Great. Good morning everybody and welcome to the second day of the Cheltenham Literature Festival. It's fantastic to be here. My name is Peter Frankopan. I'm professor of global history at the University of Oxford and we're here to talk about the United States today. I've got a fantastic panel. We're one man short because John Micklethwait is ill. But I have next to me Lauren Collins, who many of you will know from her writing in the New Yorker and her profiles of people like Emmanuel Macron, beautiful writer living in France, but a new book, They Stole the City, which came out in July. So Lauren is going to guide us through what it means to be an American, I guess, in Europe as well as in the wider world.
I've got all the answers.
Great. We talked just outside, say, what's the first question. My first question is going to be, are we living in an age of prosperity and happiness? Just a cue. We'll see. Robin Niblett is an old friend of mine. Used to run, used to be head of Chatham House, a very distinguished commentator, writer, author, thinker, has now taken on one of the most perilous jobs in the world, which is being the head of an Oxford college, New College, which unfortunately is only, I think, the second richest in Oxford, but his new book, After America, will share some insights about Robin's views about the transatlantic relationship too. And then finally, Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most famous investors of his generation and an Oxford history graduate, most importantly. His book, The King of California, has been a sensation. I know he spoke yesterday so well that his book has sold out. So keep buying it because then he might write another one. But a beautiful book about his family background, his experiences of growing up and then moving to the States. His books about, he's written with Sir Alex Ferguson. He has a sort of dream life. Will is available outside. All three authors will be signing copies afterwards. So I'm going to start, Lauren, with the famous opening of the Declaration of Independence. So you can reflect on this 250 years on. All the founding fathers, as far as I'm aware, there were no founding mothers.
Or they don't get written about.
But they'd all read classics, so they knew how to write well. And it's hard to beat what Jefferson wrote, which is, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I think he means people rather than just men. And they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How is the United States doing in its current pursuit of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
Where to begin? I'm not sure he did mean people when he wrote men, and I think we could specify even further that he meant white men. You know, when the Declaration of Independence was written and ratified, there was slavery in America. So I want to point out that from its inception, our country has had unresolved tensions between the ideal of the pursuit of happiness and the actual capacity to do so. And are we still able to pursue happiness today? I think the freedom to do so is, you know, it's a possibility, but again, in practice, how does that work? So, you know, I look at the big things like healthcare, for instance. I think if we had an NHS, the pursuit of happiness would probably be much easier for a lot of people. 13 states in which women cannot, you know, have an abortion. 10% of the American population lives in poverty. That's 34 million Americans. So I would think that, you know, healthcare and reproductive rights and a minimum of financial security would be necessary, if not sufficient, conditions to pursue happiness. And then you have the little things, you have cuts to the FDA and to regulatory bodies, and the whole country has explosive diarrhea. So...
Yeah, with the cyclospora. And in the midst of that epidemic, the Trump administration cut the FDA regulatory budget further. So I'm going to leave it at that.
Lauren, just, I mean, you mentioned Trump just by reference to his administration. So just set the scene for us about, is Trump the signal or is he the noise? Are we, is Trump an anomaly? Are we focusing too much on him, the individual? Because you could make the case for the last 20 months, apart from getting things messed up in Iran, actually hasn't achieved, well, not anything really.
Let's see. I'm going to talk about something I know about the book. My book, They Stole a City, is about a white supremacist massacre, the only successful coup d'état on American soil, which happened in my hometown in 1898. And white supremacist, it's not an anachronism. That's what they called themselves. I know John, who's not here with us today, has written critically of the imprecise deployment of that word, but these were white supremacists. They issued a white declaration of independence, said they would, I quote, never again be ruled by men of African origin and killed dozens of black men in the streets and overthrew the local government democratically elected by a biracial government at gunpoint. So what this, you know, in examining this event, what I have learned is that there's been a repeated pattern in the United States of political progress, inclusion, more people being brought into the tent of the pursuit of happiness, and then backlash against that. And I think that is the lens through which I would principally interpret the phenomenon, the Trump phenomenon. I mean, you can also argue it from the great man of history standpoint, undoubtedly. Would we have Trump without Trump? Maybe not. But I think there's a very clear pattern throughout American history of, you know, the country coming closer to its ideals and its promise, and then people slamming the door and saying, wait, we just let a little bit too much democracy in.
Just tell me about that. You know, as someone who has a finger on the pulse of what you choose to write about, what was it that's calling to you about 1898 and Wilmington right now? I mean, these books, they take a while to write.
