552. Trump's Red Card Saga and Germany's Far-Right Machine

What does Trump's shocking red card intervention reveal about how he wields power? Why doesn't his corruption seem to hurt him politically, despite adding $2.2 billion to his wealth in a single year in office, while so many Americans struggle to get by? Is Germany's firewall against the far right about to fall – and is the billionaire owner of the Telegraph pushing it over? Join Alastair and Mehdi Hasan as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Ben Rhodes by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. 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. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. 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. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Sponsored by Lloyds. Get the account that offers more. You've earned it. See how Lloyds can help you make the most of your money. Search Lloyds Premier. £15 per month fee refunded when you meet the eligibility criteria. T&Cs apply. UK residents, aged 18+. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Kieron Leslie 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?

  We are seeing two very different Americas right now as the USA celebrates his 250th birthday. Which is the real America and which will endure? Will it be Trump's America, a country being reshaped in his own image in pursuit of naked self-enrichment, where a man who has blatantly never actually watched a real football match in his life can abuse his presidential power to try and succeed in getting a red card suspended? Or will it be the country that the American people are showing off to fans flocking to the US from all around the world? They're welcoming, friendly, loving the internationalism and getting behind their national team. So which America will endure? To answer that question

• 0:45Alastair Campbell?

  with Rory on his silent retreat this week, I am delighted to be joined by the never silent Anglo-American Mehdi Hasan.

• 0:54Rory Stewart?

  This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:57Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:07Rory Stewart?

  What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about Fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get £50 towards your next bill.

• 1:19Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:29Rory Stewart?

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• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

  So don't just listen to another price cap story. Switch to Fuse, save up to £200 and get a trip plus free with code POLITICS at fuseenergy.com/politics.

• 1:56Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:59Alastair 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.

• 2:11Rory 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.

• 2:35Alastair 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?

• 2:41Rory 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/reisterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/reisterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 3:36Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:38Speaker 02

  And I'm Mehdi Hasan in Washington DC.

• 3:40Alastair Campbell?

  Mehdi, thank you so much for being there. We are going to talk about Washington DC, or more generally about the United States, 250th anniversary since independence, and also this extraordinary row that Donald Trump has created within the World Cup. And then we're going to talk a little bit in the second half about something you and I talk about a lot, which is the relationship between media and politics. And we'll be looking at that in relation in particular to a lot of the stuff that's happening in Germany. But first of all, let's kick off with football, no pun intended. And it is such a pleasure to be able legitimately to start on football, because this is a subject that my regular podcast partner freely admits he has very low down in his list of priorities. Now, last

• 4:23Alastair Campbell?

  week, I said I was genuinely surprised that Donald Trump had engaged so little, barely at all with this World Cup since he started. Well, I spoke far too soon. Their star player, Valerian Balagan, gets a red card. Trump cannot resist getting involved, more typically cannot resist telling everybody that he's involved. And he's asked his FIFA pet and his Peace Prize creator, Gianno Infantino, to take another look. Cue the whole world enraged, cue Belgium destroying the USA 4-1, and even my partner Fiona, who rivals Rory in her lack of interest in football, came up with a belter this morning when she said Trump has made Belgium great again.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:05Alastair Campbell?

  So Mehdi, what do you make of it? And is Trump actually getting any of the blame for the defeat, as I believe he should?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  No, Alastair. The Trump faction will never blame him for anything. They didn't even understand why the world was upset. For the last 48 hours, most American pundits on the right, commentators, trolls, et cetera, were doing the nonsense about, well, you know what? We're the most powerful nation. We managed to make it happen. Who cares what Belgium thinks? Not understanding or not caring that the rest of the world were outraged by this ridiculous intervention from Donald Trump. And I think, you know, I had liberals defending the Trump intervention, because when it comes to stuff like this, the patriotism takes over. And I am an American, as you introduced, Anglo-American. I'm a British American. I'm supporting the England football team, as I have done for 40 years. But I'm

• 5:54Speaker 02

  also, obviously, I also sat down to support the US men's national team last night, on Monday night. And it was bad. It was not just bad on the pitch. And there's a whole debate to be had about whether Trump got inside these players' heads. It was their worst performance of the tournament by a country mile. But also the mockery, Alastair. I mean, Trump, as ever, makes a mockery of the United States. And you see the Belgian team's Twitter account putting out pictures saying overturn this, the Belgian team dancing to the ridiculous Trump dance. And as Fiona says, make Belgium great again. Forced, Donald Trump basically forced the world to support Belgium. Who the hell ever voluntarily supports Belgium? But in this case, people did because they were annoyed about the clear corrupt intervention from Trump.

• 6:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Rick Wilson, Alastair, the former Republican strategist, never Trumper now, he wrote a book a few years ago, and the title of that book, I believe, sums up the Trump phenomenon more than anything else. The book is called Everything Trump Touches Dies. And I think that is the phenomenon. Anything he gets involved in, anything he touches, anything he's around gets ruined. He ruins it for everyone.

• 6:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you and I, we must be very careful not to passionately and aggressively agree about every single thing. But we both have pretty profound Trump derangement syndrome, and we're very, very proud of that.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  What I like to call Trump discernment syndrome.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  Fine, fine. Or realistic Trump assessment syndrome, maybe, something like that. But the reason why I'm serious about whether he gets the blame is because Belgium have not actually been playing that well. He definitely, as you saw from the dancing, as you say, and all the rest of it, he added to their motivation. And it is quite something for two things. One, as you say, virtually the whole world supporting Belgium, right? It's not like Brazil, it's Belgium.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:32Alastair Campbell?

  And secondly, Sepp Blatter, with whom the monification of football is so closely linked, him coming out and basically saying, this is an outrage, quo vardis FIFA, as he said. And you mentioned the thing about everything he touches. My algorithm at the moment is just endlessly sending me pictures of Scottish football fans, Norwegian football fans. Today it's all Belgian stuff, right? And one of them was a guy, an American guy, in the crowd, in the stadium yesterday, exactly doing what, saying what you've just said. He said, everything Trump touches turns to shit. You did this, Trump. And he sort of raised his little finger. We've interviewed this week, Roy and I are leading. We've interviewed Ben Rhodes, Barack

• 8:17Alastair Campbell?

  Obama's former foreign policy speechwriter. And he posted this, in fact, he's written a sub-stake, but I'll just read you a very short extract from it, written in the wake of this. "The failure of powerful actors to play by the rules and the absence of guardians to enforce the rules is why the world is in the chaotic mess that it's in right now. That is why we run competitions like the World Cup, which is supposed to be a respite from the harsh realities of our time. A competition where a victory emerges within an agreed amount of time with agreed rules. Now the World Cup feels like, well, the world that we're living in, where corrupt and powerful people make opaque deals above the heads of the people, and the US tries to dominate anything in its way. And even better, Mary

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  Trump, member of the family, he casts a shadow over everything. He can only win if he cheats and he thinks that applies to everyone."

