Has Donald Trump totally unravelled? | The News Agents

We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us. Donald Trump's comments get ever more infuriated by Zelensky. You know what? He's jealous of the guy because he knows deep down he's 100 times the man he'll ever be. You know, with Trump, always assume the pettiest, most vain, most pathetic, most wriggling bag of urges and instincts that you can. And you're probably close there. He can now show, without embarrassment, his admiration for Vladimir Putin. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. Mr President, have you agreed to a trilateral meeting with President Putin and Xi to talk about Ukraine? No, but I would do it. Not so much for Ukraine, because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much. And the same thing with China. Yeah, Russia has been just fine. Hasn't been doing that much. Apart from the Shahed drones, the ballistic missiles, the attacks on civilian infrastructure, the attack on civilians, the hundreds of thousands without power, the millions left traumatised. No, Russia really hasn't been doing that much. For the last two years, it's felt that in public at least, European countries, including our own, have been telling ourselves what we wanted to hear. of pretending that Trump was, in fact, in a place he wasn't. Is that dance possible any longer? Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And Donald Trump's comments on Ukraine get ever more angry, ever more infuriated by Zelensky. and his support for Vladimir Putin seems to get ever warmer ever nicer no Russia hasn't been doing much it's a good country they're very nice to deal with well when you're doing Mr President exactly what Russia wants it's not surprising that Vladimir Putin is playing you with kid gloves because he's getting everything that he ever wanted and I think the question as you say Lewis for european leaders is okay what are you going to do now because it seems that you can't rely on america whether that be in terms of give the intelligence sharing access to the Starlink satellites that allow the ukrainians to put up some kind of protection against the ballistic missiles that are coming in every night uh from russia and you know the options are limited but we do hold an awful lot of russian money in banks in brussels and places like that are you going to release that to help the Ukrainian war effort we should talk about that John we should talk about the different options that might be uh available but you know we should just take a second to correct the president not for the first time about the historical record and when i said historical record i'm not just talking about the fact that hardly bears repeating but just for the sake of it that Russia is the aggression nation here it's been an aggressive nation since 2014 since 2014 for the best part of 12 years it hasn't respected Ukraine's sovereign borders or its right of self-determination that's the obvious first invasion of Crimea here followed by the full-scale invasion in 2022 but just in the last 24 hours let's take the last 24 hours Trump says they haven't done much in the last 24 hours 14 people have been killed 71 people have been injured 12 count them 12 Ukrainian regions have been with power outages or suffering from power outages as the sort of autumn and winter descends and just to go into some of the details because like we talk about these numbers as if they're sort of just sort of almost sort of punctuation of kind of daily European life but just to sort of drill into a little bit more in Kharkiv six people were killed when a Russian drone struck a public park public park not a not a weapons factory or or a barracks or a military installation a park six people killed the president says not a lot victims included young kids among them a one-year-old girl in a push chair several other children were wounded in Kiev itself three people were killed in an overnight strike on a warehouse facility in the Kyiv region two people were killed and eight injured in an attack on a factory and Kherson 18 were injured including a child when russian forces attacked 36 villages and towns and And on and on it goes. And that includes 165 drones and other aerial weapons with the Ukrainians shooting down or suppressing 115, right? That's 24 hours. That's 24 hours in this war that has gone on for longer than the First World War that the president, out of willful ignorance, because let's be clear, that's what it is. It's willful ignorance. He does not know and he does not care to know the true picture of the humanitarian tragedy, the slaughter that russia has inflicted on ukraine because it suits his paranoid fantasies to think otherwise well just listen to him just listen to the anger with which he talks about ukraine which let's remember is the victim in all of this it didn't start a war with russia russia launched an invasion of ukraine back in 2022 you know what we've given a lot to ukraine they've given nothing to us. Remember that. We've given hundreds of billions of dollars. I gave the javelins to Ukraine when he knocked out. That was me. Obama gave him pillows. You know the expression? Obama gave him sheets and pillows. Trump gave him the javelins. So don't tell me about Ukraine. We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given us nothing. What is Ukraine meant to have given the United States of America when a sovereign nation which wants to have closer relations with the West gets invaded by an autocratic tyrannical regime in Moscow that wants to destroy a sovereign nation as recognized by the United Nations and it was only a matter of weeks ago I mean literally a few weeks that Donald Trump signed the law that Congress passed calling for sanctions against Russia bipartisan effort by the way a bipartisan Republican