Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 536. Is Trump’s Corruption Machine Reaching New Extremes? About this episode Has the scale of Donald J. Trump’s corruption become too big to prosecute? Is the US Constitution now a roadmap to tyranny instead of a protection against it? Why do 72% of Gen Z think things will only get worse, and can mainstream politics win them back?
Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 10,839 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Alastair Campbell? Is Donald Trump the most corrupt president we have ever had?
0:05 Rory Stewart? Trump's corruption is about flooding the zone. There's so much of it going on that one can barely keep up.
0:12 Alastair Campbell? It's the scale of it that I think is making people feel they just don't know how to handle it. The corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront.
0:20 Rory Stewart? As usual with Trump, any single one of these things would have been enough to lead to the resignation of a leader in any other country.
0:28 Alastair Campbell? He really genuinely doesn't seem to care how anything looks. He will brazen all of it out.
0:33 Rory Stewart? And the challenge to Americans is are you prepared to change your constitution? Because if you keep this constitution going, you're on the high road to tyranny and corruption.
0:44 Alastair Campbell? This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.
0:46 Rory Stewart? Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff, designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier: savings, clarity, and a bit more control.
0:55 Alastair Campbell? And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter.
1:06 Rory Stewart? Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill.
1:14 Alastair Campbell? And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended.
1:20 Rory Stewart? With Fuse Energy's tracker tariff, that changes. If prices fall, your rate adjusts at the next quarterly update.
1:27 Alastair Campbell? And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second-guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall.
1:35 Rory Stewart? Switch to Fuse Energy's tracker tariff at fuseenergy.com/politics and use code POLITICS to get a free trip plus subscription.
1:44 Alastair Campbell? Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.
1:53 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
1:56 Alastair 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.
2:08 Rory 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.
2:32 Alastair 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?
2:38 Rory 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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3:33 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics. Me, Alison Campbell.
3:35 Rory Stewart? And with me Rory Stewart. Today, we are going to begin with a really big story, which is, is President Trump the most corrupt president ever? We're going to do a little bit of history of corrupt US presidents, but then we're going to look into the mechanics of how Trump's corruption works, where the money's going, why it's different from any corruption before and how it relates to the US Constitution. And then in the second half, we're getting on to Gen Z. We're going to talk about how Gen Z is very... And we're trying to look at many, many young women voting for Greens, some men going towards reform. We're looking at how cost of living is affecting people and how it's affecting what they're looking for from politicians and how they vote. So a great deal to get through and looking forward to it. Alastair.
4:17 Alastair Campbell? So answer the question, is Donald Trump the most corrupt president the United States has ever had?
4:21 Rory Stewart? Yes, there's some close run presidents, I believe Warren Harding.
4:25 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
4:26 Rory Stewart? Ulysses S. Grant, but this was small time.
4:29 Alastair Campbell? Their people were corrupt. They didn't end up rich.
4:32 Rory Stewart? And it's also pretty small time stuff compared to what we're talking about with Trump. But I also think that what Trump has done, he's demonstrating a type of corruption which has almost never existed before because there's two things coming together. There's a complete transformation in the whole economic structure of the world, which provides potential for corruption that never existed before. And then there's the transformation in the US constitutional structure driven by conservative justices who are giving him freedoms that previous presidents struggled to attain. But often when one thinks about corruption, one's usually thinking about people looting the government. So traditionally, a bachelor in Nigeria literally took all the money from the central government budget and put it in a Swiss bank account.
5:14 Rory Stewart? Or when you talk about nepotism, you're normally talking about giving your relatives government positions so that they can get government salaries or you're fiddling around with government procurement. Now, that isn't primarily what Trump does. A little bit of that going on, but that's not primarily how he's making out like a bandit because Trump has spotted something extraordinary. He's spotted that government is now tiny compared to the private sector. You know, you look at the magnificent seven companies, they've got a market cap of about something like, I don't know, 17, 18 trillion, which is many multiples of the budget of the US government, federal government. And if he can get his hands on private sector money and international money.
5:57 Rory Stewart? It's both much more lucrative, he can make many more billions. But secondly, it's much safer legally. It's much more difficult for people to pin him in the way that they would if he was simply stealing from the government budget. So what he's doing, and we can get into all the depths of this, but one of the big things he's doing with nepotism is not putting his children or relatives into government positions. In fact, what he's doing is putting pressure on companies and foreign states to put them on boards or invest in their companies or bring them in and co-sponsors or give them concessions.
6:28 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I mean, I think he has already definitely won the American title. He's definitely the most corrupt. Sometimes people talk about Nixon, but he was morally corrupt. He actually died relatively poor for somebody who'd been an American president. I think the question is whether Trump is one day going to be in the running for the world title. If you, if you, if you look through the history of political corruption, generally the podium is probably headed by Sawato, the ex-president of Indonesia. He was reckoned to have made off with about somewhere between 20 and 40 billion dollars. Marcos in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, whose wife's shoe collection became very, very famous. And he was maybe
7:08 Alastair Campbell? in the 10 billion. And then there was Mabutu in what is now the DIC, was then Zaire. And then I think you could probably give a mention to Mugabe in Zimbabwe, probably Ceausescu in Romania. And of course, corruption is often easier if you're accompanied alongside it with your own authoritarian rule. And on today, I would say Vladimir Putin is probably the leader on the corruption scale. And that's not that you can point to bank accounts and say, there's all his money. It's the way that he controls you. You create the oligarchy networks. You have massive hidden wealth amongst the elites. You suppress anti-corruption investigations. And of course, you, you know, if you go to the ultimate extreme, you take
7:50 Alastair Campbell? out people like Alexei Navalny, who made his name by exposing that level of, of corruption. I think if there's an American. To compare with Trump, if I have to go back to somebody, he wasn't president, but this was a guy called William Tweed, whose legacy is that Tammany Hall, which is what he ran, is now a byword for corrupt politics. And this was a guy who died in jail. So, you know, he was, he was eventually they, they got him. But he stole what today would be in the, you know, it was tens of millions back then, but it would be in the, the billions if you put it up to date. Now, the reason why we're talking about this, the reason why this question was being asked,
8:32 Alastair Campbell? and is being asked in the American debate as well, whether he is the most corrupt president ever, is because of this very live debate about this slush fund issue. So Trump, who loves a frivolous lawsuit as a sort of source of funds, he sues the IRS, the kind of tax man, for allegedly leaking his tax returns, or lack of tax in his case. So this is a case of Trump suing his own government. He's got two sets of lawyers, he's got Trump lawyers on this side and Trump lawyers on this side. And the government lawyers, they sent a 25-page memo to the Department of Justice, explaining that this lawsuit is never going to stand up in court, and it would lose.
