost nativist American.

I think there's a lot in what Jacob is saying.

I think it's why, you know, when you look across the European perspective, it's why I think the left has got to think really, really carefully about how they handle this sort of wave of the rise of the populist right that seems to be happening.

I agreed with you, by the way, on reading, re-re-reading Hillbilly Elegy as I did.

The more I looked into it, the more I felt he's actually really contemptuous of these people.

The thing about John Prescott when he was in the Labour government and Angela Rain now, you have a really real sense that their role and their position in the government is really to fight for the people and the places that they came from.

You don't get that feeling with Vance at all.

He's fighting for ideology more than anything.

One thing that I loved about that leading interview with Angela Reiner, which I still think is one of the very best leading interviews we've done, is that there's an enormous amount of compassion and good humor in the way that she talks about her family background, a real compassion and understanding towards her mother,

who, you know, you could have been very, very angry with.

Because basically she says, my mother didn't love me.

She was obsessed with my father and she made no real effort to look after me.

But she's sort of processed it and she isn't in the way that Vance is driven by anger.

I mean, I think anger is a really important theme that we kept referring to in those four.

Whereas Anchorain has come through that.

She isn't actually somebody who sees herself as a victim, really.

She seems to have quite a sort of realistic, nuanced, good-humoured attitude towards it, quite a sort of practical sense of solving it.

Whereas Vance anger, but also oddly, although he hates the idea of victimhood, there is a sense of victimhood that he hasn't quite processed this thing in the way that someone like Angela Raynor has.

Yeah, and the other thing I say that's really interesting about Angela is that

you saw this in particular when occasionally she stood in for Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions, particularly with Boris Johnson,

where she sensed that they're thinking, she's really going to have to try a lot harder than I have to try because she doesn't come from my sort of really clever background.

And she's standing there basically, listen, Sunshine, you're going to take me exactly as i am whereas actually you have a feeling with vance that he's constantly becoming a slightly different thing i mean i thought the most interesting thing given that we went through this series almost chronologically through his life is you felt like you were talking i think with andrew rainey you're always talking about the same person john prescott the same you're always talking about the same person With Vance, I always feel I'm talking about a different person at various stages of his life.

And I think if he does become president, he'll have another persona that he kind of peels off and that becomes it.

Let's go for this one from Ben Kelly.

This is about the discussion we had about the influence of Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin.

So Ben Kelly says this: Is J.D.

Vance's positioning behind Trump comparable to that of Octavian behind Caesar in that he allows the latter to destroy the Republic and then goes on to rule akin to a monarch?

Is that placing too much of a Machiavellian level of intelligence and ambition on J.D.

Vance?

That's a great question.

Well, this is such a rich theme that we haven't really even begun begun to get into.

But Yuval Noahari, who we've interviewed, I think, now twice on Leading, said to me this morning, actually, just before we're talking, that one of the things that strikes him about the monarch thing is that it's all about the personal.

So one of the points he makes about watching J.D.

Vance, Zelensky, and Trump together is that it isn't really the American government dealing with the Ukrainian government.

It's Trump dealing with Zelensky.

And when you question Trump about the fact that Putin has broken every deal that he's done before, again, it's like a medieval king thinking just in personal terms because his reply is, yeah, he broke a deal with Obama.

He broken a deal with Biden, but I'm different.

I'm Trump.

And the implication of that is he can make a deal with Putin and it will last as long as he's in.

And when he's no longer...

president, the deal's not valid anymore because it's not state to state, it's person to person.

His final point, I'll come back to you on this, which I thought was kind of really revealing.

It's a sort of crazy idea, but it shows something about the world we're in, that you can sort of imagine a world in which Trump kind of marries Baron Trump to Putin's granddaughter and gives them Crimea as their territory, and that that would sort of somehow resolve the situation.

Back over to you.

We're recording this around the time when Donald Trump, this thing he does of surprising journalists by phoning them up and giving them an interview.

And Gary O'Donoghue of the BBC gets this interview.

I don't know if you've heard it yet, but it's really good.

Gary O'Donoghue starts asking about the state visit that's coming up to, and he says, You know, there seems to be this discussion about whether they should recall parliament for you to address it.