and Democrat it was it was named it was named after Lindsey Graham because the Republican senator from South Carolina who died a few months ago and it was named after him because it was a an an effort to stop Russia being rewarded for its war effort and its invasion of Ukraine Donald Trump signed that it was also about hitting the Russian economy so that it wouldn't be able to wage war and what does Donald Trump decide to do he decides to buy Russian diesel in a flawed and pathetic attempt to bring down the price of diesel in the U.S. for truckers and farmers it's made no difference but it has helped Vladimir Putin Trump in kind of aggression towards Zelensky is not new I mean my theory about all this by the way isn't just and we've talked a lot about the geopolitics of it and how it feeds into Trump you do your theory I'm going to do mine well Trump's you know we've talked before how Trump you know right we talked last week about how Trump's sort of view his sort of law of the jungle view of international relations simply is that if you're weak you basically get bullied by the big boys and he he finds it offensive almost that that's me which doesn't just apply to his view of international relations it literally goes back to his view of Manhattan real estate right like all of that but I think it is there's something else to it as well I've always believed that fundamentally you know Trump is deeply jealous of Zelensky you know as a person i think he recognizes in Zelensky perhaps the one person in the western hemisphere in in the western cultural political world who can rival him for attention not just an adulation obviously i mean he's adulated far more than Trump which will also sort of stick in his craw so i think you know there's lots of things going on here but i've always thought on some fundamental level you know with Trump always assume the pettiest most vain most pathetic most wriggling bag of urges and instincts that you can and you're probably close there and to me you know we can sit and talk about the geopolitics all day long but you know what he's jealous of the guy because he knows deep down he's 100 times the man he'll ever be it's so funny that when Donald Trump returned to the White House one of his first acts this is in you know when he won the election in 2016 was to restore the bust of Churchill by Jacob Epstein to you know so that it would be sit proudly in the Oval Office and the fact of the matter is in this conflict you know Zelensky is Churchill and yet Donald Trump Donald Trump doesn't want to hear that he doesn't he doesn't want to be Roosevelt either no he could be he could be and he just doesn't want to do any of the right things if there is a wrong option he's going to choose it and he's chosen Russia i was listening to the chief political commentator on Fox News no wet kind of lettuce leaf liberal him and he was talking about how Trump has got this so wrong, the cozying up to Putin is inexplicable, they can't understand it, and I think that is felt across the political divide in America and yet Donald Trump, I think, has actually finally shown his true colors and I think, yeah, partly it's about his jealousy of the attention that Zelensky is getting but I also think it's partly about he can now show without embarrassment his admiration for Vladimir Putin and I think probably one, I mean, you know not that these are great explanations, they don't show Trump in a great light, and I think he's probably eyeing the possibility of great deals for minerals and all the rest of it with Russia if there can only be a peace deal sorted out and bring Russia in from the cold, let's normalize relations, we don't give a ---- what they do in their own backyard, they want to invade Ukraine that's fine by me, but I would just like to get on some of you hold of some of your mineral trump's pressure on Zelensky isn't new and his disdain for Zelensky isn't new, obviously that was most famously vividly illustrated in the the famous showdown they had in the Oval Office last year but I think what is new is you can sort of see how this pressure that Trump is now exerting in almost every direction, you know, it's he's sort of oscillated, gone up and down in the past but over the past couple of months if you sort of take the totality of everything that he said whether it's and done whether it's as you say John you know uh vetoing the bipartisan sanctions deal cutting the diesel deal with Moscow his negotiators agreeing basically on the to buy a Russian energy firm or diesel firm and of course calling for the replacement of Zelensky himself and although the White House is denying this but it's been pretty well reported across American media you know the White House slowing down the use of the Starlink network which has literally let's be let's be clear you know Trump's got blood on his hands on that score if that's true because it's basically prevented the Ukrainians from shooting down as many Russian drones as they might have been able to if they've been given the full it goes back to your park it goes back to the attack on your park yeah the fact of the matter is that a week ago two weeks ago the Ukrainians would have had the intelligence and the wherewithal to be able to kind of foresee when an attack was coming and where it was coming exactly so i think if we sort of draw the pieces together what we can sort of say is that there does seem to have been for whatever reason a psychological and political shift possibly from Trump himself who has decided and again there's quite a lot of reporting in American media about this he keeps apparently saying to Zelensky look there's lots of money for everyone to be made here to be made here you know if only you could give up on these petty obsessions about these territories you know who's even heard them at the