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I think that Mary's point, I know Mary and Ben well, I agree with Ben's geopolitical metaphor. This is a metaphor for the US right now, clearly. The president comes along and decides to bring his brand of politics, intimidation, corruption, thuggery, intimidation to the World Cup as well, because it's the only way he knows how to deal with any kind of problem or challenge. And I think, you know, when Sepp Blatter, a man so associated with corruption, says you're too corrupt, that is a problem. I mean, Sepp Blatter is banned from attending any World Cup games till 2028. When he comes out and says, this is too much even for me, we've got to ask questions about the current FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, who, as you say, is Trump's pet, the man who created a peace prize for him. But the Mary Trump point is very important about the casting of the shadow and the undermining.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  I think it's really, really important about understanding that he doesn't let people live in peace. This is my opinion. People say to me, why are you obsessed with Trump? Somebody on Twitter said to me yesterday, why do you have to make everything about Trump? It's the exact opposite. I spent my life wishing to get rid of him from my public and personal lives. When he lost in 2020, some people thought he was gone after the insurrection. People had written him off. His career is over. The idea that he's back now and that I spend my waking hours and sometimes my non-waking hours thinking about this man, what he's doing next, how he's harming the country and the world is not a good thing. It's not something I want. I don't want him to be involved in the World Cup. I don't want him to be involved in the Olympics. Sorry, folks, just to remind you all, he's also got the Olympics. You know, luckiest man in the world,

• 10:34Speaker 02

  comes back to office and gets the 250th birthday, the World Cup and the Olympics all on his watch. Kill me now. And he's ruining the Olympics. So the World Cup, he will ruin the Olympics too. Thankfully, the US team's out now, so he'll pay less interest, but he's still going to turn up at the final. And as you say, the idea, you said, you know, last week, you thought, oh, he's not involved yet. He was always going to get involved. But the funny thing is, number one, he does not watch football. He actually says in the press conference, I didn't even know what a red card was, which is classic Trump, but he shouldn't have got one. And number two, the bragging about the fact that you did this. There's always been corruption associated with FIFA. Multiple governments have pressured FIFA and used FIFA. I just did a series for Zeteo called The Dark Side of the

• 11:15Speaker 02

  World Cup. We looked at Mussolini in the 1930s, the Videla regime in Argentina in the 1970s. This is not new. Corrupt authoritarian governments using FIFA as a fig leaf for sports washing, all of that. What is new is they never did it out in the open like this. Trump just is happy to be brazenly, openly authoritarian, crooked, corrupt, whatever word you want to use. And I think that is the fundamental problem here. This idea that he can just come along and to go back to Ben's point, say, who cares about the rules? It's all rigged. By the way, one last thing, Alastair, he said yesterday, if we lose, we'll just say it's rigged like 2020.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And he did it with that sort of little smirk. The other thing, we're going to talk lots about the press because that's kind of your world, the media and your world and part of my world as well. Just on that thing about what he said in the White House yesterday, is there no journalist there who's ever going to just say, sorry, excuse me, how can you pretend to know about football? When you've just said you didn't know that if you got a red card, you were banned? Or, excuse me, have you just said that if America lose this game, we'll just say it was rigged? Why do those people never interject in a way that pushes back? Can you explain that to me?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  No, I cannot explain it, Alastair. It's the bugbear of, it's the bane of my life. I spent decade criticizing here in the United States. I criticized it when I worked within mainstream media, NBC News and MSNBC. I criticize it now when I'm in independent media at Zeteo. It is deeply frustrating. It's why journalism and journalists have such a low rating, not just on the right who say they're fake news, but amongst liberals. It's why so many people tell me they canceled their New York Times subscription to become a Zeteo subscriber because people are frustrated that the media has dropped the ball again and again with Trump. You mentioned that press conference. I tweeted the same thing. I tweeted the same thing yesterday, saying, why is no journalist asking him about Balagan being a birthright citizen? Is that obvious question to ask the president? You say he's our best player, Mr. President, but under your rules, he wouldn't

• 13:05Speaker 02

  be playing tonight. He wouldn't be an American. His mother literally was a tourist, birthed tourist. Well, she didn't even have the intention of giving birth. She came on holiday to New York with her husband, a Nigerian couple from England. A flight attendant wouldn't let her on the plane. She was seven months pregnant. She gave birth to Flo in New York, flew back when he was three months old, I think. Grew up in England, never grew up in America. Under Trump's rules, had the Supreme Court not stepped in, we would not have a future Balagan. So no journalist on this, asking that question. No journalist ask him, do you know what the F you're talking about, as usual? You know, no one ever asks him, Alastair, his lack of knowledge. No one ever asks him a specific knowledge question. They always ask him yes or no questions. What's your opinion, Mr. President? No one ever asks a question that exposes his fundamental lack of knowledge about anything that he's commenting on. And finally, on the cheating point, yes, it goes to the heart of it.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  All the media has moved on from the 2020 election interference, from the insurrection. It's seen as old news, and yet he dredges it up every time. He brings it up out of nowhere yesterday and says, we'll just say we cheated. Somebody could have said, oh, so you accept then that the 2020 loss was a loss because you're saying if they lose fair and square in the football, that will be rigged as well. One last thing, I'll remind everyone, people say, oh, you guys on the left are obsessed with Trump and his election claims. It's not just the left. When Donald Trump lost to Ted Cruz in the Iowa Caucasus in 2016, his reaction was to say Ted Cruz rigged the Iowa Caucasus. He's never accepted defeat at anyone's hands.

• 14:26Alastair Campbell?

  The point about Balagan as well, his story is extraordinary because I mean, and you know, he's quite low profile. He plays for Monaco. He's not kind of, you know, he's, and he's a very, very good player, though he had a terrible game against, well, a poor game against Belgium. He was barely in the game. But I was, somebody sent me this morning, an American friend sent me this morning, a stack of clips of people on the right addressing this issue of the birthright thing. And including Stephen Miller, and we'll maybe talk about him when we get on to Maggie Haveman and Jonathan Swan's book. Stephen Miller essentially saying, these people are the scourge of America. If you're going to come on holiday and you're very, very pregnant, then if you drop your baby when you're here, you're never going to be an American. And if you're doing it just

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  so as you get welfare. And we should probably put in the newsletter a clip of Balagan speaking. Because, I mean, it is extraordinary, this World Cup, able to do very well. But if you think that they could and should have had him and Elise, you know, there he sounds like a South London kid. That's what he sounds like.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  I mean, he could have played for England or Nigeria, but he chose the US.

• 15:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  The Miller line, by the way, just for listeners in the UK, viewers in the UK, to understand how batshit crazy the American right is. I think sometimes people don't quite get it. You guys have your Farage's and your Lowe's and your Kemi Badenoch. I don't think you quite get how unhinged the American right is. When the birthright citizenship decision came down from the Supreme Court, when the Supreme Court said, actually, we're going to go against Trump, very narrowly, by the way, and say that actually birthright citizenship is explicitly laid out in the Constitution. If you're born in the US, you are an American. The reaction from the right, led by Stephen Miller, was so unhinged that one prominent right wing commentator suggested, suggested as an option of compulsory sterilizations of foreign women to avoid them from giving birth in this country. Miller himself was asked on TV, should we start checking women coming into the country

• 16:18Speaker 02

  to see if they're pregnant before we give them a visa? This is the insanity on the American right.

