363. The Return of Donald J. Trump

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Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell.

And Alistair, I guess we're going to start with Trump, obviously. And then we're going to move on to talk about Hamas, the ceasefire, Israel and Gaza. And then we're going to talk about the tragedy in Southport and the British government's response. But can we start with Trump?
I think we have to start with Trump. I mean, I was thinking when he first came in, do you remember what the big story was in the first 24 hours? It was a row about how many people he claimed were at the inauguration. Today, he has announced. I mean, it really is sort of shock and awe, even though we knew that they were better organized. We knew that they had this sort of Project 2025 plan ready to roll. I think the speed with which he's pushing some of this stuff out is borderline terrifying. And of course, that's what he wants. He wants it to be borderline terrifying. But it feels very, very different in so many ways to his first term.

Well, let's just quickly just summarize for people who didn't have a full chance to watch the inaugural, what he said.
So firstly, it's presented as, of course, Trump's second inaugural. And that's a great phrase in the United States because the second inaugurals of Abraham Lincoln, of FDR, of Woodrow Wilson were these incredible events. I think it's the Abraham Lincoln second inaugural where he does this with malice towards none, with charity for all.
Great speech. There was very little of that yesterday, I have to say, Roy.

Yeah. So Trump's second inaugural, I'll just quickly run through the headlines of it and then give us your sense of how it worked as a speech.
So he immediately announced on immigration, a national emergency on the southern border.
On climate, he was going to drill, baby, drill.
On protectionism, he was going to set up external revenue service with big tariffs.
And he announced that we're going to be henceforth only two genders.
In terms of American foreign policy, he says, we're going to be judged not just by the wars we end, but the wars we never get into.
So that's a hint of a new philosophy of extreme isolationism. He said that he was going to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

And he said he was going to take back the Panama Canal, send astronauts to Mars. America was going to be respected again. And somewhat, I think, to the surprise of most international listeners, he announced that the United States would be a free, sovereign, and independent country. Anyway, over to you on the general sense of watching this thing live.

Well, several times during the day as I was sitting there getting ever more, I don't even know what the word was, but slumping deeper and deeper into a gloom to think this is happening. Fiona kept coming in and saying, why do you keep self harming like this? But I felt well had to watch it. And you've got the right highlights in terms of the speech. But then, of course, he went on to sign all these executive orders.

So when you mentioned Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural, I cannot imagine Abraham Lincoln in a sort of what looked like a boxing ring with a presidential desk in the center of the ring and a pen and executive orders, signing executive orders and getting these enormous cheers from a crowd of 20,000. So when he says in the speech, I'm going to sign an executive order, he then physically does it in front of the audience. He made the speech. And just to give you the sense of that.

So there he is. It wasn't outside, apparently because of the extreme cold weather. But I couldn't help noticing the sun was shining most of the day. Sorry, just your joke there, presumably, is that given that he was so upset last time that there wasn't a big enough crowd, almost certainly he decided to manage expectations around the crowd by moving it inside. I don't know. But I mean, that is what that is what lots of people were speculating. Although there were thousands and thousands of people who were heading towards Washington, D.C. to take part.

And I thought there was something very symbolic about the fact that the red hat, MAGA hat people out there, Trump's our man, they were cut out from this in terms of, you know, they couldn't actually take part at all. And there in the rotunda, pride of place to the tech oligarchs, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, who looked like a hostage, the guy from Google, and they had better seats than the cabinet. They were alongside the sort of big donors. Millet and Maloney were kind of hovering in the background.

But then, of course, right behind him are the former presidents, Biden, Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George and Laura Bush, Obama without Michelle, they're all lined up there. And the speech basically was, if you're Joe Biden, you're sitting there having to smile your way through this guy, absolutely destroying your record, your values, your policies, everything. And then of course, we announced all these orders. And then he went off to the do these various events.

He went off the next stage, which was a really wild one of his weaving speeches to party supporters, JD Vance and Mike Johnson were behind him. And even they at times were starting to go, whoa, where is this going? Then he goes off, there's other events, then he gets into this event at the Capitol Arena. And he's on a desk there. And so he's got a White House official bringing him presidential folders with the presidential seal. And he's doing that big Donald Trump signature. And they go wild.

So you said, for example, he mentioned in the speech, drill, baby drill, he then signs, we're coming out of the Paris climate agreement. Again, we're coming out of the World Health Organization. And they're sacking people who they believe is sacking by social media, including people like Mark Milley, and anybody who's got sort of federal positions, they're all going, if they're considered to be disloyal. And it's being cheered like a goal at the football match.

What's interesting there is, I was following very closely the American reporters, and particularly the New York Times that was writing a live updated blog. Yeah, on the executive orders that they were predicting, yeah, that he would sign.

And it sounds to me as though they hadn't quite managed to anticipate with all their contacts and all their discussions, quite the scale of this, because they've got to the fact that he was going to do something on the southern border to halt illegal entry, they've got that he was probably going to allow more drilling, but they hadn't quite got to the scale of what you're talking about that. So this stuff was, he kept this in his back pocket. So he was surprising people, right?

Yeah, and certainly in the volume, although actually, he'd been saying for days, they've been saying for days, there's going to be a huge volume of stuff. So he does the ones in the arena, does a speech, then he goes back to the White House. And the resolute desk is there, covered in folders. And the same official who's come back with him, presents you with these folders. And he's now doing this whilst doing a, you know, this I've been involved in, they call him a pool spray at the top, you bring the press in, while you're kind of busy doing stuff. So he's sitting at the desk signing things while taking questions about all sorts of things, Ukraine, and what have you.

You've mentioned the ones on the emergency declaration at the border, be clear what that means. That means he's, he now has the power to use the military and the National Guard down there. He has the power now to unlock federal funding for the war, cutting off birthright citizenship, quickly on birthright citizenship to explain to people. So that means that at the moment in the United States, if you're born in the United States, even if your parent is an illegal, you become an American citizen, and he's stopped that now. Correct.