end and you know Luhansk, Donetsk, where the hell are they like you know we can all have peace you can stop the slaughter which i think trump clearly does like he does think the slaughter is pointless and he's always been very consistent about that and i sort of believe him that he believes that but ultimately that there are mercantilist commercial reasons why everybody putin trump and um zelensky or the u.s can all make money but of course what trump doesn't understand because he again he doesn't care to understand which is that putin's not in this war to make money no he doesn't care about money he's got all the riches he could ever need he knows you know he's only ever leaving the kremlin in a body bag one way or the other you know like whether it's whether it's whether it's because he sort of dies an old man in there like Stalin, or before all he's taken out and shot in Red Square, right? This isn't about money. This is about glory, and it's about history, and a man who believes, like so many of his predecessors in the Kremlin, that he's got the push and wind of history at his back. And he doesn't care about money. He wants glory, and he wants to destroy permanently Ukraine, and who knows what after that. But again, Trump doesn't care to understand all of that because it just doesn't fit his worldview, and he's too ignorant to be educated about it. So Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, has been pushing that these... monies seized by the European Union, by European nations when the invasion took place, should be funnelled towards Ukraine so that they can buy the weaponry and put in place the defensive mechanisms to protect the citizens of that country. And it's some $200 billion, I think, roughly, that is being held largely in a bank in Belgium. And until now, Britain has said it will act and release the funds that britain holds but it would only do so if the eu did it at the same time and i wonder whether we've now reached a situation where trump has come out so clearly in the past week in support of russia that actually the european union is galvanized to act because it senses this increased vulnerability for ukraine now i mean to be fair i mean europe clearly does have to seriously think about these options and the belgians have been dragging their feet because a huge amount of this money is located in belgian banks and so on and and as ever even this quite minor thing about taking these russian assets sort of shows europe's geopolitical weakness because as ever there's no there's no universal agreement when you need it but clearly these discussions now do have to happen not least because of again a lot of reporting about this in the u.s which is what might be the sort of grand division of what happens next i mean So Trump's special emissary, Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, I think he's dialing in remotely, are meeting with the Ukrainians and some of the Nordic states in Oslo this week, I think today. Then they're off to St. Petersburg to meet with the Russian government. And so what's going to go on there? What's going to be traded away? What's going to be discussed? Obviously, not the Ukrainians in the room, not the Europeans in the room either. And there's all of these rumors as well about a potential... You mentioned, we were talking about the Second World War comparisons. a potential three-way meeting at some point over the next few months between Trump, Xi of China, and Putin. A sort of modern-day Yalta, where they basically, Ukraine is sort of, they basically sort of divvy up the world in a kind of like, we're going to sort out all of these different conflicts. And Ukraine is simply one conflict among many, that these three great powers can try and arrest. And of course, the Europeans, and let alone the Ukrainians, wouldn't be part of any of that so that return that that's going to be quite scary right and that is something that Europeans have got to take seriously i suppose in trump's what trump might say and the white house might say is that like you can sort of see you know what trump's kind of doing at the moment you could say he's sort of doing what the europeans did after the invasion of ukraine right because what did angela merkel do and others after 2014 yeah there were some sanctions and whatever but the Nord Stream pipeline too they tried to get that going they basically The Merkel argument was that we'll bring Russia back in. We'll try and reintegrate them into the global economy and that will sort them out. And of course, that didn't work. And Trump, who is probably not particularly cognizant of all of that, is basically doing, it seems to be, the same thing over again. And once again, fatally misunderstanding Putin. But then again, I don't know if any of his rallies or anything to go by at the moment. I mean, again, we sit here trying to impose logic. It is just, I mean, even by his standards, I think we can agree. It's gone batshit. It's gone batshit. Just listen to this. The Democrats are the party of Abdul Mohammed al-Sayed. You know, he got very upset because I called him Mohammed. I just felt like it. Somebody said, how did you do that? I said, I'm the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want. And then they sent me his full name. And actually, his middle name is Mohammed. You can't believe it. One good thing, if you call somebody from that part of the world Mohammed, you're about 65% sure to get it right. So if you have any problem with names, just call the guy Mohammed. you'll probably be right i mean has i mean i don't honestly i don't know where you where do you start well it's very easy isn't it you just say i mean like it's absolutely dripping in racism like most casual racism i mean just i mean well i i don't think in America, look, I mean race has always obviously