518. Is Trump a Fascist and is His War on Iran Unwinnable?

Has Trump crossed the line from right-wing populist to fascist? Is he fighting a war with Iran he cannot win? Is Iraq being dragged in against its will? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Alastair Campbell as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, James Clayden Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  Is Trump a fascist?

• 0:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  When you say, I think Donald Trump is a fascist, they often mean this person is very right wing and I don't like them.

• 0:07Alastair Campbell?

  Far right, authoritarian nationalism, obsession with military strength, the centralised power, a determination to suppress opposition. I think he ticks a good 90% of that.

• 0:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Trump is a narcissist, he's only interested in himself. I don't think he's powered by a wider ideology.

• 0:23Alastair Campbell?

  We're dealing with somebody who is surrounded by sycophants, nobody talking the truth to him. That's what happens with a cult. It is a cult.

• 0:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is there not a slippage here between the tribalism and the cult, as it were?

• 0:43Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory Stewart has decided that he and his family should have a podcast-free holiday. But I, obsessive that I am, having never missed a week in the Olympiad, we've been doing this, I am here with an absolutely brilliant stand-in. So, welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And me, Dominic Sandbrook.

• 1:03Alastair Campbell?

  There we go. It is none other than Dominic Sandbrook from our sister podcast, The Rest Is History, and now also co-presenter of Goalhanger's new show, The Book Club. And boy, do we love books and are we living through history right now. So Dominic, thanks so much for stepping in. There could not be a better time to have your perspective.

• 1:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, thank you, Alistair. It's nice to be working on a properly professional podcast for once with a really big star at Goalhanger's stable.

• 1:31Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Anyway, I think it's fair to say that as we enter the second month of the Iran war, for the fifth week running, the issue will dominate The Rest Is Politics podcast. There are so many issues and angles to look at. Are Donald Trump's expletive-laden, war-crime-threatening social media posts sign of a man losing the war, losing the plot, losing his mind even? Just hours before, he was triumphant at the Americans rescuing a couple of airmen who'd been downed in Iran. But is the fact of their jets downing one more sign that they perhaps have been underestimating their enemy? We've had Pete Hexeth firing generals galore, some say because

• 2:16Alastair Campbell?

  they don't support the Defence Secretary's notion that this is a war for Jesus, something the Pope has spoken out against. Then we have Lebanon at breaking point, we have Iraq and the worry that it's being drawn into this war against its will. And maybe especially pressing for us in Europe, is NATO finished? And perhaps most of all, I guess, who's actually winning? So there's a lot of questions that we're going to get into, Dominic, but I wonder if first of all, we shouldn't just have a little seconds out round two. This is to revisit an excellent debate we had on election night in New York. You joined me and Rory, Anthony Scaramucci and Marina Hyde as the Trump victory unfolded. And we had quite a heated

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  discussion, especially with the Mooch, on the question, is Trump a fascist? I was basically yes. Mooch was a very big yes, underlined many times, and you were a no. And I just wondered if you've changed your mind at all, given all that's happened since Trump returned for his second term.

• 3:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so the short answer is no, I haven't. It's funny that you mention it because that's something that I'm asked about a lot. Like, a lot of people remember that election night debate about was Trump a fascist, especially the exchange between me and Anthony, because Anthony was so adamant that he wasn't a fascist. And I think part of the confusion is that people use the word fascist in two different ways. So number one, people use the word fascist to mean an authoritarian demagogue that they don't like. So when you say, I think Donald Trump is a fascist, or when lots of people say, I think so and so is a fascist, I mean, people said Thatcher was a fascist, they said Nixon was a fascist, they often mean this person is very right wing and I don't like them.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  I wouldn't say that about either of those two.

• 3:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, of course. I'm not saying you would, by the way. The other definition is more historically specific, which is the one that I would use, which is that I think fascism was a very distinctive sort of historical phenomenon. It came about in the ruins of the First World War. There's a paramilitary politics, you know, to fascism. There's also, if you look at people like Mussolini and Hitler, what they want to do is to, they have total contempt for democracy. I mean, I'm sure you'll say, well, there are lots of people now who have contempt for democracy. But they believe that the world is entering this new age because of modernity and because of new technology and all of these kinds of things. They want to create a new society. They want to create new kinds of people. They want, they are obsessed with change.

• 4:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I mean, of course, they're looking back to the past a lot, but they believe all the old ways should be thrown out and let us create a new way of being. They're both massive overthinkers, actually, Mussolini and Hitler. If you were sat next to them by some hideous mischance at a dinner party, they'd be extremely boring and they will be telling you about all these things they had read. You know, Hitler's a great autodidact. He writes Mein Kampf. He's, he's somebody who's always giving sort of these long, boring lectures about eugenics and racism and all of this kind of stuff. Trump, I think, has very little of that. Trump is a narcissist. He's only interested in himself. I don't think he's powered by a wider ideology. I do think he has obviously total contempt for democratic norms, but I don't think that's because he thinks democracy is rotten and it's

• 5:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  weak and all this. I think it's just because it gets in his way and that so he wants to get rid.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  Let's revisit this briefly after we come back from a short break.

• 5:30Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:32Rory Stewart?

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• 5:47Alastair Campbell?

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• 6:29Rory Stewart?

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• 6:39Rory Stewart?