9:13 Alastair Campbell? And then they decided to settle for the historically significant sum of, when was the United States founded, Rory? 1776. It's, it's the name of one of Trump's children's hedge fund. Correct. So they, they settle for 1.776 billion to pay to alleged victims of Biden justice weaponization, such as the January the 6th rioters. The fund to be overseen by a five-person commission appointed by Trump and his Attorney General, his former personal defense lawyer, Todd Blanch, operating with no oversight, not much transparency, not yet defined standards. And here's two really interesting things.
9:55 Alastair Campbell? Donald Trump, as the president, can fire any of the five at any time that he chooses, and the money has to be spent by the end of this term. Now, even some Republicans are saying this is a bit too much.
10:07 Rory Stewart? Well, let's, let's, I mean, there's so many extraordinary things. There's that and there's also the suggestion that as part of the deal, the IRS has said that they are not going to pursue any of their existing audits against the Trump family.
10:20 Alastair Campbell? It's not a suggestion.
10:21 Rory Stewart? Sorry, they've stated this, sorry, they've stated it, yeah.
10:24 Alastair Campbell? It's a state of statement by Todd Blanch, and this will be forever.
10:27 Rory Stewart? There's a bit of debate about the forever, but it certainly seems as though it's forever for a lot of them, because anything they've started, they can't continue.
10:33 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
10:33 Rory Stewart? And that's most of the investigations. Just, just to remind people of the bigger picture here. So Trump's corruption is partly about flooding the zone. There's so much of it going on that one can barely keep up. I mean, as usual with Trump, any single one of these things would have been enough to lead to the resignation of a leader in any other country, and they would have a net popularity rating terrible, and they would have been forced out by their own cabinet and Congress, any one of them. But there are, I would say, I'm almost trying to count through them. I got up into 20, 30, 40, 50 examples before I,
11:13 Rory Stewart? before I gave up. But just to remind people quickly, there's the basic protection racket, which he runs against other countries. So that, that's essentially signaling that because he's the US president and he gets to control whether or not you have US bases or US missiles to protect you. So that'd be relevant, for example, for a Gulf state, you know, is America going to protect you against Iran or not? Your control over tariffs, you know, are you going to hit Vietnam or Japan or Switzerland with 37, 40% tariffs? Are you going to launch legal prosecutions against the president of the country, Vida Venezuela, Colombia?
11:53 Rory Stewart? Are you going to disable somebody's access to Google and Microsoft, which is what he did with the president of the International Criminal Court? So incredible range of different things that he as the US president can do to other people. So people begin paying protection money. And it's a really interesting type of protection money, because it's not, I mean, this again is one of the reasons why it's a A new form of corruption and and why it gets around the US courts. The US courts in a terrible, terrible recent ruling determined that you needed to find a specific gift and prove the specific official act created to that gift. And this has reduced the number of prosecutions against corrupt politicians in the US by a huge amount. Right. It's this case called McDonald.
12:34 Rory Stewart? So Trump, on the basis that he gets famously a plane worth four hundred million dollars from Qatar. A UAE fund, very close to the UAE government, invests two billion dollars in crypto associated with Trump. And it appears in return then gets permits to get US chips, the best Nvidia chips in the world. You have your whole story around the Board of Peace, where you're paying a billion dollars for membership and where Trump has personal perpetual control for his whole life over this stuff.
13:14 Rory Stewart? You've got the amazing actions against media companies and universities in the US where he sues people. And it has a double whammy. One of them is he sues and they pay him. So just to make the law case go away, you get big American media companies just writing him checks for seventeen, eighteen million dollars. And in the future, being very, very careful to do anything that might annoy him, because he's suing the BBC at the moment. And then you have all the other things that are going on, which we haven't talked about, which are the incredible sums of money that his children are making. Now, his children are not that able. It's very difficult to quite understand how one of his sons has taken a fund
13:55 Rory Stewart? which was worth about three hundred million a year ago, that is now worth, you know, one point three billion. If you invested your money in his fund, you quadrupled your money.
14:04 Alastair Campbell? Just not very able, our US colleague, Mr. Scaramucci, describes them as dumb as a rock.
