Has Trump lost it?

This is a Global Player original podcast. But I always said, you know, the problem with NATO is we'll always be there for them, but they'll never be there for us. And when I hear the UK, which we sort of considered the Rolls Royce of allies. Right. When you say they were the oldest and they were going to be there. And I say it would be really helpful if you'd send over a couple of ships. And if you have some mind sweepers, which they do, be very helpful. And the prime minister is a nice man. I think he's a very nice guy. He says, well, I'd like to ask my team. I said, you don't have to worry about a team. You have a team. You're the prime minister. You can make a decision. Well, I have to speak to my people. I said, you don't have to speak to anybody.

So it's very disappointing. And then after we obliterated them and destroyed their military, the whole thing. And it became a much safer zone. He said, we're going to send over two aircraft carriers. I said, I don't want them anymore. I don't want them after we win. I want it before we start.

Donald Trump is sounding like an angry man with no friends. He's looking for help in his war with Iran. But so far, none has been offered. Yes, he's called for assistance. No one wants to go near the Strait of Hormuz as it currently stands. This operation in Iran is called Epic Fury. But given his isolation, is Epic Fury a better description of Donald Trump himself?

Welcome to the News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And Donald Trump spoke at length yesterday at a news conference, which was primarily pulled together to talk about the Kennedy Center in Washington. I mean, sorry, the Trump Kennedy Center, as it has now been renamed and closing for two years. And Donald Trump had the various board members around the table. But he was opining on Iran and what was happening there. And a series of more jumbled, more confused, more contradictory, more angry messages. It was sort of hard to imagine as he railed against his allies. He said the war was won. No, it wasn't won. We need extra help. But no, we don't need extra help because all we've got, all Iran is now is a paper tiger. And they're not going to be firing in the Straits of Hormuz for very long. And you thought, well, if you've got the Strait of Hormuz under control, why is no shipping going through it? And why aren't American warships, of which there are many, escorting the tankers through the strait? Answers to those sort of questions came there none.

Yet Trump has asked France, China, Japan, South Korea and Britain to help secure the straits. This is, of course, only two weeks or so after saying he didn't need any help, saying that Keir Starmer could stick his help in terms of sending aircraft carriers. Something No. 10 has actually said he didn't offer. The president's own remarks seem to repeatedly contradict himself, telling reporters, really, I'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it's their territory. Less than an hour later, he said they should come and they should help us protect it. You could make the case that maybe we shouldn't even be there at all because we don't need it. We have a lot of oil. We're the number one producer anywhere in the world times two, which, of course, rather begs the question. But what on earth is this whole war about in the first place? If American security interests aren't fundamentally involved?

And I think what's so interesting this time is the response, because Trump's anger and his criticism of NATO allies is nothing new. But it's being met this time with a kind of shrug. And I think that tells us so much about how the rest of the world is now looking at this man at the center of it. I mean, clearly, this is a grave issue. It's a matter of war. So any actual policy decision is being taken very seriously by those of whom he's asking for help.

But there is something about what we used to call the weave, the ramble, the contradiction. It's now sounding like a sort of act five, scene one soliloquy of a kind of dying monarch. And I don't mean that in a literal sense. I mean, somebody who's sort of seeing their power ebbing away, because as we know, it is not really what Trump says that matters. It is how others respond to him. And a year ago, people would have been flustering around, trying to meet him, trying to do what was right, trying to work out what they had to gain, trying to work out if they could be ahead of their European allies, sort of edging each other out of the game as to who gets to, you know, please Trump the most. What I'm going to call the gold bar syndrome, you know, you turn up in his office with a gold bar.

And now I think it's best described as a kind of shrug. Right. It's this mutual shrug, which is like, oh, yeah, it's almost, I don't know, slightly pitting. I think this is the week where the sort of collective delusion that so many in the West have had to cling to in Europe and in Britain as well have had to cling to, which is that we treat Trump as normally as we can, that when he acts, he acts rationally and that there's always reason, a method to the madness. I think that this is the week, and particularly even yesterday in that press conference, I think it was the week where all those delusions fell away.

I think it is just worth just playing this montage. This is from CNN of just some of the contradictions in Trump's press conference that sometimes were quite literally moments or minutes apart.

