365. Trump's Mafia World Order

How many ‘early warning signs of fascism’ are we seeing in the US? Has Trump delivered a fatal blow to America’s soft power around the world? Why does Alastair admire Prince Harry and his battle with the tabloids? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across England, Scotland & Wales. Use referral code POLITICS after signing up for your chance to win a TRIP merch bundle. Learn more at GetFuse.com/Politics Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Video Editor: Joshua Smith Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:04Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:52Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:06Rory Stewart?

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• 1:08Alastair Campbell?

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  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 1:51Rory Stewart?

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• 2:10Speaker 02

  Backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com slash restpolitics.

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. A quick apology to listeners. This is being done from Geneva Airport in Switzerland. So if there's clinking in the background, that's because we've gone really gorilla here. We're trying to record from an airport lounge before my plane boards. And you've got an amazing yellow background behind you. You've got Lib Dem headquarters.

• 3:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm not at Lib Dem headquarters, although I'm pleased that the Lib Dems are finally starting to talk a little bit more about Brexit. And we'll see whether the others follow suit.

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  I guess Lib Dem headquarters presumably would have like bungee ropes and special kind of climbing walls and stuff.

• 3:18Alastair Campbell?

  They'll have a paddling pool and that sort of stuff. Now Rory, let's get serious. We're going to devote most of this episode to talking about the 300 pound gorilla, Donald J. Trump. We're also going to talk about Prince Harry and his battle with the press. And I've just before I was arriving, I'm actually in a, in an office. And on the way up, all the televisions were showing the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I just saw your friend, the King, making a speech. So I actually think that today is a good day to start to assess the extent to which we actually think that there's a note of fascism in the air in the United States. And as a starting point, Rory, can I just read to you?

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  If you go to the American Holocaust Museum in Washington, there is a yellowing, thinning paper that hangs on the wall. And it's, and the headline is the early warning signs of fascism. And as I go through them, can I ask you and our listeners and viewers just to sort of maybe give marks out of 10 for the extent to which you might think that this is. And we're seeing these early warning signs in relation to what's happening in the States. Number one, powerful and continuing nationalism.

• 4:26Rory Stewart?

  Very good, yep.

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  Number two, disdain for human rights. Number three, identification of enemies as a unifying cause. Number four, supremacy of the military. Number five, rampant sexism. Number six, controlled media. Number seven, obsession with national security. Number eight, religion and government intertwined. Number nine, corporate power protected. Number 10, labour power suppressed. Number 11, disdain for intellectuals and the arts. Number 12, obsession with crime and punishment. 13, rampant cronyism and corruption. 14, fraudulent elections.

• 5:05Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let me just quickly try to get into this because this is obviously, you know, the million dollar question. Whether it's fair to describe Trump as a fascist or not, whether it helps to describe him as a fascist or whether he's something quite unique. I'm actually about to argue that later on this that there are bits of him that actually are quite unique that aren't really like the 1920s or 1930s at all.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:25Rory Stewart?

  But, but I guess the, the obvious things that seem to be there are the beginnings of real ultra nationalism, authoritarian leadership, edges of violence militarism, mass mobilisation propaganda. One of the things that might be interesting is this fascists, particularly Mussolini and to some extent Hitler, although I, I noticed on Twitter, people are very keen to say Hitler's not a fascist and they, in fact, quite a lot of the people who are real Musk fans are, are real experts on the, the nuanced micro details of the differences between fascism and Nazism and particularly on uniforms and salutes. I got this extraordinary thing where people were like, no, no, no, that's not exactly a Roman salute. The angle's slightly off and you've got to hold your hand at this angle.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, certainly for the, the Italian fascists who, who began all this stuff over a hundred years ago, there was a sort of third way corporatism, wasn't there? Kind of halfway between capitalism and communism and the beginnings of this sort of creation of a different kind of economic structure. Where are you on this? I mean, and do you put Franco Spain, Salazar's Portugal in this kind of category? Kind of phenomenon of the 30s, isn't it? 30s and 40s.

• 6:28Alastair Campbell?

  It is, but the reason why I, I've said to you before, I did an interview with Tony Blair for GQ a while back, this is in Trump's first term, and I said, aren't you worried about the parallels with the 30s? And Tony said, oh, don't be so ridiculous. Trump's not Hitler, Trump's not Stalin. But I think if I go down through those 14. I give him very high marks on the first thirteen, and I think I would give him very high marks on the fourteenth, which is fraudulent elections, not for the ones that he says are fraudulent, the one that he lost but says he won, which in its own way is a way of, you know, is fraudulent election, but the talk already beginning that maybe the next election, will it actually happen in the same way? Will they change the rules? Will he try to subvert the constitution and so forth? And I've just been, I'm going to

• 7:13Alastair Campbell?

  use the Tory word again, rereading, because I read it in proof to give a quote for the cover, an extraordinary book, which is just coming out, I think this week, The Nazi Mind by the historian Laurence Ries. And it's about, you know, like some of his other books, the rise of Nazism and the rise of fascism in pre-war Europe. But honestly, you cannot read it. And I read it first time before Trump won, and I'm now reading it second time after his one. You can't read it without thinking that, oh, that just happened. And it's the little things, it's the little things that build up and develop. And suddenly they're normalized. And suddenly, there was a wonderful phraser that I saw from somebody quoted in one of the American papers yesterday, talking about this voluntary obedience from

• 7:56Alastair Campbell?

  people who used to be critics. You're seeing it in the media, you're seeing it in academia, you're seeing it with some of the public figures. They're just sort of thinking, oh, I can't get on the wrong side of it. And that sort of, I think, leads the way for this.

• 8:08Rory Stewart?