14:12 Alastair Campbell? The extraordinary thing about this, of course, and this is what gets to your point about when you've gone through forty, fifty, sixty cases, you just want to go away. David Frum said in The Atlantic that the corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront. But I think that what was extraordinary about this hiding in plain sight, Trump did an interview where he claimed, untrue, but he said, I prohibited them, my sons, from doing business in my first term. I've got no credit for it. I didn't have to do that. And it's really unfair to them. I found out, nobody cared, I'm allowed to. He even made this extraordinary claim that as president, you're allowed to have one desk for president, one desk for business, complete nonsense. And it's the scale of it that I think is
14:54 Alastair Campbell? making people feel they just don't know how to handle it. Crypto is a big part of it. And of course, when you talk about the law, regulation around that, he's making it, you know, crypto is just a very, very hard thing to to get your head around from the kind of slow legal systems. We've got to remember as well that if if we're minded to give him the benefit of the doubt, we shouldn't ever forget, but because he floods the zone, we do forget, he is the first ever convicted felon to be president, twenty four counts of falsifying accounts. And really corrupt leaders, the ones that we talked about in the kind of league table of global corruption, there is almost always an involvement of family, particularly sons that they want maybe to take over from them when they're
15:39 Alastair Campbell? done. But I was speaking to somebody over the last couple of days who's involved in a campaign in the States for campaign reform. And he went, it was interesting, he said, the best definition of politics, of corruption in politics, is the use of public office for private gain. Okay. And he said, there are seven key areas you need to look at. Are they personally becoming richer? Well, there's no doubt about that. He's already, according to Forbes, added several billions since he's been in power. Do they abuse executive power in the pursuit of that? Are they ever involved in bribery or graft? We can come on to that. Are they ever involved in the obstruction of justice? I think you could argue that the weaponization of the Department of Justice answers that. Are they ever involved in election misconduct?
16:25 Alastair Campbell? Do they pursue policies of patronage and cronyism? No doubt about that. And do they violate democratic norms? Though I think he pretty much ticks all seven. And there's something we should put in the newsletter. I read it's a forty one page document written by a group called Campaign Legal Centre, which is a non partisan organisation that's trying to change the way politics is done in the States. And I had exactly the same feeling as you. After a while, you just thought, I can't take any more of this. So you mentioned Jeff Bezos. Did he really think that the Melania film was worth forty million dollars? I don't think so. That is corrupt. Several cabinet ministers, the people that he sits around that table with are major donors. Lutnick gave him eleven million dollars.
17:09 Alastair Campbell? McMahon, the education secretary, twenty million dollars. Chris Wright, the oil and gas energy secretary, he was a donor. Ambassadors, including to Paris, Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, who became very, very wealthy, son in law to Trump during the first term. Kushner, the father, was jailed for tax and other offences. Trump pardons him. And the other thing, the pardons, Rory, the pardons is like an industry. There are some really serious people who've committed very serious offences and been jailed, who have either through family or through self, have made big donations to the various elements of the MAGA empire. And low and behold, they get a pardon.
17:54 Rory Stewart? And one of the things that that will come out of that is he will almost certainly pardon himself and his own family before he steps down.
18:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
18:01 Rory Stewart? Thus conferring complete immunity on himself and his kids.
18:05 Alastair Campbell? It's kind of what Todd Blanch is doing, isn't it? By saying that, you know, you can't pursue them for past misdemeanors forever. He's kind of, he's preparing the ground for that.
18:14 Rory Stewart? The thing that Trump represents is something that's been developing.
18:19 Rory Stewart? In politics around the world for a very long time, but has finally reached its full culmination with Trump. And it's basically the way in which politicians in liberal democracies are now becoming awash with cash. And it's, it's, it's very striking when this begins. And when Truman stepped down famously, he went off on a train to live on his military pension. George Washington refused the salary. You know, Atlee lived pretty modestly. There was basically a very strong tradition in most countries that former politicians would try to behave. And it was considered a little bit shabby to try to make colossal fortunes.
19:02 Rory Stewart? Now that began to change. That began to change in Britain. So John Major made a lot of money. Tony Blair made a lot of money and Bill Clinton made a lot of money and President Obama's been making a lot of money. And George W. Bush has been making a lot of money. So there's been this beginning of this story of people making very large sums of money. But in the US system, I, like you, go to these funny conferences quite a lot. And these are often, you know, going back in the day, I remember what they used to be and they're, they're, they're sort of, I'm talking here about the Bilderberg Commission, Trilateral, these kind of big American conferences, which are often done by tech bros, et cetera. Back in the day, if I go back 25, 30 years, the politicians were much, much more important.
19:46 Rory Stewart? They were on the main stage. They were speaking more. It felt more like Davos or Munich Security Conference. Now, basically, you see former prime ministers, senators, heads of major countries, sitting in the sort of middle to back rows, listening politely, while the tech bros and the business people hold forth. The whole power thing has been inverted and you've entered a world in which people can make money now. And this is what Trump is in this world for doing very little. I mean, it's always been true that the relationship between how much work you do and how much money you make is weird. When one of the Trump's children now makes the speech somewhere in the world, they are being paid up to a million dollars to make a speech in the Balkans.
20:29 Rory Stewart? One of them was paid, I think, 150 million just to attach his name to a new crypto product. And then the stuff that we see in the Balkans, or I've seen in the Gulf, which is Suddenly they're turning up and they're getting prime real estate in the centre of a city to build their hotels, prime beach fronts to build their properties. Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser's hopeless and inept brother, suddenly gets a contract to build a huge pipeline through the Balkans.
20:57 Alastair Campbell? Flynn, who by the way Rory is a, is a previous recipient of the sort of money that's going to come from this weaponisation fund. I think he got over a million for the alleged mistreatment of him. Just on, just on the, the, the point you make about the presidents. So, you know, you're right, the more modern presidents have maybe made lots of money. Tony Blair, as you say, makes a lot of money, but I would argue does a lot of good through the work he does with the TBI, the institute. But just a couple of things to go back. Don't forget Jimmy Carter got rid of his peanut farm, lest it be thought that he could benefit from government policy. I was listening to a podcast with a guy called Norm Eisen on
21:36 Alastair Campbell? Pod Save America. He was Obama's so-called ethic czar and he stopped Obama from remortgaging his home in Chicago because it was at the time of the crash and he worried about, you know, people would think, well, this just looks bad. Whereas what Trump does, he doesn't, he really genuinely doesn't seem to care how anything looks. He will brazen all of it out. And, and the thing is that it's, it's almost in every area you want to look at. We've covered most of them. If you just go through this, this business of the, of the pardons and the lawsuits, you mentioned that, you know, some of the lawsuits with the media. These were entirely frivolous cases. To get whatever it was, $15 million,
22:18 Alastair Campbell? I think for his presidential library because of some bad, what he saw as bad editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. Absolutely ridiculous, totally frivolous. He got 25 million out of Meta in what was seen as a frivolous lawsuit. And just on the pardons, I'm just going through in this document by the, this, this campaign organisation. You know, a guy called Shangpeng Zhao, CEO of crypto exchange finance, jail for money laundering, face multimillion fine, puts a bit of money into Trump crypto, he gets a pardon. Another guy, Iman Zubairi, 12 years for various financial and obstruction of justice offenders, sentenced, commuted. Trevor Milton, four-year fraud, donates, pardoned.