If we ever needed help, they won't be there for us. I've just known that for a long period of time. We have some that are really enthusiastic. They're coming already. This isn't need. Need would be one of the big boys. If we need their mind boats or if we need anything, any piece of apparatus that they may have because of a situation that they have, they should be jumping to help us. We want them to come and help us with the straight. My attitude is we don't need anybody. We're the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don't need them.

And of course, the question on everybody's lips over the past week since Iran has successfully, even though its military has been seriously degraded, its capabilities seriously undermined, it has successfully used its own trump card, forgive the pun, which is straightening, which is closing the straits. And everybody has therefore been asking, how can this man who is allies claim plays three, four, five dimensional chess? What was his plan to prevent this from happening? Because, of course, everybody knew that one of the reasons that his predecessors have not done this is they knew the in extremists. Iran could unleash economic warfare with almost no capabilities whatsoever by closing these straits.

Well, Trump again the same day claimed that he'd seen the whole thing coming 20, 30 years ago. So, yeah, he said, oh, I knew about this. I was absolutely clear about it. Well, really? I mean, we used to trump exaggeration. But then he uses a story, as you say, Lewis, going back to pre 9-11. And he tells this story of something that happened the year before the attack on the Twin Towers. Have a listen. I knew about the straight that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, predicted all of this stuff. You guys were very generous in that. I predicted all of it. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before it did. I said, you better get him. He's a bad guy. I watched him be interviewed one time and I said, that's a bad guy. You better get him. One year before exactly. I wrote it in a book. You can even check about a year before the World Trade Center came down. I wrote it in a book. You can even check.

Well, if you do check, you find that that story is pure, 100 percent fiction.

He did not predict anything. He didn't say that the Twin Towers would come down. He didn't say anything of the kind about Osama bin Laden. So you're then in a land where Donald Trump is making stuff up. And the question, I guess we've got to ask is, does he believe this? Is he in a land of delusion? Is he in a world of his own? And I think these are serious. I mean, I'm not saying this offensively, but my God, when Joe Biden was failing towards the end of his presidency, we were all asking, saying, whoa, is this right? Is this proper? Is surely someone is raising this. And here we have Donald Trump inventing stories about what was in a book. It is not in any book written in 2000 that Donald Trump had anything to do with.

You don't even have to go to predictions. You just have to look at history. We're going to play you an extraordinary clip, courtesy, I have to say, of Scott Anderson, whose book The King of Kings will tell you everything you need to know about how we got to this place with Iran. Iran has been playing the oil game for decades. This was the Shah, right? That the last regime, the last autocrat, the Shah of Iran in 1975. He goes on CBS 60 Minutes and he's asked by Mike Wallace, the host, if he has any concerns for Americans who have to struggle now without their oil, because he's pushed up the price and he's created such tight conditions for releasing oil into America. Just listen to him here.

Oil, that noble petroleum the Shah likes to talk about that is at the root of the world's economic chaos. Not true. Because according to the same statistics, the price of oil has been responsible in the United States for 0.5% of your inflation, and in the countries of Europe for 2%. Japan, hardly a little more. That's all. And the huge sums of money piling up with the oil producers. Well, it's new to you. It's new. How could these strange people living, it's not our case, but living on sand have such money? It's maybe a little shock at the beginning, but you are going to get used to it.

All you have to do is take a peek at history to understand that Iran knew exactly the game that they were playing with oil and with the way they sanctioned their resources. You didn't have to be that brilliant. You just had to ask somebody who knew slightly more than you did if you were President Trump. And what was extraordinary in that press conference yesterday is that there were moments apparently of genuine self-reflection and lucidity from Trump, where he himself seemed to acknowledge his worst, the worst criticism that is being made about him and about American foreign policy. Just listen to this, where he basically seems to suggest that the reason he's done this is because America has had a habit of attacking other Middle Eastern countries down the decades.

We don't need you know, we don't need oil. We have all the oil we need for ourselves. It's one of the great assets that we have. We have doubled more than double what anybody else in terms of oil production. We're at more than double any other country. So we don't need it. But but we did it. It's almost you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did it because we have some good allies there. We have some great Middle Eastern countries there, Israel there. So we did it for a lot of reasons. And look, this is kind of I mean, you know, this is probably one percent of the stuff we could be playing, you know, from from from the same 60 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever it was.