This one took me 10 years.
Okay. But it's been something you've been thinking about and that because as a resident today, it's something that's a story that you want to tell. How does that fit with how you see the US today?
What's unfortunate about it is in the 10 years that I spent writing the book, it became more and more relevant. It became more and more pertinent, more and more topical. I mean, great for releasing a book, but not great for humanity. I think the parallels that I see, again, is this black political progress, white backlash. You have a right-wing media machine fanning hysteria and racial grievance, white nationalism, white vigilantism and impunity in the aftermath. I mean, you saw that in January 6, and in 1898 they were called red shirts. And then after there is a concerted effort to suppress the truth about what happened. So I think we're living in another one of these periods of contested history, contested ideas about who belongs in the American polity. And in writing the book, I mean, I felt like 1898 could have been 2026 in many ways and vice versa.
It does sound familiar. Robin, how about pulling the lens out on the US in its sort of global stage? And your book is called After America. Tell us, what does the world's, where are we on the temperature check or the health test on the US?
Well, fantastic to be here. Thank you everyone for coming this morning. You know, After America is a slightly provocative additional element, I suppose, because really I'm talking about the end of the American order, which so many of us have benefited from, not everyone, but certainly in Europe we have been huge beneficiaries of the stability that America helped underwrite for all the decades after 1945. And the sense of losing America as a protector for us as Europeans in particular, again, there are other parts of the world that might take a different view of American policy. But it certainly strikes me that I was, 2025, last year was 80 years from the end of the Second World War, the foundation of the UN system, the beginning of the order we recognize. And it just, I was amazed that it coincided with the election of Donald Trump for the second time, somebody who really does want to quite nakedly, openly take America back to a different type of order based on some of the issues that Lauren was just talking about. You know, this is sort of McKinley of the late 19th century, early 20th century, taking property, taking territory, annexing, the idea of annexation, very comfortable with it. We forget America did this, you know, and America wanted to keep other countries out of its hemisphere. So the kind of shock, I suppose, for Europeans who thought they were moving along in a world in which America was the steady part of the weather, but now realizing that it's not. And I suppose the big question I'm trying to address here is, will we go back to a world in which we can trust America again? And my conclusion simply is not. And I don't think that is a Trump thing. I think it was happening even under Joe Biden. If I were an Estonian, would I have trusted Joe Biden to defend Estonia against a Russian incursion because of NATO Article 5? I'm not so sure. Certainly wouldn't under Donald Trump. Well, Ukrainian, you couldn't have trusted Barack Obama, who didn't do anything in 2014.
The fair point being, of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO. So I picked Estonia for that reason. But to take your point, I think there is no likelihood. So I'm getting a bit current policy now, but I tend to live in the current on this stuff. I think there's no chance that Ukraine will join NATO because there's no American president who would risk sacrificing an American city for a country that is likely to be at war for a long time by current telling with Russia. So I suppose, you know, the book is a little bit about, is this really the end of the American order? My conclusion is yes, part of it's external, but part of it's internal. Things Lauren was saying, America is damaged. America's in debt. America is going to take time to recover or find its internal mojo again. And for other countries to rely on it in Europe or in Asia or in the Middle East, as we're seeing, I think is a long, long stretch. So if we don't trust America, you can't be an American.
So we'll come to what does the world without America look like? But what would your view of what America looks like in this paradigm when it burns its bridges and it resets what it thinks, rightly or wrongly, the new world order would look like? What does a post-America America look like?
That's a good question. I think a post-America America is one that is back to battling two identities of what America should be. As Lauren said, Lauren's been talking about a half of it. I think Robert Kagan's book, Rebellion, followed very much, probably I think it may have referenced your particular event within it. You know, America has gone through waves, they've tended to be 70 or 80 years to get in and out of them. It was 80 years for the last order. We could be into a multi-decade period of America contesting between states, central government, external government. I'm struck by the kind of have and have-nots of America. You know, we look at American GDP growing. We made this mistake in the UK thinking GDP growth equaled happiness. The Brexit vote showed there were many very unhappy people underneath the big numbers. America right now, if you look at average debt levels, personal debt levels, they've been dropping as a proportion of income. But that's only if you take the aggregate number. If you break out the actual number, you've got about 23% of Americans with no debt. You have 40% of Americans, 111 million people, cannot pay their credit card bills each month. Now that's an America that, as a European or any country, you can't necessarily rely on America. You never mind the debt, 40 trillion and all that stuff, but I think just inside it's a country that's, my view, we live, Trish and I, my wife, lived in Washington, which is not America, admittedly, but saw it from close, certainly politically, for over 15 years. It's an America that's going to have to refind itself.