23:02 Alastair Campbell? Another guy, 18 months in prison, while he's in prison, his mother's donating, suddenly he's pardoned. I mean, and then cases that are dropped, you know, people who are in the system and then suddenly their case gets dropped. Now, I just think this is of a, as you said earlier, if this had been any previous president, they'd be gone. So what's happened to the culture? What's happened to the morality in American politics?
23:25 Rory Stewart? So that's the morality point. I think values are collapsing everywhere. I think all our societies are becoming more and more money focused. I was just at the funeral and then at an event last week for Robert Skodelski, who just died. And Robert Skodelski wrote with his son Edward, a book called How Much Is Enough? That I've been reading. And he points out that John Maynard Keynes, about 100 years ago, gave a talk in which he predicted that by now our standard of living in Britain would have increased fourfold. And he predicted that we would be working much less, you know, you know, be working two, three hours a day and be able to spend our time and leisure. And he was right, our standard of living's gone up fourfold, but we're working more than ever.
24:08 Rory Stewart? And one of the questions is, how much is enough? How have we become a society which doesn't behave in the way that, I guess, you know, your father would have predicted or Keynes would have predicted, which is they would assume that when people achieve what they would have thought of as a reasonable, middle-class professional life, they would kick back and stop earning. And we're part of the same problem, Alice. I mean, you and I are racing around the world, we're doing podcasts, we're giving speeches, and we're part of a whole weird, new global culture where everybody is becoming sort of insatiable. So I think that that's one problem is values. The second problem, though, is the US. I think the US constitution is unbelievably dangerous.
24:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and weak.
24:52 Rory Stewart? And, and there are three things that are so strange when you're British looking at America. The first is his ability to personalize prosecution.
25:02 Rory Stewart? In Britain, the Crown Prosecution Services and the Attorney General are kept very, very separate from the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister cannot say, this is my political enemy. I want you to go after them, prosecute them. This was stuff Nixon tried to do. He'd go after Jane Fonda and try to audit her tax, or he'd try to go after Ted Kennedy and put frivolous litigation. But after Watergate, America slightly got back onto an idea that you couldn't do that. But these Supreme Court justices have gone back to a much older idea, that a president is like a sort of medieval king, and he has full executive power, and he can basically appoint his own head of the FBI, launch investigations against
25:43 Rory Stewart? anybody he wants. So that gives him the ability to run these protection rackets. The second thing is this thing that you talked about, which is his ability to pardon, which again, has no equivalent. It's completely mad, right? James Madison set this up, I think, in the Federal Papers, in order to deal with a very extreme case, such as pardoning people after a civil war. He said sometimes, you know, for civil dissent reconciliation, let's say you were thinking about, I don't know, the Northern Ireland Peace Process or something, the president should have the ability to pardon people because it's the only way of bringing society together. It was not envisaged as a way of pardoning your friends, your relatives, and yourself, particularly not yourself, right? I mean, that's completely
26:26 Rory Stewart? against the rule of law and Magna Carta. And then the third thing, I think, is this whole question around immunity from prosecution, and the way in which he's able to achieve that personal immunity from Supreme Court cases. So there was the Supreme Court case that said, anything he does in an official capacity cannot be prosecuted. And this extraordinary McDonald case, which we haven't talked about enough in 2016, where this guy McDonald, who was a governor, managed to take Rolexes, borrow Ferraris, stay in beach houses, took $180,000 of cash from a donor, and in return, went around desperately promoting the donor's dodgy tobacco products, trying to get people to take them up. And the Supreme Court ruled,
27:10 Rory Stewart? it didn't really matter how much money he'd take, and didn't matter how much effort he put into trying to promote the guy's products, because ultimately, the state didn't actually adopt those products, he wasn't guilty of anything at all.
27:22 Alastair Campbell? There's a couple in this document that... I don't think I've had any attention at all. And it just shows that some of this stuff's happening that's very, very big. And some of it's happening that's maybe just sort of a bit more small scale. But so, for example, Arsenal Metal, big steel company. They provided the steel for Trump's famous ballroom that's being built. And possibly unconnected, I don't know. But a few days later, the tariff regime was changed. Had it benefited them and their sector very, very well. There's another guy, a donor from one of the big oil companies who gave something like six million dollars.
28:04 Alastair Campbell? And he became the first guy fully to benefit from the, the new deals that started to be done after the capture of Maduro in Venezuela. Now, they could argue, well, that's just the way that business works. But there's, there's just such a pattern to this that's, that's kind of so staggering. And there's a, I've read a very interesting interview with a guy called Brendan Ballou, who's a former Justice Department special counsel. And he said, the, the slush fund that we were talking about earlier, he's, he described it as the most corrupt action in American history. We could have an argument about that. He's now representing police officers who were injured during the January the sixth riots. Because you imagine, you're a policeman who's, or you're the family of somebody who lost their life in those.
