Trump’s New World Disorder with Adam Tooze and Ivan Krastev (Transcript)

Mr. Commerce Secretary, on the one hand, I hear will be a bullion energy, and then I hear this note of menace. How would you anticipate Europeans who are not fundamentally differently wired than you reacting to this kind of mixture?

That didn’t go very well, and he went off down his track, and then I brought him back and he just point blank refuses to answer questions about Greenland and about the Fed. Can I bring you back to Greenland? No.

JON STEWART: It’s unnecessary. The Western hemisphere is vital for the United States of America. Our national security people are on it and they care about it. And I’m going to leave it to them to address with our allies, with our friends, and with everyone how they work it out.

But the Western hemisphere matters to the United States of America, and the United States of America, as I’ve just articulated, really, really matters to the world. When America shines, the world shines because they all need to make sure America is strong and powerful to take care of them, God forbid.

And so I think America and the Western hemisphere are vital to America, and I’m going to leave that to my national security people to address.

ADAM TOOZE: Right. It was this brutal kind of pulling down the roller blinds, as I’ve seen on a panel. It’s very unusual because it lays you open, right? It’s not really the most sophisticated way of just absorbing it would have been to roll with a hit and to give some kind of spiel.

JON STEWART: No, he shuts it down. You know, it’s incredible for someone to refer to themselves as the hammer and then be presented with nails and say, “Oh, no, no, no.” That’s what I saw from Lutnick was, “No, no, no, that’s not my. I defer to my colleagues in the international departments.”

The European Perspective

Now, Ivan, I want to bring you in here. You’ve been observing this for years. You are the author of the book After Europe. I’m assuming you are working as we speak on After America, the sequel to After Europe, as you watched. I’m assuming you did some of Adam’s panel in Davos and some of the other.

How much of this did you anticipate as being the kind of underlying cleavage point between America and the EU and the world order of the past 80 years? And is this a crystallizing of a moment you foresaw?

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah, listen, I developed it. It’s a moment which it’s not easy to forget from this point of view. By the way, it’s very interesting if you see West Europeans and East Europeans, how we’re reacting to this. I do believe West Europeans are shocked because they don’t understand what Trump is doing. And East Europeans, we are scared because we do.

JON STEWART: Brilliant, sir.

IVAN KRASTEV: Because we have seen this before in a certain way. This is a revolutionary moment. And he basically going. He’s overtaken. To be honest, the problem with the revolutions is that you cannot run them, they’re running you.

So at some point you don’t know what you’re doing because the speed is overtaking you. You start to radicalizing. If you’re going to ask him probably three months ago how important Greenland was, he’s not to tell you. But now he cannot stop.

And here, in my view, is the interesting story, because Europeans, and this is where I do believe Trump totally misread Europe. He said that Europe is weak and this is true, but Europe is so weak that we cannot cave up. This is the paradox.

JON STEWART: Well, now, why do you say that?

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah, because listen, Europeans, now is. When it comes to Greenland, this is very much facing your own societies. Because of course, he could have gotten. To be honest, he has been gotten Greenland. If he was quiet, if he takes time, if he was talking to the Danish. The paradox is that there was—

JON STEWART: I’m sorry, are we discussing Donald Trump still? If he was quiet and conciliatory?

IVAN KRASTEV: But exactly. But he cannot do this because in a certain way this is a very interesting story. I always believed that if he was in a movie production, he was never going to produce films, just trailers.

The Tariff Strategy

JON STEWART: That is absolutely true, Ivan. He loves the announcement, he loves the pronouncement. He does not like the maintenance and the follow through. And I think you’re beginning to see that so much of. Let’s even bring it around to sort of the central lever by which he is using coercion and that’s the tariffs.

ADAM TOOZE: Well, this is why I thought it was fair game. Yeah. Ask Lutnick, he’s tariff man.

JON STEWART: He’s tariff man. He’s the hammer. Adam, you were exactly right. But we negotiated with the EU, first of all. He threw out all the deals that had been done and renegotiated new tariff levels. Right. Everybody agreed. Everybody walks in.

Now, not even six months later, he decides, “Okay, I know we negotiated all these deals with Europe and we have our tariffs in place. I am now going to throw those over.” So at every turn, if you don’t do what I want, I am going to re-examine these negotiations.

Adam, that has to be the most. Then what is the point of anything of any treaty?

ADAM TOOZE: I mean, it’s real abusers language. The way they do it is to say, “Look, you’re getting all upset. We’re just threatening you and brutalizing you and you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to sit down afterwards and make up and then it’s all going to be okay.”

It’s literally that kind of language of serial abusive relationships. Like, you know, “I love you actually, but you know, I had a bad night and—”

JON STEWART: But he’s been taught that there is nothing he can do that makes people walk away and not give him what he wants.

ADAM TOOZE: Yeah. And so they will keep coming back. And it’s not clear. It’s really a ratchet. Right. Because China’s ended up in a really remarkably favorable tariff position. China of course pushed back and said, “This far, no further.”

I would agree with Ivan. This does seem like a moment where Europe might finally start moving down that route. They have this thing called the anti-coercion instrument, which was of course devised for China and Russia because the Europeans were worried about rare earth type moves or gas cutoffs from the Russians.

And Ursula von der Leyen, I think. No, it was Macron that said it today. Like, if we use that instrument against America, the world is topsy turvy.

The Real Divide: Demographics and Identity

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Ivan, I am very dubious that Europe will. I mean, this is part of Trump’s strategy. He believes Western Europe, the liberal Europe, you know, to Trump, France is gay. That’s his problem with all of this. Like he doesn’t like Enlightenment Europe, he likes Hungary Europe, he likes the right wing authoritarian Europe.

And in some respects, isn’t what he’s doing further weakening what we consider to be Enlightenment Europe and empowering, I won’t even say Meloni, I think he’s gone much further than that. But empowering Orban and the others. And isn’t it maybe more likely that his theater further weakens people like Macron and Starmer and strengthens the illiberal leaders?

The Greenland Miscalculation

IVAN KRASTEV: Listen, this is, I do believe it’s his major mistake because of course there is, particularly in the eastern part of Europe, people who like his anti-migration policy. As you know, Eastern Europe is not particularly the place where sexual minorities are adored.

But Greenland is different. Listen, it’s about land, it’s about territory. And here’s the problem. Most of these people on the far, on European far right, they’re nationalists, which means they know their history and they believe that the land is sacred and he has a real estate deal of land and they’re not like this.

And one of the paradoxes that if it was about any type of a war or if it was about migration, he was going to have allies and now his allies are silent. So he’s allowing, by the way, I don’t know how interested and to certain extent how skillful the liberal leaders are going to be, but it is the moment to have a new consensus on Europe.

And do you know what happened in the European Parliament when basically they decided not to ratify the trade deal that was reached six months ago. And then when the president of the Parliament said, we are standing behind Denmark and Greenland, so the mainstream parties there, members of the European Parliament from the mainstream parties went up and then suddenly, one by one, the nationalistic MPs starting to stand up again, also including the Orban people, because this is the story which he got totally wrong because he’s not a classical nationalist.

He’s not interested in history, to be honest. He’s not interested in future. And this is why it’s so difficult to have a contract with him. If somebody does not believe that future matters, you cannot have a contract with him because it’s based on the fact that there is future. And I’m not sure that Trump is interested in anything which is beyond his lifetime.