• 16:23Alastair Campbell?

  Now, on the 250th anniversary more generally, I assume you weren't invited to any of the big events, but you, but you.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Not like Nigel Farage, I did not get an invite.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, Nigel Farage, that's, that in itself is quite interesting, that these people on the right in the UK are so keen to celebrate the independence of America from Britain.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Rupert Lowe was in Texas doing, I think, Joe Rogan's show, and he was putting out pictures saying, Happy Independence Day.

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. If we did that, if, Alastair, if you and I did that, went to France or Germany or India, if I went to India and celebrated Indian independence with my family, extended family there, it would be like, oh, go back to India. That's where your loyalties lie.

• 17:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Or it would be, you know, you're obsessed with this sort of colonialism, ashamed of your history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But just on the general sense of how that felt, as I said right at the top, you know, it does feel like there are sort of various Americas competing. And the America of Trump, the one that he set out in his speech at Mount Rushmore, where clearly he wants to be seen in the same bracket as Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, the four that are carved into the, into the rock there. That America feels dominant and powerful because that's what we see. But when you're living there, as you do, and I know you're in that world, so maybe it's a, it's an unfair question, but is the other America that I talked about, is that still

• 17:42Alastair Campbell?

  real? Is it still, do you still feel that it's there? Is it still got a presence and a power?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, very much so. I do unfortunately live in DC in the belly of the beast, so it's all very up close and personal, but I spend a lot of time with non-political people. And the beauty of the United States, why, somebody asked me recently, are you more hopeful about the US than the UK? And I said, yes, weirdly, even though the challenge against democracy is much bigger in the US than it is in the UK, even though, you know, the threat of political violence and the proliferation of guns, much bigger in the US than the UK. I would say I'm still more hopeful about the future of the US, simply because of the vastness of this country. It is very hard, again, to explain to people who have not visited the US, this is a continent of a country. It's just such a big place that you travel up and down the country, as I do regularly, and every state

• 18:29Speaker 02

  is like a different country. Every community is doing its own thing. And therefore, Washington DC and Trump still doesn't, at the local level, have the same poll and the same impact as, for example, Westminster or London do in the United Kingdom, where it's very much focused on the capital city, and it's a much smaller, more crowded, congregated place. So the US has space, which allows people to do what they want to do. And there's a lot of resistance to Trump, even now in his second term. His poll ratings are at their lowest ever. He's now more unpopular than he was even the day after January the 6th, according to some polls. So, you know, 60, 70% of the public are against him. So just in sheer numbers, the majority of Americans do not agree with what's going on. The big issue is, are the people of power against him? And that's the fundamental

• 19:12Speaker 02

  divide right now. It's not about, you know, fundamentally left and right. It's about the powerful versus the powerless. Even liberal institutions, which stood up to him in his first term, in the second term have decided to roll over. The big universities, the big media companies, the big law firms, they have all kind of bowed the knee to Donald Trump. And that has, and obviously Silicon Valley at the front, the big tech firms. And that's the real challenge. But ordinary people? No, ordinary people, I don't think have changed. I think, you know, there's a small minority of Trump voters, MAGA voters, whose brains are being rotted by the day because of the algorithm, because of social media. I think Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have a lot to answer for. Historians will, if we have historians in the future, will ask questions about what role

• 19:54Speaker 02

  these tech bosses played in manipulating and brainwashing and inciting the public.

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  You see, the other thing, I was looking at some polling on the issue of corruption.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Huge issue.

• 20:03Alastair Campbell?

  But it strikes me as almost beyond belief that it's not damaging even more than it is. You know, we learned last week that he made 2.2 billion added to his own wealth in his first year of his second term. And his own son saying, well, in the first term, he tried to play by the rules, brackets, even though he didn't, and he got no credit for it, got all the heat, so let's just, let's just do it. And then I saw a poll that said sixty eight percent of Americans think that Trump is corrupt. Okay, that's more than two thirds. That's a lot of people, still a third, who clearly can't believe the evidence of their own eyes. But then I saw in the same poll, and I read down a bit, eighty five percent think that Congress is corrupt. So Trump is less corrupt than Congress.

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  So he's benefiting from the sort of both sides are as bad as each other view of the world. Now, is that shifting at all? Or are Democrats still in as deep a mess as they were?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  The Democrats are certainly in a deep mess. In terms of the both sides, and that is a media phenomenon. I do fundamentally blame the United States media for approaching it in that way. It was an old fashioned kind of knee jerk response from the media to always treat politics as a sport between two teams and you're the referee and you're kind of trying to be neutral in between the two teams. But, you know, the example I give both to Democrats and to the media is if one of the teams is openly cheating, is picking up the ball. If you've got a football match, and I mean football, not soccer, if you've got a football match and one team picks up the ball and starts running with it in defiance of the rules, A, the other team is under no obligation to keep just kicking the ball. And that's why I say to Democrats, you've got to fight fire with fire. If the other side is doing, you know, breaking all the rules. And B, the referee's job is not to

• 21:37Speaker 02

  say, well, both teams are to blame for this. No, the referee's job is to call out one side. And I think the media struggled to do that. And that has allowed the American public to carry on with this, you know, plague on all their houses. Alastair, you know, this is a populist moment across Western democracy for multiple reasons, partly the economy, you know, partly immigration. All sorts of issues have led into this populist moment. People don't like the people in power, incumbents across the Western world. And it's very easy to do a kind of, they're all at it. They're all corrupt. And look, by the way, there are lots of corrupt Democrats. Money in politics is ruining politics across the board here in the United States. But the idea that both sides are the same is fundamentally absurd. Like, one side is openly anti-democracy, the other side, for all its many faults, is not. One side, for example, let me give you a very current, pertinent

• 22:20Speaker 02

  example, Graham Plathner, who is a Democratic candidate in Maine, as we speak, I don't know, by the time we finish taping, he may have pulled out of the race. He's the Democratic nominee for the Senate in the crucial swing state of Maine, a state that could go Democratic in November. It could be the key state that gives Democrats the Senate. He has been credibly accused now of sexual assault. Every prominent Democrat, including top former supporters of him, have come out and said, he must stand down from the race. He probably will stand down for the race. It's a matter of when, not if. That doesn't happen on the Republican side. On the Republican side, the President of the United States was elected after being found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of his peers in a civil trial in New York City. And yet he was elected for a second term. So this both sides bullshit is really causing a lot of problems when it comes to America.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And corruption, by the way, just one last thing on corruption. I think it's partly the both sides. And the other reason Alastair Trump gets away with this is because he cultivated this image as a corrupt dude to begin with. So a lot of people kind of price it in. They say, well, that's who he is. That's who Trump is. You often hear that's the best defence from his supporters. They don't just deny the claims. They don't deny he's lying. They don't deny his corrupt. They say, that's who Donald Trump is. And that's why we voted for him, to shake things up. He's a businessman. That's the kind of nonsense defences they offer. The good news is, that's not transferable. I don't think J D Vance or Marco Rubio will get the similar pass. And I think it's sui generis to Trump.