been a cardinal feature the original sin of American politics, but I don't think you know, you'd have to go back to the Jim Crow era to find a party so suffused and dripping with and celebrating of just the most sort of casual, ordinary racism as if it's the most ordinary thing in the world and cheering it. I mean, it's always been below the surface in American politics for a long time, but there can be no doubt, right? Trump has just brought it to the top and I think it's going to be a stain on the Republican Party for a long time to come. Well, there are a lot of stains that are going to be very hard to wash out from Trump's term. I mean, Abdul Al-Sayed is from Michigan. His other obsession is Minnesota, which has got a very high Somali population, uh, and this is what he had to say about them: you go up to Minnesota, number one place in the entire country for the sale of Mercedes-Benz, think of it and Somalis buy, they come here with low IQs and no money and they get rich. Do we feel, do we feel stupid? But you know what our fraud division is getting them all, getting them all, they come here with low IQs, I mean That again, what basis is there for any of this? What basis is there for kind of, they've all got Mercedes cars? Well, if they're making money and they're doing it properly, then that is the American dream that you come and you are poor and you make money and you become rich. That is what American idealism was always about, by their efforts and your hard work. But of course, Donald Trump's not saying that. He's saying they're only getting rich because they're robbers and thieves and baddens. It's just incredible. Do you remember what, just as a marker of how much politics has changed, do you remember what George W. Bush did the day after 9/11? Yeah, he went to a mosque. He went to a mosque. Yeah. I mean, that's what, that's 25 years ago. I mean, can you imagine? Can you imagine what Trump would, I mean, Trump would actually, I mean, I don't think it's unthinkable that in the event of such an attack now that was blamed or was the responsibility of Islamic terrorists. you know it's entirely possible Trump would be the one sending his paramilitaries into mosques or at the very least turning a blind eye, I don't think that is beyond the possibility at all, Lewis I think something else is going on and I just think you know it needs to be said which is that I think that what we are seeing from Donald Trump now is even more erratic even more irascible even more unpredictable even more dare I say obnoxious and it's in inverse proportion to his personal approval ratings and what we've seen now is his lowest approval ratings ever at 31, I mean that is worse than it was after January the 6th 2021 and the lower he tried to orchestrate a coup when he tried to orchestrate a coup and so what you've got now is the more unpopular he becomes the more fragile and the more unpredictable he becomes and so the stuff you're hearing from him is getting worse and I think for the Republicans if they think this is going to help them in the midterms all the evidence is pointing in the opposite direction again just find that I mean we get so used to all this stuff right the way he's talking about American citizens right he's not just talking he's not talking about yeah foreigners or talking about Somalia which would have been pretty unusual for an American president to ride one country so much or where He's talking or even Muslims. He's talking about Americans. Right. And when we did that reporting from Minnesota earlier in the year, we spent quite a bit of time with, you know, the Somalian community in Minneapolis. And I remember saying to them, like, how's it like? These are like young kids, right? They're like they're 16 or 17 or 18. So, you know, and they're American citizens. They're born in America. How does it feel to have your president, your head of state? You know, they're equivalent of the king, the person in the Constitution who, yeah, obviously, American president is more political than our head of state. But on some level, and this is a difference with Trump compared to everything that came before, or certainly in modern history, you know, all other previous American presidents in the modern period, at least to some extent, would rhetorically play the game of being a uniter, even if someone like Nixon or Reagan or whatever could be a bit more subtle. But generally speaking, they'd say we're all one people. That's our motto. Out of many, one. E pluribus unum, right? This is a guy who instead basically says, and this is what is distinctive about America, about Trump and the Trump era, there's an in-group and there's an out-group. it's a politics of friends and enemies and i don't care whether you're american or not in fact it's more of a problem that you're american you shouldn't be american and i remember saying to these kids like how does that make you feel and what was actually extraordinary about it and what was actually really sad about it is it sort of just washed over them it actually didn't strike them as being particularly unusual because of course why would it because they have grown up in the era where that politics is a normal politics and where trump is a normal president and actually having a president i think actually they one of them even sort of said something to be like they're probably if they had someone come along and try and do the whole unity thing we're one country blah they almost wouldn't trust it they almost wouldn't believe it because they've lived in this era of sort of as i say friends and enemies politics which has a long pedigree and that is depressing and that will outlive trump i think well a lot of this of course has been enabled by the cowards that have surrounded trump and haven't stood up to him in a moment we'll be talking