And this is why he created a difficult moment for his allies. Yes, for sure. East European countries are going to insist that we are not going to use the bazooka, that we are going to be more proportional. This is for sure. But you should have listened to the Polish Prime Minister. Tusk went very hard and listen for Poland, which is the most pro-American part.

JON STEWART: Yes.

IVAN KRASTEV: For him, basically America was defense from Russia. The way he started talking about this, it means also that he knows that his public, so the majority of the polls on these issues are going to side with Europe and not with Trump.

Trump’s Legacy Obsession

JON STEWART: Let me ask you, let me push back a second on one thing and that was, and then, Adam, I’m going to ask you, Donald Trump, when you say he’s only interested in his lifetime, I actually think it in some ways might be the opposite. I think he thinks only in terms of legacy.

Look, he puts his name like an 8-year-old on everything that he owns and he views through the prism of history this idea that I’ll be the Louisiana Purchase guy, I’ll be Seward’s Folly, I’ll get America, Alaska, I’ll get them Greenland.

I almost think he’s thinking, it’s not about that he doesn’t think past his lifetime. It’s that he doesn’t think about what we’re going to need to manage and hold on to this new world order that he’s creating. But Adam, go ahead.

ADAM TOOZE: I like that version. I mean, I think there is a neo-nationalist group within the Trump administration that is closely affiliated with the AfD and Orban and so on.

JON STEWART: No question.

ADAM TOOZE: But I would associate them more with the Millers and the Vances in the administration. I think there’s a Rubio neo-con wing, which is probably having a pretty hard time with all of this because they’re a more conventional, NATO-orientated, Atlanticist kind of side.

And then I think the President is sui generis. And I totally agree with you, Jon. What really struck me is some line about how America’s been trying to get this deal done for 150 years. President after president has wanted to buy this real estate and I want it and I want my name on it. And that is the key.

And I think it’s these differences within the Trump coalition. We’re seeing it here at Davos. I mean they’re doing some, they did an event for the Turin Shroud under the headline “the world’s first selfie was Jesus” in America’s Pavilion, which is celebrated 250 years of the United States. They got Gillian Tett, the anthropologist editor of the ex-editor of the FT, to preside over an American-hosted event.

IVAN KRASTEV: On the Turin Shroud.

ADAM TOOZE: Like there’s that element and then there’s Donald Trump really wanting to. Because I also feel Donald Trump loves, he kind of likes, he likes Scotland, he loves the glitz of Paris.

JON STEWART: Well, he likes Scotland because he has golf courses there. But if Scotland didn’t let him build, he would hate Scotland.

ADAM TOOZE: He appreciates good guilt work and he knows you can’t get it in the US and they have it in Spain, in Paris. And his mate Macron, who’s a bit of a player, actually kind of digs him, which is why he’s saying, like, you know, Donald, what’s wrong? What are you doing in Greenland? I don’t understand, my lord, but I think there is a faction in the Trump which is really down the right, the East European, Hungarian side.

Understanding Trump’s Relationship with Time

IVAN KRASTEV: Adam, you’re right, but it’s different about him because normally this is about legacy, probably, but he cannot trust that when he’s going to die, they’re going to make all this naming after him. And this is the interesting story. This is a person who wants to give the speech on his funeral.

ADAM TOOZE: Yes, precisely.

JON STEWART: No question.

IVAN KRASTEV: And this is very important. He wants to do it for himself. And this is why, in my view, his understanding of time is very interesting. I remember when he was talking about what they have discussed with the Chinese president, he said, Xi promised me that he’s not going to attack Taiwan while I’m in power.

And I do believe this is important because on the other side, for how long you’re going to live, how long you’re going to be in power, this is changing dramatically. I do believe we’re totally underestimating the importance, for example, of the famous Putin’s Xi talk about “we’re going to live 250 years.”

There is something happening with the idea of time. And this is why he’s so, on one level exceptional, but on the other level symptomatic for something that is beyond him. And this is why, trying to focus psychologically on Trump, in my view, we’re making a mistake.

ADAM TOOZE: It was so interesting hearing the Chinese vice premier today who gave, you know, the Chinese come and they have these extraordinarily technocratic senior politicians and it was precise. I literally sat and took a note, which was they have this idea of the flow and the tide of history.

And the Chinese have this intact, coherent, modernist kind of vision. And if you do Trumpy things, the real problem with them is not that they’re bad or wrong, it’s just they’re out of keeping with the time and history will punish you. And this obviously is just completely disintegrated in the Trump camp.

The End of the Post-War Alliance

JON STEWART: So let’s take a step back for a moment and look at this from that more historical perspective and maybe get a sense of what’s going on here. My understanding of the formulation of this special relationship is based on sort of a World War II era feeling that this is a battle between liberal democracies, foundational constitutional republics, authoritarianism, whether that authoritarianism reared its face in communism or fascism.

So we were going to demonstrate that free peoples rule with a wiser, more stable, more prosperous hand. And we did all kinds of alliances, but basically it was we were going to prove that capitalism and democracy and the consent of the governed was far preferable, not just morally, but also in terms of tangible result than these other authoritarian regimes.

That original bargain, that original sort of what drew us together I think is over. And what appears to me to be is it is now an alliance, Trump being merely an implement of that between the battle between woke and not woke. And that’s how they’re drawing.

So when everybody talks about what does Putin have on Trump? Putin doesn’t have on Trump. They agree and the acolytes, that’s what everyone’s trying to hide here. Is that in truth, Trump actually, and that side of America agrees, we want a less gay-friendly, more religious, anti-elite rule by strongmen. What do you guys think of that new as that being the polarity of the world? Am I overstating it?

IVAN KRASTEV: I do believe you are touching on something important, but slightly overstating it.

JON STEWART: Bring it, bring it.

IVAN KRASTEV: I do believe that behind this of course, is a major important fear, but it’s very much rooted in demography. It’s much more the fertility rate. And here the gay man and the gay woman are much more the symbol of why we do not have kids.

This fear that one level your country is very powerful, but on the other side that it’s in total decline. And this is very important, not only for Trump, but for the right-wing imagination, because you start to live like the last man. Why we’re not reproducing what is happening? Is this not a suicidal societies? Is this a kind of individualism and so on?

I totally agree with you. That they don’t think in terms of democracy versus authoritarianism. And secondly, Trump himself, in a certain way he talks that America is great. But I don’t believe he does not trust American model, neither as an economic model nor does a political model. He’s all the way envying others. He’s envying the Gauss, he’s envying the Chinese.

JON STEWART: He trusts it in the hands of. And this is what gets to what I’m talking about. He does trust the American model as long as it’s in the hands of white Christian. That’s when he trusts it.

The whole thing you’re talking about in terms of demographics. They’re only concerned about demographics in the sense that minorities. Look, Elon Musk just put out on his platform or he agreed with it a statement about if whites are ever the minority, they’ll be slaughtered. This is what they’re talking about.

IVAN KRASTEV: Totally agree. And he’s very important because for all this talk about Cold War, we believe that the most important thing that happened in 1989 was what happened in Berlin, the end of the fall of the Wall.

But in a certain way, if you see these people, they identify in 1989 what happened in South Africa. Suddenly you have a majority which is different than us. And by the way, it’s much easier to become from communist, anti-communist than from white, to become black. And the other way around.

JON STEWART: I’ve seen movies about that. I think that’s true.