• 23:37Alastair Campbell?

  The other area where we see this both sides thing is the erosion in both sides and the confidence in both sides through Trump's continuing obsession with, you already mentioned it, the election denial. So just recently, we've had two hundred and sixty FBI investigators have gone into Fulton in Georgia, you know, they're reviving the idea that the election in Georgia was rigged. And there's a guy that I was talking to says that, and I hadn't really thought about this, in doing that, they're sowing doubt in a way that actually helps them more than it helps the Democrats. Because the Democrats come out, they're being accused of rigging the election,

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  the Democrats. But then the Democrats attack Trump for what he's doing. Thereby, they're saying that these elections are being rigged as well. So you're both sides in the end conspiring with the lie that people rig elections. So I think that, and you, so when you say fight fire with fire, I think this is where it's so, so difficult. And, you know, we're going to talk later about, you interviewed Maximilian Kra, the very, very, very right wing German politician. When do you get to a point where you actually say, somebody that I wouldn't have platformed before, now I will? When do you get to a point? Let's take the issue of election denial. I've talked, I've heard

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  you before saying, I will not give a platform to somebody who denies the election. Right. That means you can't talk to Republicans, presumably, because most of them now-

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Which is why I had to drop that. I held on to that for about three years, Alastair. I had that as a hygiene test when I was a host at MSNBC. I told my team, we're not going to book any Republican who's an election denier, which means you basically can't book Republicans.

• 25:19Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Because they're all election deniers now. The few who were not have been cleared out from the party. Donald Trump reasserted his control. Maybe if Ron DeSantis or someone else, Nikki Haley had won the primary in twenty twenty four, they might have been able to move on from it. But Trump has an iron grip on the party. It's now a condition for being in the party. Every judge they nominate, Alastair, I don't know if you've seen the hilarious, well, not hilarious, but, you know, black comedy hearings on Capitol Hill when a judge is nominated, and a Democratic senator says, did Joe Biden win the twenty twenty election? And they refuse to answer the question. A judge, someone going for a judgeship will not answer because they're scared that Trump will pull their nomination. So this is the America we live in now. Yes, I can't have that hygiene test anymore because I'm a journalist who needs to interview people and there's, you know, no one left if you kind of have those hygiene tests. And you're right. But just to go back to your one about fire

• 26:03Speaker 02

  versus fire, I'm not saying that Democrats should break the law. I am saying that you need to forget about norms. For too long, the Democratic Party was the party of norms. We can't do that because we've never done that before. There's no precedent for that. That would be violating the norms and the decorum and the decency of our politics. It was Michelle Obama, who I'm a great admirer of, going and giving that speech and getting huge applause and saying, when they go low, we go high. No, no. When they go low, you go lower. That is what we have to do in politics right now on the left, because the right have no standards left. They're not following any norms. Alastair, let me give you one obvious example. When the Democrats, when Biden was in office, there's a thing called the filibuster in the Senate, which allows the minority party to block the president. And the Republicans used it to block much of Biden's agenda. And a lot of

• 26:46Speaker 02

  us said to Democrats, get rid of the filibuster. It's not in the Constitution. It's not that. Get rid of it. No, no, we can't do that. It's part of American democracy. It's part of our heritage. It's a, it's a convention. And guess what? Now they're not in power. Trump and the Republicans are threatening every day that they're going to get rid of the filibuster. So this idea that you can just kind of play along and everyone will respect the rules, Trump has made it very clear. His understanding of politics is a mob boss understanding of politics. His understanding of football is a mob boss understanding of football. And you have to respond in kind.

• 27:14Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that really struck me again this week was the issue of pardons. Pardons, it strikes to the heart of the sort of corruption of the American soul in so many ways. So he pardoned a load of people this week, some of them not serving very heavy sentences, but they're all for offences against the Clean Air Act. Now, the Clean Air Act, as you know, is a big part of the American sort of fight against the climate crisis. Of course, he wants to reverse all that. But he actually said that these guys were jailed for trying to fix their car. Okay? In other words, they were jailed for pretty serious offences related to emissions from exhausts. Okay?

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  But on a kind of industrial scale, jailed for trying to fix their car. And then he also pardoned another donor. And, you know, I checked with a friend in the States that it didn't even make the media. Another donor gets a pardon. It doesn't even make the media anymore.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  You're probably the only person covering it right now. He is the master, he's the master fabulous. He's the master at making up stories. He makes these excuses up. He bullshits, he gaslights, he gish gallops. This is the problem. And the corruption story, the pardon story and the corruption story are inextricably linked, right? So we've had lawyers now tell the media publicly, there'd been stories recently, lawyers saying, in our circles, white collar lawyers know, if you pay a million, two million, five million, you'll get a pardon, right? It's just an accepted system now. And again, the pardon power is corrupt on a bipartisan level. Presidents of both parties have done dodgy things with pardons. I wish we could amend the Constitution and get rid of that pardon power. The public don't like it. It's abused all the time. But Trump has taken it to a whole different level. He's pardoned over two terms, seventy fraudsters. On day one of his

• 28:50Speaker 02

  presidency, he pardoned every single January the sixth rioter, insurrectionist, detainee, convict. Even his own vice president said he should only pardon the nonviolent ones. Trump said, F it, pardon them all, right? According to Axios. And he pardoned everyone. So this is the abuse of the pardon power. He's pardoned people who have donated to his campaign. He's pardoned friends of his. He's pardoned people he doesn't know, but who have business links with friends he does know. And then when he's asked about it, to go back to the point you and I raised earlier about, why don't people ask him about the red card about him not knowing about football? When he was asked about the Binance guy, the crypto guy who he pardoned from China, I forget his name, Trump said, guess what? I don't know the guy. I don't know anything about the case. All right, then why'd you pardon him?

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  Answer, because he does know him. And he's really got big into crypto. And crypto accounted for one point four billion of the two point two.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Isn't it funny that it's crypto that's at the forefront of the corruption allegations against Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?

• 29:44Alastair Campbell?

  I mentioned the Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan book. Fiona and I were in France last week and we were on, driving, listening to it. It's one of those books, it's a very good book and it's clearly very, very well researched. But you have to stop. You have to keep going for maybe half an hour, then you say, I can't do this anymore. You've got to stop. There is, and the thing that really struck me, there is not a single- Nice person in his orbit. They're all, when you read it, page after page after page after page, event after event, hour after hour, the kind of nastiness, the trivia, the horribleness of the lot of them, there's no niceness in it. And I just, that's what I find so sad, because this is the America that's being projected

• 30:29Alastair Campbell?

  to the world. And then, as we said earlier, there is this other America. I should say before we go to the break, Mehdi, we've had our trip reporter. I don't know if, you know, we have, this podcast has its own reporting team, obviously. She's called Izzy, she's been in New York, and she's been speaking to people from across the country, asking on this 250th anniversary what they think about Trump and the state of America. And she actually had people crying to her about the state of it. She had Latinos who were scared to give their names, and she had others who were describing the demise of the American dream. My favourite quote about the American dream this week was from Jens Stoltenberg, former Prime Minister and now Finance Minister of Norway, who said that the American dream is more alive in Norway today than it is in America. And I think there's something, there's something in that.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  I saw that, that was in Nick Kristof's piece, I think, the former NATO chief.

