You look at the Republican Party's domestic policy priorities over the past couple of years.
It's really hard to say that we've gotten anywhere just by smashing things.
Hi, everyone. I'm Ian Bremmer. This is your GZero world. Standing here in Battery Park.
You can see the Statue of Liberty is still there. Policy developments to the contrary.
Got a great and relevant big interview for you today. It's J.D. Vance, the author of
"Hillbilly Elegy," and known to many as kind of the Whisperer for the Trump population
in this country. We're going to talk about where America is heading and are there any
solutions. And also, something a little bit new for you this week I think you'll enjoy.
I've got Trump and Putin on set. You'll want to stay tuned. But first, the world this week.
From Asia, President Trump with his magical mystery tour makes it back to the United States.
It was two weeks. It was five countries. It was a bunch of summits. Frankly, went pretty well, all right?
I mean, in the sense that he didn't make any real missteps or gaffes
while he was on the trip. The bilateral meetings went well. He was treated well by everybody.
The speeches were pretty well-received. The only thing people really got bent out of shape
about is when he called (sort of) Kim Jong Un short and fat, which he's kind of done before.
But he also did it out of missile range - he had already left South Korea and Japan.
That's a smart time if you're going to insult him. Look, the biggest takeaway
from this trip was the signing of the TPP 11, the agreement to move forward on that,
which of course doesn't involve the United States. The US left that multilateral trade deal.
Not exactly the big takeaway you want to have
from the most important presidential visit of his term so far. The individual meetings
were pretty good, particularly Xi Jinping, who gave him a "state plus visit," right?
This was by far the biggest deal that they've made of any visiting dignitaries since 1949.
That says a lot about the power of the American presidency, but also says a lot about the
Chinese desire to distract away from the bigger, more thorny issues like, are we going to cooperate
with the Americans on trade and make our market more open to them? Are we going to stop engaging
in intellectual property theft? The answer to those questions are no. There's some headline
contracts that were signed. Every president does that. Shows that, yeah, we're going to
see more money coming in, but really nothing of great significance. And, you know, moving
on Trump's trade agenda with all of those countries running deficits, even the Japanese
refuse to move ahead on a bilateral deal, which Trump says he wants. Overall, you give
Trump an A-minus on the trip in terms of general expectations for how he was going to do with
all these challenging visits. But you probably give him a D in terms of whether or not the
ball's actually been advanced on policies that matter to American national interests.
That has a little to do with Trump, but also has a lot to do with the state of the world today.
And then to Lebanon. Or should I say Saudi Arabia? With the Lebanese prime minister -
or should I say, ex-Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri resigns. Resigns his position from
Saudi Arabia, saying that he's had to leave because he had security concerns and can go
back but not sure exactly when. The Saudis and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman have
been very upset with growing Iranian influence in Lebanese politics, particularly over Hezbollah,
and they don't believe that their man Hariri is able to push back effectively. But the
Lebanese political spectrum, which is quite diverse, has all basically lined up behind
the deposed-ish prime minister. So has American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who not
only said the Americans still recognize him, but also called the Israelis to say don't
get onboard with Saudi Arabia on this. Not exactly what Jared Kushner was saying when
he came back from Saudi Arabia. What Trump was saying just a few days ago after these
Saudi purges against many of the royals. Look, domestically there are revolutionary changes
afoot, which are necessary and so far seem to be going ok for the Crown Prince. Internationally,
whether we're talking about Yemen or whether we're talking about Qatar,
and now whether we're talking about Lebanon - it's a much heavier lift.
So, this is probably not the last we've heard from the prime minister-ish Hariri.
Wouldn't surprise me if that resignation turns to be kind of short term and temporary.
And if we're starting with Asia, got to end with Zimbabwe.
Is it a coup? The military says no. But it smells like a coup. I mean,
they took out the ZBC. That's their state broadcaster and, you know, Robert Mugabe is -
looks like he's under house arrest. They say he's safe. He says he's safe.