That is one of the first that will end up in the courts. That is already the civil liberties organizations are already saying that one's going to the courts. But the pardon to the January 6th rioters or the hostages as he calls them. And what I thought was extraordinary about the event in the rotunda, and this barely came through any of the commentary, I kept thinking, is somebody going to point out that this is the very part of the Capitol, that those rioters on January 6th were looting and beating up police officers and so forth. So what you had was the Trump enjoying the pomp and the ceremony without any sense of that historical context of literally just four years ago. So he's basically pardoned all of them. Some of them, a small number of the really, really serious ones, they will have an offense against their record, but they're nonetheless going to be let out.

Now, in the speech that you saw and you referred to at the top, he talked about how his entire administration will be governed by the rule of law. I mean, it's hard to think, we know that he's a convicted felon. It's hard to think of something that undermines the rule of law more than something where one of the biggest investigations in American history led to considerable numbers of people going to jail for serious offenses. And he now says they're pardoned. And I think this pardon thing is now emerging as one of the real weaknesses in the entire American constitutional setup.

Oh, yeah. And Biden pardoned family members in advance yesterday. Exactly. And as we've pointed out, there is basically no equivalent in somewhere like Britain. I mean, theoretically, there's a royal pardon and it was used, for example, after his death to pardon Alan Turing, who'd been convicted of homosexual offenses. But the fundamental separation between the legal system and the executive, this kind of rule of law idea that nobody's above the law, is really under threat here. Because you had, as you said, Biden pardoning his son. You also had this extraordinary final moment from Biden where he preemptively pardoned General Milley, Fauci, Liz Cheney. And this wasn't really much of a precedent for before. He's basically said, I'm going to issue a pardon without knowing what they're charged with.

It's a preemptive pardon so that Trump can't then come and convict him. And some of the Democrats who were pardoned actually challenged this. Some of the elected Democrats on the committee said, excuse me, we don't want to be pardoned and we don't approve.

Biden's defense of this preemptive pardons is he's saying it's not that he thinks that they'd be put in jail. He wants to save them from the cost of having to defend themselves. But I think certainly many, many people within Biden's entourage do believe that these people could be arrested and could be sent to jail and don't trust the judicial system. And I suspect the reason that Biden is putting the emphasis on the costs is he's trying to re-emphasize how much he thinks they're innocent rather than that he completely believes the justice system under Trump can be relied on.

That can only be out of a fear, and I wonder whether this relates to Fauci and Liz Cheney and the others as well, that they heard something was coming. I don't know. This I've heard. I mean, so Reid Hoffman, who we interviewed, and I think we've got quite a lot of this coming from your friend, the Mooch. Yeah, my friend too, but more your friend, the Mooch. You knew him well before me, but he's been pointing out for a long time this list and obviously Millie, Fauci, Liz Cheney are right there up on the list of the people that Trump's in. And Trump, of course, has repeatedly said that he was going to go after it. And I think in the speech that you watched, there was this amazing thing saying the weaponization of the Justice Department will end and he's going to get rid of a radical and corrupt establishment. This is Trump's words, which has extracted wealth and power from our citizens. That's what we call gaslighting, by the way.

Gaslighting. Because that is exactly what he's going to do. A very, very strong Trump determination to do this. But the thing I guess I'm getting at slightly long windedly is that if the democratic system in the United States was functioning, you would trust the legal system and say, well, in the end, this is for the courts, it's for the judges, it's for the jury. It's not for one president to say, you're going to jail and another president to say, no, you can't go to jail because I've just issued a pardon. It's not up to presidents who go to jail or shouldn't be.

This is why so much has been said by people like Madeleine Albright, by people like Tim Snyder, who we interviewed on Leading Not Long Ago, that this is a sort of precursor to genuine authoritarianism. It's why Orban is such a big deal in America, that we talked about that before, that it's why he does have this sort of huge admiration for people like Putin and Xi Jinping. And this came through yesterday because Trump was even doing this thing where he was saying, you know, he and Melania walked down with Joe and Jill Biden to the helicopter to take them off and take them to wherever they're going. And in Marine One, it's the last time they'll use the presidential helicopter, etc. And it's a nice custom. And it's nice that the incoming guy can do that.

And I'm thinking, is nobody even going to point out that he didn't do any of that when he lost, that he didn't turn up for the inauguration, that he left the White House before Joe Biden arrived, and that he consistently has refused to recognize or accept that he's lost the election. And of course, these clearances, these pardons of the January the 6th rioters, that's all about saying he didn't lose the election. That is now sort of so embedded in the narrative.

And of course, the worst thing from Biden's legacy perspective is that, you know, the legacy, whether he likes it or not in history as a one term president, ultimately, the presidency has gone back to Donald Trump. And he did lots and lots of good things as president. But people do remember these last minute pardons. They remember it with previous presidents, but he has done a lot of them.

Just maybe move for a second on to what we're beginning to see about who Trump is, and what the world is going to have to deal with. So I guess the first big fact that we've learned about Trump is maybe not a new one, which is that it's very difficult to know when he's going to follow through on what he said he'd do, and when he wouldn't. So he had said that he was going to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He's now decided that it's going to take a few months. So that might make you think, oh, well, you don't really need to take too seriously what he says, because he'll just flip. But then you look at the executive orders, and many of those are, of course, exactly what he said he'd do.

He said he would pardon the January 6th rioters. He said that he would declare an emergency on the border. He said that he'd revoke the electrical vehicle mandate. That is an interesting one, too, that maybe it's worth digging into a bit. Basically, in order to get the American electric vehicle industry off the ground, Biden had quite generous subsidies for people buying electric cars. And Trump has revoked this. But presumably, it'd be interesting, maybe Alyssa can explain what that means for Musk, who, of course, is the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world, who presumably was benefiting from people getting subsidies to buy electric vehicles.