The thing that I kept thinking about it is that phrase watching it is that phrase that Trump's friends and allies in the media and so on like to sort of bat around the head of those of us who've been a bit skeptical about the president over the years, which is Trump derangement syndrome. Well, frankly, watching that it's not Trump. The question isn't about whether we've got Trump derangement syndrome.

The simple question is whether Trump himself is deranged. And looking at where we are now, he's three weeks into a war whose objectives he can still cannot articulate, never mind to the world, but to the American people. He's got a defense secretary who's saying it's just the beginning. He's saying that it could be over any day. He doesn't know if the new supreme leader is alive or dead. I mean, this is a man who is not in command of events, right? This is a man who is currently being driven by impulse and whatever is in his head at any given moment. That press conference showed that.

And this is why I think that foreign leaders, including Keir Starmer, are in this deeply invidious position now, because on the one hand, they are having to choose between a situation where do they follow this man who clearly could be deranged into this conflict and commit their own militaries into harm's way for objectives they cannot understand and for an aim that is extremely difficult, i.e. clearing the straits might be militarily impossible. But if they don't do it, it's clear from that press conference. Trump remembers, right? Trump remembers.

And this is an absolute. America is alone at the moment. And this is an absolute potential inflection point for Vladimir Putin. This is all of his dreams come true at once, because what will Putin be seeing an opportunity to say here to Trump behind closed doors? Mr. President, when your allies, Trump has said it himself, when your allies, when you needed them, when you called upon them, where were they for you? And you spend all this money and all this time defending them just at the moment when the Ukraine war, by the way, is that perhaps one of its most dangerous points for four years?

I mean, you can flip that on its head and you can say it just so happens that if you consistently bully all your allies and threaten NATO, then big surprise, they don't come to your aid. But we are reliant on him still. Yeah, well, if you listen to Trump now, then he's, he's feeling pretty isolated and pretty alone. I mean, a lot of different European countries have said no to him in their various sort of euphemistic ways. And my favourite one, great spot by Ann McElvoy was Poland's response, which is, if you're asking for help, perhaps go to NATO, see what they respond.

But I do think there's been some really interesting shifting. Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, they're in the middle of an election campaign now, but their prime minister was on a televised TV debate, you know, last night. And she was asked whether she'd call the US, her country's most important ally. And she just says, no, I can't do that anymore. It's pretty straight, you know, her foreign secretary, Rasmussen, when asked if he would help, and obviously, Trump has threatened Denmark via his attempt to seize Greenland. The foreign secretary just says, I think we'll keep an open mind, right? Keep an open mind is what we all say when we mean, I'm going to run a mile, but I'm not going to say that to your face. I'll keep an open mind.

The Putin thing is really important now. And I think that explains partly why Zelensky is in Downing Street, seeing Keir Starmer as we record this, because Starmer is, I guess, trying to say, this is not the only war in the world, right? The war that we're really focused on, that we should be focused on, that needs our focus, is what's happening to Ukraine now, vis-a-vis Russia, who's just had all his sanctions lifted for a month. Yippee, free oil, loads more money.

Yeah, and I think it's so interesting that there's a sort of phrase that Trump used with Zelensky that you can almost play back to Trump now, in relation to the Strait of Hormuz, and that is Donald Trump, you've got no cards. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively blocked. If Donald Trump wants to unblock it, it's not going to take a few ships from Denmark or the UK or France.

It's going to take ground troops that are going to be needed to go there in their thousands. What a trap is being set for Donald Trump, and he's got no other way out of this now. He either surrenders and allows the Strait of Hormuz to remain shut, in which case this is an epic fail and the regime is in place, or you put thousands of Marines on the ground, you put swift boats into the Strait of Hormuz, you start doing all that stuff, and it becomes, you know, a shooting fight. And that is something that Donald Trump has wanted to avoid, because the number of body bags that will be going back to America, if you put thousands of ground troops there, let alone going to Isfahan and trying to retrieve the nuclear material, this could be epic, and Donald Trump has not got any cards left to play.