to the author of a new book called Profiles in Cowardice, all about the people who capitulated and rolled over to enable Donald Trump. Now time to thank our partner HSBC UK. So what actually makes a bank account premier? Well, an HSBC premier account gives you exclusive access to plenty of perks that make you feel extra special, including offers and rewards across travel dining shopping and experiences that sounds great but i'm particularly intrigued by the experiences bit yeah through premier lifestyle customers can now enjoy priority access and exclusive ticket allocations for major music tours sports events and theater productions nice so it's not just about what your bank account does for your money it's about the extras it can do for you too exactly everything's premier when your bank account is HSBC Premier at HSBC UK you're backed by the Current Account Switch guarantee we're joined now uh by Jacob Weisberg whose book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Greed and collusion in the Trump era and Jacob before we get into the detail of the book i mean what was the thinking behind it because i think it was framed by an earlier book written by John F. Kennedy, which was Profiles in Courage. Yes, that's a famous book to most Americans. And the phrase Profiles in Courage is used, usually ironically, to describe someone who isn't in the ordinary course of politics. But John, the idea of this book is that we're not in the ordinary course of politics. We have a president in the United States who's acting more like a dictator and trying to exercise powers that don't belong to the presidency. And that's what demands, I think, a different level of response, a different level of resistance. And it seemed to me that in Trump 2, as opposed to Trump 1, we weren't seeing it. You know, in Trump 1, there was all kinds of resistance inside and outside the administration. And in Trump 2, it's been much, much less. Yeah, you said history didn't repeat itself in the way that Marx said it did. We got a demagogic farce in the first term and a dictatorial tragedy in the second. Why do you think it is so different? Because I was there throughout the first term, and it was obvious that there were those people in the White House who were kind of acting as a brake on some of Trump's impulses. And, you know, ultimately, the vice president stopped him from trying to, you know, cheat the electorate. Why different this time around? I think Trump was quite surprised by his own election in 2016. And he certainly wasn't prepared. And he deferred to the old Republican Party in a lot of his appointments and picking his cabinets. He didn't have people picked out. And he went to the establishment. And that establishment, actually, in many cases, when push came to shove, turned out to be quite responsible and quite principled. Trump wanted to do many, if not most of the things that he did in the second term in the first term. He wanted to invade Venezuela. He was quite prone to go to war with Iran. And really, he was prevented, I think, by people on the inside, who I didn't give enough credit to at the time, who through a combination of bureaucratic maneuvering, and sometimes just outright resistance or resignation or demanding that they be fired, not going along, slowed him down a lot. Yeah, you make a very interesting point. You say that if you look at history, examples of physical courage abound. If you look for moral courage, harder to find. Yeah, you know, John F. Kennedy himself was a prime example of that because he was a hero in the Second World War. There's the famous story, famous to all Americans, of PT-109, which was his boat that was torpedoed in the South Pacific. And he saved his co-sailors and got them rescued. And he was undoubtedly a man of physical courage. but when he wrote this book, I think he was trying to give himself moral courage. You know, he didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism. He didn't stand up at the outset of the civil rights movement. I think he was quite weak, and he thought, well, if I look back through history at senators who did stand on principle, whatever those principles were, maybe I can do better. And I think Kennedy did do better as president. I think he actually gave himself a kind of moral courage so let's talk about the book because what you've done is you've picked on a number of people who you think have shown themselves to be sort of spineless amoebas in the face of Donald Trump in this second term and have kind of i think your argument would be betrayed their principles and just kind of gone along for an easy life and i've got to say i read the book and i enjoyed it but i found myself thinking what would i have done differently when you know you let's take chapter to one you talk about Brad Carp who was the head of the law firm storied New York law law firm Paul Weiss which had a very strong reputation as a sort of bastion of kind of liberalism if you like and yet when Donald Trump came and it started to extort money out of them you know Brad Carp the chief executive folded and surrendered i mean couldn't you argue there that wasn't cowardice that was pragmatism because he wanted to save the livelihoods of all the employees who felt, maybe wrongly, maybe rightly, that the whole company could go under if you picked a fight with a president who was in his pomp. Yes. Well, first of all, I do want people reading the book to put themselves in the shoes of someone like Brad Carr, because I don't pretend for a second that it's an easy decision. Far from it. You know, Trump put the screws to him and with great surprise, essentially said, I'm going to ban your law firm. The executive order which Trump issued said that the lawyers from this firm couldn't enter government buildings. You can't practice law if you