But just on that one for a second, how would you describe this type of person? Because I guess the routine that we had when he was in last time is he wakes up at some strange time in the morning. He watches Fox News. He goes on Twitter. He issues some radical statement. He then, during the day, his staff come in and they argue with him. In some cases, they wrote him back or they don't. And then the next morning, he wakes up again and again does something very unpredictable and peculiar, which they then try to write back. What do you think this means for how government works? What would it be like working for someone like that?

I think it is going to be very different. Anthony Scaramucci talks a lot about this woman, Susie Wiles, as chief of staff and seems to think that she's somebody who will be able to keep him more ordered than he was first time around. You can't deny that what he's done in the last 24 hours does link back both to what he said during the campaign and a lot of the arguments in this Project 2025 agenda that we talked about before. So when you look, for example, at the nominations, there was something absolutely chaotic first time around. And people didn't last. And we'll see. I mean, Scaramucci was saying he thinks that the defense guy, Heskett, will be gone in a year. He thinks that Rubio, you know, won't necessarily last the whole term. We shall see.

But I think in terms of what it means for working around him, it is what we know. It is basically that you can say anything you want in private, but you cannot criticize him in public. You have to flatter him. You have to accept that he's the most important person in the universe and that everything revolves around him. Now, that makes life quite difficult unless you are able to develop a core team that can be utterly frank. But everything you read about the first term, that is not how he operates. Will he read briefs any more than he didn't do last time? Probably not.

The other thing I think we shouldn't underestimate, and this relates to foreign policy and it relates to how other world leaders deal with him and how they describe him and what they say about what he's doing, is the pettiness. So one of these executive orders, I only saw this because I made the mistake of going on to the White House website to read a lot because I wanted to see how these things were framed. And they were in quite legalese language. Are they quite long? Tell us a little bit about them. Are they short or long? No, they're quite short. They're pretty short and they're very short explanatory.

So for example, the one of the pardons is literally just a very short explanatory and a list of names and then a longer list of the ones that are getting the full pardon. But there's an executive order which is going to strip John Bolton, his former national security advisor, of his security clearance.

And here's another one. So there's John Bolton loses security clearance. And here's another one. You remember Hunter Biden, the big story about his laptop and was he involved in kind of all sorts of nefarious activities. There's an executive order taking away the security clearance of the American intelligence officials who believe that this might have been a Russian operation against Joe Biden through his son, Hunter Biden.

And then there's another one. This one's interesting. This one isn't an order. It's an order where he's going to seek to overturn. And this is the Biden agreement on the OECD deal on minimum corporate taxation. So these are stuff.

And then the energy stuff you talk, you know, you'd say drill, baby drill. A lot of this is about energy. A lot of it's about immigration, but he is doing what he said he would. And I think what the other thing you saw from yesterday is just the power of the performative element of all this. I mean, I was reading this morning, I was going through the BBC website and I thought, okay, I know they've got to cover every single angle, but let me just read you this one because this is mind blowing.

BBC website. Melania Trump appeared at the first ball wearing a gown that had some striking similarities to the one she wore to Trump's first inauguration. Clavicle showing cut, the slit at one leg, geometric detailing on the front. But where last time the detail came in the same vanilla silk crepe as the dress itself, this time with a thick black ribbon-like strip echoed in a choker style necklace, as if to underline the occasion with more solidity than perhaps she had first time around. From a distance, the inky squiggle could easily remind viewers of the signature that Melania's husband today signed on executive orders. The first lady's black and white look was echoed in the classic tux worn by her husband.

Will we see more oval style couples dressing during Trump's second term in a move to signal unity between the pair? I mean, this is mind blowing.

Okay, so from that to the big picture then. So I think the first thing is understanding why Trump in 2025 is very different from Trump coming in in 2017. One big difference is his team. So when he came in last time, he was trying to bring in far more old establishment fingers. So his secretary of defense was General Mattis, this great Marine Corps general. He brought in Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the largest company in the world as his secretary of state. He had H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor.

This time round, it's much more radical team compared to Millie Hesketh, as you've pointed out, is a Fox News star who never achieved senior rank in the military, probably the least qualified defense secretary ever.

So that's one big difference. You can no longer do what we tried to do. I remember when he came in because I was a minister in Theresa May's government and I remember the National Security Council meetings around it. We were still able to rely, this is the Europeans in 2017, on the fact that people like General Mattis and Tillerson and H.R. McMaster, we all had relationships with. I mean, these were people that people like me knew from Iraq and Afghanistan and you could appeal to their common sense of NATO and they went out of their way to basically contradict him, disrupt him, slag him off to his fury. So that won't happen again.

The second big change is that the world has changed a lot.

So as I think we talked about a couple of weeks ago, when he came in in 2017, he's facing a world in which Emmanuel Macron is about to be elected, Trudeau's in Canada, Merkel is still in Germany, Theresa May is in Britain, and quite a lot of a relatively kind of centrist world is still in existence. We're now in a very different universe. In the intervening eight years, the U.S. economy has soared ahead of the European economy. It's much more powerful, 50% large in the European economy. Many of the European leaders are in real trouble. Macron's weak, Schulz is about to go, Trudeau's about to go in Canada, is gone in Canada. So there's less counterbalance. And then the final thing, I guess, is the conflict, which is that in 17, the Middle East was relatively peaceful, Ukraine was relatively peaceful. We're now in a very, very, very different world in which Russia is advancing in Ukraine, advancing steadily, just before Christmas, advancing about 100 meters a day and Ukraine is in trouble. Situation where it's very difficult to quite understand how Netanyahu's government is ever going to really allow a proper ceasefire to happen. And in which China's in a different position in relation to Taiwan, India's in a much more powerful position. And that's where, and that's where I'll finish my long city lecture.