And I'm thinking, oh god, here we go.

This is going to be a nightmare for Keistaba if he says yes.

And he says, Nah, nah, if they're on holiday, that's fine.

Let's stay, you know.

Why?

Because he wants to be at Windsor Castle.

And he says, What are you looking forward to?

And he said, I'm really looking forward to having a good time and being nice to the king king because he's such a great gentleman.

And that's your point.

It's king to king.

And in his head, he won't care what you think and what I think.

I mean, he may or may not know there are millions of people who think like we do, but he's going to be on the level with the monarch.

I think what's really interesting, though, about Ben's question, is the monarch the right word for Trump?

I'm afraid it's not.

The word is authoritarian autocrat.

The thing about the monarch, our monarch today, unlike the monarchs in the days when they were sort of using marriage to carve out territory, and by the way, I think you put a horrible thought out there, which somebody will tell him.

That was a good idea.

I think it's not that he's a monarch, he'd love to be a monarch.

But what Teal and Curtis Yarvin want, and I think Vance and Musk when he was in the tent as well, is a sense of powerful politicians who are not beholden to politics.

And in a way, that's what true monarchy really is.

Yes, absolutely.

I think this is the most interesting point.

We haven't done enough on this because a traditional dictator from the 40s or 50s was connected to the fact that they were a communist or a fascist, and that constrained them to some extent.

I mean, if you were Stalin, you still had to talk a bit like a communist.

A king can completely flip day to day their entire idea.

There's no ideology.

If you're Trump or you're Vance, there isn't actually an ideology.

I mean, that's one of the things I think our mini-series is all about.

And this is your chameleon point, that he's a different thing every week.

And kings can do that because in the end, all the loyalty isn't to their program or their policy or their manifesto.

It's just personally to them.

It's the cult.

They are a messiah.

So they can flip completely.

It doesn't matter.

You know, one moment we're putting tariffs on China, next minute we're not.

One moment we're saying we're not bombing Iran, next minute we are.

Doesn't matter.

And in that sense, Vance and Trump are not in the same world as Kiostama.

Kiostama is very constrained.

You know, he can't do certain kinds of things on welfare because in the end, he's a Labour Prime Minister.

He's got a Labour Party.

He's got Labour MPs.

And they're going to say, we're about social justice.

You don't get to cut welfare like that.

Trump and Vance aren't constrained in that way at all.

They've broken free of parties, of ideology, of institutions, and made it personal.

Tramier question.

Well, okay, here we are.

Diana Brocklebank, Norfolk.

Trump's policies over the coming years will make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

How can this possibly sit with J.D.

Vance?

We know he blows with the wind, but his base won't be able to handle the ever-increasing wealth divide.

Over to you, can he reinvent that far, or are there limits even to what he can do?

Well, I think it's a very good question because I think one of the reasons that Trump's ratings are actually not as good as he pretends they are is that I think a lot of people have realized, hold on a minute, your big, beautiful bill is really helping rich people and it's not going to do that much for me.

In fact, you you might be taking my medicaid away and all the other stuff that we know about so i think it will increase inequality why do i think that because that is what it is designed to do this goes back to the monarch thing the billionaires the trillionaires as they want to be they have probably more economic and political power than business people in the american system have ever had and they see trump as one of them and to some extent Trump is one of them.

So he doesn't care about the inequality.

How does it sit with J.D.

Vance?

And would he be able to end the increasing wealth divide?

Yes,

if he changes.

And of course, what he'll do, the reason why I think he's very Machiavellian and he's sort of playing quite a canny game, he knows that Trump, or I guess he could get rid of him up to a point.

He could do what he's doing with Jerome Powell now and try to make his position untenable.

But Vance is elected just the same as Trump was.

I mean, okay, it's a ticket and they were voting for Trump, but Vance is there.

He's the second most powerful person under their constitution.

So he's there.

However, if Trump does go, say, doesn't stand for a third term, if Vance does stand for the Republican Party and does win, these are very big ifs, by the way, he can then change.

Why?

Because one, we know that that's what he does.

Two, because he can say, I was the loyal number two.

Now I'm the number one and I've got my own agenda.

Here's where I agreed with the previous administration, but these are the challenges now.