  I think one of the things that makes the big question with the difference between, I guess, classic far-right authoritarian movements and fascism is the desire for a total transformation of politics, economics, society. And that's where, you know, for the fascists in the twenties and thirties, that's where the paramilitaries come in, that's where the big corporations come in. And that's where, I guess, the interesting thing is the ambitions of this new Trump and how very different Trump feels in 2025 to how he felt in 2017.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  We talked a little bit about this when, when we were together in Switzerland, right? So, I mean, the obvious things we started with, which we could see before he came in, but there's so much I certainly missed, and I wasn't expecting about these executive orders. Before he came in, we could see one big difference, right? One big difference that was obvious to us is that We've lost a lot of the central, powerful, progressive, liberal leaders in Europe that balanced him in 2017. Angela Merkel's gone, Macron, 2017.

• 9:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and if you go through some, just let's just go through some of the things. So first time round, in his first term, you know, it's just felt chaotic at the start. Today, I quoted, when we talked to Scaramucci the other day for the live stream, I quoted this journalist that I've met out in Davos, who said he's just looking ahead to the next four years with utter exhaustion, because if it's like this, these first few days, and just go through them and ask, ask yourself whether you think any previous president would have done this. So for example, take the TikTok decision alone. In doing what he's done, he's defying both bipartisan Congress decision and the Supreme Court. Would previous presidents have done that? Not so sure.

• 9:46Rory Stewart?

  Just remind us what the TikTok decision was for listeners.

• 9:48Alastair Campbell?

  Essentially, not least because Trump had been calling for it, the Americans decided that TikTok, because of its role in Chinese economic espionage and so forth, that it was effectively to be banned. And he says, no, we're going to get it.

• 10:00Rory Stewart?

  And that's presumably partly because TikTok was very helpful in his election. And now he's thinking about whether one of his friends, one of his tech cronies, might be able to take it over.

• 10:08Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. Then you have the stuff like withdrawing the security detail for people who are under serious death threats, John Bolton, Fauci, Pompeo, et cetera. I'm not sure a previous president would have done that. The DEI stuff, where every government department is being told, not merely the DEI stuff has to go, but if anybody says anything that goes against that, complains about it and so forth, they will, quote, face adverse consequences. Firing the inspectors general, which is illegal.

• 10:38Rory Stewart?

  Just again, to explain, this is like the National Audit Office in Britain. These are like the internal auditors for different American government departments, who are there to try to keep the finances straight.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they're there specifically to guard against abuse, waste and corruption. And the law says that if for any of them to be appointed or sacked. Congress must be consulted, no decision within thirty days. Now, Lindsey Graham, very prominent Republican, was interviewed on CNN yesterday and said, but look, the law says that, so he's broken the law, yes? And he just goes, well, yeah, but, you know, we're into, it's okay to break the law. Well, yeah, but, and then he justified it, same as Kevin McCarthy did when we talked to him in Davos.

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  Let me throw in a few of my own additions, because it's so difficult following all this.

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 11:24Rory Stewart?

  Of course, there are many people who, of course, think we suffer from Trump derangement syndrome and are just entirely hysterical and he can't be quite as bad as we make out. So let's try to be sort of quite straightforward about pointing out what he's actually done. So, for example, people will be aware that he put out a message on, I think initially on Truth Social Telegram, which later ended up on Twitter, where he said that Canada should be the fifty-first state, America should reacquire the Panama Canal, and that Greenland should become part of the United States. Now, when that happened, people imagined before the election that this was a bit of sort of bravado and humour. He then called the Danish Prime Minister and in a fifteen-minute call insisted that Denmark hand over Greenland. And when the Danish Prime Minister said, essentially, you've got to be joking, it's

• 12:09Rory Stewart?

  up to the people of Greenland whether they want to be part of the United States, he offered money and appeared to be threatening military force. Now, this is something very interesting and I just want to focus on it. I mean, I could look at a couple of other things and I'd like to move on to them in a second, you know, the cutting of all US international development assistance.

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Rory Stewart?

  Immediately. And we talk about that a little bit and we can talk about his announcement that he's wishes to ethnically cleanse Gaza, remove every single Palestinian from Gaza and move them to Jordan and Egypt.

• 12:41Alastair Campbell?

  I also want to talk about his silencing of the organisation which releases data on things like bird flu and down the line, should there be such a thing, a pandemic?

• 12:52Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, and then maybe we can talk about the pardoning of the January sixth rioters and who they are and how many of them are and what some of these people did and why putting them back on the streets may be a bit dangerous. But let's just focus on Greenland, for example. What struck me most about Greenland, which we, honestly, I don't think have seen in more than two thousand years of Western history, a ruler doing something like that without pretending to have any legal or ethical justification.

• 13:23Rory Stewart?

  Right, even the Roman emperors, when they went round trying to acquire territory, claimed they were doing it for some kind of reason and tried to get senatorial consent. The British Empire at its very worst always said that it was doing it because, you know, one of their consuls had been threatened or they were defending indigenous people or there was some interest of trade. Even Hitler, right? I mean, this is what's so weird. Hitler did not feel that he could invade Russia and Poland without staging an attack against his troops, claiming that he was acting in self-defense, right?

• 13:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Rory Stewart?

  So this represents a very, very new culture. I'm sort of interested in what is it about the modern world, about the world that's been created by social media, by mass communications, by total cynicism and disillusionment, that means that you can now just say, excuse me, I'm going to help myself to territory from a friendly neighbouring ally, and I'm not even going to pretend that, you know, the rights of the Greenlanders are being oppressed or that America has a legal just, you know, when the English kings invaded France, they at least did so claiming that they were the rightful kings of France and they were descended from some French king. This is a different universe.