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, that's right, yeah, exactly.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he's got a point, and Scandinavia definitely has more upward mobility and meritocracy than the US under a corrupt Trump. The Haberman Swan Book is a phenomenon, I interviewed Jonathan recently about it, and you're right, that is a key distinction between the first and second terms. In the first, I mean, at least pretended to have some quote unquote grownups around, people who might know what they're doing, who weren't just MAGA ideologues or grifters. You know, your Jim Matisse's, who was Defence Secretary and a few others, handful of people. I remember writing a piece for the New Statesman ahead of the inauguration, or just after the inauguration in 2017, and I called the Trump administration at the time a "cacistocracy", government by the worst people. And I feel like I was a little uncharitable to that administration, because it's really

• 32:00Speaker 02

  this administration that is truly, truly cacistocratic, Cash Patel, RFK Junior, J.D. Vance, go down the line, Stephen Miller, just the worst people, Kristi Noem, just the worst people he surrounded himself with. And I said this when I was at MSNBC years ago, that the fundamental divide in American politics today is not just left versus right, or, you know, up versus down, rich versus poor, it is decent versus indecent. Are there any decent people left in American politics on the right? I don't see any.

• 32:27Alastair Campbell?

  They will hopefully emerge, if you're right, that we should be more optimistic about the United States than the UK.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't say I'm optimistic about the right, I don't think they'll emerge on the right.

• 32:36Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  They'll emerge elsewhere, I think the right is a lost cause, especially with the algorithm.

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Now, I also received a fascinating text from a mayor after we briefly discussed Roy and I's devolution on the podcast last week. And Vicky Spratt, who presented a brilliant mini-series on Gen Z for us, she's going to be writing about that this weekend in our Sunday read to get the newsletter pieces. You sign up to the newsletter via the link in the episode description. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about Germany, a country you and I are both very, very interested in, and some really interesting things going on, both in the political scene and their media landscape too.

• 33:10Alastair Campbell?

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• 33:26Rory Stewart?

  It's terrifying, isn't it? I mean, if you think about what could Trump suddenly wake up and do about tariffs? What might suddenly happen with AI? What happens when a new Labour government comes in and potentially changes capital gains tax? There are so many things, if you're investing and trying to think about your pension or future, that could be completely terrifying.

• 33:43Alastair Campbell?

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• 34:24Speaker 03

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

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 34:41Speaker 05

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

• 34:45Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 34:48Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

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

• 35:01Speaker 02

  And me, Mehdi Hasan, in Washington DC.

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Mehdi, Deutschland. I mentioned in the first half that you interviewed Maximilian Krach. And I just, those who don't follow German politics as closely as you and I do, Maximilian Krach is a major, a senior figure in the alternative for Deutschland. But he's also, I think, one of the more, tell me if you think I'm right or wrong, I think he's one of the more intelligent in that he understands there is a risk to the survival of the AFD if they go so far right that a constitutional court says, sorry, you guys are against the constitution. And there is a case pending, or a case being developed, against people like Bjorn Hucker

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  in Turing, in Turingia, against some of the young, alternative Deutschland people, some of whom have just been elected to the board of the AFD. So let's just, let's just talk a little bit about that. First of all, how long and hard did you think before you sat down and interviewed him for Al Jazeera? This is in your head-to-head programme.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:06Alastair Campbell?

  And secondly, what did you make of him and what do you make of the strategy that they seem to be pursuing, which is, we've got to admit it, is being successful in electoral terms, and also being successful in splitting this view that the firewall that keeps the other parties well away from the AFD may be fracturing, not least under pressure from senior figures in the media that we'll talk about in a minute.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the big question of whether to interview him, to go back to our earlier discussion about election deniers, you know, this is so depressing, isn't it, Alastair, that we live in a world now where you kind of have to drop all these hygiene tests and walls, as a journalist as I am, and have to ask questions of people who you don't really want to have to platform. But yes, I mean, years ago, I've been presenting head-to-head on Al Jazeera English, I think for about 14 years now, we launched it in 2012 with Richard Dawkins, if memory serves me correctly. And we discussed with teams over the years, I've had discussions with producers, should we have someone on from the AFD? And we always said, no, we don't want to platform this party, too close to neo-Nazis, too far right, why would we do that? We don't want to platform fascists. But it came to a point where the AFD, whether we like it or not, are so now in the German

• 37:15Speaker 02

  mainstream, are so, you know, enshrined in the political system of Germany, they are leading in the polls, sadly, they are leading in the polls for the Saxony-Arnholdt big state election later this year, they're the second biggest party in the Bundestag, in the German parliament. So at what point do you say, you know what, we need to actually hold them to account, just like everyone else? The old system of saying, well, just ignore them and hope they go away, that hasn't worked. Now, that doesn't mean I think you should platform them everywhere and anywhere, I don't think you should be having chummy interviews with them on breakfast TV, but I do think if you do it, you've got to do it in a sustained, challenging, interrogatory way, which is what head-to-head was built for. So we kind of slightly arrogantly said, okay, if anyone's going to do it, we should do

• 37:57Speaker 02

  it, because we have a format, a one-hour sustained interview with, I have a very good research team that helped me prep, very in-depth questions, we have a panel of experts to support me, we have a live audience, which always holds a politician's feet to the fire in a way that even journalists cannot. And so we thought, let's have him on head-to-head. And he agreed to come on. He was actually a last-minute change, because the previous guest from the AFD, Markus Fröhnmeyer, had just come back from Russia and had got into a controversy in Germany as being too close to Putin. And he pulled out of our show, and then Maximilian Krach agreed to join our show. Krach is an interesting character, because he's part of what is a, basically, a neo-fascist party, but he has a smile, he has a charm, he has a sense of humour.

• 38:37Alastair Campbell?

  He has a handkerchief in his pocket.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yes, very stylish, says I have Muslim friends, I love the Turks, very, you know, in that very, very Trumpian, in fact, he's been described and has described himself as Germany's Trump. He's not the leader of the party, that's Alice Vidal, who is a very interesting person herself, she's a lesbian co-leader whose partner is Sri Lankan. And again, they wheel out her partner to say, we can't be racist, our leader's partner is brown. But this is a party that is very racist, is very Islamophobic. He didn't have any response to my questions about their Islamophobia, other than to try and kind of pretend he hadn't heard about it. But it is a very dangerous moment for Germany, because as you mentioned, for people who are not aware, the German system post-war allows for the constitutional court to say,

• 39:19Speaker 02

  this party, this movement can be banned as neo-Nazi, as a threat to democracy. And the German intelligence service said the AFD is an extremist group. And when they gave that label, the AFD went to court, the court stepped in and paused it while they investigate that label. So right now, we can't call them a far-right domestic extremist group, because the German courts have put that classification on hold while it's being investigated. But I would point out, 72% of Germans think it's an extremist group, according to the polls, but they might end up in power.