But that doesn't mean he's in power. Mugabe has been in power since 1980. That's when we had the
Pina Colada song by that guy that did the Pina Colada song. No one should be in power that long.
And he's in his 90s, he's trying to get his 52-year-old wife Grace to be in charge.
That's why ousted the vice-president, who had a lot of support from the military.
If he was a little more compos mentis, he probably would have realize that was a bad move.
But the military has now stepped in, and I think this is the end of Mugabe.
Frankly a nice piece of news for all of us today.
And now something very different. We have international conflict but domestic dispute.
It's Puppet Regime.
Ok guys. I'm glad you're here. And I want you to remember, the important thing as
we work through this, is that we be honest with one another.
No post-truth nonsense in this office, ok?
So. Who'd like to begin?
Donald?
What you said over the summer, Vladimir. That I am not your bride.
It was very unfair and hurtful and I was, I was just very, very hurt.
I thought we have agreement, Donald, not to let truth become problem for us. But suddenly, you -
you never remember what you tweet. This is main problem with you. You are always on the phone -
Oh, that's the problem?
Always on social media.
That's the problem?
Yes, is main - is, is one of problem. Look, I put so much on line for you. For us.
To remove anyone who stood between us. Now, in America, it's hysterical.
They drag our name through mud, and you are just -
Please. Look. First of all, ok? He loves it, ok? Let me just tell you, ok? I mean, he loves
that he's the center of attention in America, ok? To be honest, I'm surprised he can even
keep his shirt on just sitting here, ok? Will you please, ok? So he loves, ok? And the other thing -
Look. If things get bad with me, he's just going to run off with China, ok?
That I can tell you.
How dare you.
I've seen it before. I call it China Maples. Really. I know, she just - look, she just
uses and uses and uses you, Vladimir. It's a disgrace, really. I mean, I can hardly -
I don't need American permission for -
And she treats you like a puppet, really.
No puppet! No puppet! You are puppet.
Even though the country is so different,
we're still fundamentally trapped in this debate between Johnson and Reagan.
I'm here in Naples, Florida with J.D. Vance. He is a partner at Revolution LLC. He is contributor at CNN.
But everybody knows him from "Hillbilly Elegy," his #1 New York Times bestselling book,
which is kind of the Bible of understanding the Trump voter in the country right now.
J.D., glad you're here.
Thank you.
I want to start a little personal, because as a kid from the projects myself,
I felt connected to you when you talked about your Mamaw -
Sure.
Your grandmother who kind of made it possible for you to get the hell out of Appalachia.
Sure.
Kentucky and then Ohio. When you look back at the way you grew up, what percentage of
your success comes from simply the fact that you had someone in your family that could
get you out of what everyone else was stuck in?
Well, I'd say half goes to Mamaw, probably 40% goes to everybody else in the environment
that was really positive and influential for me, and then 10% goes to the Marine Corps.
So I think in a lot of ways the lesson of my life is that when you grow up in really
disadvantaged circumstances, you need a lot of things to go right. It's not one thing.
It's not one policy. It's a number of people.
Came across very clearly that you're not necessarily thinking or looking for the government to
provide solutions for people in this situation because, at least, for you
and everything that you saw, that's not what was moving the needle.
Government can help, but it can't solve all of these problems, right? When you talk about
people who really feel disconnected and hopeless, and you talk about the problems of family
trauma and domestic violence and family instability, it's hard to look at policy and say there's
a clear lever that we can pull that is just going to make all those problems go away.
Do I think the government could play a role in creating more job opportunities? Absolutely.
Government could play a role in creating better educational opportunities, actually preparing
people for the jobs that will exist in the 21st century as opposed to the jobs that existed
30 or 40 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't think policy is totally helpless,
but how do you recreate the experience of a loving home and the support provided by Mamaw?
That's a tougher question, and unfortunately it doesn't always have a policy answer.