• 14:31Alastair Campbell?

  Also, you said in your preamble that, you know, he may, he said it during the election, but actually on this one, he didn't say it during the election. He has no mandate for this whatsoever. This came out of a clear blue sky after the election. And you say, what does it say about the world and how that world has developed? What it says about the world is that people like Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, probably Modi as well, basically see the world now as chunks. And you have this bit and I have that bit, and let's see how we can, we can work things out. And let me say, I've, by the way, I, every Dane I met in Davos, I've told this, and also I've been talking to people in the Danish government

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  as well, and I've given them a very good idea. Can I tell you my idea?

• 15:19Rory Stewart?

  Done. What's your idea?

• 15:19Alastair Campbell?

  You basically say, do you, you know about Ozempic and Wegovy, the anti-

• 15:23Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  Obesity medication, right? Ninety percent of Wegovy goes to America. Sixty-six percent of Ozempic sales go to America. And this is a company now that is the biggest company in Europe. So what we're going to say is, Donald- Looking at your slimline version, because he's lost about thirty pounds, you're clearly on this stuff. Let me just tell you, you're gonna have to get on the black market from now, because we're gonna stop all sales of Ozempic and Wegovy to America. And then you think, all these guys are serious. What do you think of my idea?

• 15:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's beautiful, it's beautiful. Can I just develop this one stage further? It's extremely unlikely, but it's not impossible that Trump begins to tie too much of his ego to this statement. He's not backing down. After this call with the Danish Prime Minister, he did a full press conference reasserting that Greenland should be part of the United States and that he's gonna get it. Keeps saying he's gonna get it. So it doesn't seem to me impossible that he begins to use economic sanctions to make this happen. Now, what happens? What happens if you actually ended up with a US president who started saying, actually, we're gonna help ourselves to Greenland? And of course, you can begin to see it from the MAGA, the deep MAGA crowd on my Twitter feed, and now people saying, yeah, they can't

• 16:36Rory Stewart?

  do anything about it. We've got the greatest military in the world, we'll just walk in and we'll take it. It's fifty-six thousand people, we'll just help ourselves to Greenland.

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, Xi Jinping thinks, well, you take Greenland, we'll take Taiwan, what are you gonna do about it? And Trump will say, yeah, fair play.

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  And sorry, to defend Xi Jinping, right? He has much more right to Taiwan than Donald Trump has to Greenland, right? And at least Xi Jinping and Putin are pretending to have legal reasons, historical reasons for what they're doing, right? So what would actually happen if the US landed troops on Greenland?

• 17:06Alastair Campbell?

  I honestly don't know. I mean, well, they've got troops, they've got a base there now, haven't they? If they sort of took it by military force, I just don't know what would happen. I mean, for a start, where does that leave us on Article Five? Article Five of the NATO Constitution is an attack on one is an attack on all. Right, Denmark is a NATO member.

• 17:22Rory Stewart?

  And the reason I'm pushing it, I mean, I'm being a bit silly, because I don't think that's likely to happen. But the reason I'm pushing it is I'm just trying to get people to think about how even these kinds of threats and behaviour is now pulling at the most fundamental threats the international system. If you follow that logically to its conclusion.

• 17:39Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 17:40Rory Stewart?

  Europe would feel forced to respond.

• 17:42Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 17:43Rory Stewart?

  Denmark might even try to fight. Troops might be deployed to try to support Denmark. And and and the reason why this is worth saying is that for seventy or eighty years, America has built an international system. It's built international institutions, it created NATO, it created the World Bank, the IMF, helped to set up the United Nations. It's done these enormous military assistance programs worldwide. It's got bases in over a hundred countries. It has made everything interoperable. So the British military, the French military can't operate without the US military. When we go into Libya, we need the US. The reason why NATO couldn't stay in Afghanistan when two thousand five hundred American troops were removed is because various vital bits of the whole war fighting machine only America

• 18:28Rory Stewart?

  can really do, we can't really operate with them.

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  With countries like Jordan, they have signed ten billion, ten thousand million dollar aid contributions with six year promises. And Jordan has signed up to being part of American security architecture because for fifty, sixty years, they've been able to depend on them.

• 18:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Rory Stewart?

  And at no point in the last seventy, eighty years has America tried to use these things for extortion. When they have shifted changes, they've done it with consultation, they've done it quite slowly, they've done it quite predictably, and they've usually done it in a way that countries can understand. It's been about democracy, it's been about human rights, it's been about American enemies. You can sort of understand over seventy, eighty years what the American values were, whether you like them or not. They remained pretty constant between different bipartisan people. And you didn't feel that you were taking an incredible risk integrating your military with the American military, or taking ten billion dollars of international aid over six years and basing your whole budget on it, until now.

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  But if you think about the way that this, let's just take it back to Denmark and Fredriksson, the prime minister, the tone of what's emerged of that conversation of the politics around it is basically, it's less diplomacy and it's more kind of mafioso stuff. It's like, look, Metta, we can do this nicely. Oh, we can do this in a way that's going to be really, really difficult. That's your prerogative. Do you want to get hurt or do you want to do it nicely? And that's the sort of the tone of this. And by the way, the other thing which has got next to no coverage at all that I've seen. The Department of Homeland Security has put a pause on the programs which allowed immigrants to settle temporarily, including Ukrainians.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, ten to fifteen thousand Afghans who have already been vetted and approved for immigration to the United States have been blocked, including some who were blocked as they arrived at the airport to leave the other day. Right, that's Afghanistan.

• 20:17Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 20:17Alastair Campbell?

  People who've worked for the Americans.

• 20:19Rory Stewart?

  Let me just spell out what's happening now with USAID. So.

• 20:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Rory Stewart?