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• 6:41Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 6:54Rory Stewart?

  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.

• 7:17Alastair Campbell?

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

• 7:24Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 8:12Alastair Campbell?

  If we go back to the night of the election, your principal lines of argument against what Anthony and I were saying, you said that he doesn't have a paramilitary force. Well, I think we could argue that he does now with ICE. And also he and Hegseth treat the Pentagon as though it's an extension of their political operation. You said he doesn't have a cult for war.

• 8:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed, you actually said in his defence, he was actually a draft dodger. That's how much he hates war. He now actually would seem to be, despite constantly saying he's ending wars, he's actually started a war that we're going to talk about that is potentially catastrophic. He said he doesn't have a plan for aggressive expansion. Greenland, Monroe Doctrine, et cetera. And he said there's no ideological dimension to recreate society in his image. I definitely think tick, tick, tick on the first three, that makes him a fascist by the the definition I would put on it. But then I think even on the no ideological dimension, I think MAGA has morphed into one, not least because of the way that the people around him have made it so.

• 9:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let me just say, by the way, that I think it would be, you mentioned MAGA.

• 9:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think there are people who are associated with Trump who I would say are much, much more, as it were, fascist adjacent.

• 9:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you said on the night you thought Musk was a fascist.

• 9:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's people like Musk, there are a lot of these tech people, the way they talk is very similar to how people talked in the nineteen twenties and thirties, or someone like Stephen Miller. So again, somebody who's very close to Trump, but some of the stuff that he comes out with, I would say is very reminiscent of kind of mid twentieth century, the aggression of it, the nihilism of it, all of that kind of stuff.

• 9:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Trump himself, I just don't think he's that interested in ideas, frankly.

• 9:51Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. I did a couple of things as I was thinking about how we were going to talk about this. The first is I did what all good people do when they're looking at big historical concepts. I went on to Wikipedia and looked for a simple definition of fascism. And what that says is at its core, far right authoritarian nationalism with an all powerful dictatorial leader, obsession with military strength and centralised power, a determination to suppress opposition, not least by seeking to control media, curb the judiciary, distaste for the rule of law, and a passionate hatred of communism, liberalism, pluralism, democracy itself. I think he ticks. A good ninety percent of that.

• 10:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think a lot of authoritarian, demagogic populists would tick some of those boxes, but not all of them. So first of all, I don't think ICE is a paramilitary movement equivalent to the paramilitaries that you saw on the streets of Italy or Germany in the nineteen twenties. I mean, I don't like ICE and I don't like the way they behave, but I don't think it's the same kind of, it's not a volunteer paramilitary movement that inspires enormous enthusiasm from young people as.

• 11:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, but you could see it morphing alongside his misuse of the National Guard, alongside using troops on the streets of cities. You could see it morphing into something that we could at least equate with it. Because this is the thing, I think, when we talk about fascism, I think people with your perspective think that fascism, as we saw in the thirties and what evolved, was so horrific, we should be very careful about making the parallels. My point is that what started out in the thirties is now judged by how it ended. The Holocaust, et cetera, six million Jews being exterminated.

• 11:41Alastair Campbell?

  But I sort of feel that Trump is on that sort of path, particularly in this term, faster than Hitler was in his time in office.

• 11:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I think that's a big claim. I think there's a massive difference between Trump and Hitler. Now, I know a lot of restless politics listeners will be throwing their phones at the wall at this point because they love to think that Trump is like Hitler. But I think Hitler had an exterminatory programme from the very beginning. He was driven by virulent racism. Trump can be racist, by the way, but I think it's casual rather than virulent. I think it's casual and boorish. It's the racism of the boor at the golf club. I think Hitler's racism, he couldn't shut up about it. He talked about it absolutely openly and unashamedly. And he saw it in terms of kind of, he talks about racial hygiene and cleansing society and all of this kind of thing.

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  So does Trump. Somali garbage.

• 12:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  But again, I think that's the kind of thing that somebody says when they've had a few too many drinks. Of course, Trump doesn't drink, but they've had a few too many drinks at the golf club bar and they are boring on and they're revealing that the ugliness of their their kind of political instincts. That to me is what Trump is. I think rather than the sort of the cold blooded pseudo intellectual side of fascism. Now, one thing I think you're you're right about, I think if fascism was were to return in the 21st century, it would look very different from how it looked in the 20s and 30s. So in the 20s and 30s, there were kind of torchlight parades and there were mass, you know, marches and all of that kind of thing. That was the sort of political world of that era and that we would have something very different now. The other thing I think actually, Trump is not going

• 13:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  to run again in the in the next presidential election. I mean, he's but he's basically said that himself and I think it would be almost impossible for him to do so. I think after November, when we have the midterm elections, we won't be having the same kind of debates about Trump because he will be a lame duck president because basically he'll be yesterday's man. Now, we'll be having maybe we'll be having a different conversation about J D Vance, let's say. I know we'll be talking about Vance probably a little bit later in this episode. But I think the Republican Party, even now, I think there are people who are conscious that they've maybe overreached a little bit, that people are tiring of the that they are in a democracy, whether they like it or not, and people are tiring of the constant aggression and that abrasive style of politics. And of course, the MAGA

• 13:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  movement now is so unstable because there are so many people who don't like what Trump is doing in foreign policy.