The Fear of Democracy and the Question of Numbers

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah. And there are too many people, not like us. And democracy is about numbers. And this comes the fear of democracy because democracy at the end of the day is counting. And the fact that we are going to be outvoted. This created this kind of anxiety about democracy.

And this is not by accident that most of these people, they’re not so much talking how you’re going to govern the world, but how you try to run out of the world, how to escape. We should go to Mars. And by the way, why Greenland is so interesting? Greenland is important because you have everything there, but no people.

In a certain way you have the resources. I do believe that we should go on another planet. This is part particularly when it comes from the Silicon Valley type of an imagination. Because this world is becoming kind of unlivable for us.

JON STEWART: But if it’s unlivable for the billionaires that control everything, what chance do the rest of us have? But Adam speak to get back to is this what’s happening? Is America now acting as though they are fearful of democracy and that democracy actually is the wrong thing? Because we’ve populated the country with people that they don’t believe are worthy of that.

Race as an Organizing Category

ADAM TOOZE: I do think the race. I don’t want to play these off against each other, but I think the race as an organizing category is more powerful than woke in general. Because historically, I think the form of conservatism and rightism that has clustered around Trump comes out of the backlash against civil rights.

I mean, if you think about the American polity as going through a series of convulsive major changes, one is the New Deal and another one is the civil rights revolution, and then the Civil War and Reconstruction before that.

JON STEWART: And the immigration changes at the same time, Civil Rights Act.

ADAM TOOZE: And Trump has a solid track record as a standard racist, an anti black racist. In his party days, he was notably. He’s not a standard conservative on sexuality, including on homosexuality. Right. So I think the line, this idea of kind of great displacement, that the savagery of ICE, the casual anti black, anti Chinese. I mean, just the comprehensive white power kind of vision that rings true to me as an organizing idea of a conservatism.

Does it make you hostile to democracy? I’m not sure that follows. It makes you hostile to liberal versions of it or the version that American liberals have pushed. It makes you hostile to the inhibiting norms of the rule of law, all those kind of things. But of course, their idea is that once you get the citizenship down to the sort of people who should be allowed to vote, then that group will solidly return their kind of politics.

So I don’t think it’s illiberal. It certainly wants to. I mean, one of the most shocking pieces of news in the last 24 hours is that the Americans have clearly been waging a campaign against French judges presiding over the case that was going to prosecute Marine Le Pen for various types of corruption, corrupt practices. And officials from the American Embassy visited French judges. And so they have a thing for judges. They have a thing for the independence of the judiciary. This is a problem.

JON STEWART: But understand this. They’ve been doing that around the world.

ADAM TOOZE: Around the world.

JON STEWART: They did that with. They put 50% tariffs on Brazil to get Bolsonaro.

ADAM TOOZE: But this is to do with the independence of the law. Right. So it’s not democracy, it’s the independence of the law.

Migration With Rights vs. Migration Without Rights

IVAN KRASTEV: But there is some important paradox. And the paradox is the following. Look at some of the countries that he likes a lot. Emirates, the Gulf countries. Listen, this is the countries with the highest number of immigrants in the world. So it’s not about migration. It’s about migration with rights.

ADAM TOOZE: Yes.

IVAN KRASTEV: If they’re going to come simply as a labor.

JON STEWART: Yeah, those are workers, laborers. They don’t have full rights.

IVAN KRASTEV: Exactly. And this is the very. This is in my, the story and I totally. This is very famous. You know, in 1953 during the anti-communist protest in East Berlin, Brecht has this famous poem when he said if the government does not like the people, they should elect the new people.

And this now suddenly you have a government who believe that they should elect people because otherwise the situation is getting out of control. So migrants are fine. By the way, this is also true for Europe. People normally are going to say Viktor Orbán very much against foreigners. Do you know that in 2018 Hungary was the country that gave the most labor permits in the European Union?

The problem is about. You can share labor market. What you are not going to share is power. And this understanding of democracy where citizenship goes with ethnicity, with race, with things like this.

ADAM TOOZE: This is changing and it goes all the way back. I mean this. If you look at the constitutions of Australia as it becomes an independent commonwealth, which was a huge inspiration for racists in California and also conversations in South Africa, it literally says that we will decide who the people are with a view to excluding Asian migrants. Right.

So this, this Brechtian quip that the government should elect a new people is for those who have always been addicted to trying to defend white rule at the frontiers of power. This has always been a key legal, I mean explicitly formulated constitutional principle.

The Greenland Question and American Exceptionalism

JON STEWART: Hey, I just swear. How’d you sleep last night? Did you wake up at 2, sweating, thinking a little bit about what if Greenland invades us? Did you ever think about that? Yeah, well, I didn’t sleep very well.

Now, I want to separate, you know, what we’re doing in Greenland and what we’re doing in Venezuela from this larger context about democracies. Because to my mind, again, the exceptionalism that supposedly was America was that we were going to do away with that.

That the rights of citizenship are unalienable and that the people that are there, if they are citizens, that the whole point of it was that it wasn’t going to be tied to a religion, a race, a practice, a political ideology, that it would be about the consent of the governed within a constitutionally mandated system. That was supposed to be what was so novel.

And again, what transformed what was either feudal systems or warlord systems or authoritarian systems into this prosperous world order, which, by the way, and I want you guys to comment on this, how crazy is it that America is complaining about the 80 years since World War II of the world order that we created? This is what we. We were the driving factors of disarmament of these various places, of creating of these institutions. That was us.

ADAM TOOZE: But, Jon, the last serious effort to buy Greenland was made in the 1940s by the people who made that global order. So the glitch in this. The glitch in this is that, like, at the moment, they were creating that order. Yes, they had their eye on Greenland. Because, you know, it is a. It is just. And in World War II, it had proved important. Real estate and its position within Denmark and the Danish sovereignty is really ambiguous. It’s the product of settler colonialism.

JON STEWART: But we all are.

ADAM TOOZE: Well, many of us. Many of us more. Some more than others. Right. So we have to be realistic about the logic of that earlier epoch of power that is celebrated now in retrospect.

JON STEWART: So am I making a mistake, Adam, by thinking about this through an idealistic prism? Is that the mistake we make when we try. And are the formulations of our criticism, should they not be moral and idealistic, but actually much more pragmatic?

The End of Liberal Hypocrisy

IVAN KRASTEV: But is it also not true that part of the strengths of Trump came from the fact that for many people around the world, disorder was disorder?

JON STEWART: Yes.

IVAN KRASTEV: And, for example, his major point was, I’m against liberal hypocrisy. We are talking about democracy, but in many places, it was not about democracy. From this point of view, the legitimacy of Trump paradoxically, comes from the fact that he is the nightmare for the conspiracy theorist.

Because before American goes to Venezuela, talk about democracy, people suspect it’s about oil. And then he comes and said, no, no, it’s only about oil.

ADAM TOOZE: It’s about oil.

IVAN KRASTEV: You cannot be conspiracy theorist anymore unless you believe that he goes there for democracy and just talks about oil.

ADAM TOOZE: And then Exxon shows up and says, we can’t invest there. It’s like, what?

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah, but what he’s not understanding is that hypocrisy, of course, was awful and many of the people hated it. But also, hypocrisy is a constraint. Because I’m saying that I go for democracy, I should do certain things, and there are certain things that I will not do. And from this point of view, this is, in my view, changing dramatically.

Because what Trump does not understand, he is every revolutionary leader, does not respect borders. Talking to the French judges, for sure, other American diplomats have been talking probably to French judges during the Cold War, too.