  The American government gives about forty billion dollars a year, forty thousand million dollars a year in overseas assistance, twenty five point six billion through USAID. On Friday, I got a flurry of emails from all the NGOs that I'm associated with or partnering with around the world, because they had all received a message from USAID saying, all funding stops now, stop your programs. These are NGOs who have contracts with the American government, signed contracts. So let's say you're operating in the Congo and you're doing vaccination, you've hired a lot of staff, you've bought your vaccines, you're rolling out your vaccination program, stop.

• 21:03Rory Stewart?

  And when people tried to ask questions, there was the most extraordinary email that came back from USAID. And I'm just going to read it to you because I think it's quite a good way maybe of illustrating what must be happening inside the US government at the moment. This is an email from USAID. Dear grantee, just imagine writing this as a civil seven. We are aware that you may have questions about how the executive order on foreign aid will impact your grant. At this time, we are coordinating internally while waiting for formal guidance on how to interpret the new executive order on foreign assistance funding. We appreciate your patience and we'll be in touch as soon as we have more information.

• 21:46Rory Stewart?

  Now, if you're the Jordanian government, this is your entire education budget, health budget. It's all gone on budget and the money's been stopped on a dime.

• 21:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Rory Stewart?

  So your government basically is bankrupt and can't deliver services. Now, the US government gets to do this once and only once. What Trump has done is one of the great scams of all time. You become a monopoly provider. You insert yourself into the middle of everybody else's military, political and economic system. And then you say, I've got you over the barrel. Give me everything you want. What does that mean? You can't do it again. Nobody's going to let America integrate into their political, economic and military systems in the same way in the future. Because they've seen it, it would be like if somebody turned up in your house, said, I'm going to take responsibility for all your heating, electricity, broadband services, children's education. And then turned up and said, by the way, I'm providing all that. I'm going to extort you for, you know,

• 22:37Alastair Campbell?

  I know.

• 22:37Rory Stewart?

  $200,000. Well, you might pay up once, but you're going to get another provider in future.

• 22:42Alastair Campbell?

  What do you think this does for soft power? Do they care about soft power anymore? Because I know historically, the Americans have really liked this idea that they're sort of top of the global soft power. It's usually us and the Americans that are up there.

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Alastair Campbell?

  This is going to damage them so much, but it's so deliberate. And then the other, the other thing that happened yesterday, which, you know, the Trump people will say, well, that's good because it shows how strength works. Two planes set off full of Colombians nationals who are being deported from the United States. And the president of Colombia refuses to allow them to land. Trump immediately announces, immediately 25% tariffs, 50% in 24 hours. If you haven't reversed the decision, they reversed the decision. So what it shows is that bullying, if you like, works. However, it will also upend whatever positive relationship there is between Colombia and the United States,

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  which actually the previous administration had worked pretty hard to try to repair. So this is a sort of deliberate, let's just, everybody's an enemy. We go after everybody. Right now, he'll be thinking, this is working. I'm getting my way on everything. But there'll come a point where I think this just backfires.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. I mean, so he can in the short term get his way on anything. Because the reason partly, I guess, that all previous leaders pretended to have ethical and legal justification before they did things is that, you know, if you were Hitler going to the Czech Republic, you didn't want Britain and France to go against you. So you invented some legal justification to try to give you a bit of cover and hope that some of the people in that country might support you, right? You also wanted legitimacy in the country you went into. So there were a whole series of reasons why he did this stuff. America is now a superpower so enormous that it's not like any of these other powers that had to worry in the same way about allies and about local populations.

• 24:35Rory Stewart?

  America's military is, as I said, so indispensable and enormous. But again, if he starts using American military bases as blackmail, so, you know, he started a bit of this in the last administration. You've put a big US military base in some country in the Middle East. And you say to that country, thank you very much, you're now going to start paying for my base.

• 25:01Rory Stewart?

  You create a whole NATO system, which involves selling quite a lot of American weapons. Let me give you that as another example, okay? So when I was the Chair of the House Commerce Defence Select Committee, one of the most fashionable things to say in those days was, well, why don't we just buy American? Instead of spending all this time developing our own weapons with BAE systems, wasting a colossal amount of money. There are these cheap American tanks, there are these cheap American rifles, they make them at scale. Let's just buy American. Now you wouldn't look so smart, right? Because Trump might well turn around and say, oh, excuse me, yeah, you got the weapons. But if you want any resupply, if you want any of the software updates, if you want any of the missiles, you're going to start paying us four times as much as you were before.

• 25:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, and by the way, if you don't use the weapons in exactly the way that we want, we're going to stop spying and we can cripple them. So all these American systems that they provide, we saw it in Afghanistan. Turned out that none of the American helicopters or planes that they provided the Afghan army could fly without American consultants and contractors doing software updates daily. And as soon as they remove them, they're crippled.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  Let me take you to another area where I've been actually talking to people in the protective health sector. And again, I think this is something that people should be really, really concerned about. This is one of his executive orders that got next to no coverage at all. Freeze at the National Institute of Health on meetings, travel, communication and hiring, while they, quote, "review protocols." Executive orders also halting publication of regulation and guidance documents issued by bodies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare, Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration. Now, it says that the pause will be temporary, but meanwhile, the people who are in these organisations, one of which I spoke to, says that the whole thing has had an absolutely

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  chilling effect and that for the first week in something like sixty-four years, something called the morbidity and mortality weekly report, this is something that goes out every week and has done for sixty-four years, and it explains with real live data, health risks to the American people. This week, it did not go out. And the thinking is, two things. One, he wants to show them that they can be muzzled whenever he wants them to be muzzled. And secondly, he wants to make sure that if there's bad news coming out about health and what have you, the White House can be in complete control of it. I've got another email, this, I think, is chilling as well. I mentioned NASA when we talked about this with the Mooch.