• 13:58Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I obviously hope you're right, and I think the midterms will be crucial. I also think that the Supreme Court, which I think has been pretty lame most of the time, it has actually started to show a bit of what you might call independent judgment. But maybe before we go on to Rand Domini, I the last time Rory and I discussed this on the podcast, I recalled a visit that I made to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington. And there's this very, I don't know if it's still there or whether it's been taken down in the the light of the cultural revolution that Trump is is supervising, but there's this very yellowing, very thin piece of paper. And I don't think it's even got an author on it, but the headline is early warning signs of fascism.

• 14:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Alastair Campbell?

  And there are fourteen, but I'll read them very, very briefly. And again, you listeners, viewers, just, you know, bear the bear Trump in mind as we go through. Number one, powerful continuing nationalism. 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 mass media. Number seven, obsession with national security. Number eight, the intertwining of religion and government excess. 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. Number 13, rampant cronyism and corruption.

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  Number 14, fraudulent elections. Now, I think he ticks them all, with the possible exception of number 14. He passes that one merely by the fact that he claims the election he lost was fraudulent. But but I think that's that's the American Holocaust museum's warning signs of fascism. I think he takes all of them.

• 15:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  See, I think he's not sufficiently ideological and not sufficiently consistent to count as a fascist. What I do think, however, is the the political ecosystem is moving in that direction anyway, with or without Donald Trump. I think Trump has hastened that.

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why your point about the tech bros is so important, because they are such big drivers of the change that are bringing this about.

• 16:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think so. So I think that we are. It's a really interesting question about how sustainable the, you know, the democracy that you and I grew up in, the model of democracy, how sustainable that is in the 21st century, where the institutions that were so important to the survival of that democracy. So they would be things like big mass membership organisations like trade unions. Or let's say in Britain, an organisation like the Conservative Party, where, you know, hundreds of thousands of people would be affiliated with it one way or another. They'd turn out for fates, they'd turn out for all these fundraisers, all that stuff, as they did in the Labour Party or before then, the Liberals. So those institutions have gone. People see themselves much more as atomised individuals and they get their news not from.

• 16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  As it were, responsible institutions like the big newspapers or the BBC or big broadcasters that felt they had a duty to reflect the pluralism of a democratic society, but they get their news from X or from, you know, TikTok or whatever. It's much harder to have a pluralistic democratic conversation, I think, where you recognise the legitimacy of other people's positions. If you live in this hyper polarised, hyper partisan world that the tech giants want us to live in, because it's good for the, you know, for the, because their algorithms drive it and it's good for their revenues. And that's what would really worry me. That actually fascism, or a more modernised version of fascism, can really thrive in such a climate in a way that it couldn't in, you know, 1960s

• 17:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  or 1970s Britain or something, where you have these big institutions that basically act as gatekeepers.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, we'll clip that up and send it on to the mooch and see whether he has moved in his opinion, but I suspect he's

• 17:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know he has not.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect he's hardened his view that we're dealing, we're definitely dealing with a wannabe fascist, I would argue. But let's turn to Iran. As I said in the introduction, we're now into week five. We've had a lot of claims from Trump that it's been won. We've had a lot of promises that we're just, it's about to end. I think we're now on to the eighth final warning to Iran to avoid complete obliteration.

• 18:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Alastair Campbell?

  But as so often with Trump, the realities don't really square with the claims that are coming from his bully pulpit. And the brutal truth, I think, is that the war shows little sign of ending. I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I think the Iranians seem, for all the destruction and for all the cost, I think they seem happier with the way that it's going. And meanwhile, for the whole world, the costs, the consequences, and the risks, particularly of economic catastrophe, are rising. But I wonder if we shouldn't start with that question that I've trailed at the top. Who do we think is winning this war?

• 18:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know, it's such a strange war. I was trying to think of a historical precedent for it, and I couldn't think of one. And it's a sign of how warfare has changed. So The Americans, you know, by a sort of conventional measure are obviously winning the war. They've killed, they've killed the Iranian leader. They've killed a lot of senior Iranian leaders. I mean, just before we started recording this, I think the intelligence chief of the Revolutionary Guard was announced as having been killed. And, you know, his predecessor was killed six months ago by the Israelis. So the Iranians are losing a lot of their top people. They're obviously taking a battering. So by conventional standards, you might say, well, they are obviously, you know, that they're losing. But there is an argument, isn't there, that this is going to end up as a big strategic defeat for the United States?

• 19:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  That they have, they're torturing their own reputation yet again by launching this sort of, this attack that feels more like a spasm than a sort of cold, you know, coldly calculated, planned operation. It's never been clear what their objectives are. It's never been clear what their rationale for the invasion, for the attack was. I mean, I called it, I was about to say invasion. It's not really an invasion. I mean, that's the peculiar thing about it, that they said they're hesitating to put in ground forces. There's no end game in mind. Um, what do their, you know, has this strengthened their allies in the region? Has it strengthened their bonds with countries like Saudi Arabia or the other, the other nations on whom they depend? No. Is it likely to make the Middle East more or less stable? I mean, it's hardly going to make it more stable.