ADAM TOOZE: No, no, no. Of course, all practice, normally you are.

IVAN KRASTEV: Telling to the people, do it, because we’re going to invite you on our party. And his major story is, I’m doing just for the Americans. I don’t care about any of you. And this is an interesting story. This is a major change.

For the first time, you have a kind of a major radical way to change the order. And at the same time, he’s not telling anybody else that they can benefit from this. A colleague of mine, an American colleague of mine, told me something that is right or wrong, but I believe that it resonated strongly with me.

He said it’s not by accident that the only business in which Trump really failed spectacularly was the casino business. Because in the casino business, in order to make money, you at least should try to create the illusions that others are winning. And for him, allowing others to win is psychological, unacceptable.

And what he didn’t like about the liberal order was that if America is so powerful, why we’re not getting the spoils? If we have taken the city, why, basically, we are not allowed to do in the city everything we want.

The Zero-Sum Game

JON STEWART: But, Ivan, within that, though, in what world can we argue that the last 80 years, America hasn’t taken the spoils? We may not have distributed very well throughout our population, where we have tremendous inequality and lots of poverty, but who’s done better in these last 80 years than we have?

IVAN KRASTEV: Listen, his answer is going to be, in the last 30 years, the best did China. And then he said how it happened that after World War II, Japan and Germany did so well because this is his idea of a zero sum game for him, that you are governing not because you’re doing well, but because your enemies are doing badly.

And this is interesting, he goes, and you’re totally right, America benefited a lot, but not everybody. And he goes to these poor Americans and said they’re telling you that you’re the hegemon. And this American said, yes, you’re right, we are not.

ADAM TOOZE: I think Japan is crucial in this story.

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah, Japan is crucial because this is how he was socialized and this is exactly.

ADAM TOOZE: I mean if we think of him biographically, that’s the key moment. And that is not a moment which has, you know, say China’s globalization or Mexico, NAFTA, you’d say American capital benefited on a really gigantic scale from that.

JON STEWART: But not the workers.

The Economics of Post-War Trade Relations

ADAM TOOZE: Japan is a more clear cut case of a national industrial country that really did assert itself. Now overall it’s probably welfare enhancing because the stuff they made was high quality and cheap. Wall Street in the end does begin to make footholds in Tokyo. But I think that experience of the 70s and 80s is really formative and I think it just sort of reverberates around and he slots new countries into that space one after the other.

And that talk at the time was very commonplace, right, that zero sum vision. And there’s an element the Germans and the Japanese did pursue within the fixed exchange rate system of Bretton Woods strategies which meant their currencies were undervalued. And America of course in the early stages, in the 40s, 47, 48, Marshall Plan and so on, deliberately accepted that as the trade. Right. They would be part of the American hegemonic bloc in the Cold War and American consumers would benefit from the inflow of relatively affordable, high quality goods.

JON STEWART: And we’d be the reserve currency though, for all of it.

ADAM TOOZE: Yeah. And American industry was so strong it didn’t need to worry. It would out compete, it would out innovate, it would rise to the top, no stress. And through the early 70s that bargain works pretty well on balance. Not of course for everyone in American society because of racism and inequality, but nevertheless standard of living go up. So you don’t see that divide opening.

And it’s really from the mid-70s that it breaks down. And at that point I think a kind of national mechanism, Japan as the bad guy merges with a social resentment which is driven by the real stagnation, indeed deterioration of the standard of living of the American working class. And you begin to get that hard hat coalition, the labor, populist, nationalist, protectionist forces gaining quite a lot of strength. And by the 90s, Buchanan and people like this can really begin to make a powerful case along these lines.

The Cost of Imperial Exploitation

JON STEWART: But Buchanan was, as a national figure, vilified for the nakedness of what he was talking about in terms of the blatant racism that we’re so beyond. Yeah, Buchanan at this point. But I want to talk about, you know, you say, well, there were flaws in terms of globalization and clearly maybe letting China into the WTO or allowing capital to travel so easily when labor couldn’t, and not figuring out a way to make that a more ameliorate the kind of downside of that for the American worker, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

But reforms to that system could have so strengthened it rather than destroying it, because the system they appear to be going back to. And this is really what I think people need to understand, the system we’re going back to in terms of exploiting resources rather than even sharing the benefits in a slightly, you know, less fair way. I don’t think people understand how much it takes to, for an empire, what you have to expend to exploit resources because those other countries want to be free too.

Venezuela wants to be free too, all of them. And the fact that we think, oh, we’re the biggest, so we’ll go in and we’ll exploit Greenland and we’ll exploit Venezuela, and that people’s resentment doesn’t have a cost to goods and services seems nuts.

Trump’s Paradoxical Nationalism

IVAN KRASTEV: You know, you’re touching on something critically important, at least from my point of view. Paradoxically, Trump does not understand nationalism, so himself talks about this and yet uses it very well because he basically really cannot understand that the more you talk about Venezuelan oil for Venezuelans, this becomes the major issue. It became the magic things. The resource nationalism does not come from nowhere. And from this point of view, he’s basically fueling the forces that are going to create a problem for the world that he wants to create.

Because all these people, even Denmark, this absolutely amazing with Denmark. If you look at Denmark, Denmark should be one of the very few European countries that he likes. Paradoxically, there is a certain nostalgia in all this Trumpian movement, and this is very much based on social cohesion, migration, whiteness. Paradoxically, Denmark is one of the countries that he should love most. This was a country which basically was quite effective in protecting their borders.

Secondly, this is a country with a lot of social cohesion. This is a country that was a very important American ally. So welding is not there. Basically. Their soldiers have been dying in Afghanistan and they have been dying out of solidarity with the United States, not because there was a problem for Denmark itself.

JON STEWART: Boy, were they. They stood next to America. Yeah, no question.

IVAN KRASTEV: But the problem is that in a certain way, when Trump talks about the world, he sees only America. And this is the problem with Europe. In a certain way. You go there and you basically see only the things that you know from the United States. So here are the Europeans, and they’re like the Democrats, and they’re like that. So perhaps he does not have much interest in other places, particularly when it comes to the allies.

And this is this strange kind of a combination of one level person with a strong imperial imagination, and on the other side, incredibly provincial. So even when he decides to remake the UN, what he’s doing with the Peace board. It’s a golf club.

JON STEWART: Your goal is a billion dollars entrance fee.

IVAN KRASTEV: I’m inviting this. Yeah, but it is a golf club. So in a sense, institutionally, the golf club is the way to basically see the world being crowned.

JON STEWART: Right. And that’s how they do business.

The Economics of Greenland

ADAM TOOZE: And he doesn’t understand the economics. Right, yeah. Because if you were serious about Greenland’s resources, anyone could have invested in Greenland. America has a great treaty 51, the wartime treaty renewed. There’s no, you know, those resources are not somehow lying fallow, hidden behind a protective wall of power, you know, Danish anti-American nationalism that prevents good American businesses from. No, no, no. It’s just a weird. My personal favorite interpretation is it’s the map of the game risk. You know, I mean, Venezuela and Greenland are very large.

JON STEWART: Can I tell you what I think it is, Adam? And I think he said it. I think what he’s saying is, no, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to rent it. We want to own it. You know how it is. If you rent a place, you can’t even put pictures up and put holes in the wall, but if you own it, you get to do whatever you want.