• 27:35Alastair Campbell?

  And do you want to know the name of the email and the address that you have to send to? If you, if you see somebody who is not going along with this new DEI initiative to basically get it out, it's called [email protected]. And it says, "There will be no adverse consequence for timely reporting of this information. However, any failure to report such information within ten days may result in adverse consequences." In other words, if you hear somebody saying, "Well, this fucking DEI stuff, you can bollocks that, I'm not going to get engaged." You're, you're sitting at the next desk, you have got to tell [email protected] that

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  your neighbour in the, the office, I mean, it's, it's positively Orwellian, the whole thing.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  Let, let me come back on, I know I'm being boring on international aid.

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, it's not boring.

• 28:28Rory Stewart?

  I'm sort of still struggling to get the scale of it.

• 28:31Alastair Campbell?

  Let me, let me just say why I don't think it's boring, why I think you're right to come back on it. If I remember rightly, when we were going, the big, big, big players on aid and development were America, the UK, Germany and Japan.

• 28:42Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 28:43Alastair Campbell?

  And America, the biggest of all.

• 28:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Alastair Campbell?

  And in virtually every country in the world, particularly the poorer countries, organisations that were keeping people alive and that were making systems kind of vaguely work, suddenly overnight have the plug pulled. That is really serious.

• 29:00Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So we're in a situation in which the number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa has gone from about hundred and seventy million in nineteen eighty to about four hundred and thirty million today. We have an incredible number of refugees, displaced people, places like Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, face these repeated droughts and humanitarian catastrophes. And what's happened by stopping it, and again, they're claiming they're just stopping for a review, is that you are stopping programmes now in one hundred countries. USAID has programmes in a hundred countries. And they have dozens of programmes in each of those countries. Thousands, tens of thousands of programmes have just ground to a halt overnight.

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  And that's everything from vaccination, nutrition training for young children, healthcare. And none of the countries know what's happening. So you saw Zelensky saying, oh, as far as I'm concerned, I'm still getting assistance from the United States. Well, it doesn't look like it. On the list at the moment, the clarification is exempting only Israel and Egypt from the total cessation of aid. Now, this idea that they're going to review it, how are they going to get around reviewing thousands upon thousands of USAID programmes? How long is it going to take them? What are they going to restart?

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  And what are the judgments they're applying as well?

• 30:23Rory Stewart?

  And then what happens to these institutions, so many institutions, even the big NGOs, they're often forty, fifty percent dependent on USAID for all their work. Now, there's a lot wrong with the international development system. I was the Secretary of State for international development. I've run NGOs. There is so much nonsense in the development system. But the way to do it, of course, would be to set clear targets, address future contracts, not existing contracts, and provide a very, very detailed, rigorous way of shifting the strategy of USAID. But stopping all existing contracts and stopping on-budget payments. The US government went away from USAID giving money to NGOs to deliver things

• 31:06Rory Stewart?

  to saying, okay, we will support the Jordanian government budget on health and education. Stop that. You're stopping the government providing its own services to its people. Of course, anyone listening to me who's on the Trump side is like, yeah, well, that's their fault. Why were they relying on American money anyway? Well, sure as hell, they ain't going to be relying on American money in the future. And all the soft power and all the influence that America's built up over seventy, eighty years. Because remember, Jordan isn't just, in the way that Trump thinks, some sort of neutral recipient of American aid. They have been the key American security partner in the region for decades. There's American troops on the grounds, American bases. Jordan took a million refugees out of Syria. Jordan was vital for balancing ISIS. Jordan is vital for the security of Israel.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  Toppling Jordan is not just, oh, well, we were giving them money and Bagram will have our money back. It's toppling your entire system.

• 31:57Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know what I find most alarming at the moment? There was a, there was a single column on the front page of The Times today about a survey of the extent to which around the place, including in the UK, I think it said that half of Gen Z young men actually think there would be no harm in us having a dictatorship in the UK. This is what this thing is doing. And this is why, you know, we talked about this to some people in Davos. The left or the progressives have got to get their act together in understanding this is an international, this is the culmination of an international campaign that has been going on for many, many years, and they are now absolutely on the rampage. Listen, let's take a quick break, Roy. When we come back, Keir Starmer's first call with Donald Trump happened last night.

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  And I also, I watched, so that you didn't have to, I watched Elon Musk speaking to the Alternative for Deutschland rally in Germany.

• 32:46Rory Stewart?

  Great. Look forward to it.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.

• 33:20Speaker 06

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• 33:43Speaker 07

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• 34:19Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alice Campbell. And Rory, I love the fact that you're whispering. Is that because there's lots of people pouring coffee and clinking their glasses and?

• 34:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm feeling slightly embarrassed.

• 34:30Alastair Campbell?

  Are you in the business class lounge at Geneva Airport?

• 34:32Rory Stewart?

  I managed to get into the business class lounge. There are all these people trying to get their beers and get their coffees going. Okay, tell us about the call with Kier Saman. And can I just sort of preface? I mean, I sent you that thing on the first 20 calls made by Marco Rubio. And it was absolutely staggering.

• 34:50Alastair Campbell?

  Was there a single European in there?

• 34:51Rory Stewart?

  Basically, no Europeans on the list. EU not on the list, UK not on the list. India number one, and then a lot of other countries who you would not have thought were their top priorities.