So, I think that he is in a right old mess now, as a result of not having predicted any of this. And I thought there was kind of one other bit about, you know, is Donald Trump mad, deluded, whatever. He said in this rambling news conference about that he'd spoken to the previous presidents, and one of them said to me, oh yeah, we wish we could, well let's hear it.

Other presidents should have done, I spoke to one of the former presidents, who I actually like, actually speak to some, I do like some people, be shocking. And he said, I wish I did what you did. Could have done it. Other presidents, somebody should have done it. 47 years this went on. They call Iran the bully of the Middle East.

So, let's just go through that. Trump is the 47th president. Joe Biden is the 46th. He denies having any part and having had any conversation. Barack Obama was the 44th. He also denies having any conversation. Not a big fan of war. No, not a big fan of war. Not a big fan of Trump. Yeah. And then you've got the 43rd president, George W. Bush. And he says he's had no conversation with, so all three former living presidents. Oh, sorry. And Bill Clinton as well, also denied it.

Do we think it might be Abraham Lincoln? Could it be Grover Cleveland? Clinton? No. Someone in his mind. Trump asked the 45th president of the United States. Well, I wonder. The 45th president. I asked myself. I wish you'd done it. I suppose he could have wished he'd done it in the past. He himself.

So, again, it's just the land of fantasy. It's very easy to disprove these things. Quite. It's just like when he says a lot of people have said yes and they are sending military aid. And we're like, who? He's like, I can't tell you.

Would anyone like to tell us? No, there is no country that has so far admitted signing up to Trump's call for military aid. Maybe this is just a sort of net result or the natural end point of living in fantasy land, which he does so often about so many things. You know, that 99 percent of the time, because of the kind of polarization of American politics and because a good proportion of the American electorate will or certainly the bagger base anywhere will believe whatever confected nonsense he may well believe to exist. But there are just some times right where confection and imagination doesn't win the day.

And the Straits of Hormuz, to go back to your point, John, is either open or it's not. The oil price is either rising or it's not. That is that those are inescapable realities.

And I think you put it exactly right, which is that he has set a trap against himself because the natural logic of this war now, it seems to me, is either regime change or bust. Because if you leave the Iranians, he could OK, he could just declare victory and say, fine, but you leave the Iranians in place and actually the regime is cemented. They have shown to the entire world that when push comes to shove, even though, yes, their military capabilities have been severely, severely degraded, even though, yes, thousands and thousands and thousands of rockets have poured down upon them. They've survived it. And when push comes to shove, they can unleash economic warfare on the world.

They might emerge stronger than actually going into the war in the first place. So the natural conclusion now, it seems to me, is that Trump either has to step it up further or he's lost and he cannot stand losing. I mean, what I would say is from Israel's perspective, and they're obviously the other player in this, they think that it's going much better than Trump does. Right. They can point to, for example, overnight the killing of Larijani, who's the head of the Secret Service, essentially the man who many think is responsible for the massacres of protesters on the streets of Tehran in January. They can point to another beheading. They can say this is part of our overturn of the regime. Others will say, actually, all you're doing is cementing the Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC in place. And if all this was about trying to kill Iran's nuclear capabilities, which from what we know, they still haven't touched, they haven't they haven't dented any further than they had last June.

What is happening if you're Iran now? You're thinking, Jesus, the only way to protect ourselves in the future is to get a nuclear bomb. In other words, you are hardening up the stance towards that country's own defence in a way that was never as obvious before this conflict took place. If your objective is to say Iran must not get a nuclear weapon and therefore our military objective is to take all the enriched uranium that Iran currently has and remove it from the country, you're not going to do that by bombing from the skies. You are going to need troops on the ground who are prepared to undertake a military operation to seize all that material and to get near it. And that immediately means you are in a proper war with, you know, troops facing each other, tanks facing each other. Exactly what Donald Trump wants to avoid. Exactly what he promised would never happen.