28:48 Alastair Campbell? And now you have your taxpayer, your tax dollars being part of a fund that Trump wants to pay to the people who took part in that riot is completely insane. And they, but this guy says something very interesting. He said, his worry is that this money is going to be deliberately used to fund these violent people who are going to be loyal to the president, come what may. And he even talks about the funding of paramilitary organizations. And this is sometimes how it works in authoritarian countries. You have the police, the law enforcement agency, but then you have people outside who are able to do exactly what they want. And some of the people that are saying that they're going to try and get money out of this fund, you know, the Proud Boys that we used to talk about a lot.
29:30 Alastair Campbell? A guy called Andrew Paul Johnson, who describes himself as an American terrorist. He's since been found guilty of molesting children. These are the people that Trump wants us all to think are heroes. He's crazy.
29:44 Rory Stewart? My conclusion, the US Constitution is broken. It's not fit for purpose. What we've discovered is that if you get a president like Trump and if you enter a world of private sector, crypto, globalized growth, the US Constitution has no protection. In fact, the president can worm his way like a termite into every nook and cranny of it, and the Supreme Court will back him because they will say that his ability to prosecute his enemies is part of the executive power of the president in the Constitution.
30:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
30:20 Rory Stewart? They will say that his ability to pardon his cronies is part of the executive power of the president in the Constitution. They will say that his ability to grant himself immunity is guaranteed within the Constitution.
30:34 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
30:34 Rory Stewart? They will say the ability of people to flood the American political system with untold money, I mean, hundreds of millions, billions, stuff that Trump himself in his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, when asked about it, said, yeah, that's how it works. I gave all these people money, I get favors two, three years down the line. All this stuff is guaranteed by the Constitution and the challenge to Americans is, are you prepared to change your Constitution? Because if you keep this Constitution going, you're on the high road to tyranny and corruption.
31:07 Alastair Campbell? Maybe just briefly touch upon how this relates to the UK. When you talked about the way that Trump is able, as it were, to suborn the Constitution in the way that he's doing, at least in the UK, when we had a character as disreputable as Johnson, who was doing all sorts of bad stuff and parroging Parliament and all the kind of stuff that people know about the Johnson did, eventually, albeit over a completely different issue, but the system worked it out and said, no, we're not having this. Now, okay, we ended up with this trust, which, you know, we cannot, whether that was better or worse, but the point is, it sort of worked. But the reason why I've been so agitated in recent weeks that this issue of Nigel Farage
31:49 Alastair Campbell? and the five million pound donation has not been getting the attention that it merits and not been getting the media focus that it merits, even though some of them are trying. Is because I genuinely worry that if somebody like Farage and Tice and Youssef and all these people who are, you know, very much about money and very much about, you know, they projecting themselves as men of the people who I think are actually very much driven by by wealth. And this story of Farage and the five million donation, I mean, he literally keeps changing the story. We're now expected to believe that he's the victim in this story because he's claiming that the Russians of whom he actually is quite an admirer hacked his bank account or hacked his phone and briefed the Guardian.
32:33 Alastair Campbell? I mean, it's so sort of ridiculously unbelievable. Well, this is Trumpian. You just sort of say something that gets you through the day and eventually people get bored and move on.
32:40 Rory Stewart? Okay. Well, I think time for a break. And then once we come back from break, we'll move on to a very different subject.
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34:07 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
34:10 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell and we're joined for the second half of this episode by Vicky Spratt, who many of you will have listened to her excellent mini-series on Gen Z. And on the back of it, two things to report. The first is that she spent the morning with Alan Milburn to talk to him about the Neets review that's coming up. First part's happening soon and the sort of what we're going to do about it is coming later. So we'll talk about that. But also we've done some polling or Ipsos to do some polling on Gen Z. So just on the polling, Vicky, what were your main takeouts from what you took from the polling of this generation? Just to remind Rory, because you keep forgetting, Gen Z is, let's see if you remembered.
34:53 Rory Stewart? Oh, it's people, oh, is it people aged between 15 and 30? No, Vicky, go on.
35:01 Speaker 06 So close Rory, so close. 14 and 29.
35:06 Rory Stewart? 14 and 29.
35:08 Alastair Campbell? Very close, very close. There we go.
35:10 Speaker 06 Nearly.
35:11 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, nearly got there.
35:12 Speaker 06 We're really lucky to have had this exclusive polling done for us by Ipsos and it ran between February and April. So it gives us a really good snapshot of what was going on for Gen Z at the start of this year. I think the thing that really jumped out to me at first is the favorability ratings for leaders of parties and would be leaders of parties. So some of this might not sound surprising. Andy Burnham came top of the polls. He's the most favorable leader or would be leader. We all think he might quite like to lead the country. And after him came Zach Palansky in second place.
35:54 Speaker 06 Now, that might not be surprising. Zach is getting a lot of press at the moment and that also ties with what we're hearing about how young people, this generation of 14 to 29 year olds consume their news, mostly online. And if you are on Instagram or TikTok as I am, you will be reading a lot about Zach Palansky. And in third place, a bit more surprising, Nigel Farage.
36:20 Speaker 06 Keir Starmer comes in sixth place after Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch. Now, in some ways you'd expect that, sitting prime ministers tend to poll pretty badly, they've got a tough job. But he really comes in even below Kemi Badenoch, who you would not expect Gen Z to be looking upon favourably. But when you dig in to this data, it's not as straightforward as Andy Burnham, Zach Polanski, Nigel Farage, good to go, walking on water. There's another question that was asked, which was about satisfaction with those leaders. So not just who they think might be a good leader, but how satisfied they are with them.
37:02 Speaker 06 And actually, Zach Polanski had a satisfaction rating of thirty seven percent. And that is down ten points on the last time Ipsos asked the question. So even though people are aware of Zach Polanski, they feel good about him as a party leader, they're actually not that satisfied with the job that he's doing. Nigel Farage had an even worse satisfaction rating of fifty seven percent, which is down twenty eight points on the last time they asked the question. But poor Keir Starmer coming in right at the bottom with a satisfaction rating of just eighteen percent and a dissatisfaction rating of seventy five percent,
37:44 Speaker 06 down fifty seven points on the last time that Ipsos asked the question. So I think that gives you a more nuanced sense of what young people actually feel about these leaders. They're not looking at Zach Polanski and thinking, great, they're looking at him and analysing his performance. And then what else have we got? Something that might surprise you, because it surprised me. The biggest concern for this generation is inflation, the cost of living, the price of everything. And after that, immigration. So cost of living, immigration, and then the third in the top three of their concerns are economy.