can't enter government buildings. Now, it was unconstitutional, and the firms that challenged comparable orders got injunctions or got them quickly overturned. But imagine yourself in that situation. So I do have sympathy, but I think there are some fundamental principles in any profession, whatever you think. And the rule of law and the Constitution are the fundamentals of the American practice of law, the idea that anyone has the right to a lawyer. That was the principle Trump was attacking. He came after this firm because he didn't like some of the clients that they'd represented. And I think it was incumbent on them to stand on that. Now, a year and a bit later, we can look back and say, the firms that resisted did fine. They didn't go out of business. They're generally thriving. And Paul Weiss, I think, has suffered. Their business is probably all right, but very many of their most prominent lawyers have left. There's a kind of firm in exile that's been joined by 25 or 30 or 40 of their top lawyers. And their reputation is gone. I mean, their reputation as a firm that stands for a set of values. So I wonder even now if Brad Garbus doing it again would make a different decision. Yeah, I know. But that's that's isn't that the kind of glory of 2020 hindsight that you can say, OK, well, the other firms did. But when they were caught in the crosshairs, I didn't read it and think, God, you're a coward. You're spineless. I thought you're trying to do a deal with a monster who's coming after you, who's got the whole machinery of government behind him. And you're trying to, you know, I knew someone who was involved in a different law firm with negotiation. and it's kind of you know yeah they'll do some pro bono work but it's on a mutually agreed basis and the guy said to me look if we don't agree to it we're not going to do it so it's slightly meaningless what we've done we've got Trump off our back and with and yeah we've done a deal with him but we're not going to be providing endless amounts of uh free legal work for him for his conservative causes because it's by mutual agreement and he thinks you know that was another way of approaching it yeah some of them thought let's just appease him but we do have a kind of controlled experiment because there were firms that stood up and they, I think, understood what was at stake and made the right decisions. But, you know, again, I would never want to be in this position. And Brad Carr talked to me for the book, and I think I can understand very well what that moment was. Where I think he misjudged the threat was he saw it as what he called an existential threat. That is, he thought this firm with its history, its enormous scale, could go out of business, I think more plausibly, they might have lost some clients and taken a hit to their incomes. And part of what's happened in corporate law in America is the incomes that these top firms are much more like incomes in finance or the top of the sports leagues. I mean, the average attorney at Paul Weiss makes something like $8 million a year. Some of them make $25 or $30 million a year. And would it have been so catastrophic if their incomes had been halved for a few years but they kept the reputation of the firm okay so let's move from a lawyer to the top judge in the United States of America and you do a chapter on uh John Roberts who is the kind of senior juror on the Supreme Court that body of nine men and women that essentially have the most power in America i think of anyone under the constitutional arrangements what is the argument that he is a coward? The argument is that he's avoided a confrontation with Donald Trump on fundamental constitutional principles. So in so many cases, such as the birthright citizenship case, you know, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution says anyone born in the United States is a citizen. This is one of the things that Donald Trump has said, I don't like it, doesn't matter, I'm going to find a different way of reading it. And the Supreme Court has finally edged towards supporting what the Constitution says, but it spent over a year deferring it. It's a kind of complicated procedure, but rather... They ended up in the right place. They ended up in the right place, but with a lot of doubt and uncertainty that shouldn't have been there for a long time. And I think with Roberts, I think it's a bit more complicated. I think he has an agenda of his own. I don't think he likes Donald Trump very much, but he very much believes in a stronger executive branch. And he's taken the opportunity of the Trump presidency to advance a lot of his own agenda, pretending as it were that the president is someone other than Donald Trump. I was going to make that exact same argument to you. He believes in, you know, unitary executive theory, if we're giving it its fancy name, which one of the great jurists on the Supreme Court, you know, Antonin Scalia, was an absolute proponent of back in the day. And he's following that up. I don't see, I can see that you disagree with his interpretation of jurisprudence and whatever else i don't see that he's a coward for acting the way that he's doing he's doing what he wanted to do and on certain things that he has ruled in favor of trump and in certain things you know trump's furious about that they're ruling on mail-in ballots he's furious about what they did to the tariffs policy they have they have held trump to account and have interpreted the constitution according to what they believe is right yeah There's a legitimate political difference and legitimate political opinions, even if I don't agree with them. But I also think there's been an extra step that has empowered Trump in some of his abuse of power. And I'll point to the decision which I think has been the most dangerous, which was the