Let's go back to the Mark Kelly line. Mark Kelly was the senator of Arizona. We had him on the podcast a month ago, and he famously put out this video, along with other senators, other legislators that said warned the military not to get pulled into something that might be an illegal act. Now, I guess, you know, there's been no congressional sign off for this. There is still a question mark over whether this is in any shape or form an illegal war. But where would that leave troops now? I mean, I genuinely don't know the answer to that. Are you allowed to say no to your commander in chief if you think that you're being pulled into a war which is not in America's interest? Well, I suppose they would argue at this point that given the Iranians are attacking American military assets and so on, that it would be legal because it's a form of self-defense now. But I mean, one of the ironies, of course, now is that Trump's best hope, if he is to avoid that kind of ratcheting up, ratcheting up and basically ending up in a kind of sort of death match against the Iranians, is probably his best hope might well be the Chinese. Because the Chinese at this point, one of the few kind of, you know, four major powers who might have some influence on the Iranians are currently in a position where it is their oil supplies which are being disrupted from the straits. They will be deeply unhappy. They're getting oil through. They're getting oil through. Well, they're getting less than they were before because there's almost nothing going through. But the point is, as well, is that like the longer this goes on, the higher the price becomes. And, you know, countries are sort of bidding up the price over time and also for gas as well. So, you know, it introduces instability, which is something that the Chinese most are poor. But, you know, the net result, this is what I mean in terms of why all of the logic points towards a bigger and bigger war, which is, you know, if this were to end anytime soon, basically, what would the net result be for the Americans?

"I mean, the weird thing about that is that the Chinese are actually offering themselves up now as the kind of peace brokers. Well, indeed, I know. And they're sort of trying to step into it and say, you know, we could be the world's policeman. If you don't want to play that role anymore, we'll see what we can do. I mean, it's a total turning of the kind of old world order on its head."

"It is. And the net result right now, if it were to end anytime soon, is that the straits either reopen but on Iranian terms or they remain closed. Who knows, at least for a period. America has basically proven itself when push comes to shove to be basically allyless across the world. The Chinese power potentially enhanced, the Iranian regime embedded in place, the Russians suddenly with a load more foreign currency reserves that they've got as a result of oil sales, an absolute foreign policy disaster."

"Exactly. And just one other thing to add to that list, Lewis, is if you have got a situation where Iran, which controls the strait, says, yeah, we'll let our ships go from Hague Island and we'll go and export to our friends. But UAE? No. QA? No. Saudi? No. Then what you've done is America has lost those Gulf countries because they're going to think, well, hang on, we thought we put our protection and our safety in America's hands and they haven't done it. We gave you a jet. We gave you a 400 million dollar jet. And all you've done is fuck it up by allowing Iran to become even more powerful in that strait of Hormuz. And that's why we need to look elsewhere for our friendships. Thank you, America. We're done with you."

"And so America strategically in geopolitical terms just seems to be losing and losing and losing. I don't think this is us with Trump derangement syndrome. I think this is just a realistic kind of looking at the state of play right now on the ground in Iran, in the Middle East."

"As we're recording, I have to say we've got some breaking news and it is something we have rarely seen during this second Trump era. And that is a senior official resigning in protest. In this case, it is the director of counterterrorism, Joe Kent, who is resigning protest the war against Iran. And he has written quite a lengthy letter to Trump. After much reflection, I've decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Effective today as a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a gold star husband who lost my beloved wife, Shannon, in a war manufactured by Israel. I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people, nor justifies the cost of American lives."

"Yeah. It also goes on. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. And it's clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. So you've got to see this in the context of the battle that is going on within the MAGA movement on which Tucker Carlson is the most obvious kind of spokesperson. He says that Israel has got us into this war. Why are we doing it? And there are others as well. quietly in that camp as well. And so this looks as much of being about kind of anti-Israel as it is about the war itself. But where I think it is very, very bad for Donald Trump is it undercuts his main reason for going, which was to say that Iran posed an imminent threat. And this guy, the head of counterterrorism, say, no, it wasn't. It didn't pose any threat whatsoever."

"Yeah. I mean, this is public, right? This is written on headed notepaper, Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Centre. It is all over social media now. It is directly in Donald Trump's face. Somebody who went to war for his country 11 times. Somebody who has lost their own partner, their own wife in combat is saying this war makes no sense to me."

And to your point about the sort of the anti-Israel line, what he's saying is early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed a threat.

I mean, it's interesting to to spell out that you think your own president was deceived by an echo chamber. I mean, that doesn't speak volumes to the confidence he must have had in him that he could just pick up bits of the American media or of what he was being told by Israeli officials and sort of somehow conned. Right.