And we've seen wealth inequality rise and I'm going to bring it down again.

He can actually turn it to his advantage.

Yes.

I mean, there's an interesting question maybe here, just for you before we move on to the next question from a listener, which is, do you think that we've entered a world where, in a sense, reality doesn't necessarily catch up?

I mean, when we're being optimistic, we keep hoping that in the end, these guys get undone by reality.

But it's possible that when you've entered reality TV, they can keep spinning.

They can keep blaming other people, whatever happens.

They can keep distracting, pushing.

So that actually, maybe one of the reasons one needs to organise and push against them is that you can't sit back and say, in the end, they're going to get undone by reality.

They're only going to get undone by really fierce opposition.

I would argue that Boris Johnson got undone by reality in the end.

And it wasn't the reality of the issues on which he had been truly terrible.

It was actually a sort of tipping point issue at the end.

I think Putin might in the end be undone by reality, but

I don't know.

He's an amazing survivor.

Netanyahu's an amazing survivor.

The reality surrounding Netanyahu, he ought to have been destroyed many times over, but he hasn't.

Trump is a bit like Putin in that he's created an unreality and he's made people feel, those people who are part of it, he's made them feel that they belong to something really, really important and that makes them feel good, even as their lives are not good.

Now, that is an amazing piece of sort of political communication, conmanship, call it whatever you want.

I still hold out hope that eventually reality will catch up on these guys, but I agree with you.

You can't take it for granted.

Mandelson, I saw an interview with...

Lord Mandelson.

Lord Mandelson.

Lord Mandelson, former First Secretary of State, etc., Commissioner Lord Mandelson.

I saw an interview with Peter Mandelson at the weekend in which he said Vance was much more thoughtful and nuanced in private than in public.

Does he really believe that?

Or is that the kind of thing ambassadors have to say?

That's from Florence Hobson.

That's a very, very good question.

I saw one of his fellow ambassadors in Washington recently.

I won't do the accent because he will give away the country.

He basically said, I really enjoy Peter Badlows' low-profile approach to

his ambassadorship.

And I said, oh, really?

He says, yes, I read about it in the Financial Times.

Well, Peter was talking about it in the Financial Times.

Anyway, I did see parts of this interview.

I think it was the Sunday Times, but then they put some clips out on social media.

And in one of them, he did say that.

He was sort of hanging out of what looked like a sports car being filmed.

And he said, Trump is really good, fun.

Vance is, as Florence said, very thoughtful, much more nuanced.

So does he really believe that?

Or is it the sort of thing ambassadors have to say?

Well, it is certainly the latter.

Whether he really believes that, Peter may well believe that.

Peter does like really

interesting, complicated, difficult people.

He's interested in them and he will, I've no doubt at all, he's enjoying being surrounded by very interesting, difficult, complicated people.

And then having to deal with another set of difficult, complicated people back in London.

I think he'll be quite enjoying that.

But Florence, that is a very, very good spot.

Very, very, very good spot.

I just put a small qualification in my two cents worth, which is, of course, ambassadors don't quite have to say that.

I mean, that isn't the way that Kim Darrick spoke about Trump.

There is another way of being an ambassador, which is more the Angela Merkel, which is that you're pretty dignified, you're pretty restrained, but you don't go overboard on the praising.

I actually met a group of ambassadors,

and one of them who was no longer in the US, but was there for Trump's first term, and said that they had got to the point where they were no longer putting down in their telegrams their reports back to the foreign minister.

They were no longer putting down what they actually thought on a lot of occasions because they were making assumptions that, you know, wolves have ears and all that, and that they were finding other ways to communicate really what they thought about things.

That's dangerous.

So just to remind listeners, Kim Derrick, who was our ambassador to the US,

there was a leak of a telegram that he had sent back to London, very critical of Trump.

A classified telegram was leaked.

And Trump basically demanded that he be sacked.

And the British government went along with it and fired Derek.

Well, Johnson went along with it.

Johnson went along with it and fired Derek.

Johnson has a double problem, though.

I mean, you know, we talk a lot about truth.

And if you can't be honest in secret telegrams from an ambassador back to headquarters, you're in real trouble.