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, Marco Rubio is definitely going to be going big. I think his first big visit is going to be to Latin America. Trump said when he was on the plane back from Las Vegas that he thought his first visit would either be to the UK or Saudi. But they had a call yesterday and the readout, certainly the readout from the British end was very, very sort of warm. And there was certainly no threats to take the Hebrides or to rename the English Channel, the American Channel. There was none of that stuff going on. But I think that being said, you know, Labour, the government is really going to have some big, big, big choices to make. And I do think this is happening at a time when the Europe debate is changing. And of course, if you speak to the pro-Brexit people

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  who say, well, look at Europe, it's a complete bloody mess, et cetera, et cetera. Well, it's not a complete mess, but it's certainly, it's got a lot of problems. And you and I, when we were in Davos, we heard from a lot of the American, the big American people in particular, almost contempt for Europe. And I think that's about because Europe still wants to have a rules-based order. But I, I think that there's no way that a Labour government in the UK, as it were, can ride on the ideological coattails of somebody like Trump. So it's really going to be quite difficult to, to navigate this. But what I would say from the tone of that call is that you got the sense that Trump is looking to have a decent relationship, which sits very, very oddly with this kind of Elon Musk obsession.

• 36:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And so that was something I did pick up on Davos because I was talking to people who are part of this kind of new republican, deep and dark MAGA movement. And they were saying they would be very, very anxious if they were the UK because a story has developed, which Elon Musk has been obviously peddling, which is that the UK has basically been taken over by Islamists. It's become a kind of Islamic state. And you can see people, you know, on Silicon Valley saying to you, oh, my goodness, poor you. You live in the United Kingdom. Are you okay? Are you safe? You have Jordan Peterson giving this extraordinary interview to Piers Morgan, where he's just like, what's happening in your country? You know, the whole thing's gone to hell in a handbasket.

• 37:11Alastair Campbell?

  He was one of the people, by the way, named in this survey of young men. And he and Andrew Tate were named as. You know, role models and what have you. I mean, this thing is kind of off the scale mad, but it needs a proper fight against it. These people have just been allowed to kind of dominate the airwaves, dominate the intellectual debate.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  And it's so dishonest. I mean, Jordan Peterson, I mean, began as an academic, began with his first book, you know, it was slightly macho and he used to come and give talks in Britain, which mostly earnest young men listening to him. But, you know, he talked about God and religion and truth and, and my goodness, by the time you see him on Piers Morgan, I mean, he doesn't care really about getting his facts right, doesn't care about putting things in context, doesn't care about proportion, doesn't care about pointing out who's been prosecuted or who hasn't, when these particular rapes have happened.

• 37:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but if you, if you end up being one of these big, big names on the, the kind of ideological right and this opinion forming attention economy, it is big, big, big, big business. You become very wealthy, you become pretty powerful. Do you want to hear what Musk had to say to, um, to the AFD?

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  Yes. Okay. So a quick reminder for people again, AFD, right wing party in Germany that did surprisingly well in the elections in Turingia and Saxony, Turingia came first. And this matters because the far right in Austria now dominate Austria and Germany's about to go into an election. And at this particular moment, Elon Musk has decided not to get behind the conventional sort of equivalent of the Tories, not even behind the equivalent of kind of Nigel Farage, but to go much further out. Remember, he's a guy who, who supports Tommy Robinson and wants him, sees him as a prisoner of conscience, Tommy Robinson being this kind of hooligan football loon. I mean, sorry, maybe that's unfair to you as a football supporter, but anyway, a kind of crazy Islamist conspiracy

• 38:59Rory Stewart?

  theory, unrepentant propagandist. And he's now gone for the AFD. Musk is now trying to promote the AFD in Germany, interviewed their leader and has now appeared on their stage. Over to you for what he said.

• 39:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he appeared with this massive, enormous, it was a hall with four and a half thousand people in it. Alice Vidal, the chancellor candidate, introduced him and it was this huge, just his face was about 60 feet tall. And he did his usual kind of slightly geeky, couldn't quite get his words together and what have you. But it was straight on pro AFD propaganda. AFD is the best hope for Germany. It's okay to be proud to be German, be proud of your cultural values. If you lose everything in multiculturalism, it dilutes everything. We mustn't become one big soup. You're an ancient nation, you go back thousands of years. Julius Caesar, he said, his account of meeting the German tribes is how strong and powerful they were.

• 39:51Alastair Campbell?

  And then he says, you've got to move beyond past guilt. You shouldn't have to live and carry the guilt of your grandparents. Be excited for the future, preserve German culture, protect German people. And then he had a dig at Brussels, which I suspect, I think this is about Brussels. Brussels, as I said earlier, rules based, online, looking at the regulation of social media companies. Same as Trump in his speech, he said, I love, I like the member states, but he deliberately didn't say Europe. He ended it just by saying, I hope the AFD do well, I hope Alice Vidal becomes chancellor. I mean, what the fuck does he know about Alice Vidal? That would be very good for Germany, I strongly support the F D, and then he just went, go.

• 40:30Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. I mean, we talked about fascism at the beginning. I think the guy who really is a proper authoritarian fascist or emerging as such is Musk. I mean, the recklessness now of this man, that stuff that you've just talked about where he says, you know, every country needs to have its own culture. Connects directly with this ethnic pluralism phrase, which all the far right in Europe use. And ethnic pluralism, as I said a couple of weeks ago, is this theory that Germany is only supposed to have a limited number of people from other countries. I think they've calculated they're supposed to have exactly 600 Afghans and no more. And ethnic pluralism, and because it's got its word pluralism, sounds quite liberal, it's not at all.

• 41:13Rory Stewart?