The key things underlying these executive orders show a really fundamental worldview is emerging. It's protectionist, not free trade. It's isolationist, instead of trying to get involved in other countries, had a phrase in his second inaugural where he said, instead of America spending unlimited money protecting foreign borders, we're going to protect our own borders. It's absolutely anti any conversation about climate change or energy transition. And I guess, above all, it's pushing the rest of the world to be much more transactional. So if you're Britain or France or Germany, or an African country, I mean, let's say you're Uganda, you're looking now to think, all I can do is defend my national interest, look for transactional deals that I can do with Trump. And almost certainly, new blocks are going to emerge into the vacuum that he's creating.

Yeah. I was, I was talking the other day to Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker who you'd have thought would have ended up as a bit of an enemy of Trump because he's, you know, he basically lost his job as part of all that kind of maggot infighting, but he seems to be reasonably, still reasonably close to him. But I was saying to him, which of the, which of the leaders last time around do you think handled Trump best? And he said, oh, no doubt the Japanese guy, he really improved his golf. And he was serious. He went and had golf lessons to sort of, you know, the best thing I can do is really get my handicap down, play with Trump, obviously make sure Trump wins. But so, and I think for, you know, for Britain, you know, Keir Starmer did a sort of short statement from the, from Downing Street, congratulating Donald Trump, welcoming him, worked with him, blah, blah, blah. David Lammy was on the airwaves talking up his charmingness as a host when they had dinner and before the election and these sort of, you know, love of Britain, et cetera.

But the fact is I worry in that sort of foreign policy mindset that you've just set out, I do worry that here we are Britain for all our historical strengths, we are kind of bobbing around in the sea at the moment. China's over there, Europe's over there, America's over there. And it's, you know, it's quite, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard for the UK, I think, to deal with this. Michael Ignatieff wrote quite an interesting article in the FT, and we've interviewed him on Leading if people want to pick up on him. But what he was really focusing on is that there seems to be a hint, more than a hint, that Trump basically is trying to create an empire focused on the Americas. That's why he's talking about Canada as a 51st state.

That's why he's talking about the Panama Canal, and to some extent, why he's talking about Greenland. And what Michael reads in that is not that America is necessarily going to invade Canada. It's more that Trump will do his best to make Canada even more economically dependent on the United States and impose ever more aggressive terms against his neighbors. And that the Trump doctrine feels like he's saying, my sphere of influence is the Americas. China's sphere of influence can be its neighbors. Russia's sphere of influence can be Europe. And I'm going to give up on the idea, all the ideas that liberals really had since the Second World War, that it makes sense to try to talk about any kind of global order. He's hunkering down. And he's saying, we've got the oil, we've got the gas, we've got the rare minerals and resources, particularly if we bring in Canada and Greenland to help us. And really, we just put up the walls, we don't need to worry about the rest of the world. We're sort of a planet apart.

Given there have been all these fears about what his mindset is and his attitude is towards NATO, I don't recall hearing him mention NATO. Now, you could say that's a good thing, in that he wasn't saying, I'm coming out of NATO, like he is with the WHO and the Paris Climate Agreement.

I think my final point, Roy, before we go to a break, and then come back and talk about Gaza and South Port. The Mooch, again, to quote the Mooch, he said on a podcast a few weeks ago, that he felt that there was the danger of the opening for what he called a golden era of corruption. And again, you mentioned Lincoln's second inaugural. Now, I know we didn't have cryptocurrency in the time of Lincoln. But if we did, I cannot imagine either that Lincoln or his wife would launch a meme coin, which would immediately raise millions and millions and millions of dollars. This in a currency that Donald Trump used to say was basically no good for anything apart from fraud and deception.

And the other thing that just final, you know, having taken the mickey out of the BBC fashion coverage, if I can close on Melania. Melania apparently is part of the deal with the oligarchs, has done this 40 million pound TV deal with Bezos for a documentary. And I noticed that both at the Arlington Cemetery the day before, and as she was walking towards the Rotunda. I don't know whether you've ever done a documentary so high budget that they have these cameras that they can sort of move around in the air as they're walking with them. They're like, they weigh like a matchbox. And she had those following her all around. And I noticed that this means she smiled more than she normally does. And it's interesting, I saw Steve Bannon being interviewed. And he said, look, these guys are there and they think they're all powerful. They've got to understand they are there now, because he's got them. They are now his little toys. And that's why he's making them look, you know, he's part of that part of the scene. So we'll see. We'll see. But it was it was quite a day. It was quite a day.

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This is an advertisement from BetterHelp with 2024 now coming to an end time to start thinking about what you want your 2025 story to be. And there's a lot to sort of think about some of the things that we talk about in the podcast, which you know, frankly, can get me down. What am I thinking about? I'm thinking about reading more, actually, because I was surprised when Rory and I were talking on Boxing Day about the books that we'd read. I actually hadn't read nearly as much as I did last year or the year before. So I'm going to be reading more. But I'm also going to look out for some sort of new sporting challenge. I'm open for ideas about that. Whatever you're planning for 2025, 1st of January brings you 365 blank pages waiting to be filled. And you can see therapy as your editorial partner. Write these new chapters with BetterHelp and create meaningful resolutions that last past February. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Write your story with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash rest politics. That's better help.com slash rest politics.

Hi, it's Katty Kay here from the rest is politics US. We felt at this time as America is heading into the Trump administration that we should look back on one of the darkest moments in recent American history. So we have done just that with a series on Trump's insurrection and his attempts back in 2020 to steal the election from Joe Biden. There was an incitement of an insurrection. They stormed the Capitol. They literally have senators running for their lives. We break it down. We give a hour by hour of all the incidents, the fences smashing, the windows breaking, gunshots firing, Trump supporters smoking joints in statutory hall. Just imagine the bedlam. And incredibly, some of these people are going to be pardoned by Mr. Trump. And so January 6, I've never told Katty Kay this, but January 6 is my birthday.