Johnson's other problem, which I saw again and again, is, and this is true, I'm sure, in the Trump administration, is that he didn't want to read anything that was uncomfortable so that every telegram began to go another win for global Britain.

It was all kind of booster-ish, optimistic, because Johnson would get angry if an ambassador wrote back saying, actually,

Britain doesn't have very much power in this country.

The US has more influence, or India has more influence, or China has more influence.

He wanted to hear that we were the centre of the world.

Of course, Tom Fletcher, former ambassador who's now doing a brilliant job at United Nations speaking up for refugees, I think that there is something,

I think, really important in all of statecraft about ambassadors, the old cliché about your centre abroad to life for your country.

And it is a cliché, but there is also sometimes a little bit of truth in it.

Peter's job is to project project the interests of the Britain and the British government.

But at the same time, you have to operate according to the politics that

you're swimming in.

It's the point that, again, to quote Seth Moulton, he said that when he's on these trips with Republicans, and they will say privately things about Trump, but he says they're terrified about getting it back to him because he will hold it against them.

I think there will be a little bit of ambassadors doing that as well.

And that's really bad for the foreign policy debate right around the world.

It's kind of weird, isn't it?

Because what you're talking about there is the sort of corruption of institutions.

Oddly, so much of what's going on in the world, I think, is genuinely about social media and what's happened to truth and what's happened to journalism.

But that's a little bit different.

That's about weird forms of almost tyranny and corruption.

It's that sense in the American government that you can't really be an FBI agent doing your job anymore without risking being fired.

On that, I don't know if you noticed that recently there was a story in one of the American papers that in the FBI now they're doing lie detector tests on the staff and one of the questions before they do the lie decision is have they said anything critical of Cash Patel, the new politically appointed head of the FBI?

I mean, that is nuts.

I would quite often go home from work with Tony Blair and say to Fiona, God, what he was a fucking nightmare today.

Christ almighty, why did you do this?

Right.

So does that mean if I'm doing lie to have you ever criticised Tony Blair to any of your friends or family?

Well the answer is yes occasionally.

So this is very weird, too, because the standards that we're now asking of people, these completely unrealistic standards, are actually making our institutions worse.

The example that we were talking about a couple of days ago, which I've been interested in, is that there's now this new letter from the BBC that came out on Monday requires journalists, anyone narrating,

you have to go back through all their social media.

to be absolutely certain that they are completely impartial on an issue before they can present.

On the surface, it sounds like that's going to make things better, but actually

it's a massive drop because you're

suddenly ruling out almost everybody because almost by definition, somebody presenting on a subject has firm views on it.

Let's imagine the BBC thought it would be fun for you or I to do a program on Trump, right?

Yeah.

Well, suddenly they go through our social media, they conclude we don't like Trump, so we can't present on Trump.

The only person who could present on Trump somehow is somebody who's never expressed a view on him.

But somebody who's never expressed a view on him over the last five years would be somebody with no interest in contemporary affairs.

It's utterly absurd.

What's so odd here is that the BBC has been driven almost in this cache patel direction of this sort of very strange idea that the only people who can function are people without opinions.

Really interesting example.

There was recently on a thought for the day.

I actually most days can't stand thought for the day on the BBC Radio 4, but there was an amazing one.

You'd be brilliant at it, Alison.

I can just see you.

The producer just tasted great stuff, but can we link this back to Vance?

Right, I'm going to try and link this back to Vance.

So this links back right to JD Vance, Rory.

Because very good.

These are people who say that they believe in free speech, but of course they don't believe in free speech.

They actually believe only in those voices being articulated that echo what they say, think, and do.

But just briefly, if I may, on the BBC point.

So Ridian Brooke, the author, did a brilliant, brilliant thought for the day the other day about Live Aid, where his message, his thought for today, was basically just weaving together lyrics from some of the most famous songs ever written.

It was an incredible piece of work, okay?

And I did a tweet, I just said, Best thought for the day in ages, well done, Ridian Brooke, using the message of Live Aid and the genius of songwriters to say something powerful and worthwhile.

And then I thought, I don't really know much about this bloke, I'll follow him on Twitter.

So I went over to Twitter, and his first tweet was a reposting about the quotes, the persecution of Francesca Albanese.