• 20:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose the one thing you would say if you're playing devil's advocate is that it has emasculated Iran's ability to strike beyond its borders. You know, Iran definitely looks, I would say Iran looks weaker as an offensive actor now because its, its ability to project its power beyond its borders has been hampered by this. You know, if you were a client state of Iran, you wouldn't look at Iran and say, gosh, they're so powerful, I, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad we're in bed with them. I suppose the other, the, but the counter to the counter argument is Iran looks more resilient than people thought it would have been a few weeks ago. You know, think of all the protests at the turn of the year. And there was an expectation, I think in Washington. Well, maybe, you know, the Iranians will seize the opportunity to rise up and overthrow

• 20:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  the regime. I mean, that was Trump's rhetoric, wasn't it? He said, it's now up to you to take to the streets. And people haven't done that because, you know, one of the, put my historian's hat back on, a lesson of history is if you rely, if you think aerial power will cripple a regime, it never works out that way. Often it solidifies support for a regime because people say, frankly, I'd rather, I hate their leadership, but I'd rather side with them than with those bastards who are dropping death on us from the skies. So I would say, I mean, it's very hard to make a case the Americans are winning the war, isn't it? I mean, no matter how many people they kill.

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think also, I completely agree with that. And I think the other point to make is that we talk a lot about asymmetric warfare. Because of Trump and Rubio and Vance and the competing narratives and objectives they put out there, and because of this superlative language that Trump uses all the time, it's the biggest, it's the best, it's the most daring, we've got the most amazing, et cetera. Winning for America literally has to mean a changed regime.

• 21:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Alastair Campbell?

  The regime has been decapitated, but the same regime is still in place. And the other thing is that the Iranian, for the Iranians to win, they just have to survive. They can tolerate a lot of deaths. We've seen that in the way they treat their own people. And I'm not sure I agree with you about your point about extending their power beyond the borders. We'll talk a little bit in a moment about what's happening in Iraq. But I think their power at the moment, which they are using absolutely brutally, is an economic power based upon their access to and control of the Straits of Hormuz. That is a form of power. And let's just look at what Trump said yesterday, what was probably, actually had a debate going in America yesterday about the 25th amendment, whether you can

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  remove a president on mental health grounds. So this was the tweet, the post in full on Truth Social. And I can't believe anybody was in the room with him when he did this because I, even though I know people in there who tell me that the only person Who speaks truth to power still a bit is Susie Wiles, he's Chief of Staff, who's now got breast cancer. So I don't know whether that's going to take her out of the picture for a while. But I think even Vance and Rubio, even possibly Hexeth, no, not Hexeth, let's forget him, would have said, please, Mr. President, don't do this. So this is it. I'll read out in full. Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards,

• 23:20Alastair Campbell?

  or you'll be living in hell. Caps. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. This is Easter Sunday, by the way. President Donald J. Trump.

• 23:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, demented.

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, that is, if I may use the F word too, that is fucking insane.

• 23:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Alastair Campbell?

  And it's strategically stupid.

• 23:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, because he's making a threat that it's not clear whether he can follow through with it.

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  If he does, they're war crimes.

• 23:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, to attack the power plants.

• 23:45Alastair Campbell?

  It's all very well to say, we call, I mean, Netanyahu is an entiary war criminal. We regularly call Putin a war criminal because he attacks hospitals, energy, infrastructure. This is Trump saying he's going to destroy your civilian infrastructure. That is a war crime.

• 24:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  The crazy thing here is, I mean, you mentioned Putin. Putin's obviously a very bad man. And Putin has made some horrendous miscalculations, you know, most famously in 2022. But Putin is a cold-blooded, you know, he's a cold-blooded killer, isn't he? He sits there, he makes his plans, he thinks what he wants to get out of this, he weighs up the odds, and then he makes his decision. Trump is just lashing out.

• 24:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, that, what is this, his eighth deadline or something, you say? His objectives for the operation have changed over time. His, what he thinks about the Straits of Ilmas has changed over time, because just a couple of days ago, he was saying, if the Europeans want the oil so badly, why don't they go and get it themselves? Oh, they can't because they haven't got a proper navy and all of this kind of thing. So he's just making stuff up on the fly. I mean, the extraordinary thing is, this is how he has run his, this is how he has run his administration since day one. I mean, not just in, when he, the second term, the first term as well. The first term, he had people there who were restraining him. Now he's basically just got a cabinet of enablers, an administration of people who enable him. Somebody like, I mean, you mentioned Hexeth. Hexeth is just Trump's mini-me, isn't he? He doesn't seem to have any sort of plan either,

• 25:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  which is why he's getting rid of generals who disagree with him. So how do they get out of it? You see, I think there's a very easy way to get out of it. They declare victory and leave. I mean, this is what people used to say about the Vietnam War. Why don't you just say, we've won and go home? I don't think he necessarily has to have regime change to stop. You see, I think he could say, we have degraded the Iranian regime to a point where they can, they're no longer a threat to America or to the wider world. We're finished. Mission accomplished. Thank you very much. We're going home. I mean, if I was in Trump's administration, God forbid, that's what I would tell him to do.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. And what the Iranians might be sitting there thinking is, okay, he's desperate, he's worried about the midterms, gasoline prices are going through the roof. It would be nuts of us to engage with him on negotiation because he took out a leader, he took out a new leader's wife, children, all the rest of it. There's no reason to engage with this country. So they let him do that for 48 hours. And then, back to my point about asymmetric warfare, Houthis, or they get Hezbollah, they get one of their proxies to, or they do things in London, or they do things in Berlin, or they do things in Paris. They go down the kind of terror route. Where does he go then? In his mind, he has to go back in. And what I think that post said to me is that

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  psychologically, they've kind of got him where they want him. Now, he's put himself there. But I don't think this is as easy to get out of as you think, because they are thinking now, because they're desperate as well. They've got a population that they're not stupid. They know the population doesn't like them. This war, as you said earlier, has brought them together to some extent. But I think this is, I think he's in this for the long haul, and of course, for the world, that's a disaster.