And, Ivan, you touched on this earlier. You said that what Trump does is he finds a way that the world has always worked and he is transparently explicit about it. But the thing that I think maybe we’re missing a little bit is it’s not the only way that the world has ever worked. It isn’t only mob threats and trying to coerce people. I don’t think we’re fully appreciating how difficult it is to have something sustainable and prosperous through coercion only.

And to Adam’s point, we could have had all of it. And we did have more bases there. We let them go fallow. I don’t. Adam, is Europe, are they believing yet that this is a real. Because I saw your panel and I saw the faces on the Europe. It was disbelief. I think everybody keeps thinking, oh, no, they’re going to pull out of this spiral.

Europe’s Response Strategy

ADAM TOOZE: Or not. I mean, depending on what you saw earlier in the day. You saw the opposite logic. And the common denominator is it’s as though the Americans forced the Europeans to actually come up with a concerted investment strategy for Greenland, which they’ve never previously had. And the Europeans are actually going to do. They’re going to make the movie and he’s made the trailer. I mean, well, they’re going to make the sequel to the film that he never made.

And so they’re going to end up doing some sort of weird actual European program. I mean, Greenland, it’s 56,000 people. It’s a territory the size of both Alaska and California put together. It currently runs entirely on Danish public money. So 25% of its GDP, half its 50 to 60% of its public budget, is coming from Copenhagen and Danish taxpayers.

So, you know, if that’s what America wants to take over, this is a substantial. I mean, not huge by American standards, but nevertheless, this is a net negative in its current form. And what the Europeans are going to do is their usual European thing. They’ll do a regional policy and they’ll find a few billions to transform this. And Ivan in Bulgaria knows the story only too well of how mixed the results of those kind of programs can be. They can be very real, but it depends critically on the politics in the place where the money is applied.

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Trump’s View of the European Union

Trump views though the EU as being having been created to hurt the United States. I mean, he already views it in a kind of very aggressive. I don’t think he views it as allied with the United States in that way, no.

IVAN KRASTEV: But also in a certain way he views as hostile everything that he does not understand. No, it is true.

JON STEWART: Like dogs.

IVAN KRASTEV: And to be honest, I have a sympathy with him. European Union is not easy to understand. And in a certain way in the European Union, what is totally absent is the possibility to have politics based on a personal relationship. Because having a personal relationship with school and as a result of it, for him, everything that’s coming is just bureaucracy constraints. Everything that he hates about America, he sees there.

But also what is interesting in the case of Greenland is that Denmark basically was telling him before, we’re going to give you what he wants. And his message is, no, no, no, I don’t want you to give to me. I want to take it from you. And this is the story where Europeans understand that it cannot work like this because paradoxically, he is the society response.

Also what he does not understand is the pride of others. Danish people are proud people. By the way, if he was playing different way, there was a very good article in Foreign Affairs by a former American diplomat. How he can take Greenland, but he can do it in four or five years with investments and doing this and that and basically talking to the Greenland population and Greenland elite.

But for him it doesn’t matter. For him, it should come fast, it should come for July 4th. It should be used for the midterm elections. So in a certain way, this is the symbolism of this. And this is where I’m afraid he’s playing symbolic games. Europeans does not know how to play symbolic games. Because this is not where we are from. But he’s totally underestimating the capacity of Europe not to cooperate.

Political Impossibility of Compromise

JON STEWART: Has he made Adam, this politically impossible then for Europe to acquiesce to some kind of deal going along with what Ivan is saying? That. So let’s say there is a deal to be made. Is it now too politically damaging to people who are already weak? I mean, the leaders of that sort of Western European flow are much weaker, you know, than some of their right leaning counterparts.

ADAM TOOZE: I mean, I just, I’d love to think that I just really need to check my biases on this. One shouldn’t underestimate the capacity of the Europeans to fail. And they.

IVAN KRASTEV: We have a talent for this. I should agree very much.

ADAM TOOZE: We have a real, it’s spectacular.

JON STEWART: So you think this actually is going to work, that Trump is going to get it?

ADAM TOOZE: Think Democrats, we know it. Think Schumer, think Democratic leadership. Every bit as bad as that.

JON STEWART: Oh, dear Lord.

The Complexity of European Power Structures

Plus more division. It’s not a done deal. But I love the basic logic. One of the things that’s really shocking is as a kind of action-reaction kind of logic is the promotion of Ursula von der Leyen in the first term. Ivan’s totally right. They had no idea who she was. Like, they just couldn’t process the fact that Europe has this complex polity.

This time around, Lutnik on stage literally said, “You know, this way, the way this goes, we bully, you agree to be bullied.” Then he literally said, “Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Trump get together and do a deal.” And it was like, what has happened here? This is so strange.

And the Biden people, of course, prepared this because they really deliberately promoted Brussels and the commission and von der Leyen into the telephone number that you call in Europe. There’s no question now you call the ECB and you call Brussels. This is where you call. There’s no ambiguity about it, really. The Germans and the French you need to talk to too. But increasingly the trend has gone towards that centralization.

JON STEWART: Ultimately, then what is the point of any of this? And does Donald Trump believe actually we will have a better world for America without the EU and without NATO? Because if this goes through, I don’t understand how the EU is still any way considered a credible organization protecting the sovereignty of its member states. If you do this, what is the point of being there?

The Strategic Gamble: Russia and China

IVAN KRASTEV: But this is a very interesting question because I do believe that there are people around him who still believe that the very important is to try to get Russia to decouple from China to make a deal. And their thinking is if there is not European Union and if there is no NATO, why Russia should not be America’s best friend threat. And all these people negotiate and they see this and that.

And don’t forget most of these people, they don’t come from diplomacy and they don’t come from security. They come from trade and this why for them is very difficult to understand. Somebody like Putin who is totally kind of immersed in history and pride and story and economic argument is the most, not the most important. And I totally, this is the real issue.

The people around him, I don’t believe that they, I don’t know is Trump himself in this. They believe that European Union is bad because it is big, that if you have 27 small countries, you’re going to do much easier with them. That for America is going to be easier to do it. By the way, not understanding that if this is going to happen, America should try to manage a space which is going to be so both economically security and politically tentious, that it’s really going to be an issue, particularly for this administration that does not want American money to be spent outside Europe is going to be a nightmare.

I do believe that somebody should try to show President Trump films about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and so on. Disintegrations is not a funny game. It’s not a funny game. But of course there is also this other wing of the Republican Party. And I do believe this is why people like Macron and von der Leyen and of course Merz, they understand that.

But when it comes to Greenland, they are not facing America. They are not even facing the Republican Party. They are facing Trump and small group around him. They do believe that even in this administration there are people for whom NATO is a value and losing NATO is against American national interest. So this is why they are going to be in my view, much more assertive than in other situations.

JON STEWART: Ivan, if you’re impressed by how Europe can capitulate to Trump, let me introduce you to the Republican Party. Because if you ever want to see somebody sublimate to their dear leader. And isn’t it though in talking about that, Adam, I’m curious what you think about this.

If the idea like so let’s say there is an end game here that they view it as if I can get Russia to decouple from China, that’s better for me than if the EU is strong and productive. I mean, if the United States has to defend Greenland alone, somehow that’s better than defending it with 32 other countries. But okay, that’s fine. How naive is it to think that Russia would ever decouple from China in an honest and real way and somehow align itself as a great friend of the United States? And why would we want that anyway?

The Norway Letter and Infantile Politics

ADAM TOOZE: No, I mean, I think there is a real. I mean, I love Ivan’s mapping of this is delirious. It is fascinating. But, I mean, don’t we have to talk about the Norway letter? I mean, and the silence about the Norway letter?