Yeah. Well, what he's saying is a much more dramatic version of what the Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, which was that, you know, kind of Israel persuaded America to go in. And then, of course, Donald Trump the next day comes out and says, no, no, no. We persuaded Israel to go in because Donald Trump can't have it be seen that he was somehow led, blindfolded into this, you know, kind of not aware of what he was doing.

But this will kind of set fire to the argument within America, within Donald Trump's own power base of what the hell is going on in Iran. Look, this is ten past two now. We're recording it. The news dropped in the last few minutes. I guess one of the questions we'll ask is whether this will be a tipping point. Will this allow others to follow suit? Will it be a defining moment in terms of who has to say whether they are with him or against him?

Do you remember the whole bush line? You're either with us or you're against us. If Donald Trump turned around to his administration, his cabinet now and said, if you're not with me on this war, get out. Who would go? Well, go back to that analogy. And it was the coalition of the willing in Iraq in 2003. And what we seem to see in America today is only the unwilling.

We'll be back in just a second.

From a range of trusted voices and award winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. There is no question ending the war is the quickest way to reduce the cost of living. That is my first instinct, my first priority. Is the best way to help us with petrol and fuel costs for Keir Starmer to say yes to President Trump and send the Navy to protect Hormuz?

The fallout of the Iran war. Follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. The news agents.

Well, Keir Starmer made it very clear yesterday that he wasn't going to get dragged into a war in the Middle East. What about the opposition leader, Kemi Bainock? This was her response this morning. Found the words that were coming from the White House yesterday. It's just quite, quite shocking.

I'm Keir Starmer's biggest critic. I think he does a lot of things wrong. I think on this he's been very slow. But the last thing we need is a war of words. It's quite childish as well. A war of words between the White House and Downing Street. We've got President Zelensky in the UK today.

Oh, Kemi. So what are you saying? Who is quite childish and who is having the war of words? Because I didn't hear Starmer say anything. So is she is she jabbing at Trump there? Is she just alluding to it and then running away? Or has she been pulled aside by a timely adviser and told that her poll numbers would be badly hit unless she suddenly worked out whose side the conservatives were meant to be on in this particular dilemma?

I think you've seen over the sort of past two to three weeks. I mean, the sort of a pretty slow but nonetheless absolutely recognisable complete reverse from Kemi Badeno. Quite acrobatic. Almost. Yes, exactly. Almost like trapeze like.

I mean, you know, remember, let's not forget Kemi Badeno started her criticism of Starmer by saying that we are in this war whether we like it or not. She's completely explicit about that. And then about a week to 10 days later, telling said to the BBC that no, no, I was never in favour of us going into the war. I was just criticised that the government had been had been too slow.

I think that conservatives and reform who were initially very bellicose about the whole thing, very aggressive about the whole thing, have woken up to the fact that a the polling is appalling on it. You know, Starmer is basically where the public is, although it is interesting. There's a poll out today which showed that even though the public are where Starmer is, they actually think a small plurality actually think Starmer has handled it badly, which I think does tell you something about the prime minister's own lack of popularity that even when he is where the public is, the public don't necessarily approve of it.

Nonetheless, when you have got, as we heard yesterday, warnings from, you know, serious people like Nick Butler used to work for Gordon Brown knows international industry really well. Talking about the idea that if this war goes on, we could be looking at petrol rationing and energy conservation measures within the next two months or so. You can see why it would be that I think certain political leaders have woken up to the fact they don't want their fingerprints on this war because whether we're involved or not, if they are seen to have backed it in theory, they have to own the economic consequences.

We were just talking yesterday about the idea of Trumpflation, right? This word Trump, if you call it Trumpflation, it's definitely his problem. Yeah, I mean, I saw a clip of Ed Miliband apparently saying that, you know, to save energy, publicans should just serve warm beer and you can't afford to refrigerate it anymore. If you want to save costs, you serve warm beer. He's going to find himself even more popular than he currently is.

But I mean, there was another clip of Kemi Badenoch I heard last night, which I just kind of I just laughed when I heard it, which was a reporter said, should we be sending Navy ships to the Strait of Hormuz? And Kemi Badenoch replies, well, the prime minister will have had more detailed briefings on this than me. Oh, well, that's leadership. Don't ask. I don't want to go there. I don't want to go anywhere near this question.