He reposted a post where somebody said the real Nobel Prize candidate, a picture of Francesca Albanese.

Now, I hope I haven't damaged Ridian Brooks' relations with the BBC in saying that, but that illustrates the utter madness that you've just called out.

Utter madness.

Let's bring it back to Vance.

I'll do

the sort of nimble mental gymnastics as we go down.

Went down a little rabbit hole there, but I do think it does connect because what we're talking about here is attitudes towards freedom of speech you know what do we mean by freedom of speech and vance is right at the heart of this you pointed out that his whole munich speech jd vance's speech at the munich security conference which as you said went down like a pale of cold sick in front of the european leaders

was a speech in which jd vance fundamentally says there is no free speech in europe right and what he means by that is people are imprisoning tommy robinson or they're trying to stop a far-right fascist party basically stealing an election in Germany.

And then he goes after, J.D.

Vance is very much at the heart of the chasing of these Ivy League universities.

Whatever his experience was at Yale, some level, he's going after Columbia, Harvard and the rest.

And again,

it's this story about free speech, but what it really means is not what liberal free speech meant in the past, which was pluralism, tolerance, a democratic society, society where we accept that we all have different values, we all have different views, and we let them out.

In this case, it's policing it.

I'm going to set up for Columbia University a panel that will assess, are these people saying things which are

moving from critical of Israel through to anti-Semitic?

I'm going to shut down demonstrations.

I'm going to fire faculty.

That's his idea of freedom of speech.

In other words, I think it's the point you keep making.

Basically, he thinks free speech somehow, and I'd love you to sort of get into this a bit more because you made the point, but it's just so paradoxical and difficult to understand.

He somehow has convinced himself that free speech means

being able to say very powerfully and loudly what he believes and stopping people saying things that he doesn't believe.

Correct.

That's exactly what it means.

And, you know, we talked in one of the episodes about, I sent you those videos of this guy who's a psychiatrist who analyzes these politicians in these rather impressive YouTube videos that he does.

And he did one recently about the cruelty, he called it the cruelty of the Trump administration.

And he focused on Trump, Vance, and Musk.

And you said earlier about the point about Musk's anger.

And this psychiatrist basically says that we had quite a lot of questions actually asking whether people thought that Vance was a woman hater.

Now, he parades around with his wife, and it seems to be a genuine marriage and all that, but he does come across slightly, as I said in one of the episodes, as, you know, a captain in the handmaiden's tale.

It's like women are there to serve and men are where the power power should be, and what have you.

And the anger, of course, comes from a mother that didn't love him.

And then these sort of this utterly chaotic upbringing that he did.

A woman didn't love him, that actually tried to kill him.

Tried at one point to kill him.

And at one point, as he says in his own book, that he wished she was dead.

The point that he makes about the cruelty is that it's about understanding, and this is maybe where Vance is clever in a kind of really horrible way.

So basically, they have one power in large part by persuading working class and middle class people that he, Trump and Vance, are for them.

Okay.

What does for them mean?

What does make America great mean to those people?

It means make America like it used to be.

And like it used to be essentially means that people like them, the white working class, they had the power.

They were the most important people in the country.

They now see all these kind of university educated and immigrants and black people rising up through the system and they don't like it.

And so the cruelty is a way of saying to those

white working class people, even though their lives aren't necessarily getting any better,

these guys are having it a lot worse because we are giving them hell.

And that's why the performative stuff with immigrants, which he defends, or the eating the dogs, and never forget, he was the one who started all that nonsense, it's performative to make people whose lives they're not actually improving feel that actually, well, at least we're doing better in the hierarchy.

Nikki Joyce is one of the people who's asking that question that you've just raised, who's a Trip Plus member on Discord, where she says, to what extent do you think that sexism or misogyny feeds into J.D.

Vance's developing views?

And is he the same or different to Trump and MAGA more broadly in this?

Again, without sounding like I've been completely taken over by the woke mind virus, it's very striking how gender and race are at the heart of a lot of what's going on.

That, as you say, Vance and Trump are trying to return back to some American past, a pretty sort of extraordinary move back.

I mean, fluoride was introduced to drinking water in the 1940s.