• 39:49Alastair Campbell?

  Would you, for example, would you do an interview with Bjorn Hucker, who is the leader in Turingia?

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Who said actual Nazi slogans?

• 39:56Alastair Campbell?

  Where a court has said you actually can describe him as a neo-Nazi, would you platform him?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  It's a tricky one. Probably not unless I have to. Let's say he's on the verge of becoming Chancellor of Germany and I'm offered an interview with him. Would I take it? Yes. But, you know, I think we've got, as journalists, we've got to decide when and how is the right place and the right peg and the right location to do these interviews. My worry is that you head down an American path where you just platform everyone all the time and treat everyone the same. And I think that's a mistake. And even in the British media, you know, there's some interviewers who do tough interviews, there's some who don't do tough interviews. And if you are going to have these very controversial figures on, you really have to be prepared. My problem is, a lot of journalists aren't prepared for interviews. So if you're gonna, you know, I would advise against a random British journalist just turning up to interview Krah, because he'll run rings around you. He knows the subject better than you do. You won't be prepared for all the, you know, the gaslighting.

• 40:48Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think he left that interview with you, feeling that he had achieved his objectives? Because I felt, I watched it the other night, and I felt he, I abhor what he stands for, but he did quite a good job of pretending that the things that you said he stood for, he didn't really stand for them. And you can't hold him responsible for everything that every member of the AFD has ever said. And I thought he did it quite cleverly.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  I agree. I agree. He's a very clever guy. And it was an interview, you know, there's some interviews I walk away from, Alastair, where I'm like, yeah, that was a slam dunk. It was very easy. And, and that clip goes viral because the guest made a fool of themselves. This clearly wasn't one of them. He's clearly a smart guy. And it's interesting, I asked my team later, I wonder what a Marcus Thron might interview would look like, because he doesn't have the charisma or humour. And this is the thing about fascists, the funny charismatic ones are the really dangerous ones. The reason why Donald Trump is still a singly more dangerous figure than JD Vance is because Trump, whatever you think of him, has charisma. He's able to make people laugh. He's able to dominate a room. JD Vance has the charisma of a wooden chair. So I'm less worried about JD Vance as a threat to American democracy, even though-

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's more plastic chair. He's not even wood.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  He's not even wood. So, so Krah definitely has that charisma, and that enables you. I mean, my defence of that interview would be to say, what I was able to do, I hope, was to put on record what the AFD actually stands for, rather than what they think they stand for. So, for example, there's an exchange in there that people can watch, where I said, well, what do you think about the fact that your manifesto talks about Muslims the way that Hitler talked about Jews? And he said, oh, you can't just bring up Hitler. I said, yes, here's the evidence. I bring receipts. Your manifesto says Islam is an alien religion, Muslims don't belong in Germany. This is exactly the language that was used about Jews in Dschlerma in the 1930s. And he said, oh, I don't know anything about that manifesto. I'd never heard about that manifesto. So it was a very important moment there to put that stuff on the record. And again, this is about appealing to the broader public. I'm not going to change his supporters' mind, or his mind, obviously. And you mentioned the firewall with

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Merz. I mean, that is the big question. Will the German mainstream political establishment say, well, actually, the public love the AFD, so we've got, we've just got to get on board with them. And I think some of us have to resist that and say, well, actually, 72% of Germans think the AFD is an extremist group. They are polling number one, but they're polling at, what, 30% in a, in a PR electoral system?

• 42:57Alastair Campbell?

  In the east, even, even, even higher than that in some places. Let's just turn to the firewall, because this is the other big story that, that's been going around the German political scene in the last few days. So there's a podcast called Venzi Wusten, If You Only Knew. And they reported that Merz, in March, had had a meeting with the CEO of Axel Springer, a big media group which now owns the Daily Telegraph, a guy called Matthias Dopfner, who I think sort of fancies himself as a bit of a German Murdoch, but he doesn't want the baggage that goes with the sort of Murdoch label. But he's very, very interested in his own views and pursuing his own views. They bought Politico.

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  He regularly writes in Politico. And what the, this podcast, Venzi Wusten, what they alleged, was that Merz and Dopfner had a huge row, because Dopfner said was pressuring Merz to drop the firewall, essentially to say, you're not going to be able to fix our economy unless you work with these people because, etc. And according to this report, Merz said, once is enough, meaning we had this back in the 1930s. And then the meeting ended with Dopfner saying, you're going to regret this. Now, denials, some of them a bit in this sort of non-denial-denial kind of phase, but very strong denials from, from Dopfner. So I've been looking into this guy, and I've been looking in,

• 44:24Alastair Campbell?

  I read Bilt and I read Velt fairly regularly. I don't think you need a podcast revealing that he has these views. You can see it in the newspapers. I then watched a podcast, this guy, as I say, has his own podcast. He interviewed Nigel Farage. Now Nigel Farage is a British political figure. Nigel Farage, for various reasons, best known to himself, doesn't want to come on the rest of his politics. But he goes and spends, he goes and spends an hour talking to this guy, who's asking him questions like, do you think you're ready to be Prime Minister? What would the relationship with America be like if you were Prime Minister rather than Gstaadma? Snigger, Snigger, Snigger. And so I then, I'm starting to think this guy clearly is the sort of person who probably is

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  pressuring Merz, even though he's denying it. And as I say, there is, this is of special interest, I think, now, because he's got, he's got this British newspaper, The Telegraph, as well. But then I read some of their editorials. I think they're pushing in this direction. Now, they're entitled to do that, if that's what they believe. But say you believe it. Say you believe the firewall has to go. Don't sort of, you know, do this behind the scenes stuff. And have, they had a poll of their readers, a survey, and it looked to me like one of those where you had to kind of, you had to volunteer to give your view. And a very large majority said they thought the firewall had had its day. So I just wonder what you, I wonder what you think is going on in the mind of somebody

• 45:52Alastair Campbell?

  who's a major media owner in Germany, now in the UK, and, and how difficult that might become for a German Chancellor who's not very strong right now?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, Alastair, be careful what you wish for when you say, they should just say openly. I think they will, very soon. I think they're building to that moment, where they will just very openly mainstream the AFD and say, why, why wouldn't we do a coalition with them? This is what the public wants. And I think we need to have a broader conversation as well about the role of mainstream liberals and conservatives in mainstreaming the far right, whether wittingly or unwittingly. You know that in Marxist political thought, on the left, there is this line, a derogatory line, which is, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. This idea going back to the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, that it was mainstream liberal centrists who welcomed Hitler and the Nazis into the political system, thinking, we can control this guy. And I think, you know, you don't want a repeat of that, obviously, where you think Matthias Dopfner and Friedrich Merz think, we can control Alice Vidal and the AFD.