And what about the rest of the world? What does that mean for us here in the UK and in Europe?
It's a Sunday morning, so I know, try to keep happy.
I'm an optimistic person. The second half of the book is we can do it. More to the point, we've got no choice but to do it. And maybe that's the point I'm trying to say here. America's not coming back as protector. Fair enough. We've over-relied on it. We had a world that was not sustainable anymore. I give lots of examples. First chapter is called It Couldn't Go On. So it couldn't go on. And that means we've got to do more ourselves, but we're not ready. So what it means for us right now, buy time. So a lot of the embarrassing stuff we see British prime ministers doing is buying time. They know what's going on here. But you cannot tell America that when we rely on America for the survival of Ukraine, rely on America for at least telling President Putin that there could be risks if he got involved. We rely on the American market for our exports. We rely on American technology to power just about everything we do. We rely on American LNG, liquefied natural gas, to be able to power our economy. Now, we're not taking it from Russia, or not as much as we were before. So we have to buy time for an after-America world and invest as fast as we can for it.
Michael, how does that all sound to you? I mean, as someone who has written about dislocation in new world orders, your family experienced in the Second World War and beyond, innovation, disruption has been something you've seen and invested in and worked out how to read. We have the Dow and the NASDAQ closed on Friday pretty much the highest they've ever been, and yet we're hearing about the end of an era and disaster. Which of the two sides, who do we believe? The people who are investing in an optimistic future or those who think that we're on the edge of a precipice?
This, for all the flaws of America, for all the battles that are fought and have been fought since the founding of America over 250 years, which, as Lauren was saying, are flourishing and alive and well today. If you live in America, I live in San Francisco, California, and you look with all of those flaws and with the fact that 37% of Americans don't have $500 of savings in their bank account, it is still the one place in the world with great ambition. And also, I should say parenthetically, you know, my views of Trump are undoubtedly, you know, they're very harsh and very severe. I think he's a vile, venal, vain character who makes Richard Nixon look like a saint. But America's economy, and we can talk about China if you want, but America's economy is still the best in the world. And if you look at the UK and Europe from an American perspective, you'd way prefer to be in America than to be in the UK or to be in Europe. If you're thinking about the future, if you're thinking about ambition, if you're thinking about invention, if you're thinking about vibrancy, progress, and change, it is the one solid place that people can invest in the future. And so I have this very ambivalent feeling, knowing that, you know, recognizing the flaws, but knowing too that there really are only two places, one of which is inaccessible for Westerners, which is China for a whole variety of reasons. But the only two countries in the world that are really embracing the future are the United States and China. And so much, as Robin was saying, so much of Europe depends on the progress that's been achieved in America. And if there were half a dozen companies in the United States that on one rainy day decided to switch the lights out for Europe, it would go dark in Europe.
Is that a lack of vision? I mean, Robin said, I think it's a throwaway line, that the prime ministers here know what they're doing or something like that just now, which...
You can hold me to that one.
But Michael, is that a lack of preparation where we've been caught cold here in Europe? I mean, I'd like to talk about the US and China and leave Europe to others this morning. So, but just a quick reflection on Europe. How do we, is there a way in which we found ourselves out of position and it's all too late?
It needs a revolution, particularly in the United Kingdom. You can't contrast the position of the UK 120 years ago to today. It's lost its way in the world. And the position of this country is dire. And unless there's a profound change, the slide towards oblivion is going to continue.
Can you put your finger on why that's happened? Is that just the imperial disease of the pathogen or the pathology of the death of empire and unable to shake off?
It's all of that. It's also the aversion to success that is, I think, insinuates many aspects of British life. It's the lack of ambition. It's the lack of treating people who are entrepreneurial or who have made money with, you know, the sort of, respect is the wrong word, but with the feeling that they're welcomed in this country. You look at all the people who fled the country and gone to Dubai or Monaco. And many of them are the most successful people that Britain has created or have been raised here over the last 50 years. And there seems to have been a concerted effort over the last 10 to 15 years to pillory these people and drive them out of the country. And with a dreadful tax regime, great hostility to business, and on top of it, the lack of recognition of the fact that the UK, if you're starting a company, particularly a technology company, is a small market. And so to be successful, you've got to be successful in America as well. And I often encourage young entrepreneurs that I come from and that I come across from, you know, Oxford or Cambridge or Imperial or elsewhere around Britain, come to America. You're going to find life way easier. You're going to be welcomed. You're going to be embraced. And you're going to find all the wherewithal that you need in order to create something that's going to make a profound difference in the world.