38:25 Speaker 06 So that tells you that Gen Z are plugged in and rightly, I think, worried about is what is going on in our economy. But immigration particularly stood out to me because that's not something you associate with young people. We've got a bit of a misconception in this country. That's something that only older people, perhaps reading the right wing tabloids, are worried about. And that's just not the case. And then finally, really, really sad, but economic optimism, really, really, really low figures. Seventy two percent think that this is going to get worse.
39:00 Rory Stewart? One of the things that struck me, and it's the sort of point you hinted at, is that it doesn't actually seem as though the normal story, which is that young men are radicalising, is correct. What's actually happening is young women are radicalising. I mean, young men in Gen Z are not really more likely to vote Reform than the general population. In fact, they're slightly less likely. Whereas young women have jumped from like two percent support from Green to sort of twenty three percent. This is a story about the radicalisation of young women.
39:29 Speaker 06 This is it, Rory. And I think this is really, really underreported. Young women are going to the Greens in big numbers. And they are, by many metrics of polling, not just done in Britain, but across, across the world, more left wing than men of the same age. There could be many reasons why that is happening, but the impact on our politics is enormous.
39:53 Alastair Campbell? The polling also did some stuff on the kind of characters. And it was interesting that, and I wonder how much this just reflects that what's happening in the media at the time that the polling is done. But I guess if there are two politicians who stand out as being broadly more popular than the rest, it's Zach Polanski and Andy Burnham. So does that suggest, was there a genuine appetite, do you think, for Andy Burnham? Or was it just that people were hearing a lot about him because of all the leadership talk?
40:18 Speaker 06 Of course, Andy Burnham is in the news all the time at the moment, and so is Zach Polanski. But I suppose, to challenge your idea a bit there, Alistair, Nigel Farage is in the news a lot too, and he came out on this polling pretty badly. So you could, you could argue that young people were looking at who they were being presented with in the media and making a judgement on, on them. And Polanski came after Andy Burnham, but when you look at it, there are quite a lot of young people who also are dissatisfied with how Zach Polanski is doing. Keir Starmer comes fairly low down the list, but sitting prime ministers always do.
40:59 Speaker 06 And I would have expected Zach Polanski, actually, to have had a much higher favorability rating than he does, given all of the buzz around him and all the social media. So it's quite interesting that Andy Burnham came above Zach Polanski, I think.
41:15 Rory Stewart? And Vicky, just, just give us a sense, I mean, let's step away from the figures at the moment, maybe back to the sense that you get from talking to people, what Alastair might call a focus group. Give us a sense of what's behind these numbers, what, what people would say, I mean, it's difficult to generalize, but give us a sense of what Gen Z might say about these different people.
41:35 Speaker 06 So making this series for you guys, one of the things we did was poll the Rest Is Politics audience, 12,000 responses, 6,000 of them were members of this generation that we're talking about. And they're so hopeful but disillusioned at the same time. And I think what they've seen growing up, what they told us is, we see people promise change and then the change doesn't come. We see people say they're going to overhaul the system and the system stays the same. I still can't afford a house. I did everything right. I did a degree and I'm working in Costa and living with my parents and thinking about the tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt that I've got.
42:17 Speaker 06 And there was one reader who wrote in and said, the only people that really seem to speak to me are Zach Polanski and Gary's economics. Everybody else is just fighting amongst themselves and saying the same thing. And I think they feel really let down by politicians and like they've not been listened to. And now that these problems they face, the fact that jobs aren't paying them enough to move out of their parents' houses or buy houses of their own, were avoidable.
42:47 Alastair Campbell? I, I saw, um, other polling companies are available and I, I was looking at some YouGov polling. And this question was fascinating. Do you feel lucky to have been born when you were? And it asked all age groups from eighteen upwards. So if you were born eighteen to twenty four, so that's you now aged eighteen to twenty four. Thirty four percent said that they feel lucky to have been born in that era. That's pretty low. Twenty five to forty nine, forty six percent feel they were lucky to have been born in their era. Fifty to sixty four, which I regret to tell you, Roy, that is now your era. Fifty nine percent say they felt lucky. My generation, sixty five plus, sixty seven percent. Now, that's quite a depressing finding.
43:32 Alastair Campbell? If you think that, you know, the older you get, the happier you are with the world that you're entering. And I do worry with all the challenges facing the Gen Z generation. And now hopefully going on to produce the next generation. If that trend continues, we're going to have a very, very unhappy British population.
43:53 Speaker 06 Absolutely. And and this idea that the baby boomer generation are the luckiest generation in history. When you look at the statistics and you look at what was possible for baby boomers when they were younger versus what's possible now, moving out, starting a family of your own, buying a house, getting a job, moving up the career ladder, moving up the housing ladder. You know, it's hard to argue with this idea that they might be the luckiest generation in history. Born at a particular time when our economy was changing. And homeownership was on the rise for the first time in history and the world was opening up. Global financial markets were opening up. And then you've got what's happening today, which is wages that haven't really gone up since two thousand and eight.
44:36 Speaker 06 Historically high house prices, student debt and a contracting jobs market. And one of the things that the younger trip audience told us was that they do feel unlucky. We asked them to describe themselves and unlucky was one of the words that came up the most.