• 26:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  But do you think he's in it for the long haul in terms of putting in, I mean, they've moved troops to the region, haven't they? There was some talk of them seizing, what is it, Carg Island, which is the crucial oil refinery island in the middle of the Straits. I mean, I could imagine them seizing that, even though it's very heavily defended. But a ground invasion of Iran, I mean, that's clearly not, that would be absolutely insane.

• 27:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, just, just look at what happened. This is the other thing, because we talk about Trump as the reality TV master. If he was at the top of his previous reality TV game, he would have let the episode about the rescued airman run for at least 24 hours.

• 27:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  Because it was an amazing rescue mission.

• 27:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Alastair Campbell?

  Right? And it would allow him, truthfully, to say, we have these amazing forces, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But because, as you say, he's operating by spasm, he kind of wipes that out by coming out with this, you fucking crazy bastards, open the fucking straight. So I think we're dealing with somebody who is surrounded by sycophants, nobody talking the truth to him, angry with Europe, angry with the rest of the world, lashing out at them. That's giving them the opportunity, with massive public support, to pull back. It's allowing the Chinese just to sit there as they do.

• 27:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Alastair Campbell?

  Russia is now feeling financially empowered, politically empowered. Putin's sitting there seeing the air defenses being shifted from Ukraine to the Gulf.

• 28:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Alastair Campbell?

  Good for Putin, bad for, bad for Zelensky. So I think he's created a mess. Then you've got the economy. You've got every government in the world having to pick up the economic pieces of this.

• 28:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 28:15Alastair Campbell?

  I think this is a catastrophe for him, for the world, but I don't think it's that easy for him credibly, even with the MAGA crowd, to say, I've won and walk away.

• 28:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, lots of the MAGA crowd are very, are very, very divided about this. I mean, one of the things that people forget is that there's a, a real strain of isolationism to the Trump movement. I mean, remember when he won in 2016? It was partly by saying, we've had a generation, no more wars. We've had a generation of leaders who have taken into these mad wars. No more wars. I'm going to keep us out. I'm going to keep American boys at home, all of this kind of thing. And, and one thing that I did not anticipate, I have to say, I don't know if you anticipated this, was that his second term would be so different in that regard from his first. His first, he wasn't really interested in foreign policy coups. In his second term, it's been a search for one foreign policy set piece or photo opportunity. It could be Greenland, it could be.

• 29:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Annex in Canada, kind of these, these crazy ideas is a sort of ceaseless search for validation abroad.

• 29:15Alastair Campbell?

  I kind of did see it because if you remember, again, back to our night election night, I, I was obsessed with this project 25 document. Project 2025, which I think signaled a change of direction domestically and internationally. That's for example, where they started to talk about Europe in such hostile and detrimental terms. You mentioned, um, Pete Hexeth there, the Fox News commentator turned Secretary of War. And you mentioned the generals he sacked. Randy George, who's the 41st Chief of Staff, and they announced he's going. They made no bones about the fact he's being sacked. He'd been nominated by Biden, confirmed by the Senate 2023. So he had another couple of years to go.

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  But I thought just as interesting was the removal of a guy called Major General William Green Jr., whose job is to be in charge of the army's chaplain corps.

• 30:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess I saw this, yeah.

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  There is this suggestion that's been doing the rounds that the reason these guys were sacked was because the refusal to go along with the idea that this was a war for Jesus.

• 30:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hexeth has been having Bible readings inside the Pentagon. He reads the Bible and says prayers at, at briefings. And I've been at a lot of briefings in my time, Dominic. Most journalists are not interested in what's being said at prayers of the Bible. And they also had, this was, this was the Easter weekend and they had a service at the Pentagon for Protestants only. So I don't know whether this is a, a religious thing. And don't forget, we had the Pope in his Easter message. He said, the Christian mission was being distorted by a desire for domination entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ. He didn't mention Hexeth, he didn't mention Trump, but I think we know what he's talking about.

• 30:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Isn't the peculiarity with all this, though, it constantly bewilders me that so many people on the kind of nationalist Christian right in America, the kind of the real evangelical kind of hardcore.

• 31:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  That they've taken as their champion, a man who could not be

• 31:14Alastair Campbell?

  Incredible.

• 31:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  More, more contemptuous of the moral teachings of Christianity. I mean, everything in Trump's life. And whenever he speaks about it, there's a sort of smirk playing on his lips. You know that he doesn't believe a word of it. I mean, I always remember when there were the, it was after the George Floyd.

• 31:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there were the big protests and there was tear gas in Washington and it was all this kind of thing. And, and he came out, he remember, he stood there holding the Bible.