• 46:45Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not saying Merz should do it. I'm saying, I'm, I'm saying, if, if that's what Dopfner believes, and if that's what he wants his newspapers to do, fight for it.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  I mean, look, this is a guy who, just to give context to your viewers and listeners, this is a guy who sent texts to his senior editorial staff, ahead of the 2020 election, saying, we should all pray for Donald Trump's reelection, right? This is a guy who runs Politico, which is kind of, in, in the US, I know you have Politico in the UK now as well, but in the US, it is seen as the gold standard of kind of impartial Westminster Beltway political journalism. He bought Politico in 2022. He writes in Politico, as you say, Politico's staff have objected internally to him turning their outlet so partisan and going out and giving these partisan statements about politics, about Islam, about Israel. I should also point out to your listeners and viewers that if you work for Axel Springer, one of the core values, it's called one of the essentials, is to

• 47:40Speaker 02

  defend Israel's right to exist. You must support Israel in that way. Otherwise, you're encouraged to resign or you're fired. And I think we can't ignore the role of Israel right now in the German political debate. We've seen German mainstream politicians act in a very authoritarian way towards pro-Palestine protesters, towards Jewish Germans, anti-Zionist Jewish Germans who've been protesting the genocide. I don't know if you've seen, Alastair, the horrific scenes of German police dragging nonviolent, unarmed people, women, off the streets. That kind of authoritarianism, you know who that helps in the long run? It only helps the far right. Same thing in the UK with Palestine Action. When you act in an authoritarian way as a centre-left or centre-right party, the ultimate beneficiary of that is the far right, because that's where the political spectrum moves

• 48:22Speaker 02

  towards. That's where the energy in the centre of travel goes towards. So in Germany, it is very worrying that they're on the rise. It is very worrying that this media mogul who owns The Telegraph, owns Politico, owns, I think he owns Bilt as well. He has this power to kind of set the political agenda in these places, is backing Nigel Farage. And Alastair, if you look at all these far-right parties, you will find these billionaire media and tech moguls behind a lot of them. You will find Elon Musk backing the AFD as well. You will find Rupert Murdoch with his fingers in a lot of these pies. You will find Matthias Dopfner now, supporting a lot of these groups. He's obsessed with Islamism. He's obsessed with Israel. And that is not, you know, and that's why he's supporting a lot of these far-right parties. I should point out, a lot of these far-right

• 49:04Speaker 02

  European parties traditionally have been very, very anti-Semitic, but in recent years, they have reconfigured themselves as super pro-Israel.

• 49:12Alastair Campbell?

  Before we leave Herr Dopfner, though, I think we'll come back to him, because I, it'd be very, very interesting to see whether he plays the same sorts of games in The Telegraph, which is fair, you know, well to the right, I would argue, of the papers that he's in charge of in, in Germany. But the other link, which you may or may not be aware of, is that his son, and I know you shouldn't, you know, dob the sons in with the dad the whole time, but his son, Moritz, was Chief of Staff to a gentleman by the name of Peter Thiel, who I think you'll know very, very, very well. And that Peter Thiel is now investor, a big investor, in Dopfner Junior's big startup. And it is interesting how

• 49:52Alastair Campbell?

  this guy has, I think, changed. I mean, he used to be somebody you see very traditional German business in terms of the way he dressed. He now dresses very much in the kind of Silicon Valley, Andy Burnham, black vest type mode. I think he now sees Musk, Thiel, Bezos as his milieu, as opposed to, you know, the, the kind of, the German business class. So I don't think he'll like the kind of German Murdoch label, but I think that's kind of what he's becoming.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Do you think he wants the German Musk label? I mean, Musk has interfered a lot in German politics. He's spoken at the AFD rallies, just like he spoke at Tommy Robinson rallies. Peter Thiel is a deeply disturbing figure, also former PayPal ally of Elon Musk, part of the quote-unquote PayPal mafia in Silicon Valley. Thiel spoke at Donald Trump's first Republican Convention in 2016, a gay, right-wing tech boss who is very Christian, talks about the Antichrist all the time, thinks Greta Thunberg may be the Antichrist, just to get a sense of how nutty Peter Thiel is. Had dinner with lots of white supremacists that came out a few years ago, wrote an essay about 15 years ago, saying, I've come to the conclusion that freedom is incompatible with democracy. He's a libertarian,

• 51:09Speaker 02

  wants to, he's one of these guys who wants to like build a, you know, a colony on Mars or in the middle of the ocean, where there's no government and no regulation. And these are the guys, unfortunately, running a lot of our politics on both sides of the Atlantic, worryingly.

• 51:21Alastair Campbell?

  Somebody got hold of some of these sort of, you know, private comments, which included, "Free the West, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riffraff. The Aussies, that's these Germans, are either communists or fascists. They don't be in between. Disgusting. I'm all for climate change. We shouldn't fight climate change, but adjust to it."

• 51:37Speaker 02

  And again, to go back to my point earlier, we can't talk about this stuff in a vacuum. When you read out that quote, where he's going after Muslims and he's obsessed with Islam and Islamism and Muslim immigration, again, that is a mainstream issue, right? Mainstream politicians have entertained and promoted that idea as well, have said Islamophobic things, both Democrats and people in the Labour Party. And I think that's, that's one of the reasons why a lot of us, not just for moral reasons, do you have to stand up to bigotry, but also for political reasons, because all you're doing is you're helping the Overton window move further and further to the right. I know this goes back, and this goes back to unfortunately, your time in government as well, Alastair, where the Labour Party's position was, "Well, you've got to try and appease these people on the right. That's how you win them over." And it doesn't. When you meet a fascist halfway, all you do is embolden that fascist and the fascist narrative. And that's what we're seeing across Europe right now.

• 52:22Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, on that though, do you think, so for example, you, you and I both had lots of experience and I, on kind of as we're both sides of the, of the fence with politics, but it is interesting. So that, you know, this podcast, we, we have this motto, "Disagree agreeably." And we did, when we first mentioned, for example, that we, you know, might like to have Nigel Farage on. Now, as it happens, it's, it's never come about because he's, he's not, he's not agreed to do it. But lots of our listeners said, "No, we don't want you to do that. We don't want Nigel Farage." And then we said the same about Rupert Lowe. I threw out an invitation to Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe, likewise, he said, "I was a traitor. Don't know what I've done to be a traitor, but I'm a traitor." And therefore, he didn't, he didn't want to do it. But likewise, then, lots

• 53:04Alastair Campbell?

  of our listeners and viewers said, "No, we don't want you interviewing people like Rupert Lowe." But I'm kind of with you on this. I think you have to engage. I'm not, you know, and the Bjorn Hucker thing is very, very interesting, because I think I would like to sit down with him.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  But Alastair, how though? That's the question. And I, and no disrespect to your podcast, and I do a podcast too. But I do think we live in an age of podcasts, and a lot of politicians do enjoy the fact that we live in an age of podcasts. Just look at what Donald Trump did in the last election. He avoided a lot of tough interviewers, but he did a bunch of podcasts. He did, you know, the Joe Rogans and the Theo Von's and all of those guys, the Andrew Schultz, I think he did as well. He did a bunch of podcasts, and a lot of those podcasts, especially the right wing podcasters, it was all just fun and games, right? And politicians now like doing podcasts over doing Sunday morning shows or tough political interviews, because they don't get asked follow-up questions. They're confronted with a podcaster who doesn't understand politics or doesn't have, you know, a team of people writing forensic questions for them. And I think that is a problem, right?