presidential immunity decision. Right before Trump was elected, John Roberts writing the majority opinion threw out all of the ongoing cases that were investigating January 6th. We had a special prosecutor trying to hold Trump to account for trying to reverse the results of the election. And John Roberts wrote a decision that created such a wide space of presidential immunity that it's essentially now impossible to imagine a president being held accountable for criminality except through impeachment, which has become impossible. You could say you could make an argument for the decision. I think it's an extreme and radical decision. But to do that at that time has given Trump such impunity and the unprecedented corruption we've seen around his administration has been empowered by that because he can't be prosecuted for it realistically ever after he leaves office or at any point in the future. But wasn't Roberts making a judgment that was not, I mean, if I'm right in my recollection of it, so, you know, I've followed it pretty closely at the time. It doesn't talk about Donald Trump. It talks about the president and the presidency and not talking about Donald Trump and what he's got immunity from. And this will apply to other presidents who come in after Donald Trump, assuming the 22nd Amendment still holds and Donald Trump doesn't kind of go for another term. And that was the view of the conservative jurors, I've got a six to three majority, that that was the right legal approach to take. Yeah, I mean, look, the case in question was the case against Donald Trump. So it wasn't an abstraction. He was throwing out that case or making it effectively impossible to pursue it. But, you know, Roberts is a complicated case, and I think he has a different way of rationalizing everything he does. I don't think he even thinks about it in terms of advancing his agenda around the unitary executive. I think he sees himself protecting the Supreme Court as an institution, which is appropriately part of his role. But part of that, too, is to avoid a confrontation with the president because the power, the Supreme Court can only, it has no way to enforce its orders. It depends upon compliance. It has no army. It has no, you know, it has nothing. So I think if you look at where Roberts has challenged Trump at the margins, it's been in cases where it would be very, very difficult for Trump to defy him, because I think Roberts has been afraid that Trump might at some point simply say, make me do it. There are some examples in the book and you talk about Bezos. Yeah. And, you know, I would say probably it's a slam dunk. What has happened with him, where he was in the first term, where he is in the second term, the repositioning of The Washington Post, which he owns as well as Amazon, just before the election to say it wasn't going to support any candidate, which was a big statement from a liberal newspaper. that that one I think is clearer isn't it I mean what do you think the impulses there were was that just about look I've run a big company I want to make money my space company you know depends on Donald Trump and government contracts therefore I better suck up to him it's especially stark with Bezos because he was courageous in the first term as owner of the Washington Post but he was Trump punished him. He took an enormous government contract away from Amazon, a Pentagon cloud computing contract. It was a $10 billion contract. And Bezos held firm. I really admired him in the first term. And then in the second term, just the opposite. I mean, even before Trump was sworn in, he was reining in the Washington Post, as you say, shutting down its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, making devastating cuts to their newsroom, but also, you know, paying, let's say, an uneconomic price for the Melania Trump documentary, which ended up putting $28 million at least in Melania's pocket. And you sort of think, well, what happened? Did he just wake up one day and say, you know, this democracy thing isn't working out so well, let's try, you know, let's try dictatorship? No, I don't think so. I think he had something very particular to protect, which is his interest in space exploration. And I think by the second term, he was losing out his company, space company Blue Origin, was losing out to Elon Musk's company, SpaceX. That business depends completely, almost completely on government contracts with the Pentagon and NASA to put satellites in orbit. And this is the thing that if you look back at his biography, he's cared about most since he was a child. And I think he saw that dream jeopardized by his antagonism with Trump and decided to go along. I detect, let's just zoom out from the individuals to the book itself. I detect a streak of Puritanism in you about the way people should behave and the moral standards by which they should be judged. And isn't it the experience that if you are in public life, it's complicated. There are compromises that you have to make. You have to take, deal with the president who is there at the time. but you kind of think you know what in two years time three years time he'll be gone and hopefully it'll be someone better and then we can go back to a more normal way of operating but i can't jeopardize everything about what i'm doing in this given moment well when you have a president who tries to bully people in the way trump does it gives him a tremendous amount of power if you if you start from the premise that the only option is to accommodate him in some way and wait till it's over. I do think that's the reasoning many people have used to defend what's been an easier path. But it's interesting what you say, John, about puritanism or compromise. Compromise is the essence of politics in ordinary times and in ordinary situations. And I don't