• 31:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Outside the White House for a photo opportunity. And even then, there was this sort of little half grin on his face because he knew how performative and how contrived and how fraudulent this was. And it astounds me that so many people like, I mean, is Hegseth a true believer? I don't know, but let's assume that he is. Does he look at his commander in chief and think, you know, this is a Christian warrior? This is a man who was standing up for Jesus? How can he possibly believe that given Trump's track record?

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, also, how can anybody believe it about Hegseth, given his track record?

• 32:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  In terms of his private life, et cetera. And yet you see all these, I mean, some of the most extraordinary scenes. There was a wonderful tweet recently. It was a picture of Trump surrounded by about 20 pastors, all laying their hands on him in the Oval Office. And somebody tweeted, see, I told you this was a war between religious fanatics. So it's horrific, but that's what happens with a cult. It is a cult. And you now have people, I mean, we've, we've managed to go almost half an hour now, Dominic, and I haven't even mentioned the B word yet, but it reminds me a little bit of Brexit here.

• 32:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I knew it was coming. I knew this was coming.

• 32:45Alastair Campbell?

  Even when people will, in the quiet of their own lives, say to themselves, ah, it's not really going as I expected. And maybe I'm a bit poorer than I was. You will still have people who will look at anything Trump does and say,

• 32:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  He's doing the right thing.

• 33:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  But hold on, Alistair. So I'm going to challenge you a tiny bit on this. Not about Brexit, because I, I, my specialism, when I was back in my Daily Mail days, was columns that began with the words, as a Remainer, I think that's. We should drop a nuclear bomb on Brussels or whatever it might be. So you, for example, you're a keen, you're you're a Labour man to your fingertips, you're a Labour, I mean, I don't know whether you would like the word, but you're a tribalist, you believe in the Labour Party, you're part of it. Is there not a slippage here between the tribalism and the cult as it were? So lots of people think, well, yeah, my party has rather let me down, they are a bit useless, all this kind of thing, but they don't want to admit it to other people, they don't want to admit it to themselves because they're emotionally invested. So all of these Christian pastors

• 33:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  standing around, Trump would laying hands on him, some of them, deep down, must know he's a very un-Christian man, but they don't want to admit it to themselves, they don't want to admit it to other people because that would be giving in to their enemies. And there's a link there between the tribalism that we've always known in Britain, you're Labour, you're a Tory, all of that kind of thing, and the sort of politics as a cult.

• 34:01Alastair Campbell?

  But for example, pretty much ever since 2016, various shades of Labour, I have attacked them publicly for not being hard over enough in understanding the disaster and in doing something about it. I still am. My position as a kind of Labour tribalist is I can see there are good things they're doing, I can see there are things they're not doing well, and I want them to do it better. What I see with the MAGA people is how dare you say that it's not perfect? How dare you say that he's not doing the right thing? How dare you say that he's corrupt? How dare you say that? How dare Dominic Sandbrook question his Christian virtue and morality? That's the difference.

• 34:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  First of all, I think people are much more likely to jump to that extreme position when you have only two parties, because then it becomes so clear cut, us versus them, that we are on the side of virtue, they are on the side of vice.

• 34:56Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's a fair point.

• 34:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think when you have a multi-party system, even in Britain, we've never had a purely two-party system. So there's always been a sense that there are more than two voices, you know, there are other people to fit into the conversation, so you can be a little bit more, more nuanced.

• 35:10Alastair Campbell?

  I worry we're pushing it a little bit far at the moment.

• 35:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, maybe. Also, the two other things, one is, America is a much more religious political culture, so it's much more extreme in that way, it's much more existential, apocalyptic, you know, good and evil, but also the changing. Sort of the ecosystem, as it were, rewards extremism and partisanship, doesn't it? The X, the all the various social media forms, it becomes so tribal, us versus them. And it makes it very hard for people to say, you know, if you are a commentator like my ex-student, Owen Jones of The Guardian, your supporters just want you to double down at every opportunity, never to admit you're wrong, never to admit flaws in your own argument, never to concede that the other side have a point.

• 35:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that means you just end up with this ratchet effect of ever greater partisanship. And if you're a Trump adherent now, if you question him at all, you're out, aren't you? You're seen as a an apostate, you're thrown, you know, you're thrown to the wolves.

• 36:09Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Well, listen, let's take a break and then when we come back, I'll talk a bit about Lebanon, a bit about Iraq, and then I think for, we should talk about NATO and whether Trump's threats against NATO actually mean the end of NATO, even if it's not formally dissolved. See you soon.

• 36:27Alastair Campbell?

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• 38:02Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 38:13Speaker 06

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• 38:23Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 38:26Speaker 07

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 38:27Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 out of 10 without parent.

• 38:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back everybody to the breast is politics. That's a sentence I never thought I'd say with me, Dominic Samrick and my sidekick, Alastair Campbell.

• 38:45Alastair Campbell?

  Sidekick. Oh, I don't know about that, Dominic. Listen, I've already whacked you for being wrong about fascism. I don't want to whack you over that as well.

• 38:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Robin to my Batman, I think is the technical.

• 38:54Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, very good. Very good. Listen, let's talk about Lebanon.