JON STEWART: When he says a Norway letter he was referring to Trump wrote Norway and said, “I don’t even care about your Nobel Peace Prize, but since you didn’t give it to me, I now don’t have to be a man of peace.”

ADAM TOOZE: And actually goes further. He says, “Now I don’t have to care about universal peace. Now I can care just about America.” He actually, this goes to this weird relationship, the national. He literally says, “Now I can be America first.” Right? Because previously I was doing the peace thing. And because you and, I mean, it’s so ludicrous.

And the overwhelming, what we’ve seen here at Davos is that people just are tight. Led a shutdown about the evident fact that this man to whom they swear a kind of personal loyalty and fealty is childlike. Truly, it’s childlike and basically crazy. And I agree with Ivan. There may be strategic groups that want to use this for the purpose of the kind of grand rearrangement that you talking about. But I think we have to, we have to, we have to allow for the fact that there is just this emptiness and madness at the heart of the whole.

JON STEWART: Oh, dear Lord.

ADAM TOOZE: That is genuinely infantile.

JON STEWART: So it’s literally, Greenland is just another f*ing ballroom.

ADAM TOOZE: It’s a toy.

JON STEWART: It’s just another ballroom.

ADAM TOOZE: It’s another, it’s big. Big, big ballroom. Like you get to decorate.

IVAN KRASTEV: But do you know what is interesting? You know, this, that part of kind of the pressure coming from this politics is that you cannot distinguish between important and unimportant.

ADAM TOOZE: No, you can’t.

IVAN KRASTEV: It’s all. And this is very typical, by the way, for the monarchical politics, because important is what matters for the guy. And from this point of view, being strategic, particularly if you’re working with the guy, is the biggest mistake that you can do. Be sure that you know what he cares about.

When he said that basically he wants to buy Greenland, I was trying to say this is also a risky strategy because probably the sovereign fund of Norway can come with a higher price. And don’t forget we have a little debt.

JON STEWART: Hey, listen, there’s no reason to get personal, Ivan. We have a little debt. I’m telling you. Next month is going to be a big month and we are on our way back.

ADAM TOOZE: Oh yeah, that could not have been clear about this. Best credit in the world.

JON STEWART: Best.

Russia, China, and the Geopolitical Reality

ADAM TOOZE: On the substance though of your question, you’re John, about like Russia and China. I mean this would be for Putin currently the greatest disaster in recent history is the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s spoken about this very eloquently and I think actually Xi Jinping agrees. This is one thing that Putin and Xi Jinping agree on is that the collapse of the Soviet Union between 89 and 91, I thought this is the center of all of their thinking.

And for the Chinese, of course, 89 means not just South Africa and the Berlin Wall, but Tiananmen Square. But would a disintegration of Europe lead Russia away from China? It would certainly make Russia less dependent on China and it would open up an incredibly wide field of influence in Europe. But I don’t think there’s any reason to think it would squarely. Why would they, they just won. Why would they give something up?

And if energy is the hardcore of the Russian regime, both oil, which is globally fungible and gas which has to be piped in the main for efficiency, China’s the decisive variable in your demand equation. India is not going to be a China. China is the be all and end all. They’ve been desperately trying to get a big pipeline deal with the Chinese done. They’ve somehow maybe got there. They are not going to back away from that.

So I think the idea that you break Europe so as to win, I mean it has an amazing logic, but I don’t think it would work. It’s just like, I don’t know, my modest suggestion, I think it probably might not work out like that.

IVAN KRASTEV: And also Adam is making a point which is very important because between Putin and Xi, both of them are obsessed with a long history. You remember famous Xi saying we see a change which is are you really going to bet on Trump if you want to build the relations with the United States States. And this is the interesting story with the Russians. From our point of view, they’re over excited about Trump.

But on the other side, the Russians are very much afraid that they can make a deal that is not going to survive for a long time. And this is why on one level he cannot make a deal. But on the other, others don’t believe that they can make a deal with him because they still don’t know what is a post Trump America. We know that post Trump America is not pre Trump America. I don’t believe that anybody has doubts on this, but how exactly it’s going to look like what kind of a geo strategic vision is going to have, what kind of political values it’s going to share?

So from this point of view, paradoxically, what we’re seeing everywhere is kind of identity politics. But on a global level, everybody is asking themselves who we are. And this is for America, this is for Russia.

The Cognitive Dissonance of American Leadership

JON STEWART: Listen, we’re asking ourselves, look, we’re living in a world where they’re telling us we have to attack Greenland if we have to, to protect it from it falling into the hands of the Russians. Okay, what about Ukraine? Yeah, no, that. No, we’re going to give that.

ADAM TOOZE: Plus, why is it strategic territory? Because of climate change, which isn’t happening.

JON STEWART: Right. I mean, the cognitive dissonance that it takes to be one of his ardent supporters, and then they all just look at you like, “Hey, this is the guy who wrote the Art of the Deal.” And you’re like, “No, he didn’t. Some other guy wrote it and he put his name on it.” Like, basically what he does with all of his projects and all he’s done, as far as I can see, is turned us into a less free, less democratic, more kleptocratic disunion on any of these things.

And I begin to wonder, and this is really, it gets down to the crucial question, is there a free world and who’s going to lead it? Take your time. I mean, am I wrong there, Adam? Is that too weird?

The Fight for Freedom Continues

ADAM TOOZE: Hey, John, we’re making this show. If you want to answer that question, try making this show in mainland China.

JON STEWART: Okay.

ADAM TOOZE: Try making a show like this in Russia at the limit. Clearly, there are huge differences in the world and they’re still extremely meaningful and absolutely worth fighting for. And we still, at this very moment, are the beneficiaries. And the game is not done and midterms are coming up. And these people are wrong about so many of their hypotheses.

JON STEWART: But Adam being able to make this show, but we’re also okay with them taking over a sovereign country that doesn’t want to be taken over.

ADAM TOOZE: No, no, no.

IVAN KRASTEV: I mean, like, can.

JON STEWART: You know what I’m saying?

ADAM TOOZE: Is there, is there a pure, clearly defined. Do we still know what freedom is? All of that like I agree is kind of out the window, but I mean really would be, it would be, it would be, we would be self, it was self indulgent to deny the huge differences which are still very real.

It’s conceivable a time might come where those differences get erased, but we are not there and there’s everything to play for. And presumably all of us engage in this conversation saying that’s why we need to talk, we need to talk publicly, we need to raise voices.

JON STEWART: That’s exactly right.

ADAM TOOZE: We need to make people laugh, we need to make people think. We need to engage with these questions because this is so not done.

The Border Between Democracy and Authoritarianism

IVAN KRASTEV: And in my view, this is also where the part of the big problem is the current administration. Because we talk as if in the world there is a major kind of rise of authoritarianism and so on. I don’t see it like this. I do believe that the real problem is that the border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world.

JON STEWART: Bars. Hold on, Ivan, you can’t just drop that. You can’t just drop that in the middle of a podcast and expect me not to stand up and applaud. Say that again.

IVAN KRASTEV: No, no, I’m not going to say it again because probably this time it’s not going to be so spectacular. You know, the repetition is always a problem.

JON STEWART: The border between totalitarianism and democracy is the least defended border in the world.