Okay, tune in and listen. Yeah, that's not the only extraordinary thing about the date of January the 6th. However, I mean, this is why this story in this series is so important and so gripping, because so many of these characters are coming back with us today. And so much has been forgiven and swept under the carpet. And America decided in the election last year that they were going to reinstate Donald Trump. With that, there really is no better time to take a look at these events. To hear more, just search The Restless Politics US, wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's a clip from this miniseries at the end of this week's episode.

Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, you've been deep in Middle East talking. Tell us about it.

So I've been in discussions with a lot of different players, because it's a Chatham House Rules Conference. I can't go through the details of the individuals. But we've been right in the middle of talking to Israelis, Americans, Brits about the ceasefire deal. And just a quick reminder on where we are. And maybe just before I get onto that, a quick encouragement to people to listen to the Tom Fletcher interview that we just did on our separate leading feed, because Tom, amazing new appointment of a British diplomat as the UN humanitarian lead worldwide talking about his first few weeks touching on Gaza, yes, but particularly on Sudan, Ukraine and Syria. What was your sense of the Tom Fletcher interview?

And then I'll come back to this. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought he was extraordinarily interesting and bright and clever.

I've got quite an amazing story about Tom Fletcher. As a result, Anissa Misagi, who works for a company called Pladis, texted me yesterday to say, on my way to Davos, listening to Tom Fletcher on leading, really enjoying it, what an amazing job, really interesting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She then arrives at Davos, and she's waiting for her bags to come off the carousel. And she thinks it's her suitcase. She pulls her suitcase off the carousel, but it's sort of a bit scuzzed and a bit dirty, looks like a bit more traveled than her suitcase. But she thinks, that is the exact same suitcase, but is it my suitcase? She looks at the name, and it's Mr. Thomas Fletcher. And it turns out that Tom Fletcher, as she said to me, she said, he may be bloody clever, and he may be really smart, and he may have an amazing job, but he's got great taste in suitcases. But he's also a thief. He nicked her suitcase? He went off with her suitcase. Yeah, anyway, she managed to track him down, and they've now a suitcase swap. There we are. There's a horrible 1970s joke that my father liked about the brains of the world, stealing someone's sandwich box instead of the parachute for jumping out of an airplane. It's the same story, really.

There you go. So let's get back to Gaza. So to remind people of what the deal was, in essence, it's a three-phase deal. Phase one, which started on Sunday, is supposed to be the release of 33 Israeli hostages, a release of a number of Palestinians in exchange, humanitarian access, and a ceasefire. Phase two is then meant to involve the release of all the remaining live hostages, more returns of Palestinians, and a permanent ceasefire. And then phase three is supposed to be the return of deceased hostages and the blockade lifted. So this has begun. And on Sunday, there were these very dramatic scenes of the return, amongst others, of Emily, who's a British hostage, who returned with two of her fingers cut off. It was a very dramatic scene, partly because the three hostages were delivered, surrounded by 300 Hamas fighters, very much publicly demonstrating to the world that Hamas still existed, and that they were right out there on television, showing that whatever had happened over the last months of bombing, more than a year of bombing, they were still there.

And the question now is, what is the end case? And I guess there are three scenarios. One of them is that it returns to chaos and conflict. Ceasefire deal breaks down. Fighting continues almost indefinitely. Second scenario is an Israeli occupation of Gaza. Israel taking responsibility for security, putting IDF troops permanently in on the ground and trying to run and occupy Gaza. And the third scenario, which is the optimistic but probably unlikely scenario, but it's the one that everybody, of course, is trying to push for, is a permanent ceasefire and the reconstruction of Gaza. And there the devil is in the detail on whether you can possibly imagine what that would look like in a way that works for both Israelis and Palestinians.

And the problem, in a nutshell, is that Netanyahu's government certainly would have two demands, which would be unacceptable. In reality, the first demand is that Israel would have total security control of what was happening in Gaza. They want 100% security. They want an absolute guarantee there can be no return to October the 7th. And that means that they want to be able to continue military operations. They're not going to delegate it to anyone else. And that would not be acceptable on the Palestinian side, because there's no way that the Palestinians or the Arab states that are often being talked about as coming in, doing the reconstruction, could be Jordan, Emirates, Egypt, are going to want to be on the ground if Israel is continuing to conduct military operations. And it's going to be very difficult to raise money to reconstruct buildings in Gaza if people think Israel is going to come in and blow them up again.

The second condition is the Netanyahu government will demand that there can be zero participation of Hamas and probably no participation of the PLA. We can get onto that later. But that's partly because they don't trust the PLA and the Israeli public. I think the PLA will either fail because they'll be corrupt and useless, or they'll succeed, in which case, there'll be a stronger Palestinian state, which is something they don't want either. Whereas on the other side, international observers looking at it think it's almost impossible to imagine anything happening in Gaza without at least some level of consent from Hamas. Hamas may not want to be the government, but Hamas is still an incredibly powerful force on the ground. So if Israel says reconstruction can go ahead, but reconstruction involves continued Israeli military operations and no possible participation of Hamas, then it's almost impossible to imagine anybody, Arab, Palestinian taking responsibility.

When the deal was announced, although it unleashed an awful lot of joy and hope and expectation, I think an awful lot of people who maybe are close to it and are close to these sorts of situations were not hopeful that we'd get to the end of phase three without an awful lot of hiccups along the way. And I think it was during that sort of bizarre executive order signing, press in for a bit of it, session where I think Trump was sort of saying he's not quite sure whether this thing will hold through the three phases. I didn't see that bit. I just read something in one of the papers about that. So I think it, I think this is going to be very, very difficult. And I think that, you know, we are, the rest is politics. I think the politics of this are a lot tougher for Netanyahu than he is projecting.