Vaccinations were sort of stuff the 1940s.

A lot of the environmental protection on air quality was sort of 1970s.

They're trying to reverse all of that.

They're trying to get back to sort of something which is well before.

James were more subservient.

Exactly.

That's absolutely right.

Yes.

Do you have something to say, Mr.

President?

Yeah, exactly.

That sort of stuff.

Hollywood was John Wayne rather than woke sort of films about equality and Harvey Milk.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So gender and race is really interesting here.

That it's partly a story of male white anger.

But there is something in all the pushes against minorities and all the kind of dismantling of liberal democracy seems to be something about silencing the voices of non-whites and of women.

And my goodness, that's powerful.

My goodness, it seems that he's able to draw on something in the American psyche or the male psyche that really seems to respond to this kind of

very simple, misleading idea of what society, I mean, because we're in a very modern society.

It's completely changed.

It's not the 1940s anymore.

Totally.

You know, half the workforce are women.

Civil rights has been completely transformed.

Sexuality has been completely transformed.

So it's very weird because you're not being somebody from the 1940s and the 1940s.

The genie's, in a sense, out of the bottle.

You're trying to be someone from the 1940s in 2025.

And that's even stranger in terms of the way that plays out.

I'm not convinced, though, that Vance can do this without Trump.

I could be wrong.

And I floated the idea that the Trump that Vance might relate to is Don Jr.

and that that might be the ticket that they try to get.

Where you and I agree, and I think we agreed again on this with Seth Moulton, is we shouldn't just see Trump as a unique one-off, couldn't be repeated again, because he is the head head of a movement.

These are trends that are very, very powerful.

I'm not yet convinced that Vance has the political and communication skills to

do what Trump does as well as Trump does it.

So he has to become something different.

Right.

Now, I wonder whether we could finish with a kind of more positive question from Maggie Whiteman from Colchester.

Listening to your series on J.D.

Vance and the associated link to Trump leaves a feeling of despair about the worldview of these people, a little feeling of hope.

Where do you see hope coming from?

His ratings are falling.

You made a point on the main podcast recently about how the markets have almost baked in some of the kind of economic chaos.

It's this acceptance that a lot of it is performative and therefore it doesn't necessarily have any sort of lasting impact.

And that's a kind of optimistic view.

The other place where I see hope

because you have to

is even though I would like the Democrat Party to be showing more signs of deep analysis and an understanding of how themselves got themselves into this mess, I'm seeing enough of it to think that they'll do reasonably well in the midterms.

I think to really damage Trump, they've got to do very well.

But let's say they do reasonably well, I see hope in that.

I see hope in some of the leaders that

have stood up against some of this nonsense.

Fair play, Kierstarmer, you know, he's done, he gets a lot of criticism for a lot of things.

And a lot of people, particularly on the Labour side, probably think he's been far too sympathetic to Trump and not called him out enough.

But actually, I think he's pursued the national interest quite well.

And he was one of the few people who actually did straight out call out Vance on this free speech thing.

He did it in a very polite way.

But when Vance was raising the issue of free speech in the Oval Office when Keir was there, he called it out and they moved on.

And so I think leaders are getting a bit more confident about calling this stuff out when they can.

So, and I find hope as well, to be absolutely frank, I find hope in the fact that so many people,

maybe outside America, but certainly in Europe, so many people kind of thought, well, we've got to give this guy a second chance.

And they've actually thought, no, this isn't going to work.

And I think that does damage Vance.

So my hope is that actually he won't become president.

He won't become president, provided the Democrats get their act together and find a decent leader.

Yeah, I think hope has to be hope in each of us being active,

whether it's what you and I do for a living or what citizens do for a living or what political people do for a living.

That's the sense that we can't do it all, right?

We're not superheroes, but equally, we can't just complacently sit back and expect reality to somehow write itself.

And what are the areas that we need to focus on?

One of them, I think we've talked about, is social media and AI.

And here's some hope.

Peter Malinorskis regulating

social media in Australia, I think, is a huge step in the right direction.

I think some of of the stuff that the European Union is doing on regulating data,

AI, algorithms, trying to develop a more sensible European architecture,

which really relates to trust, truth, facts,

facts in our world.