  It's the justification, what Musk is saying out there is the justification for this remigration. It's justification for saying German and Austrian citizens who happen not to be ethnically white should move out of the country because they come from an alien religion, they haven't assimilated properly. And the most worrying thing of all, I was talking to a Jewish friend who was like, well, it's fine. You know, they're only going after the people who aren't making a real effort to assimilate and who are wearing funny clothes and are going to mosque too much. Of course, this is very, very dangerous because of course this was indeed what people said in the 1930s. Oh, you know, maybe they're just going to go after the Jews who, who aren't assimilating properly.

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  This is why I referred to Lawrence's, Lawrence Ries's book, The Nazi Mind. It's, it's got this vibe of, oh, it'll be fine. Don't stop going on about it. Stop worrying too much. You know, and, and you've still got lots of people thinking, oh, well, at least he's strong. At least he's funny. Get stuff done, all this stuff. And all he's done so far is sign a lot of executive orders, created a lot of noise. The one thing I really do worry about is the point that the mooch made on our live stream is that, you know, the dissent just seems to be kind of a bit weak. It'll come, it'll come, but you know, honestly.

• 42:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the things that's, that's also special in this new situation, which wasn't so true in 2017, is that young men in particular, and this is, this is famously, also this task I've given you for the year is our kind of envoy to young men, right?

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, I know. I'm on the case. Don't worry. I'm reading about little else.

• 42:37Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, one of, one of the key points about them is they're completely obsessed at the moment with anti-heroes and the idea of the disruptor. And the disruptor is a kind of tech bro who comes in and take the phrase from Silicon Valley, move fast and break things. So, famously Elon Musk is willing to take risks that his unmanned rockets will blow up and just keeps throwing them up in the air and therefore can get them built more cheaply than NASA can that has all these safety protocols in place. So somewhere there's a kind of melding between the vision of the heroic, anti-hero disruptor who moves fast and breaks things and just gets shit done. Um, which Curtis Yavin, who's been profiled in the New York Times,

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  talks about the need for an American Caesar, an American king, an American monarch, you know. Just imagine, you know, the difference between if Elon Musk was running the government and a normal kind of liberal Democrats running government. And somehow Trump is harnessing that, all these executive orders, the flurry of it, the fact that he's basically saying, and, and you, you pointed this out, a lot of what he's doing is technically illegal in US law. You know, he's deprived, he's announced one of his executive orders that you can't, by being born in the United States, be an American, automatic American citizen anymore. That is going directly against the US Constitution.

• 43:57Alastair Campbell?

  Amendment fourteen.

• 43:58Rory Stewart?

  But the stopping of all, stopping of all his funding is going directly against all the contracts that the US government has signed with all these countries, right?

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:08Rory Stewart?

  So eventually, Congress will try to act, people will take legal cases. But what's so interesting is he's behaving as though Congress doesn't exist, the legal system doesn't exist. At no point in the drafting of these executive orders, apparently, is a lawyer involved. Is anyone saying, is this legal or isn't it? Can we actually do this?

• 44:29Alastair Campbell?

  Crazy, it's crazy stuff. Well, doubtless, unfortunately, we'll be talking about a fair amount on the podcast this week, next week and in many other weeks. But can we close off with a little discussion about the second son of your friend, the King, Prince Harry?

• 44:43Rory Stewart?

  Yes, go on then.

• 44:44Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I'm an admirer of Prince Harry. I like people with guts. I like people who take on, you know, big, powerful forces. What I want to draw attention to, I want to ask these listeners and viewers and you to ponder, let's just say Harry had taken this case to court and lost. I wonder how many front pages that would have filled and how many pages inside they might have used to cover it.

• 45:08Rory Stewart?

  So just take us back a little bit, because not everybody's following the story. So this, for international listeners, this was this immense phone hacking scandal.

• 45:15Alastair Campbell?

  Believe me, Roy, Prince Harry gets a lot of international coverage.

• 45:19Rory Stewart?

  Okay, but just, just explain the story for us in simple terms. As far as I understand it, what happened is that a lot of the British newspapers were hiring private detectives and others. And what they were doing is they were tapping the phones of celebrities. And then the stories that they ran in their papers came not just from tapping, but also breaking into their homes, going through their rubbish, doing all this kind of stuff. Prince Harry was one of the victims of this, but just probably one of the more famous victims, because there were, I don't know what, thousands of victims of this stuff, right?

• 45:46Alastair Campbell?

  Thousands, thousands, yeah.

• 45:47Rory Stewart?

  And Hugh Grant and others have been involved in cases over many, many years. But what was different about Prince Harry seemed to be that he was saying he was going to take it all the way to the wire, because the others have often settled out of court. Is that right?

• 45:59Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, yeah. First up, there were loads of cases for the News of the World and, and of course, the News International claimed, News Group claimed that this was just isolated to the News of the World, not the other papers, the Mirror said the same.

• 46:12Rory Stewart?

  And the News of the World was then closed? They then closed the News of the World as part of this?

• 46:15Alastair Campbell?

  The News of the World was then closed, a tactical move, I would argue. The settlements and the legal costs up to now have cost News Group newspapers up to two billion. And so what's happened with Prince Harry the other day, they were literally minutes away from the start of an eight-week trial, okay? Now, the problem is with our legal system, there is a danger that if you are offered a settlement and you don't settle, but then you go through with the process, and even if you win, if you're awarded less than the settlement that you could have had, you can end up paying the costs even of the people that you've defeated. So it's a stupid system. And that's why, for example, Hugh Grant said that that was why.

• 46:57Alastair Campbell?