One of the other orders, by the way, is reversing the sanctions against settlers. Was that part of the deal? Don't know. But I think you've got to worry that the politics that made him so dependent on the hard right in the first place to get into power, to build a coalition, to get through his legal reforms and so forth, that whether he can hold on as long as he seems to think he can without those people being inside the tent rather than outside. Because their basic line is, okay, let's get the hostages back. We've got three so far. We've got another 30 that are going to come through, hopefully, in this first phase. But then we've got to go back to war. Why? Because they say the war aim was to destroy Hamas. And as you say, it was perfectly obvious and it was deliberate. There's no doubt about that.

Hamas, and they could have decided, well, tell you what we'll do. We won't have any of the media involved until we get to the bit where we hand them over to the Red Cross. And you could have driven a nice car up and they could have stepped out of the car and walked in. Instead, it was very deliberate that they showed these Hamas fighters opening the doors, jumping on the car, showing they're very, very visible, very, very present. So, I think that was deliberate. The rest of it looked like, I mean, well, you know, it was joyous. It was amazing to see those three young women come back. We'll find out as time goes on the extent of the trauma, physical and mental that they've suffered.

But at the same time, you then had alongside it, the pictures of Palestinians going, quotes, back to their homes, which was heartbreaking because they were going back to places which frankly didn't exist anymore. Just literally sort of masses of rubble. And I think that the long-term reconstruction plan for Gaza, how much is that going to cost? Where's that going to come from? Is that all going to be about these kind of geopolitical and business deals that get done?

So, I think phase one, let's see if that gets through six weeks. Phase two, they then have to work out the timing of that. But I think there's a long way to go before we can be confident this is the end of the war.

So, I guess you've put your finger on three things. One of them is the politics around Netanyahu. The second is the question of what Hamas is up to. And the third is this question of reconstruction. I mean, on the first, it's very striking how similar Netanyahu is to Trump. Firstly, in his complete elision of the difference between truth, post-truth, non-truth. Secondly, obviously these corruption allegations. Thirdly, his voter base. You know, he's got this very, very strong voter base, which is strangely often composed of younger, poorer Israelis from non-European backgrounds who see the old European Israeli elite as traitors and corrupt, but who are voting for Netanyahu, who is, of course, a representation of that.

I mean, that's another sort of Trump. And his allies, of course, Smotrych and Ben-Gavir. And Ben-Gavir has resigned, but may well come back in again. Very difficult to put a cigarette paper, it seems, between them in terms of their ideology. I mean, Hamas, of course, and many Palestinians talk about, you know, Palestine must be free from the river to the sea. Smotrych has written a book saying Israel basically should occupy an enormous amount of Palestinian territory. And it's very clear about the fact that he sees Palestinians effectively as second-class human beings. And Smotrych and Ben-Gavir's deal has been, we'll give you a coalition if you give us war. And their mindset, and I guess this is the really difficult thing here.

To get to peace, the Netanyahu government, and in fact, the Israeli public, and part of the question is, would any prime minister make any differences? Or is the public in a state where actually any Israeli prime minister would feel that they had to do this? But anyway, the Netanyahu government, with the support of a lot of the Israeli public, has got to the worldview now that Hamas and many, many Palestinians are completely irreconcilable. There's no possibility of peace. There's no possibility of change. You get senior Israelis saying that this is Arab culture. This is their religion. There's no way of negotiating with them.

They're saying that this conflict is not like any other conflict in the world. If you raise Northern Ireland or Cyprus, they say, no, no, no, no, no. Those things could be resolved by interest. This is purely values-based. And the only way this is going to end is with us killing them. But the problem is that Israel has so far killed perhaps 19,000 Hamas fighters on their own count out of the nearly 50,000 that have been killed. And who knows how that counting works, right? But there are about 300,000, I think, Palestinian males under 18, part of a conveyor belt that will come through presumably, and many of whom will feel that they need to get involved in resistance. What is the end game? And the end game for Smotrych and Ben-Gavir feels at the moment like perpetual war. No interest in reconstruction. Back to you.

I saw David Miliband at the weekend, who, as you know, runs the International Rescue Committee. I think one of the themes maybe you could add to your connection of Trump and Netanyahu is this sense of impunity that you can get away with a lot more in the modern world. And the IRC have produced this really interesting report, which is their emergency watch list. It's the countries that they feel are most in need currently of humanitarian support.

To go back to Tom Fletcher, Tom made the point in our interview that it is harder than ever to be working for a humanitarian organization. And the report that I mentioned in terms of the numbers that need of humanitarian support right now are off the scale. Sudan is the country deemed to be most in need, followed by the occupied Palestinian territories. But interestingly, this report builds itself around four themes, which I think maybe we should come back to them another time. We have more conflict, but we have less diplomacy.

We have far more attacks on civilians, including aid workers, than ever before, but we have fewer consequences for that. We have more carbon emissions affecting these poorer countries disproportionately, but we have less climate crisis action and we have more wealth accumulation, but we have less poverty alleviation. And I read the report over the weekend. So reading that in the context of then Trump coming in with the agenda that he sets out, which was basically sod more diplomacy, don't worry about, you know, law and so forth. Climate crisis is a myth. And as for poverty, drill, baby, drill, get richer, get richer, get richer, get more powerful, get more powerful, get more powerful. So it is a tough time, as Tom said, to be a humanitarian.

On this question of whether a deal is possible, and I think one has to keep hoping, and I guess this is presumably the situation that people would have felt that they were in, in Northern Ireland or South Africa in the 80s. You have to keep hoping and trying to imagine what peace could be. But at the moment, it feels like a zero sum game because the Israeli government is basically saying, I think almost explicitly that Israeli security is more important than the rights and the dignity of the Palestinian people. And this push for 100% security effectively leaves no room for risk, no room for autonomy, no room for letting stuff happen in Gaza.