IVAN KRASTEV: I love that because one of the interesting story about the Cold War was that because of the nature of the Cold War, America had to basically redefine itself as the free world, very hypocritically here and there. But without the Soviet Union, of course, American jazz was not going to be as important for America because jazz was important because it was forbidden in the Soviet Union.

And secondly, because basically the Soviets believed that future belongs to them, America should become also very much future oriented. And I’m saying this because I also believe one of the reasons the Cold War never became hot was that both sides believed that future was on their side. This is why they believed that better to fight tomorrow when they are going to be stronger.

What makes me really nervous about the world in which we are living is that you have basically people who fear the future. They fear for demographic reasons, for technological reasons. All the time somebody is going to replace us. And when you fear the future, you believe that if there is going to be a fight, better fight today because tomorrow we are going to be weaker.

And this explains this kind of strange combination of, on one level, this kind of trailer is about American power, which was real. Listen, what happened in Venezuela was the operation that took the Russians four years and they cannot finish it. Americans did it in four hours. But on the other side, there is no future perspective. And this is why people are becoming so anxious and this is why you cannot project your life.

And I totally, this deficit of future is a huge problem for democracy because future and certain type of future is one of the invisible institutions for democracy. If you don’t believe in future, democracy cannot function. Because democracy is also the art of postponing, of timing certain things.

The Will to Defend Democracy

JON STEWART: And of persuasion, because persuasion is the coin of the realm when it comes to that. Adam Tooze, you are in Davos. You are perhaps no one standing closer to the border between democracy and totalitarianism than you right now. Is the fear here while you’re there, because all the leaders of that so-called democratic world are probably walking around right now in Davos. Is there a will to defend that border as forcefully as perhaps it needs to be defended?

ADAM TOOZE: I mean, we went back and forth on this a minute ago. It’s worth saying there’s one really depressing thing going on, which is that people are leaving before Trump gets here, which is another way of responding to this border, which is to say, no, I don’t have to sit on the edge of this. I don’t want to be part of the spectacle. I don’t want to be dragged into this. I’m just going to, I don’t have to be here.

And that is a kind of withdrawal that’s very ambiguous, right? Because it doesn’t necessarily dispose. The Europeans are going to meet on Thursday. There’s everything to play for. But one of the things that’s happening is that kind of stepping away and people are making choices literally today because we know what kind of security is going to happen and it’s going to be mad.

And there’s one faction which is leaving and there’s another faction who’s basically getting locked into the conference center tomorrow and live with all of the insane American security because the physical other leaders come and go in Davos and there’s a bubble around them, Ivan will note as well. But they don’t change the whole thing.

The Americans tomorrow are going to put their boot print on the entire show and you can either choose to not be there for it. This is no kind of heroics. It’s just literally who’s going to be part of the Trump sleepover and who not. And some of us are going to stay for the authoritarian sleepover show that is going to descend on this place tomorrow.

JON STEWART: Adam, do you think the buffet is going to get better with the Americans in town, or do you think it’s still going to be wanted?

ADAM TOOZE: No, the Chinese, I think, are doing the buffet tomorrow evening. And that is the buffet, I’m afraid, as you would imagine, that is the buffet that you want to be at.

JON STEWART: Gentlemen, I can’t think of a better note to end on than the fact that the Chinese right now in the world as it stands, provide the best buffet and I think America is going to need.

IVAN KRASTEV: I only hope that Europeans were not going to do the dishes again.

JON STEWART: That’s the problem. Trump sees no peers at Davos. He sees only Putin and Xi as his peers. They are the only ones. Everyone else is working in the kitchen.

Gentlemen, thank you so much. What an interesting conversation. It’s going to be really wild to see how this is going to turn over the next week. Adam Tooze, author of Chartbook Substack. Ivan Krastev, Chairman, Center for Liberal Strategies. I really appreciate you guys joining us and giving us those insights. Thank you.

IVAN KRASTEV: Thank you, folks.

Post-Interview Discussion

JON STEWART: Those guys, you know, it really was. They’re interesting. Ivan was suggesting that, oh, no, there may be a method to this madness. And I think Adam probably along more like what I was thinking, he’s like, but strategically, we can pull Russia. And I think Adam would be like, nah, I think he just might be that guy. I think he’s just that guy. I think he just wants this shit and he wants to put his name on it.

PRODUCER: And it’s never good when the method is white supremacy.

JON STEWART: I like, though, he’s like, there are some fears that people have about, obviously, birth rates and demographics.

PRODUCER: Yeah.

PRODUCER: What could have given you that impression?

JON STEWART: Did either of you watch the panel that Adam hosted at Davos?

PRODUCER: Yes.

PRODUCER: Yeah, I wasn’t able to watch the whole thing, but, man, he’s got to have ice running through his veins.

JON STEWART: Like, he’s just like, with Lutnick, like, what are you doing? What’s Greenland about? What’s wrong with you people?

PRODUCER: And just this silence after Lutnick’s answer of just everybody up there. Like, Adam’s like, I think we need to talk about Greenland.

PRODUCER: Lutnick. No, we don’t feel like, no.

JON STEWART: What do you mean, Greenland? Why would you even bring that up?

PRODUCER: Yeah.

PRODUCER: How random.

JON STEWART: Seems irrelevant. I love, though, that during the panel, you watch the various people on the panel, like, almost like they were watching a TV show, too, where it’s like the highs and lows and the suspense and they’re all, like, locked in. And then they, and then, you know.

PRODUCER: Yeah.

PRODUCER: All that was missing was the popcorn.

PRODUCER: Truly.

JON STEWART: Yes.

PRODUCER: It’s so rare when you see a panel that’s actually going to break news, you’re like.

Macron at Davos

JON STEWART: Well, it’s going to. I mean, when Trump shows up. And by the way, for those of you who haven’t seen the Macron, it’s bananas. He’s got on, like, aviators, and he looks like a social chairman at, like, a fraternity. And he’s just up there like, all right, man, we’re just going to, here’s the thing. We’re going to take on fing Theta Kai. They’re going down. F those guys.

PRODUCER: Senioritis at its finest.

JON STEWART: Come on. Kappa rules. Kappa forever, baby. Yeah.

Like, it was. I couldn’t figure out, like, what kind of shit they give somebody to battle jet lag. And then I’m like, oh, wait, he doesn’t have jet lag. He came in from France.

PRODUCER: Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, he’s just high.

JON STEWART: I mean, it’s hard not to think something’s going on behind. You know, most people don’t wear the glasses inside unless you’re like, f*ing Yay or something like that. Like that. It’s, you know, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

PRODUCER: I mean, who could blame him for doing some drugs right now, you know?

JON STEWART: Oh, you’re not kidding. Well, the real news is going to be obviously Wednesday when Trump shows up there and the circus is in town. And, you know, and right now, everybody is still on the American side going, you know, Trump, this is what he does. You know, he goes out there with a big ask and like, right.

But his big ask is, or the thing that he’s saying is, I’m going to take over an allied country militarily. Like, that’s different than staking out a broadly winning position. Like, that’s the antithesis of everything.

PRODUCER: You know him, he just loves to weave a yarn.

PRODUCER: Yeah, he’s going to start.

JON STEWART: He’s going to throw the invasion out there, but, you know, he’ll settle for 10% raw earth materials.

PRODUCER: Yeah. I saw Tillis, who’d actually been critical of him, was saying, I think earlier today, he was like, to be clear, I’m not criticizing the President, I’m criticizing the people that are giving him this advice.