  He settled, and ultimately, I think that's one of the reasons that Harry and Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, settled as well. That's the reason that they, I think, settled on this occasion. However, what Prince Harry managed to get, as well as a full and unequivocal apology, was an admission by News Group of lawbreaking on their behalf. They said it wasn't their journalists, it was all these hundreds of private detectives and what have you. However, what this has opened the door to is the possibility of perjury, because these are people who have stood up in the Leveson inquiry, which is under oath, who've stood up in previous court cases, said they had no knowledge, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the other thing, the reason why, and this is not, this is not going away, Tom Watson

• 47:41Alastair Campbell?

  stood outside the court and said he'd be handing over a dossier to the police, because we're talking about literally millions of emails that have been deleted, lost from evidence. And by the way, this after a court, a case had been sort of put in train, as it were. And I was sent yesterday, we should maybe try and get a version of it into the newsletter, but I, I was sent this extraordinary document, setting out since 1999, the incidents in which the police had been informed of, you know, s- serious, clear evidence of serious allegations against the press, and have essentially ended up with saying, no further action to be taken, right through dozens and dozens and dozens of these.

• 48:25Rory Stewart?

  Can I ask a, a sort of really awkward question? I mean, you were a journalist with the Daily Mirror, like a tabloid newspaper for many years. You had nothing to do with this? I mean, you didn't see any of this? You weren't aware this stuff was going on, or?

• 48:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you've got to remember, I was, I, I was a journalist in, I stopped being a journalist in 1994, so I can't remember when the whole sort of mobile phone thing became, I, there was a case, I was involved in a court case where we were, somebody who'd been Tapping somebody's phone brought in some information. And we ended up, it ended up in court and we were told we couldn't use the information because of the, we'd argue that it was in the public interest. So that was, that was the only time I had any kind of sign of this happening.

• 49:05Rory Stewart?

  And does the culture of it make sense to you? I mean, was it just sort of almost inevitable that the whole culture of newspapers had become so kind of cynical and brutal? That it was almost inevitable this kind of stuff was going to happen?

• 49:18Alastair Campbell?

  Totally, totally. Well, what makes, what was extraordinary is that, so when we were in government, I, I had a settlement because they'd been, you know, getting into our stuff. Um, I was actually a witness in the Prince Harry thing because they, I was used because they wanted to show that just because it didn't lead to a publication of story, it didn't mean that the law wasn't being broken to get information. And this was what the, these private attorneys were being used to get into our, into my bank account. And that sort of went nowhere. But so, no, I think you're right about the culture. And it's the culture, we're back to this point that we keep talking about the whole time, impunity. They think they above the law. And the thing that's happened since Harry's case is that, and as I said to you at the start, if Harry had lost this case, it would have been, we'd still be talking about it.

• 50:03Alastair Campbell?

  The papers would still be full of it. He's finished. He's gone back to, you know, Diana will be turning in her grave, all this sort of stuff. Let me just give you some examples of this. So The Spectator, now edited by Michael Gove, brackets Rupert Murdoch. In the end, writes The Spectator, Harry folded. His much ballyhooed case, which was due to begin in the High Court, lasted for eight weeks, has concluded. Much ballyhooed. I mean, I'm more dismissive. The Mail barely reported it. And they didn't mention the fact that they are currently involved in a case which is coming to court next year. The Sun, the paper at the heart of it, it was kind of tucked away on page six.

• 50:41Alastair Campbell?

  The Times, sister paper, it was on the bottom of page 12 alongside a story about Judi Dench being worried about her eyesight. The Mail and The Mirror buried away. And The Telegraph, to be fair to The Telegraph, Rory, it was on the front page. But guess what the headline was? Harry climbs down after eight-figure payout. And the Sunday papers, it was as if nothing had happened. It's all gone away. And so this is how they get away with it. But I think with this one, I think I've got a feeling this one could go because we talk about perjury. We're talking about the destruction of evidence and so forth. And it's very rare that I would quote Kelvin McKenzie, former editor of The Sun, favourably at all.

• 51:24Alastair Campbell?

  But I do think he had a lot of, I read a transcript of an interview he did. First of all, he pointed out that this was happening on the watch of Rebecca Brooks. She was editor, she's now the chief executive of the entire shooting match. And he said this, if this was the BBC, BP or John Lewis, with a CEO involved in a scandal like this, they wouldn't last 10 minutes. The criticism from the press would be unbearable. But he says that basically, he says that the media in Britain has got an NPP, which is a no pissing pact. In other words, they don't piss on each other. And so I just think, you know, how guilty must they feel to have spent two billion pounds not going to court?

• 52:07Rory Stewart?

  No, it's beyond imagining. It's beyond imagining. And I'm glad that the, I'm glad that the rest of this politics has not signed up to the NPP. But we're actually prepared to call this out. So thank you.

• 52:17Alastair Campbell?

  We're prepared to call that. We're prepared to call. And also, I'm also going to, I'm going to shout out, you mentioned Hugh Grant. You know, that's what I mean about I, there's a guy who is very, very famous. He's very, very wealthy. He would acknowledge, I think, that he's had a few issues in his past that he probably regrets. But he's got guts. Because I, you know, I know to take these people on, you have to have a lot of courage. And I also, I'm a great believer in organised campaigns on stuff like this. And I do think hacked off, I understand why the press hate them because they keep going for it. And so I want any, anybody who wants to, who does have information about the legal activity and their relations with the police and all that stuff, just get in touch with the hacked off inquiry

• 53:00Alastair Campbell?

  and they'll, they'll, they'll lead you down the path of righteousness.

• 53:04Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Thank you, Alison. Well, lovely to talk to you and well done on making it work with this rather chaotic background. Thank you.

• 53:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I enjoy whatever you're going to go and get from the buffet.

• 53:15Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 53:17Alastair Campbell?

  See you later.

• 53:17Rory Stewart?

  See you later. Bye bye.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 53:48Speaker 05

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only views October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 53:54Speaker 08

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  Espolone Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. 80 proof. Copyright 2026. Campagna America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.