• 54:01Speaker 02

  As much as I love independent media, I run an independent media company, I have a podcast team. I do worry though, with my kind of political nerd hat on, looking at political history, if politicians are able to find these safe spaces, fine, if you had Nigel Farage on, I'm sure it would be a very, a very lively interview. But my worry is, if Nigel Farage just pops up on podcasts as a whole, you're not going to get the kind of grilling or investigative journalism that you might get in more traditional mainstream outlets. And that's my concern. I, I'm, I'm for grilling these people. I'm not for kind of quote unquote, "engagement for engagement sake." And I do think that agreeing disagreeably thing, there has to be a line for that, right? Do you agree disagreeably with a neo-Nazi, with a fascist, with a racist, with a Holocaust denier, with a climate change denier? At what point do you say, "I can't actually agree disagreeably

• 54:46Speaker 02

  with you. I can't disagree agreeably about whether up is down, hot is what, cold, black is white." Reality, right? And I think that's where we're going to have these kind of tortured conversations as the right gets more deranged, more disconnected from reality. What do the rest of us do? And my position is, you still hold the people in power to account, but you try and understand and engage with their followers, for sure. You need to understand with ordinary people, ordinary people who are voting for the AFD, who are voting for Reform, who are voting for the Republican Party. I, I, we can engage with them and try and understand, are there any legitimate grievances? Are they, have they been misled? Is there something that actually is powering this populist anger that we need to take seriously?

• 55:25Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. You see, look, I think if I were sitting down to interview somebody, well, let's say Rupert Lowe, let's say Rupert Lowe did it. I would want to give him the opportunity to say where he comes from, his background, how he made his money and all that. And I'd like to do that in a very conversational way. I think then when it came to what I think he stands for, and how repellent I find some of those views, I would, I would want a listener to be aware of that's how I felt, but I wouldn't want that to dominate the interview. I would want, I thought you did it well with Krah, to be fair. I'm not just blowing smoke up your backside because you're there. I thought you did it well, because anybody watching that, nobody would ever think that you were giving him,

• 56:10Alastair Campbell?

  you weren't giving him an easy ride. Nor were you just sitting there saying what you think about him. You were confronting him with the reality of things that he had said and done, the things that other people said and done. Now, and you were sometimes, because you didn't have time, you were letting him slide away with stuff that you in your heart knew he was being disingenuous, obfuscatory, etc.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  You can't cover everything, even in a

• 56:31Alastair Campbell?

  No, you can't. And you, you, you, you end up sort of boring the arse off everybody, because you're just going down sort of a little rabbit hole. Another example I would give, when we interviewed Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, some people think we were too soft on him. But I actually, I don't agree with that, because if we'd have just, again, just gone at him again and again, "I was right about Kosovo, you're wrong about Kosovo, let's revisit Kosovo", what have you. I just don't think that informs debate.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  You also interviewed the president of Syria, who until very recently was a wanted Al Qaeda leader.

• 57:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Um, and look, I'll be very honest with you. Thank you for blowing smoke up my arse. It makes this very awkward then to say this in response, which is, there's a lot of people who are going to be mad at me for coming on the show with you, because of Iraq, right? You and I fundamentally disagree on Iraq. I think what you did on Iraq was horrific. I think what Tony Blair did was horrific. That's something you and I will never agree on. And if we were having an Iraq debate, we'd probably get very, very lively now, where we'd probably be shouting at each other. And I think that's, but I still come on the show. First of all, I don't think you're a fascist or a traitor, obviously. Rupert Lowe, these people on the right just throw around these ridiculous phrases. But, you know, if I, I wouldn't come on this show to do this show with you if you were just abusing me as a Muslim, right? All I'm trying to say is, we all have our red lines and our hygiene tests. And, you know, some people have, draw the line here, some people

• 57:47Speaker 02

  draw the line there. And I think, you know, for me, I'm in a position now where I was more hardline on my lines, as it were. But now I just want to talk to as many people I can, within reason, right? Within reason. I still got to, I've still got to have some kind of hygiene test. Like, if you asked me, would I have Tommy Robinson on my show? No, I don't think there's any value in having Tommy Robinson on for an interview. It would only help him and his cause. It's not like we'd have any kind of good faith conversation. And I do think that's an important criterion when we judge who we're going to talk to. Can you have a good faith conversation with that person, without it turning into a grift, or just a shouting match, or abuse, or without it turning into an opportunity, a vehicle for one of the guests to just push their bullshit agenda? And I think that's a key question we have to ask ourselves. But I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think when people come into the comments of your show or my show

• 58:32Speaker 02

  and say, "You shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have done this." I've got that all the time. It's very easy to say, you know, for the armchair pundits. It's very difficult for those of us who are in the middle of this crazy political moment, trying to work out, well, who do we talk to? Who do we ask questions to? What audiences do we address? And I, I, I think it's a work in progress, Alastair.

• 58:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. On the Tommy Robinson point, over in Australia, a guy called Carl Stavnavich, I don't know if you've followed this, but he's like a big deal TV presenter for the breakfast programme on Nine, Channel Nine, the Today Programme.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  I think Piers Morgan was on his show recently. I may have seen

• 59:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, Piers Morgan's talked to him recently. But the, the reason Piers Morgan was talking to him is because this guy has had to leave his job on Channel Nine, because he did a very tame interview with Tommy Robinson on his own podcast.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Missed that, missed that.

• 59:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Alastair Campbell?

  Benny, it's been lovely to talk to you. Thank you for saying you still disagree with me about Iraq. I'm stunned to believe that. I thought, you know,

• 59:29Speaker 02

  I'm sure you were shocked. I'm sure you were shocked to hear that revelation.

• 59:31Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely shocked. Although, as I said in our interview with Ben Rhodes, I do kind of, I still kind of have lots of soul searching about that and lots of, of other things. But I think this point, I, I do think, and now I'm glad that Zetio is coming to, you know, you've largely been based in the US, you're now coming to the UK. I do think we need more media that's just challenging, challenging of the media, and more challenging of politics as well, which is kind of what we try to do from a pro-politics, pro-good journalism perspective. We do try to do that when the rest is politics. But I think it's good to have more of it around the place, because I do think that the, the, I hate the phrase, the mainstream media, but people know what I mean. It's in big trouble. It's in big trouble in part because of economics, in part because of

• 1:00:16Alastair Campbell?

  people like Musk and Zuckerberg doing the vileness that they've done, but also in part because I don't think they've really got to grips with the pace of change in the world, and how we all need to, to adapt to that.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Thanks for the plug for Zetio UK, which we just soft-launched last month. Great to be on The Rest Is Politics.

• 1:00:33Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.