And I think that this speaks to whether it be the political class, whether it be the press, many of them with right wing owners are just seeing that this is all nuts that's happening, you know, under the guise of Donald Trump and that they're putting distance.

You know, people who are the supporters at the moment right now in the UK of what Trump is doing? Who are the people saying you've got this absolutely right now? I'm sure there are Iranians who think this is great that the regime may be gone. I'm sure there are people, you know, with contacts to connections to Israel who are kind of hopeful that the regime will come to an end. But in terms of a strategy, where are the friends of Donald Trump saying you're playing this so well, we're right behind you?

Well, what is reform saying now? I mean, what are they? Farage's line now is that we should be backing it, but because we don't really have the capability to do so. So we can't. If we had the ships, we'd be going for it hard now. So we're metaphorically backing it without any hardening. We're right behind you. So if you're Farage and Kem, if you're Farage, you just slag off the fact that we've decimated our military. Fair enough. I think a lot of people feel like, you know, at a time when the world is very precarious, we haven't spent enough on defence. We kind of get that now. If you're Kemmy, you can't say that because your party's been in power for 14 years decimating the military.

I suppose the other question, and, you know, maybe some people will think totally irrelevance, but I think it does sort of matter, is does the king go to America next month as he's been planned, you know, on a state visit to Washington to see Donald Trump when Donald Trump is so openly insulting the British prime minister in this war of words, as Kemmy Bade Not calls it. Might this whole visit get called off? And I think that it's interesting there are voices that you're just beginning to hear who are saying, do we really want our king to go over there to be embarrassed potentially by Donald Trump on a state visit? Maybe not. Maybe we should just, you know, be delaying this or postponing it.

I have to say, I asked Ed Miliband about this on the Sunday show on LBC, and I was actually surprised the extent to which he really did. He was really quite ambiguous about it, and I thought he would just go, you know, this is a matter of palace, but, you know, this should go ahead and so on. Of course, it's not a matter of palace really, it's for the government. But he was actually not especially clear and didn't actually want to say that he wanted it to go ahead.

Just listen to this. Should the king's state visit go ahead in the next couple of months? That is a matter for the palace and obviously talking to the prime minister, and we'll have to see where we get to on that. But your understanding is it is going to go ahead? Again, I'm not going to say what should happen on royal visits. We obviously stay in close touch with the palace on these questions. I just mean as current plans, your understanding is it's going ahead? This is a planned visit, but it's a decision for the palace.

I mean, and actually that does build on, I mean, we talked about it a little bit on Friday's episode with Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogger, and they're reporting in the paperback of their book, Get In, saying actually how much even for the second state visit, which took place last year for Trump, how basically the king was really against it at the time, because, of course, him being king of Canada and at the time Trump was actively threatening to annex it. So and basically the government, Obama's government, you know, insisted that it went ahead. So there is some form from the palace in terms of resistance to these events going on.

Yeah, I mean, the king is in these situations our ambassador, right? He's the biggest, the greatest ambassador that we have. So he does send a message from the government and he does send a message from the British people. And the fact that he's meeting Zelensky today, I think tells you everything you need to know about where his priorities go. And the fact that Keir Starmer was so keen to see that state visit for Trump last September. What's that yielded? Well, absolutely. Fuck all right. I mean, seriously, you must learn to say what you think. But we're four months, six months on from that. Right. Can you point to the state visit and say, I mean, I know they will talk about the procurement of pharmaceuticals and they'll talk about investment. And I know some of that has gone through and some of that has got held up. But if you're actually looking at the at whatever we call that relationship now, you know, between Trump and Starmer or between Britain and America, I'm not seeing that it yielded such positive vibes that we are now, you know, in the good books and sort of sailing through the Straits of Hormuz.

And I do think that longer term, you know, Starmer has sort of politically, I think, ended up in the right place over the Iran crisis. But I do think longer term, however long the war goes on, the sort of apparent collapse, at least for the time being, in that relationship. I mean, that does put his Trump policy in tatters. I mean, remember, Starmer's whole line throughout the course of the last, you know, his whole premiership really, certainly since Trump came to office, is we don't have to choose between America and Europe.