• 38:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  It's getting far too little attention because I think this is an absolute catastrophe in the making. This is a country Rory and I were actually there not that long ago on our way to Syria to see Ahmed Al Sharra. It actually was quite peaceful and calm at the time, but you saw the signs of of war all around. So you've had a financial meltdown in 2019. You had that terrible port explosion in 2020, which caused $8 billion worth of damage. You've had $11 billion wiped out from the fighting from 2324. But you've also got a new government, very weak government in many ways for obvious reasons. Part of whose appeal has been that they said they were going to take on Hezbollah. They probably have been trying, but Hezbollah is now, they've launched between a thousand and

• 39:42Alastair Campbell?

  two thousand rockets in recent weeks. Israel meanwhile has conducted hundreds of strikes across Lebanon, including in parts that even previous wars didn't really touch in the same way. So I think this is, this is something that demands a lot more of our attention than the world is currently giving it.

• 40:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, Lebanon, I mean, this is a long running issue. So Lebanon has been in a, a mess since, what, nineteen seventies, when the civil war began. It's already a very unstable mix. So as lots of your listeners will know, I think the, the mix is something like thirty three percent of the population are Shia, about another third are Sunni, then there are Orthodox and kind of Maronite Christians. That's what lay behind the civil war in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. I know lots of people saying, well, Lebanon become a failed state. I mean, you could argue that, you know, with apologists to Lebanese listeners, it's basically been a failed state for fifty years. And, I mean, it's interesting, what is Israel's plan for Lebanon?

• 40:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they've called up an enormous number of troops, haven't they, reservists, the Israelis?

• 40:48Alastair Campbell?

  Four hundred and fifty thousand on the, that they can call up?

• 40:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, something like that. Hardliners are talking about pushing Israel's border further north, basically making southern Lebanon an annexed part of Israel. What would that mean? Massive ethnic cleansing? Massive displacements of people?

• 41:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the Defence Minister has been absolutely clear and open that the tactics that they're using are going to be similar to the tactics that they used in, in Gaza, parts of which, we don't, again, we don't talk about that much at the moment either, but parts of which were literally reduced to rubble.

• 41:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rubble, yeah.

• 41:20Alastair Campbell?

  And Lebanon, the population, I think, is about the same as Scotland, is about five million.

• 41:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Alastair Campbell?

  Over a million already displaced. And the other thing that's, I think is really worrying is that the government with President Aoun is such a difficult situation. And now you've got Hezbollah stepping up a public campaign against the government, accusing them of treason because they've been saying, we have to take action against Hezbollah for the violence that they perpetrated, et cetera.

• 41:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Hezbollah, I mean, they're basically a state within a state and have been for decades. There are swathes of Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley or whatever, where Hezbollah controls it. Hezbollah effectively is the state. The Lebanese government simply isn't strong enough to go in and disarm Hezbollah. I mean Hezbollah is very heavily armed.

• 42:04Alastair Campbell?

  And in addition to the point that you made about essentially moving the border, effectively annexing southern Lebanon, with all the bridge crossings now bombed in a clear attempt to kind of cut the area off from the rest of the country. And the other thing, the Israeli's energy minister has said that this agreement that was signed in 2022 between Lebanon, Israel, ending the dispute over where the sea boundaries are, should be cancelled. Now, what does that mean? That means that they've signed an agreement, they now will say, they will now argue that the situation has changed, we're at threat, and therefore we have to take over the sea as well.

• 42:43Alastair Campbell?

  I bet that issue wasn't even on any American radar when Trump was saying, we're going to do this.

• 42:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  What's a puzzle to me is what the long, again, it's rather like the US in Iran, what the end game is as far as Israel is concerned. Because if, you know, if I was an Israeli politician, my long-term end game would be stability and security. That's what you want. And I think surely you have that. I would argue, if you create immensely fragmented, broken, unstable countries in your backyard, they are precisely the kinds of places where paramilitary groups, terrorist groups can thrive, can recruit, can find willing recruits. They can probably get weapons amid the rub, the chaos and the rubble. They can build up again and they can prepare for another attack in a few years' time. I don't see how that, how creating that kind of environment is a route to long-term

• 43:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  security for Israel. And that's why I'm puzzled where he thinks he will get to in five or 10 years' time.

• 43:42Alastair Campbell?

  He's been in power on and off for well over two decades. So he is thinking about the next election, which politicians are entitled to think about. Just as Iranian populations to some extent rallied to the flag as a result of being attacked. So to some extent, Israel has rallied to the flag over his attack on Iran, which does make the Israelis feel very, very insecure and he's making them feel more secure by what he's doing now. But I think it is a, it is a strategy of regional domination. And that means weakening the other side. But as you say, and back to my point about asymmetric warfare. They don't have to do that much to keep the Israeli insecurity.

• 44:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, of course not.

• 44:25Alastair Campbell?

  Front of mind.

• 44:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't think this ends with a world in which people are no longer firing rockets at Israel. You know, I don't think this ends with them saying, oh gosh, the Israelis are too strong. We'll never challenge them again. That's just not how history works.

• 44:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And I mentioned Iraq and I think Iraq is really interesting in this because ever since October the 7th, they've pretty much tried to stay out of things. And they've largely succeeded. They've worked at keeping reasonable ties with the US. They've worked to keeping reasonable ties with Iran. They've worked with Iran on sitting on the Iranian aligned militias in Iraq, of which there are quite a few that emerged after the toppling of Saddam. And that has been effective. What's happened now is that Iraq is being drawn into it. Some of the attacks inside Iraq have included attacks on the American embassy.