But do we, but not punch above our weight? I mean, forget about where, you know...
No, I think Britain punches below its weight.
Okay, good. Okay, a good interviewer knows when to leave that for you guys to pick up on rather than to push.
With apologies. I don't mean to be rude or insulting. I'm just trying to be very straightforward and frank of how Britain looks from a long way away.
Lauren, based in Paris, does that sound both familiar to you and also to tell us a bit about the strengths of the US rather than the weaknesses that are all very evident?
Let me take the first. You know, I wanted to pick up on something that Robin said, that Europe and the UK are going to have to adjust to America's abdication as protector. And I think it'll be interesting to see how that happens. It just reminded me of something. The most popular movie in France right now is a two-part, six-hour biopic of the general de Gaulle. And it's a really interesting movie because it came out, it's the highest budget film ever to have been made in France, 80 million euros, which is nothing for an American movie. I think the budget for Barbie was like twice that. Our great national hero. But it came out and it was a flop out of the gates, and then it made this kind of de Gaulle rally, and people started talking about it, and, you know, the resistance, it like coalesced, and it's been a massive hit. But what's interesting about it is it really challenges the role of, you know, Roosevelt comes off as this kind of mercenary, and, you know, it's trying to write the story of the Second World War without America as the inevitable savior and protector. And so it's this really kind of interesting beast, which is an anti-American Hollywood film. So I was just very fascinated by the paradox of that, that it is a film that's trying to tell a French story that is not centered around America, but it's using American methods and cultural templates to do so. So I'll leave that there. The second part of the question. Okay. What do I have nice to say about...
Yeah. I mean, look, if you had to resort to saying that you're Canadian and, you know, and apologize in Paris, that you don't mean no harm, and actually just because Trump is in the White House doesn't mean America or Americans have lost the plot. I mean, how do you see how the US is portrayed here in Europe, where almost everything the United States touches seems to be highly negative, whereas...
Well, I think a lot of it is fair and accurate in the realm of foreign policy. But I think what sometimes gets lost, I mean, the power, the energy and the promise, as I talked about, I don't know that the promise has necessarily been fulfilled, but the promise that we're still reaching for is a dynamic, multicultural... I can't stress enough that the United States is a country of immigrants. And so I think, yeah, when I'm just going to speak from personal experience, when I'm there, I love, there is a, there's just a dynamism, there's a creativity, there's an energy, I think, made of these various elements of American society bumping up against each other. I mean, I was, if I may pose a question...
I was really interested to know, how do you define success? Do you define it only as the accumulation? Is it all financial success?
No, it's improving the common good.
I think, and you touched on this, I think probably the biggest problem that is responsible for so many of the ancillary problems in the US is the widening income inequality.
I agree. It's unsustainable and it needs to be addressed. One of the most obscene texts ever written in the English language is the United States tax code, which has all these sorts of things that in my mind wickedly favor the moneyed classes with all sorts of loopholes that should not exist. It is ridiculous, as Warren Buffett himself has said on numerous occasions, that he pays a lower tax rate than a school teacher in Omaha. Nuts. So I don't think it's about the accumulation of wealth. It's about doing stuff that improves the common wheel. And if you do that, one of the side effects is that wealth gets accumulated by the people who change things.
Just on that, because I'd like to nudge that to China. So of the $775 billion startups in the US, 60% were founded by migrants. How does migration and the fact the United States attracts talent globally, how does that work given the conversations we have in Europe where migration is the single first way to lose an election?
Well, it's a hot potato. Obviously, migration in America, just as it is here, is a really hot potato. And you know, before World War II, and parenthetically, I wrote about this a little bit in this family memoir that I wrote about. My paternal grandparents couldn't get into America because they couldn't prove a means of support in America. You can't have massive immigration into America if it then depends on the support of the state. It's unsustainable. Now, clearly, Silicon Valley in particular is a magnet for the people who want to be in the heart of technology. It's the vital engine of growth, and we all know the names of the various people, you know, Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, whose family fled Russia, or Jensen Huang, the wonderful, incredible CEO and founder of Nvidia, who came from Taiwan, or the founder of WhatsApp, who was on food stamps when he first came to America because his family fled Ukraine. I mean, it's a lot. Or Andy Grove, one of my heroes, who was one of the principal founders of the semiconductor industry in America, who fled Budapest. It's just the history of the imprint of immigrants on Silicon Valley. Without immigrants, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist.