And when we think about reconstruction, you usually think about three things, you normally think about governance, economic development and security. So from the Israeli point of view, security must be done by the IDF, economic development, they will probably choke off an enormous amount of the border and the imports because they'll be worried that some of the things imported into Gaza could be reused to dig tunnels or fire rockets. And on the governance side, they're very unlikely to support any form of Palestinian authority, partly because if they had elections, they'd worry that Hamas could win the elections. But even if Hamas didn't win the elections, the whole idea of Palestine, the whole idea of a two state solution now seems impossible to many Israelis, because they see it as a threat to their security.

And the threat to security is an interesting one, I was trying to get my head around this, because of course, what happened on October 7, was brutal and horrifying. And of course, Hamas has documents committed to the elimination of the state of Israel. But the question I've been trying to focus on is, what kind of threat really does Hamas actually pose to the continued existence of Israel? So if Israel improved its borders, it had a very, very bad border security with Gaza. The Israelis that you've been talking to, what did they say in answer to that question?

So what they say the threat is, is real and existential. And we people who live here, we underestimate what it's like living there. Yeah, there's a loss of that. There's a loss of you don't know what it's like having people just 15 kilometers from your border who want to wipe you out. I think there's a middle ground, which is people saying, okay, it's probably true that we've discovered that Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthi are less of a threat than we thought. And it's probably true that Hamas isn't actually in any position to conquer Israel. But even if they're able to do these terrorist attacks, again, this is completely unacceptable, that both because it's an unbelievably traumatic to the Israeli people, and also because of what it means for the Israeli economy and stability.

But Israel's response to it, or Netanyahu's response to it, is creating a really toxic political atmosphere where the few remaining Israeli liberal critics of what Netanyahu is doing, the few remaining people still talking about the recognition of a Palestinian state, still trying to acknowledge that you probably do ultimately have to work with some parts of Hamas, and that there are more moderate parts of Hamas to work with civil servants, for example, now for the first time are beginning to feel that they're under pressure to leave Israel. It used to be a great sort of shame to leave Israel. Now, there's a sense around Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gavir and their supporters that they don't want these liberals around a sort of sense of, well, if you're not prepared to get involved in this perpetual war, you can leave.

And you see, this is the first year where the number of people leaving Israel exceeded the number of people moving to it, 85,000 net external migration, and many of those people that Israel doesn't want to be losing. And of course, another point that an Arab friend of mine made is that the risk is that Israel is going to turn from being a liberal democracy into something that will feel more like a Arab state in which four tribes, the ultra Orthodox, the religious Zionists, the liberals and the Arabs within Israel live in completely separate silos, reading different media with totally different politics, totally different obsessions, and the country becomes increasingly religious, nationalistic and nuclear armed.

Yeah. Before we turn to Southport, a couple of sentences between 2013 and 2023, the number of countries facing attacks on civilians increased by 42% from 33 to 47. The number of countries seeing attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers increased by 57.5% from 40 to 63 between 2016 and 2023. And the number of countries seeing attacks on humanitarian aid workers more than doubled, 136% up.

Can I just finish before we go to Southport with a brief idea of what optimism could look like, because we're often being criticized for not being optimistic. So the very best case scenario, which the world needs to try to move towards, if there's any hope of a lasting ceasefire, is a technocratic administration led by Palestinians, the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Let me jump in. What do your Israelis you're talking to say about that?

Well, for the people who are close to Netanyahu's government and sympathetic towards it, total rejection.

Right. So to get there, you would have to have either a new Israeli president or some people being optimistic, say, maybe what you get is Trump saying, I can deliver a Saudi Israeli deal. I can guarantee a lot of money and security guarantees for Saudi and Israel. And in return, you will recognize a Palestinian state, right? So there's two ideas, either Netanyahu goes or Trump somehow gets into a very transactional conversation with Netanyahu.

In that if, and it's a really big if, you then would try to build an administration, which was Palestinian led with Hamas, not in the government, but consenting to what was happening and money coming in, potentially from Saudi and the US and potentially Egypt, Jordan, UAE involved in some of the technocratic bits of the administration. And then you move from the humanitarian assistance into full reconstruction.

Now, I'm only saying this because I owe it to the people who are desperately trying to get there. And I think the British government and others would desperately like to get there. Biden and Blinken desperately wanted to go there. Blinken had a whole detailed plan around how this is going to happen.

But I'm saying it, of course, sadly, very, very doubtful, because I just can't see how that's going to happen, how Hamas is going to allow that to happen, how Israel is going to allow that to happen, or why internationals would want to get involved when either Hamas or Israel can disrupt and upturn the apple cart at any moment and destroy all the investment they've put in. Yeah. So you said you were going to be optimistic and ended up being pessimistic about your optimism, which is kind of sums it up.

Now, look, finally, let's just talk a little bit about Southport. So Axel Radicabana, the young man who's now pleaded guilty to the murder of these three young girls, Elisa, Alice and Bebe in Southport. He entered a not guilty plea first time round yesterday. I think a lot of people were taken by surprise. He entered a guilty plea. He'll be sentenced on Thursday. And Keir Starmer has immediately announced a full public inquiry. The reasons, I think, driving that, other than the absolute horror and that led to the riots that we talked about a lot at the time, is the fact that I think we're looking at yet another of these failures of the state situations in that this young man was known to virtually every aspect of the services of the state that relate to young people and the problems that they might be causing to themselves and more importantly to others.

So kicked out of school for possession of a knife, mental health services aware of his obsession with violence, police aware, social services aware and three times reported to prevent the counter-terrorism body. Now, Keir Starmer was given a pretty hard time. I caught the end of his part of his press conference after he made this very long statement about why he felt there was a need for an inquiry. He continued to say they didn't need the similar national inquiry in relation to the the rape gangs and the grooming gangs that we talked about before because he thought that could be done locally. But there was such an interest in what led to this or if you like what led to this not being prevented.