denigrate it or dislike it at all. But there's ordinary compromise and there's extraordinary compromise. And the extraordinary compromise has to do with these core principles, certainly around how American democracy operates in the Constitution. But I think for each of these institutions and professions, there's some basic things. For law firms and lawyers, I think it's the rule of law. They swear an oath to the Constitution. For universities, I think it's academic freedom and academic independence. And it's because Trump has showed up and tried to dictate terms with powers that don't belong to him, to tell universities what to teach, who to hire, whether to allow protests on campus, to law firms to say who I think it's acceptable to represent, to private businesses to, it's extraordinary, demand stakes in private companies for the government. He's done this because he can. And conservative business people who hate the idea of any kind of socialism, any kind of government ownership of private businesses have said, well, this is the cost of doing business now in Washington, turning a blind eye to the kind of corruption we've seen. I think what they're compromising on is what you shouldn't ever compromise on, which is the core principles under which you operate and that have enabled your success. Are you an optimist that when Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029, that America snaps back to a more normal way of doing things? Or is this the new normal? Somewhere in between. I'm an optimist by temperament, but I don't think there's any snapping back. I certainly don't think there is a snapping back in international affairs, because if you think about Britain or other countries that are our traditional allies, how can they count on the stability having been through what they've just been through twice in two versions of it? How do they know that America will not return to a kind of Trump politics? and when it comes to... Well, let me just stop you there. I mean, let me just interrupt you there because, you know, you've written about a number of American individuals who've shown cowardice. Do you think that Keir Starmer, our last prime minister, showed cowardice in the face of Donald Trump by, you know, a second state visit and not criticizing and standing back and all the rest of it? Well, you know, with... No, I don't. I mean, given the relative power of Britain and also, I think, you know, appeasing Trump with trinkets, you know, another invitation to the palace is probably quite a good idea. On the other hand, I really admire Mark Carney, who has drawn a line, or Volodymyr Zelensky, who has drawn a line, said, we want the United States as an ally. We're prepared to do business to you and talk to you and negotiate. But there are certain things we can't compromise. The thing you can't compromise if you're a world leader is sovereignty. And I think it's Trump's talk about, cavalier talk about how Canada should be part of the United States and the 51st state, you know, that I think has provoked Mark Carney, who's, you know, not a, someone who understands politics and is not a provocateur by nature, to say, no, this is where I stand. And he's had the political support of the country. But, you know, again, it's a position I wouldn't want to be in, to be on the burner right now and figure out how to negotiate Trump. As Trump gets weaker, more lashing out more in unpredictable ways. You know, you don't want to rise to the bait. You want to think about your country's long-term interests. The long-term interest is in restoring and maintaining the alliance with the United States, and I think vice versa. But it's in a dangerous spot right now. Jacob Weisberg, thank you so much. John, it's a pleasure talking to you. You know, the first one is so simple. So what the Times does, and they always show the first question. Well the first is easy. Second, first four or five are pretty easy, real easy. The first one is they show you a lion a bear a snake and a giraffe and they say which one's the giraffe okay so what the so what the fakers back there do they show that as and everyone thinks oh none of those people could get close to getting a perfect score but i got it three times i got a perfect score that is donald trump talking about his unrivaled cognitive abilities i mean he can tell the difference between a lion and a snake arguably correct Volodymyr Zelensky is the lion and we know who the snake is i'm only surprised given some of the content of his recent speeches he didn't start talking about how sexy he found the giraffe given mainly he's not he mainly now spends quite a lot of each speech talking about how attractive he finds the male senatorial candidates for whom he's campaigning talking about how great their bodies or their asses are, have you noticed this, um yes I have, it is slightly troubling, I mean you know, I mean look, fair play, it's no problem and maybe Donald Trump's on a journey we just don't know, yes no I mean for God's sake we know that the music he loves to come on stage to his YMCA, I mean you know just saying that's putting it out there, imagine how devastated most of America's gay community would be if they discovered that the gay president the first gay president they'd always longed for was in fact Donald Trump once again confounding people's expectations, well if he hasn't outed himself, we'll be in the in the states for the midterm elections full coverage here on the news agents throughout the week, it's in guys 10 days time, 12 days time, it's coming up, no it's two weeks today, it's two weeks today until the midterms and we will be there for that full coverage, we'll see you then and tomorrow, the News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK opening up a world of opportunity, this has been a global production