44:51 Rory Stewart? Vicky, one of the odd things is that in real terms, house prices are lower than they were in the past. And it hasn't had much effect on people's views. Now, that might be because house prices got so unaffordable. That even now that they're lower in real terms, it still hasn't got anywhere within anybody's income. But some calculations suggest that actually house prices in real terms in in many sectors of the economy were higher in two thousand and eight than they are now. And that many of the things that people talked about over the last fifteen years about dropping the price of homes has happened. Many people will find that they can't sell their houses for the prices they bought them from.
45:32 Rory Stewart? But that isn't somehow getting through. Young people continue to believe that house prices are higher than ever.
45:38 Speaker 06 Well, that is true, and particularly in London, real house prices have fallen, and don't I know it because I am affected by this myself. But the the statistic or the bit of information you really need here is what's called the loan to income ratio. And because we had that epic house price inflation after two thousand and eight, when interest rates were nailed to the floor, but wages weren't really going up as much. We're now in a situation where even though we've had those real terms falls in recent years, particularly, what you need to be earning to be able to afford a home has been stretched. So in the nineties, it was around four times the average income to get a mortgage. Now it's eight.
46:21 Speaker 06 So this generation that we're talking about, Gen Z, they are particularly impacted by that because they don't have very high salaries. But even with those real terms falls, the house prices are still really, really high. So it's whether they can borrow to buy. That's the problem.
46:39 Alastair Campbell? One of the most interesting slides in the polling for me was the one that was about what young people see as their key issues. And what's particularly interesting is the the issues are listed and then there are two bars. There's there's the eighteen to thirty four year olds who've been polled specifically. And then there's the general population. Number one is inflation.
47:00 Alastair Campbell? Number two is immigration. Number three is the economic situation generally. Then the NHS and then and only when you get down to number five is it housing. And what really surprised me. Education is in single figures. Crime is in single figures. Unemployment is in single figures. And I was also surprised that even some poverty and inequality. Just 12% listed it as one of their three most important issues. So it suggested I I I would have put housing right up at the top, but clearly I'm wrong.
47:35 Speaker 06 Well, I I interpreted the the bars there as suggesting that perhaps housing was coming under cost of living for people because inflation, the economy was so high up. I wondered whether actually young people were connecting that to their housing situation as well, rather than drawing it out on it on its own. But I was really struck by the fact that immigration came in the top three concerns. Because I would have expected that to be something that older people over indexed on. But one thing about this generation is they're very worried about their own situations for understandable reasons. And that might be leading to quite an individualized outlook.
48:17 Speaker 06 And that tells you, I think, a little bit about, of course, we've not seen the enormous swing to reform amongst young men that was being reported a couple of years ago. But it is true that some young people have gone to reform. I was at Reform Party Conference in Birmingham last year interviewing young reform councillors. And their concerns about migration, immigration policy as a whole, were very much in the vein of people coming to take the jobs that we need. And I think we could underestimate the impact that that issue has also had on a younger demographic.
48:53 Rory Stewart? Vicky, one thing that.
48:57 Rory Stewart? It's very tempting, I don't know, if you're a mainstream politician, Labour politician, Conservative politician, and you heard that younger people felt that everything was stacked against them and that the only people who were listening to them and coming up with solutions were Zach Polanski and Gary Stevenson, would be to try to argue that Gary Stevenson and Zach Polanski's economic policies don't add up, that wealth taxes have been tried all over the world and they've generally failed and there's only two or three countries that have retained them, that many of their assumptions about how economics work are unrealistic, many of the promises they're making are not realistic, that solving these
49:39 Rory Stewart? issues like housing, even when the price comes down, as you've pointed out, Vicky, doesn't actually make it more affordable, et cetera. My guess is that wouldn't go down very well. My guess is that if you were to sit with the people you were interviewing and say, no, I'm sorry, but, you know, the economics doesn't stack up and these guys are misleading you, people would feel patronised and insulted. But that raises a question, if it were true, just hypothetically, that the Labour or Conservative mainstream politician had a point, that actually the Polanski-Stevenson economics is pretty out there and they're a bit doubtful about it, how would you communicate that to a younger person?
50:13 Speaker 06 I think that's the challenge that the current government have got, and frankly, anybody who fills their shoes in number 10 after this, it's not the case that there are quick fixes and silver bullets, right? We have a problem with growth, even though the figures were a bit better at the start of the year, we need to grow the economy, we need to look at our jobs market, we have a problem that's been building, as we've just discussed, for a really long time with housing, and this idea that you could just wave a magic wand, abolish landlords to borrow a Green Party policy, and abolish freeholders and redistribute the wealth and everything would be okay is for the birds. But at the same time...
50:58 Speaker 06 When I'm travelling around, speaking to young people who frankly like cannot visualise their life in ten years' time, twenty five years old, and they don't know what the milestones of adulthood are anymore, because they can't necessarily build their own life. I can see why those ideas cut through, and I think politicians need to find a way of communicating how tough things are, but also finding some solutions that are hopeful. And Alistair and I talked about this with Angela Rayner, you know, the Workers' Rights Act, the Renters' Rights Act, so much in there for this generation, but it just wasn't packaged up and sold that way. So I think it's a communication issue.
51:40 Alastair Campbell? When the Mike's continuing exchanges with Gary Stevenson, he keeps saying, Rory, that we should get this guy Gabriel Zuckman on the podcast because he thinks he does explain how wealth tax can work. But it's very interesting that Wes Streeting, who is clearly one of the people vying to be the next leader of the Labour Party, the next Prime Minister, is talking about a wealth tax. And when we talked about policy solutions, Vicky, earlier, do you get a sense that this generation, that Labour needs to win back if they're going to become a two-term government, that there are policy solutions? Or is there just a sense that they're the establishment, they've got the wrong vibe, they've got off on the wrong foot, and they're just turning away? Or did you, both from your interviews and from the polling, do you detect that actually
52:25 Alastair Campbell? a different approach and a different policy agenda could bring them back?