And I think a lot of it in the end is, it reminded me a little bit of, I don't know if you remember, one of the things that sort of shot catapulted Tony Blair to political fame, for want of a better word, was his response as shadow Home Secretary to the murder of James Bulger, a young boy who was murdered by two kids in Liverpool and in Merseyside. And what Keir Starmer essentially was saying is this is about more than this case. This is about what we expect from the state. This is about young people and how they develop. It is about community and integration and so forth.

But and also if you remember that the hate that Elon Musk has towards Keir Starmer seemed really to be fired by what happened in the South Port. He was also very clear that he felt that a lot of this was about what young people are consuming on social media. He talked about the access to videos of violence that you get again and again and again, many of which never get taken down. So he basically was saying this is a failure of the state. We've got to look at every aspect of what went wrong. And he was essentially saying, you know, as often is said when these inquiries are set up, they've got to look everywhere or whatever they come up with, provided it's not crazy, we've got to do it.

Is this a sort of UK equivalent to these American school shootings? I mean, when you describe him, you know, he's consuming sort of weird propaganda and violence stuff. And he's into Hitler and Genghis Khan, and he threatens people. I mean, it feels like the sort of backstory of these horrible cases that happened so much in the US. I mean, you know, hundreds of them, of young men of about that age going in and pulling out their guns and just shooting lots of people. Well, of course, he'd been expelled from school.

And it turned out that prior to this, he had been, one of his previous thoughts was that he was going to go and do this at his old school. So I guess there will be those kind of comparisons. I mean, I think it's very hard to talk about this without knowing all of the kind of facts and that presumably will now emerge. People were expecting it all to emerge during the trial. But of course, now the trial is going to go straight to sentencing.

But from a public policy point of view, I'm just trying to think about this as somebody who was the minister responsible for not just prison, but sort of probation and trying to manage these kinds of risks. I guess that in the US, the conclusion for many people has been that it's very, very difficult to fully anticipate and stop these things. And the biggest problem in the US is people have access to guns. And that if they didn't have guns, they wouldn't be able to kill so many people.

I mean, I agree, it sounds like a lot of things got dropped in this case. But I guess in the US examples, often, you don't really find out until after the event. That's when you get onto their hard drives and into their libraries, and the stories start emerging. And I suppose another problem for the state, maybe that I don't know whether this is true, but what if there were thousands of young men who have extremely unpleasant violent fantasies and get into Hitler and Genghis Khan? And how does one deal with them? And what sort of protections are people suggesting could have been put around him? Are they suggesting he should have been arrested, tailed?

I mean, what practically do you do to stop this? And of course, what will happen, particularly now in the context of a public inquiry, is that how this situation has ended is what will then cast a light on everything that happened before that. And as you say, are we saying that every time we think somebody might be becoming obsessed with violence, might have harmful designs upon other people, that somehow they have to be locked up, they have to be hospitalized, they have to be given... And then you're into the capacity of the state to do that kind of thing anyway.

So I think this is going to be a really big moment. Obviously, there's a politics attached to this as well. Because if you remember at the time, Nigel Farage was saying there's a cover up, that they know more than they're saying. Well, of course, they probably did. However, they were being governed by laws of contempt. And I think this is where the sort of pace of modern media and the pace of modern change does make life so much, much more difficult for people who are actually tackling law enforcement at the front line.

And it also connects to something which is very much about our politics, which is we want to be in a 100% security, zero risk environment. And of course, in practice, government is, because of limited resources, because of many things that perpetually making decisions, you know, when I was prisons minister, we were perpetually releasing people from jail who'd done horrendous offenses and taking the risk that they might offend again, couldn't keep them, didn't keep them locked up for their whole lives.

And if we're moving into an environment in which the public really wants 100% security, no risk at all, that has huge impacts on many, many things on basic idea of liberty, freedoms, the amount of surveillance the state puts around you, the way that prison works, the way that sentences work. I mean, everything becomes challenging.

Actually, you know, there is a sort of slight echo of that, isn't there, in the conversation about whether one's going to try to take the risk of allowing a Palestinian administration to reemerge again in Gaza?

So that was a fairly gloomy episode, Roy. I'm afraid it was a pretty gloomy episode. But I'd also want to pay tribute to just how impressive the people are who are still trying to push for peace in Gaza. And I think they're completely right to do so.

It's all very well for people like me to sit there and point out that it's all impossible and there are 58 problems. Their response to that is, well, we've got to do something. And at least they're still pushing. Yeah, we've got to keep doing that. See you soon. Bye-bye.

Here is that clip from our miniseries on Trump's insurrection.

And these senators are being kind of ushered out through a very narrow corridor. And one of them says we were 20 feet away from the rioters. If the rioters had just looked the other way and seen that a whole bunch of senators were coming out, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what could have happened to Mike Pence?

And I think it is important to point out that Donald Trump was getting these reports and did not care.

The Senate has been evacuated at 2.18pm. Nancy Pelosi is also pulled out of her chair by the Capitol Police and taken off the podium and taken to a safe location at Fort McNair in southwest Washington. She originally tried to stay. She didn't want to leave the building. But because of security, she had to get out of there.

One of the Democratic members of the Congress at this point, as they realize that the rioters are starting to breach their area, one of the members, Democratic members of Congress, yells down to the Republicans, this is because of you.

And the members are getting texts. This is how they know that things are bad, because they're getting texts from their family saying, what are you doing there? Why haven't you left? Are you safe? But they haven't got a television. They're not watching it. They're trying to get on with the business of the day.

I mean, it's this surreal. I keep thinking how surreal it was that inside the chambers, they're trying to do business as usual. And feet away, the rioters are there saying that they want to have some of these people hung and that they want to overturn the election result.

So then a few minutes after that, the House floor is evacuated, literally in front of the rioters. The police manage again to secure a very narrow passageway through the rioters to get them out. And one member afterwards says, I could look in the eyes of those officers and I saw the fear. They knew that the officers were outnumbered.

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