That would be folly. That would be a catastrophe. Is that still a position now with everything that has happened? And if in terms of other potential political consequences, Starmer might have to own, like if the war does go on and we do have that Nick Butler scenario and we have petrol rationing, the political consequences of that and the potential as well for pressure at the moment, the British public don't want to get involved and be involved in terms of clearing the Straits of Hormuz. But if we end up with petrol rationing, what about then? Is there greater political pressure for Britain and Europe to become more militarily involved? I mean, this could just go in so many different directions for Starmer.

You must remember, I remember power cuts. Do you remember power cuts in the 70s? It was really weird. You know, you get home from school and you're doing your homework by candlelight and suddenly the lights would go out and it was quite scary. You know, I was a kind of three year old, four year old kid and it was really scary. And I never connected what was happening then to actually what Iran was clearly doing so masterfully, you know, in the 70s. Exactly. Or even more recently, the petrol protests in 2000 and obviously that wasn't Middle East related, that was domestic politics. But, you know, briefly, the Blair government at that time, very, very popular going into it, did recover its popularity. But that was coming from a great height. You know, Starmer would be going into anything like this. That was one of the most critical moments for Tony Blair in terms of losing public support.

Yeah, it was the only time in that whole parliament that William Hay started to poll ahead of Blair and the Conservatives started to poll ahead of Blair. So, you know, any hint, I mean, you know, governments really do collapse, rise and potentially fall on the question of energy, energy conservation, Middle East wars. We've been here before. So Starmer might be politically in the right place now, but the potential different timelines of this are torturous. Which is where Donald Trump is right, that the European nations are going to be really seriously affected by what happens in the Strait of Hormuz. That's where Donald Trump is absolutely right. Maybe Donald Trump shouldn't have started this war without having thought that bit through. But we are lumbered with the effects of it. We'll be back in a second. The news agents.

So one final thing, we've played a lot of Trump clips today, which perhaps show that the president is not always in the soundest of places. I think in terms of taste alone, there was one clip yesterday which really stood out. Donald Trump on Monday publicly revealed details about Republican congressman's terminal diagnosis, prompting the speaker of the house who was sat next to him, Mike Johnson, to, in his own very gentle way, do something which he very rarely does, which is chastise his own president. Just listen to this exchange.

I don't know. I don't I won't mention his name. Should I? Do other people know his name? Do you want to mention it? He'll be proud. Go ahead. Tell him. Tell him this.

OK, well, thank you, Mr. President. Congressman Neil Dunn of Florida had had some real health challenges and it was very serious and had had a pretty grim diagnosis. And I mentioned it to the president. I said Congressman Dunn is a real champion and a patriot because he's still coming to work. And if others got this diagnosis, they would be apt to go home and retire.

What was the diagnosis? It was I mean, I think it was a terminal diagnosis. He would be dead by June.

OK, that wasn't public. But yeah, OK, that's it was it was grim. That's what I was going to say. I don't think with a heart problem, by the way, this was a heart problem. So long story short, the president called him.

So you can hear the assembled Republicans in the room gasp when Trump revealed that this gentleman, Neil Dunn, the congressman could be dead by June.

He follows it up by laughing, slapping the speaker of the house on the back. A spokesman, a person for Dunn has not responded to requests for comment.

Just gleeful, isn't it? I mean, there was glee in his delivery of that terminal, that sentence, which I think takes you kind of straight into the mindset of, you know, we've probably said it before. The narcissism, which is nothing else. No one else exists. But that's the rest of the clip then goes on to talk about.

And this is the reason why Donald Trump wanted the story to be told, was talking about how Donald Trump rang him up and Donald Trump was fantastic. And Donald Trump did this and Donald Trump said that. So the story is not about a dying congressman and the fact that he is at death's door, which was revealed at a news conference. It's about how Donald Trump had spoken to him. And so the story becomes not about that.

He approved of Trump's actions. Yes. I mean, this is meant to be a reflection of Trump. And so, it's the glorification of Donald Trump, even though you're revealing the impending death of somebody else.

And we didn't even have time to play the clip where he suggests that he might be invading Cuba next. Save that for Wednesday. Let's save it for Wednesday. We'll see you then.

Bye bye. Bye for now. This has been a Global Player original production.