52:28 Speaker 06 I think it could, and I think that is borne out in the polling about which leaders are more favourable, and Andy Burnham coming up top. Because I think Andy Burnham is often underestimated. I've interviewed Andy a few times, I've been up to Manchester to see what he's been doing there. And he has focused on young people. The M back, education focused on training young people in Manchester for the jobs available in Manchester. The B network, buses, making it affordable and easy to get around Manchester. His Good Landlord Charter, which he announced before Labour had their Renters' Rights Bill properly moving. Going out with Andy is like... The only other politician I've ever been out and about with that you get the same response to is Boris Johnson. People stopping him in the street, wanting to chat to him,
53:13 Speaker 06 "How are you doing?", catching up about something they spoke about a few weeks ago. And I think that is because he has done things for the community and people recognise that. And even when you speak to people in the south of the country who you wouldn't expect to be such Burnhamites, they really, really recognise the things that he's done in Manchester. And for the policies of a mayor to cut through like that, I think that's really interesting. And I think it suggests that he's speaking in a way that resonates with what people are concerned about. The policies of someone like Andy Burnham do cut through. And I think one of the mistakes, actually, I think the Tories made this mistake too, is not talking about policy in terms of what it will actually do day to day. I
53:58 Speaker 06 know Labour are trying, I've seen it on TikTok and I've seen it on Instagram, but for some reason, Andy's really managed to communicate that, just in terms of the actions and the words.
54:10 Alastair Campbell? Look, he's done a great job as mayor of Manchester, a great man of Manchester, no doubt about that. But in a way, the fact we've already seen in the last few days, he's had to, already slightly having to recalibrate message, he had to put out a statement essentially to try and calm the bond markets. And this is what happens when you step up, you get all sorts of different pressures coming in. But what else have you learnt in the last few weeks when you've been doing this about what politics is doing wrong with regard to young people's appreciation of it? Because I see this all the time in schools, there's a real interest, there's a real passion, but there's a disconnect. And personality's a part of that, for sure. And essentially,
54:53 Alastair Campbell? the three you mentioned at the top, Burnham, Palanquy, Farage, they're all, in different ways, very good communicators. But beyond communication, what is politics doing wrong?
55:02 Speaker 06 It is policy. I know that sounds so boring. And lots of my colleagues in the media don't like policy. They like the politics, they like the big fights and the challenges. But young people are way more engaged with what they need to build a life than I think older people realise. You know, we heard during this series from young people who had side hustles, multiple jobs, because they were trying to save money and think about how they could get ahead. We heard from young people who were picking particular degrees because they thought it would get them a job. We heard from young people who were looking at the policies being announced on tax and writing into us about the triple lock. And
55:47 Speaker 06 obviously, that is a political hot potato that nobody is in a rush to pick up. But they are smart, they're educated, one of the most educated generations in history. This is not about throwing them something shiny that doesn't really mean anything. They want to know what wholesale reform of our systems look like.
56:06 Rory Stewart? The final one from me, um, before we close. Um, AI is a massive threat to jobs. You know, we're, we're talking today just the moment where Zuckerberg has announced that he's getting rid of almost 10% of the employees at Meta, Facebook. You will see very, very quickly huge layoffs in call centres and software development, in white collar jobs, hiring, et cetera. How are people responding to that? And why was that not number one on the list of people's concerns?
56:37 Speaker 06 It's really interesting that it didn't come up in the polling. We're racing towards this iceberg, Rory, with the jobs market, as you've correctly identified. I was in a jobs, job centre in Birmingham on Thursday, shadowing the youth unemployment team. And what I saw was young people who desperately, desperately want to work. They are looking for jobs. They want to work in hospitality. They want to work in engineering. And they're applying and they're not hearing back. And then at the other end of the scale, we've heard from graduates who are maybe working, working in a temporary job. They won't be coming up in those unemployment statistics. They won't be showing up in our job centres. But the jobs that they're looking for in set professional sectors are just not there.
57:21 Speaker 06 And what happens now and how our welfare system copes with it?
57:28 Speaker 06 I think is a huge unknown and that's really troubling. And that is one thing that the reader and listener responses really flagged. I'm worried about AI, nobody's talking about it. I can't get a job, nobody knows how to get me a job. And I think Alan Milburn's NEAT's report, that's not in education, employment or training. I think that that's going to do a lot to highlight the issues with the system. But I was talking to him just before I came on with you this morning. I can share a little preview of of what he said, you know, we need a huge system overhaul in terms of supporting people into work, not just managing economic activity.
58:09 Speaker 06 And if more jobs do disappear from the market, I think that the welfare system is going to be hit with a tidal wave that's just not prepared for. And as we saw after two thousand and eight, it will be the youngest two who are impacted the most. I mean, I graduated in twenty ten, so I remember graduating into a jobs market where suddenly all the jobs we'd been told we were working towards had disappeared. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that we're about to see that again. And, you know, the trip listeners know that and they're worried about it. But what is the solution?
58:41 Rory Stewart? Vicky, thank you very, very much. Now, we've talked a lot about Ipsos, which have provided loads of fascinating graphs and charts that paint a real picture of how Gen Z will vote. And we'll share all those in our newsletter this week with some writing from Vicky too. So sign up for the newsletter for that much more, just follow the link in the episode description.
59:02 Alastair Campbell? And our Gen Z series is a member's series, but we've created a student subscription, which is twenty pounds for the whole year. Just go to therestispolitics.com and enter your university email at checkout. And question time tomorrow, we're going to talk about Cuba. We're going to talk about Ben Gavir and his horrible treatment of people who are trying to get aid to Gaza. We're going to talk about reform and whether reality is catching up on them. And I am going to finally answer that question about whose is the most evil hand I've ever shaken, and it's not Putin.
59:33 Rory Stewart? Very good answer. Look forward to it. Bye bye.
59:35 Alastair Campbell? See you soon.
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