Congressional Abdication

JON STEWART: F Tillis. F all those guys. We don’t even have a Congress. Congress is now a vestigial tail. It is a neutered cat sitting on a windowsill watching the world go by. They are useless. And I know that as soon as a Democrat gets in office again, they will rear their powerful heads again. But right now, they are embarrassing themselves on a world stage. Truly preach. F* them.

F. Did you see the Danish MP? Danish MP goes, “I will say this in a language Donald Trump understands. F off.” And I was like, dude, he nailed it. He pronounced that complete. And then he said it again in Danish. So now I know how to say f* off in Danish.

PRODUCER: Well, everyone loves to learn curse words in foreign language. You know, it’s the first thing we all learn when we take Spanish. So who shows that to Trump? Like, you might want to see this.

JON STEWART: Imagine doing that to the Danes. And by the way, the Danes, every time I used to host this thing called the Warrior Games, it was always like, it’s like Invictus, but obviously for, you know, more like us. It was always the U.S. so, like, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Special Forces, Army. And then like, Canada had a contingent there, Australia had a contingent there.

And then the only other contingent that was consistently there, wounded warriors hurt in Iraq and Afghanistan. Denmark, it was the one country that was there every time I hosted, and I hosted it maybe seven times. Every single time, Danish men and women who had suffered grievous battlefield injuries defending the interests of the United States of America. And now we’re like, yeah, f* those guys. We’re going to take Greenland.

ADAM TOOZE: We want it.

IVAN KRASTEV: Yeah. Because they joined us when we invoked Article 5, and now we’re going to go Article 5 against them.

ADAM TOOZE: You know, it’s. You love to see it.

JON STEWART: Yeah. All right, what do we got, Brady? Anybody want to know anything?

IVAN KRASTEV: Yes.

ADAM TOOZE: First up, Jon, be honest with us. We’re fucked, right? There’s really nothing we can do to stop the damage Trump is doing.

JON STEWART: Nope. Disagree. Disagree. Hard. Hard pass on that. No, this. You. You. What? No, I’m not saying he’s not going to do grievous damage, but isn’t that what you do after a devastating storm? You rebuild, you put in the work and you make some changes to the grid.

And you say, like, you know what, maybe we shouldn’t bury all the electrical wires underground near the salt water. Now we’re going to put them somewhere else where they can be protected. You know, we’ll make changes. We’ll do things that will. Now, that is not to say that that’s happening a week from now, and it could be catastrophically like.

But we forget through the arc of history where it’s like, you know, after the Civil War, they had what reconstruction now didn’t last as long as it could have because they decided to appease the South. And so reconstruction went the way, and Jim Crow soon settled in. So even the rebuild doesn’t necessarily always go the way you want it to go.

But f*, man. No, we can’t. No. That attitude. No hard pass. No 100% disagree. Like the guy says on the subway who. I love that guy’s. I love that guy. Kareem.

ADAM TOOZE: Yeah, shout out to Kareem.

JON STEWART: No, f* that. Anything that he does can be redone and done better.

IVAN KRASTEV: Better.

ADAM TOOZE: So the lessons here is patience. This too shall pass.

JON STEWART: I don’t know about. No, not patience, but like, it’s going to take. Yeah. And the harder we work now, the faster this will be over. That’s all.

ADAM TOOZE: Okay.

JON STEWART: Now, I. Now I just got tired from your list to copiers, man. Yeah, I hear you. It’s a tough time. What else we got? What else we got?

On Media Personalities and Trump

ADAM TOOZE: And, Jon, do you think Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters defend Trump out of genuine belief? Or is it more about personal financial gain?

JON STEWART: I think sometimes one blends into the other. I think when you wear a mask long enough, you start to believe you’re that character. And you do start seeing everything through that filter. It’s one of the interesting things about like, actors that are method. Like, you play a role long enough and it’s kind of hard. Like, am I Frasier or am I Kelsey Grammer?

IVAN KRASTEV: Like how Austin Butler just kept that accent for like two years after Elvis.

JON STEWART: That’s perfect. That’s the perfect analogy, you know, so Hannity’s like kind of a normal radio host. He’s like, I’m on the right. Combs is on the left. And now he’s just like, look at me, I’m 60, and I take martial arts and defend whatever Trump says. Like, you know, it all falls apart. What else? Last one, last one, last one.

Advice for Aspiring Comedians

ADAM TOOZE: Jon. I aspire to be a comedian, but I’m really anxious and overthink. How do I become confident?

JON STEWART: Oh, that’s never going to work for comedy. Never. The two shall meet. We’re neurotic. Come into comedy and learn a healthier way of living. Wait, this person is. Say it again.

IVAN KRASTEV: They’re neurotic, anxious, and overthink, and they want to know how they become confident.

JON STEWART: You don’t. That’s your superpower. You’re anxious and you overthink. I can’t think of a better starting block for becoming a comedian. That’s like somebody saying, like, you know, I’m 6 foot 11 and have an unbelievable vertical leap. I’m thinking of becoming a basketball player, but what can I do to change, to enable that?

Like, you’re anxious and you overthink. All you need to do is just start writing some of that shit down. Translate it. No, I look forward to watching your specials. That’s what I say.

IVAN KRASTEV: Oh, that’s very sweet.

JON STEWART: That’s very sweet. How do these people get a hold of us on these socials? What do they do?

Social Media and Closing

IVAN KRASTEV: We are weekly show pod. Instagram threads. TikTok, Blue Sky. We are with the show podcast. You can, like, subscribe again. You can subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with Jon Stewart.

JON STEWART: And a special shout out to Instagram’s newest user. The official Instagram of Jon Stewart at Jon Stewart. Yeah, yeah, I joined Instagram. It’s been lovely. I think third day in, I just took a picture of my dog’s poop.

IVAN KRASTEV: It’s a total jump scare, I’ll be honest.

JON STEWART: No, I just want to give people a sense of what’s coming. I can’t even tell you how much preferable it is to Twitter. Like, every time I went on Twitter, I was just like, it’s like you had walked into a room of sociopaths, of literal Nazis, and like they were all waiting for you.

And this has been like, there’s pictures. It’s pleasant. You get, like, funny reels. Like, yeah, so far nobody’s been vicious or any of those. Like, what? I was like, what is happening?

IVAN KRASTEV: You’re having fun with it.

JON STEWART: This is actually pleasant.

IVAN KRASTEV: Good.

JON STEWART: So I’ve enjoyed it so far.

ADAM TOOZE: You’re crushing it. I don’t know if you saw, but all of your famous followers are falling in line. We’ve got you got Timberlake coming in. You have Madonna followed you. Yeah. Justin Timberlake. She’s looking at your dog shit right now.

JON STEWART: You know what? No, don’t. You know what? I don’t want to know because I don’t want to get self conscious. Like, now I’m going to now, like, before I post dog, I’d be like, but the mayor of New York would be watching that.

ADAM TOOZE: Believe me, the mayor of New York sees a lot of dog shit.

JON STEWART: You know what? But that, it might be a thing where I’m like, this is his day off. Do I need, do I need on his day off to show him what he’s walking to work in every day?

Fantastic. Well, as always, guys, thank you so much. Great job. Our team couldn’t do it without him. Lead producer Lauren Walker, Producer Brittany Momentovic, Producer Gillian Spear, Video editor and Engineer Rob Vitola, Audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, executive producers Chris McShane, Katie Gray.

We will see you guys next week from Greenland. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast, is produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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