The area where I think we're weakest is filling the gap that's emerging in international stuff, conflict, war,

this rules-based international order.

I mean, I think the next real challenge for our citizens and politicians is to start rebuilding what we do about this culture of impunity, what we do about a world in which rich countries with technology, Israel, the US, appear to be able to just do whatever they want, whenever they want, with no consequences.

And then the final thing I think is this,

can we have hope about rebuilding a sort of very unfashionable thing, which is institutions, trust in human institutions.

What would it mean to really reinvigorate a system, get away from where we began, which is Trump trying to be a

vance, trying to be a personal monarch, this kind of medieval idea of monarchy that my friend Yuval Noah Harari keeps talking about, this kind of idea that we're going back into the Middle Ages.

What would it mean to

all of us get behind institutions, say actually we believe in civil services, judges, elected politicians, parliaments, prime ministers, parties.

What kind of reform would you need to do to make that more credible?

How would you make those institutions better?

And then how would you get people to believe in them so that instead of just putting all our trust in either algorithms or monarchs, we can get a bit of trust back in democracy?

Yeah, I saw an interview that Ursula von der Leyen said, where do you get hope?

This gave me a bit of hope, actually.

She did an interview with Diet Zeit, the German newspaper.

Just listen to this.

Europe is still a peace project.

We don't have bros or oligarchs making the rules.

We don't invade our neighbours and we don't punish our neighbours.

On the contrary, there are 12 countries on the waiting list to become members of the European Union.

That's 150 million people.

In Europe, children can go to good schools, however wealthy their parents are.

We have lower CO2 emissions, we have higher life expectancy.

Controversial debates are allowed at our universities.

This and more more are all values that must be defended and which show that Europe is more than a union.

Europe is our home.

People know that.

People feel that.

Now, I wish she'd got up when Zelensky was in Munich and said that to his face.

Now, I think he's got the message since then, because a lot of leaders had said that.

So, I guess that's, yeah, let's finish on that because we started really in the political side of him taking on Europe.

That's when I think he broke through as a global figure, by the way, that speech.

Speeches still really, really matter in politics.

If Vance becomes president, people will talk for the rest of time about Vance's Munich Security Conference speech.

It was really consequential, very significant.

That was where a bit of a mask slipped.

The real Vance sort of came out.

He will try to become a different Vance to become presidential candidate and he'll become a different Vance after that.

But I thought, well done, Ursula.

Ser Guttgespochen, as we say.

There we are.

I hope our listeners have enjoyed us.

We're also going to do a chat with David Fromm about Vance because, of course,

we've interviewed David and we used some of that interview in the series.

But David is somebody who knows J.D.

Vance a lot better than we do, to some extent, used to be his boss.

So we're going to do, that will be our final take in this mini-series will be a chat with David Fromm.

But I hope you've enjoyed everything so far.

Thank you very much indeed.

That was great.

I loved your message of European hope.

I'm sorry you don't have your bagpipes to play out to to Joy, but that was a great moment.

And I wish we had a little bit more of that.

I've got a lot of that.

A little bit more of that optimism.

So tell people what that is, Rory.

Tell them what it is.

Yeah,

that is...

Well, there's the chance.

So it's the bagpipes without the bag, and that's them playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which is the European national anthem.

I just wish we could hear more of that because there's so much sort of despair and self-hating in Europe and a sense that we're falling by hide economically and in productivity.

And we're forgetting that our public education system and our public health system is far better than that of the US.

And that if you were poor, you would much rather be living in Denmark or Sweden than you would be living in Mississippi.

So let's not beat ourselves up too much.

And let's try to get the hope from individual people in Britain and Europe rebuilding a world of trust and human institutions.

Excellent.

See you soon.

Just before you go, I hope you enjoyed that special Q ⁇ A off the back of our mini-series on JD Vance with questions from members of the Restis Politics Plus.

If you want to hear the miniseries in full right now, you can enjoy a free trial at the RestisPolitics.com.

You get access to the one we've just done.

You'll get access to the next one, which is already in the planning.

You get monthly bonus episodes, completely ad-free listening, our members' chat room, and much, much more.

Hope you enjoyed it.

All the best.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.