So it's easy to say government's broken, right? It's easy for us to complain. But there are
a lot of things that feel broken when you read your book and when I talk to you about
your life, right. The family seems broken, the schools sort of seem broken. If you could
wave a wand and start with one thing, one thing that you think would make a difference -
and I'm not talking about government policy. Any one thing. It would be what?
It'd be family. It definitely would be the family. You know, the evidence that a lot
of these disadvantages and lack of privileges accumulate before kids even enter school age
is pretty overwhelming, right? So we talk about the instability that comes along with
growing up in a pretty broken family. Talk about the domestic violence and trauma that
is actually much more common than we might like to think in some of these families.
If kids are growing up in a place where they don't know where they're going to go to bed
that night, where they're not hearing a lot of support for education or learning in their
house, and whether - they're worried that they're either going to go to bed being physically
abused or emotionally abused. We can't expect that kids who grow up in those circumstances
are not going to show a lot of the negative side effects of disadvantage.
Move to the more atomic family. Big part of that or not? Are you one of these people who
thinks, you know what? I mean, if we don't - if the family unit doesn't actually cohere,
you're going to have a real problem as a single X or as an aunt Y. I mean, you were, you know,
you were raised in a fairly untraditional way.
It doesn't have to be a one size fits all answer. But, but again, so many of the disadvantages
we see accumulate in the lives of these kids before they're even five years old. We really
have to start there and appreciate that that's - to me - the most significant source of disadvantage.
So, you know, you went from this environment that is pretty deeply nativist to a life that
is now very deeply globalist. Right? I mean, the fact that we're meeting here in Florida
and last time met in Aspen and - that's not a, that's not your traditional Trump supporter,
at least not at the base. How, how do you relate to the fact that your background is
kind of ripped between these two poles? You in some ways are living this. And how do you
connect with the people that come from where you came from?
Yeah. Yeah. So, definitely much better traveled now than I was when I was a kid, that's for sure.
I really do think that being part of a place is a fundamental part of my identity.
And if I was one of these kids who quote unquote "made it out" and completely severed all my
ties to the old world, as they say, I don't think that I would be happy or comfortable.
I think that in some ways, just because of who I am, it's really important to me to find
that sense of rooting and identity in the place that I came from. And that's probably
always going to be the case. It's always going to be the case that I'm going to want to maintain some
connection to the places that really made me who I am. And not everybody is like that, of course.
But that's certainly how I am.
Now let me - when's the first time that it became clear to you that there was a real
nativist movement - political movement - in the United States that was going to matter?
I guess it depends on - you know, nativist obviously has a number of different definitions.
But, you know, my sense of, of the Trump movement is that it was probably mid to late 2015 where
I start talking to folks from back home and realized that there was something real here.
So it was Trump that got you started. It wasn't before then.
No, no, no, no. And I mean, you know, like I don't think that I would call Trump necessarily
a nativist movement. I think it depends. Obviously, there are nativist elements to it. I think
most of the folks that I knew who supported Trump and voted for Trump were not motivated
by nativism in the sense that they were motivated by a fear of outsiders, unless you define
outsiders as what we sort of pejoratively and -
Democratic elites.
Democratic elites.
I would. Why wouldn't you?
And if you're going to define nativist as anti-democratic elites, then absolutely.
That was, that was the sense that I got is that there was was this really broad-based
feeling (even among folks who ultimately voted for Hillary Clinton) that those people - meaning
the people who call the shots - have screwed something up. And it wasn't just Democratic elites.
It was Republican elites too, you know, whether it was the Jeb Bush or the Hillary Clinton
or Marco Rubio or whoever. There was this sense that for a long time, we've been
trusting a certain group of people to call the shots, to call the shots in business and
in politics and in finance, and our lives aren't getting better. If anything, things
are getting worse, and we need somebody who just is going to blow up that entire system.
And that was really - so I guess the answer to your question is, it was recent when I, when
I started to realize that this was a real political movement. Now the frustration was there.