And how does that work then with China? There are more foreigners living in Berlin than there are in China.
More foreigners living in Berlin than there are in China.
Well, you're sorry, more Westerners, I mean.
For every Chinese student at MIT or Berkeley or Stanford, if I had a magic wand, I would, for those who graduate, say, with PhDs or work on PhDs in those sorts of universities and are on the cutting edge when they graduate, I would give them two things. I'd give them a degree and I'd give them a US passport and keep them in America. I tried to persuade Oxford to do this a few years ago when there was this big clampdown, and I couldn't get anywhere with the university bureaucrats to bring the brightest people from China to America or to Britain or elsewhere in Europe. It'd be a massive competitive advantage. But I mentioned earlier that trying to invest, trying to build a company in China if you're a Westerner is close to mission impossible.
Well, tell us about what the world looks like without the US from the China perspective. I know you've thought about that and also with Russia. What happens in the vacuum as it opens up for the geopolitical picture?
I think what's interesting is right now China's on a big exercise to define itself as the upholder of order. Obviously, President Trump is helping enormously with this. Look at Iran, Ukraine, tariffs, Canada, you know, we all know the list. It's incredibly long. But intriguingly, and again I write about this in the book, in the last big summit that they did to mark the end of the Second World War, again 80 years at the end of the Second World War last summer, in 2025, they got together Russia to remind everyone actually that the Second World War started in China with Japan. Now we all think 1939, Poland, UK, no, it started in 1937, and China and Russia defeating Japan was one of the key, therefore ending parts of it. So this is the beginning of a rewriting. Rana Mitter, you know well at Oxford, now at Harvard, has written about this kind of importance of narrative. And I was in Beijing back in July. They just released in June a very interesting paper about the Global Governance Initiative and how China's going to uphold international law, and, you know, unlike America. So there's a real effort to try to build a new set of structures, but they are all based on the idea of the state, and this is going back to the future. You know, the state dominates, individuals don't have a say, there's no Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's what states agree amongst each other will be the future. And what's been amazing about America, and it comes a little bit to what you were saying, Mike, about its kind of drive in business as well, is the power of individuals and individual rights, and that's what the Universal Declaration of Rights was all about. So where does China fit into this? China, to use the slightly hackneyed phrase, is trying to make the world safe for autocracy, the top-down government. The stable world is one in which you don't trust the chaos of the masses. You make sure there's a nice strong hand at the top, strong hand Russia, strong hand China, and then try to bring some other systems of government and countries into that process. So I think it's quite interesting. They're looking at this moment very clear-eyed and saying to themselves, America's losing its leadership capability. We don't like disorder. We, China, we're going to step...
in and try to come up with some alternatives. Of course, if you're in Europe, you feel a little bit abandoned. You're between those two. You certainly don't want the Chinese top-down, but the American red in tooth and claw kind of approach that Mike, you were describing as well, is not a kind of future we want. So, as Europeans, we're sort of stuck between two worlds. And when we see President Trump more comfortable with the top-down autocratic model and openly praising those kinds of leaders, you say to yourself, we are abandoned. And we're going to come together. Last point I would simply make on this: there is, and this is kind of the second half of the book, this whole sort of middle power concept is a very risky phrase. But it is, I suppose, emblematic of an effort of countries that say we're the global majority. We're not going to be dominated by these two. We've got to get our act together. It's going to take a long time. It'll be difficult. But I think we are at an inflection point. I don't think either China or America have the capacity to rewrite world order together or alone.
Mike, you want to come in on that?
There's just one aspect of what Robin was saying about China that I'd like to disagree with a little bit, knowing full well that it is a top-down state and it is, you know, industrial initiatives in particular are managed from the top and sectors are identified. But let's face it, Trump is the greatest gift that China has ever received. And Xi Jinping and his coterie of people who visited America in the last couple of weeks must have got back on their airplane and on route to returning to Beijing, chuckling at the notion that they were given a tour of a helicopter pad and of the East Ballroom. The thing that people miss about China is, in my mind, it rivals America for capitalism. Raw, unabated capitalism, which is why so many of these companies have been successful. The degree of entrepreneurial creativity in China surpasses that of Silicon Valley.