• 45:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, US bases as well, right?

• 45:20Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing to understand is that Iraq has been a bit of an economic support for Iran as well. Their, their banking networks are what allows Iran to get access to the dollar. Tehran gets around sanctions by selling a lot of oil and gas to Iraq. So they're quite linked, way more than we think with the, because of the history of the Iran Iraq war. And, but that balancing act, I think is now under threat because you've got these factions that are linked to what's called the PMF, the Popular Mobilization Forces. And they've been the ones that have been firing drones, firing rockets, hitting bases, going after sites in, in Kurdistan, including hotels, including oil production facilities.

• 46:00Alastair Campbell?

  They've killed fighters from the Peshmerga, which is the Kurds' regional security force. And meanwhile, unsurprisingly, America has hit targets now associated with these militias. They've hit infrastructure, they've hit weapons depots, they've taken out some of the commanders. So that front, it seems to me, is at risk of. Of opening.

• 46:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are two or three other things on there. So one of them is that Iraq has been, there's been a basically a political vacuum in Iraq for the last, what, almost six months now.

• 46:30Alastair Campbell?

  Since November, yeah.

• 46:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Since there was an election with no, that was basically a stalemate election. There was a government crisis again, I think in 2022 with a similar sort of story. So the politics is very, very delicately poised without a really strong central government. So there's that. So it makes it much harder for the government to control the militias, the different kind of groups.

• 46:49Alastair Campbell?

  For sure.

• 46:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's the issue of, as it were, religious solidarity. So, you know, Iraq famously, you know, has this very complicated sort of demographic picture. It has a Shia majority and the more that the Iranian regime can say, well, this is actually, the Americans are waging a war on Islam. Obviously it makes it very hard for militia leaders in Iraq then to restrain their followers, who would obviously want to say, well, we rally to support acro religionists in Iran. But also there's the economic issue, the closing of the Straits of Oromz. One of the countries that's most affected by this is Iraq. Because Iraq's oil output has tanked, I think, from four million barrels a day to one million barrels. That's a huge part of Iraq's budget.

• 47:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  So again, you've got, not unlike Lebanon, you have a very fragile, delicately poised regime that is looking at greater fragmentation, political chaos and economic meltdown.

• 47:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And you've got, on the oil point, you've got these global companies, including BP, Chevron, that have been slowly getting back in, investing in Iraq. And this is now, I suspect, shaking their confidence as well. Your point on the religion is, is why I find this Pete Hexeth, this is a war for Jesus, so alarming and Trump sort of leaning into it a little bit as well. I mean, go back to the Iraq war. Do you remember when George W. Bush, and I, look, I was there and I know this wasn't the sort of, when he talked about a crusade.

• 48:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 48:14Alastair Campbell?

  Right. He, he was talking about a moral crusade against evil, back to your good and evil point. I don't believe for one second he was putting it in that concept of the crusades.

• 48:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Richard the Lionheart. Yeah.

• 48:26Alastair Campbell?

  Right, whereas this law, I think, kind of are.

• 48:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 48:29Alastair Campbell?

  So I think the religion point is a very powerful one because they will feel, and I go back to the point I made earlier. The Iranians are thinking, why on earth should we deal with these people when they killed our leader, they've killed his family. They talk about bombing us into the Stone Age. We can't trust them because they keep changing their line day to day. So I think Iraq has done a pretty good job in staying out of this, but I think the next period of this. We'll see whether it gets dragged right in in a way that I think would be very, very difficult for all of us.

• 49:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  What do you think China is making of all this? Because there are different arguments, aren't there, about China? Some say, well, this is a strategic defeat for China because Iran is a Chinese client and whatnot. And then there are others that say this is brilliant for China because the Americans look like idiots. And the Chinese can just smile and sit back and kind of rub their hands with glee. What do you think the position is?

• 49:20Alastair Campbell?

  The last week, the front page of The Economist, a picture of a smiling Xi Jinping with the Napoleonic quote. Don't interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake. I think that's what they think.

• 49:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  It's not great for them and they are being hit by the oil stuff as well. But I think the big casualty out of this, well, global stability is one of them. The global economy is another, but I think if we're looking for strong powers and weak powers, I think America is doing itself a lot of damage now.

• 49:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  I mentioned at the top, we were going to talk about NATO. I've thoroughly enjoyed the discussion, Dominic, but let's put NATO in question time because we did. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it, we've got lots of questions about Trump's threats to NATO. So let's talk about NATO in question time. I also want to talk about Hungary, very, very important election coming up. And given you're here, Dominic, I think it'd be good to talk about the role of history in politics. I've got this obsession that the right uses history better than the left. And I also want you to have a think about whether you think we've had any political leaders down the years that genuinely understand and use history in the way that they've governed.

• 50:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, interesting. Loads of good questions.

• 50:29Alastair Campbell?

  See you then.

• 50:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right, see you then.

• 50:31Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

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• 51:07Speaker 05

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

• 51:10Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 51:11Speaker 05

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

• 51:16Speaker 06

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

• 51:23Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped brewing? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 51:28Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 51:31Speaker 07

  I'm not the first man.

• 51:32Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.