The frustration was there among Republican voters who were maybe really unhappy with
the Iraq war. It was there among Democratic voters who were unhappy with bank bailouts
or some of the policies of the Obama administration. You definitely saw that frustration with elites,
but I never quite saw it in a coherent political movement until Trump started running for the presidency.
So when that happened, when you started seeing that movement cohere and when you saw Trump
whipping it up, was your knee jerk response "Uh-oh, this is scary," or was it
"Finally, someone giving voice to this."
Yeah, no, it was, it was finally someone's giving voice to this. I mean, you know, my
natural inclination, I think, was to be really, really supportive of Donald Trump. When he
went in - you know I'm a Republican - when he went during the Republican debate and said,
you know, we really screwed up the Iraq war. We should have done better. We should have
taken better care of our veterans. Maybe we should have been taking care of the working-class
base of the party as opposed to the donor base of the party. And when he said those
things it really, really resonated with me and there was a part of me that always really
identified with Trump's message. And the criticism that I always had and the worry I always had
is that you actually have to turn that frustration into a governing agenda. And that
was really where I saw the breakdown. I didn't see that there was any way to connect that
frustration with something that would actually make these problems better.
Drain the swamp has a lot of resonance for you.
Sure.
Right? But I mean, if things are really that broken and have been for a long time,
don't you need someone that just comes in and smashes the damn thing, right?
I mean, you would think that you would then support that.
Yeah, well, I think you probably need somebody who smashes the thing. But if you smash the
thing without any real sense of how to move forward, then are you really smashing it or
are you just letting the same old institutions that have not worked especially well replace
the institutions that you're allegedly smashing? You know, if you look at the Republican Party's
domestic policy priorities over the past couple of years,
it's really hard to say that we've gotten anywhere just by smashing things.
You did not vote for Donald.
You were one of five people that voted for Evan McMullin.
That's right.
What was it that made you decide, that's it, I can't do this? Despite all of the -
Again, he's very aligned -
He's absolutely aligned.
With you kind of philosophically.
Sure.
Right?
Look, there were a lot of parts that wanted to support President Trump, but at the end
of the day I just felt that unless you paired that recognition of the problem with an idea
for how to move forward, you would end up in either the same situation the Republican Party
had always been in, the country had always been in, or you'd maybe even be at a worse off point.
So in terms of what he's done so far.
Sure.
That you would give him an A.
Yeah. Well, I mean - been really happy with judicial appointments and nominations, right?
So I think you've seen a lot of good judges, folks that any solid Republican president
would have appointed, so would give him high marks there. I think that, you know, despite
the fact that there's a lot of rhetorical danger in the Trump administration with foreign policy,
he hasn't actually made a significant foreign policy blunder yet. And that's actually -
if you judge by standards of recent American presidents - that's actually been pretty good.
I think that you can make a really strong argument that most recent American presidents
have gotten us into a significant problem overseas. I don't see that Trump has done that,
at least not yet, and so in some ways I think the best conduct of American foreign policy
is to not get us into some of these significant blunders that other folks have gotten us into.
I mean, he's expanded Afghanistan troops so that - I don't want to get into that in a big deal.
I would rather ask you on the domestic side. Do you think that his embracing of the identity politics piece,
whether it's on the wall or it's on the Muslim ban or it's on the NFL.
I mean, clearly it's useful politically for his base. But do you also think it's valuable
for a population that has not felt like they've had a coherent sense of community for a very long time?
Yeah. I mean, look, some of the identity politics stuff makes sense to me politically, but at
a fundamental level, we have to recognize that Republicans are still not a majority
party in the country. They're at best 50% of the electorate and probably actually smaller
than that. And so often, my reaction is, are we actually expanding the Republican tent?
We saw recently in the Virginia elections, Gillespie was focused a lot on the identity
politics issues. Was not focused a lot on the economic issues and how to actually bring
a more positive economic message from a Republican perspective to the electorate. And that only
gets you so far. In Gillespie's case, it got him a pretty significant defeat. And I think
that's going to be unfortunately the case for a lot of Republican candidates. Populism
can't just be identity politics from the right. There has to be an economic piece of it too.