It is so intense, it's hard to convey to Westerners who've not been to China. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So there are, I don't know, 25 electric vehicle manufacturers in China all beating each other's brains out. And the reason that there are so many is that every provincial governor sees it as an emblem of success to have an electric vehicle manufacturer in his province. So they all beat their brains out. None of them make any money in China. They all have tiny, tiny margins. But what's the result of it? It makes them incredibly competitive elsewhere in the world because they have this huge cost advantage from the competition that they've encountered in China. So here you are in Britain with Chinese electric vehicles having taken 25% of the market share of the British automobile industry in September. It's a result of Chinese entrepreneurialism. I mean, China, we're now beginning of October, on average has released four new vehicles. I mean, four new models per day every day this year.
But if I just come in on this point, the problem with that is fantastic innovation, you know, and if you're there, as you said, the capitalist model inside China, although a lot of subsidies, as you know, in there as well, but nonetheless, once those companies are up, they've got a huge market in which to try to become strong competitively. But if you're 31%, I think is the latest figure, of global manufacturing, but you're around 10% of global consumption, you're running a $1.2 trillion trade surplus. The tooth and claw capitalist model there is depressing workers' wages. So the consumption level is way low compared to the investment level. It's an unsustainable model for the rest of the world. They're doing great right now, but everyone, it's not just Europe, is imposing tariffs on China right now because their exports, you know, the drive is get it out. The capacity to absorb their creativity at the moment, at least, is proving, you know, it's just not happening. So my worry is, you know, even parts of Africa are now, I mean, China still has the world's largest, what do you call lighters, you know, for cigarettes. Then they're trying to keep the bottom end of the manufacturing level and they're taking the top end. They're literally top to bottom, and it's just going to lead, you know, the two big boys in a way are turning everyone else off at the moment, and we'll see what happens with it. But it's unbalanced. I mean, I totally recognize, Mike, all the things that are happening, and they clearly are, but it's not a sustainable model.
Well, I mean, the irony, of course, is that, you know, Trump is wildly popular on Chinese social media, as I'm sure you know, where he's called, you know, Grandpa Tariffs. But Trump has made China great again, ironically.
Lauren, tell us a bit about the, you know, Robin mentioned the power of the individual, the midterms, the next presidential campaign. I mean, do you see that there is a moderate leader who can articulate a slightly different, less aggressive version of the United States? Are you hopeful that in the next, you know, I don't want to identify candidates because that's a fool's errand, but can you see the United States resettling itself back down, dealing with some of these structural issues a bit more thoughtful, a bit more mature, for want of a better word?
I mean, I think prognosticating about elections, as we've learned the hard way in the US, is kind of a fool's game. So what I do want to point out is that the Democratic Party is in a dilemma because the, you know, multi-racial, cross-class coalition of white, more educated voters and then voters who are interested in identity issues is not holding together at all. So they have a couple of alternatives. I mean, I think it's interesting to, you know, the question is, is the future of the Democratic Party going to be to continue trying to find the center, which has not been wildly successful recently, or is it going to be to go further to the left to follow the kind of, you know, democratic socialist, Bernie insurgent wing of the party?
Or a third option, which is America becomes more autocratic.
Do you not think that's already, I mean, what are you, isn't that, aren't we doing that?
Well, I'm a historian, so I can promise you things always can get worse.
Yeah. No, I'm interested. I mean, it's really...
Yeah, I think, you know, if you take a step back and detach Trump from it, the question is, do institutions in the United States still function? And the heart is still beating, maybe not as vibrantly as it could have done, but, you know, most people think this is just an anomaly of a guy who understands box office TV, he's enriching himself, all the things that, you know, we know. But that model of Trump saying, you know, Xi is a great guy, he rules a billion people with an iron fist. You know, the job of politics is to stay in power. And we have politicians here for the last 10 years who don't have any fist at all to be able to rule their country. So it's an attractive model about how do you bring people along with you. And I guess that model that Trump has is a very effective one if you're trying to lead. You know, businesses get led by charismatic individuals who sit at the top and make decisions, and ideally they make good decisions or they get thrown overboard by their shareholders or their voters. But that's not necessarily where we are. I think the default is that we assume things are going to get better. So I don't want to talk us down.
Do you think, I mean, do you think Trumpism exists without Trump?
Um, luckily I'm not one of the panelists. So I'm going to ask Robin and Mike what they think?
