Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Is Donald Trump the most corrupt president we have ever had?
Trump's corruption is about flooding the zone. There's so much of it going on that one can barely keep up.
It's the scale of it that I think is making people feel they just don't know how to handle it. The corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront.
As usual with Trump, any single one of these things... would have been enough to lead to the resignation of a leader in any other country.
He really genuinely doesn't seem to care how anything looks.
He will brazen all of it out. And the challenge to Americans is, are you prepared to change your constitution?
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Chapter 2: Is Donald Trump the most corrupt president in US history?
Because if you keep this constitution going, you're on the high road to tyranny and corruption. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings clarity and a bit more control.
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Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. Welcome to the Restless Polities.
I'm Alistair Campbell. I'm with me, Rory Stewart. Today, we are going to begin with a really big story, which is, is President Trump the most corrupt president ever?
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Chapter 3: What unique mechanisms enable Trump's corruption?
This is a case called McDonald. So Trump, on the basis that he gets famously a plane worth $400 million, from Qatar. A UAE fund, very close to the UAE government, invests $2 billion in crypto associated with Trump, and it appears in return then gets permits to get US chips, the best Nvidia chips in the world. You have your whole story around the Board of Peace
where you're paying a billion dollars for membership and where Trump has personal perpetual control for his whole life over this stuff. You've got the amazing actions against media companies and universities in the US where he sues people. And it has a double whammy. One of them is he sues and they pay him.
So just to make the law case go away, you get big American media companies just writing him checks for $17, $18 million. And in the future, being very, very careful to do anything that might annoy him, because he's suing the BBC at the moment.
And then you have all the other things that are going on, which we haven't talked about, which are the incredible sums of money that his children are making. Now, his children are not that able.
Chapter 4: What challenges does Gen Z face in today's political climate?
It's very difficult to quite understand how one of his sons has taken a fund which was worth about $300 million. a year ago that is now worth, you know, 1.3 billion. If you invested your money in his fund, you quadrupled your money.
Just on not very able, our US colleague, Mr. Scaramucci, describes them as dumb as a rock. The extraordinary thing about this, of course, and this is what gets to your point about when you've gone through 40, 50, 60 cases, you just want to go away. David Frum said in The Atlantic that the corruption story is almost just too big for people to confront.
But I think that what was extraordinary about this hiding in plain sight, Trump did an interview where he claimed, untrue, but he said, I prohibited them, my sons, from doing business in my first term. I got no credit for it. I didn't have to do that. And it's really unfair to them. I found out nobody cared. I'm allowed to.
He even made this extraordinary claim that as president, you're allowed to have one desk for president and one desk for business. Complete nonsense. And it's the scale of it that I think is making people feel They just don't know how to handle it. Crypto is a big part of it.
And of course, when you talk about the law regulation around that, he's making it, you know, crypto is just a very, very hard thing to get your head around from the kind of slow legal systems. We've got to remember as well that if we're minded to give him the benefit of the doubt, we shouldn't ever forget. But because he floods the zone, we do forget.
He is the first ever convicted felon to be president. 24 counts of falsifying accounts. And really corrupt leaders, the ones that we talked about in the kind of league table of global corruption, there isn't almost always an involvement of family, particularly sons that they want maybe to take over from them when they're done.
But I was speaking to somebody over the last couple of days who's involved in a campaign in the States for campaign reform. And he went, it was interesting, he said, the best definition of politics, of corruption in politics is the use of public office for private gain, okay? And he said, there are seven key areas you need to look at. Are they personally becoming richer?
Well, there's no doubt about that. He's already, according to Forbes, added several billion since he's been in power. Do they abuse executive power? in the pursuit of that. Are they ever involved in bribery or graft? We can come on to that. Are they ever involved in the obstruction of justice? I think you could argue that the weaponization of the Department of Justice answers that.
Are they ever involved in election misconduct? Do they pursue policies of patronage and cronyism? No doubt about that. And do they violate democratic norms? Now, I think he pretty much ticks all seven. And there's something we should put in the newsletter.
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Chapter 5: How does Trump's corruption differ from traditional forms?
He's preparing the ground for that.
The thing that Trump represents is something that's been developing in politics around the world for a very long time, but has finally reached its full culmination with Trump. And it's basically the way in which politicians and liberal democracies are now becoming awash with cash. And it's very striking when this begins.
When Truman stepped down famously, he went off on a train to live on his military pension. George Washington refused the salary. Attlee lived pretty modestly. There was basically a very strong tradition in most countries that former politicians would try to behave And it was considered a little bit shabby to try to make colossal fortunes. Now that began to change. That began to change in Britain.
So John Major made a lot of money. Tony Blair made a lot of money. And Bill Clinton made a lot of money. And President Obama's been making a lot of money. And George W. Bush's been making a lot of money. So there's been this beginning of this story of people making very large sums of money. But in the US system, I, like you, go to these funny conferences quite a lot. And these are often...
Going back in the day, I remember what they used to be. I'm talking here about the Bilderberg Commission, Trilateral, these big American conferences, which are often done by tech bros, etc. Back in the day, if I go back 25, 30 years, the politicians were much, much more important. They were on the main stage. They were speaking more. It felt more like Davos or the Munich Security Conference.
Now, basically, you see former prime ministers, senators, heads of major countries sitting in the sort of middle to back rows listening politely while the tech bros and the business people hold forth. The whole power thing has been inverted. And you've entered a world in which people can make money now, and this is what Trump is in this world, for doing very little.
I mean, it's always been true that the relationship between how much work you do and how much money you make is weird. When one of the Trump's children now makes a speech somewhere in the world, they are being paid up to a million dollars to make a speech in the Balkans. One of them was paid, I think, 150 million just to attach his name to a new crypto product.
And then the stuff that we see in the Balkans or I've seen in the Gulf, which is suddenly they're turning up and they're getting prime real estate in the center of a city to build their hotels, prime beachfronts to build their properties. Flynn, the disgraced formal national security advisor's hopeless and inept brother suddenly gets a contract to build a huge pipeline through the Balkans.
Flynn, who, by the way, Rory, is a previous recipient of the sort of money that's going to come from this weaponization fund. I think he got over a million for the alleged mistreatment of him. Just on the point you make about the president. So, you know, you're right that more modern presidents have maybe made lots of money.
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