Now, for a long time there was this presumption that the sweet spot in American politics was,
be a social liberal and be an economic conservative. Your Schwarzenegger effect and all these people.
And you believe now that it's exactly the opposite. The sweet spot for the Republicans
is really being a social conservative but being an economic liberal. I guess I would say,
What changed? And also, who do you think reflects that?
Well, I should say that I think that's the sweet spot for any American political party.
If you look at where the average American voter is, they tend to be socially to the
right of mainstream media and so-called elites, and they tend to be economically to the left.
So that's not a place that's actually embodied by a lot of folks or really anyone in American politics.
I think in some ways, you can make an argument - especially during the primary
season - that President Trump came closest. He was the one who was running as a social
conservative but also pretty critical of right wing orthodoxy on trade and immigration and
tax policy and so forth. So I think you can make an argument that, at least rhetorically,
President Trump was trying to occupy that space and it obviously worked for him -
On gay rights, he kind of tilted back to New York City.
Yeah, but I mean -
Transgender. Why not just eat those points, you know?
So down the line, certainly, he's not a social conservative, but I think he ran more to the
right than, let's say, any Democratic party candidate would run. And again, I think that's
the sweet spot of American politics. The unfortunate piece of this, just for me and for my priorities,
is that you have to actually turn the rhetoric of economic populism into actual policies.
And so I always push back a little bit against the idea that what it is is that we need to
be running economically to the left. I think of myself very much as a conservative.
But what I do think is, we have to recognize that most voters are not right-wing libertarians
on economics. They actually want the government to support working and middle-class Americans.
Question is, what do you do with that? But the fact that so many in our politics can't
even recognize that that's where the average American voter is, I think doesn't bode well.
I think most people understand the average American likes more money spent on them.
Sure.
So hence Obamacare, maybe not be so popular until you have it and then don't take it away
because I'm going to lose something, right? So you're basically arguing that,
I want to see more redistribution in the United States system.
I don't necessarily think that. I mean, in some ways we have a very progressive income
tax right now, so it's not a question of more redistribution. It's a question of how do
you actually make the economy work for the broad middle and working class of the country,
whether they're on the left or whether they're on the right. You know, to me the question
of redistribution, if you say do we need more or less redistribution, you're fundamentally
just throwing back to a political conversation that people were having in the 1980s, right?
Do we want more of the Johnson administration and its policies in the 60s, do we want more
of the Reagan administration and its policies in the 80s? To me, that misses the way in
which the country has changed in a very fundamental way. The problems that we're confronting right
now are much different than just more or less redistribution. So you can say, for example,
you want people to have more and better access to healthcare. But what form does that take?
Because if you're not actually reforming the American healthcare system, if you're not
reforming some of the monopoly power that certain drug companies, that certain providers have,
then you can spend money all day on healthcare. It will be redistributive.
But you may not actually get better healthcare outcomes in the process.
What do you think the United States should stand for as a country?
This goes back to my point about the identity politics issue and why I'm so uncomfortable
with it sometimes on the right. I think at our best we stand for the idea that no matter
what you look like, no matter what your race or religion is, you can be part of the American nation.
It's a nation built around a common creed, a commitment to certain values, as
opposed to who you worship or what color your skin is. That, to me, is the very best part
of the country. But I worry that we're losing it, because I worry that when you ask an 18-year-old kid
or even a 35 or 55-year-old man, what does the country stand for?
Not many people actually would give a consistent answer.
So you just had a child. What are you going to do to make sure that your baby grows up
to have the values that you really respect and want to see in this country?
The most important thing for me is to make sure that the kid who is going to grow up
with privileges that would have been completely fantastical to a young version of myself,
to make sure that he grows up and has some connection to people who aren't necessarily
given everything in their lives. So I want him to spend time with people that I grew
up around. I want him to spend time with people who I didn't grow up around, but who have
known real struggle in their life, because without it, I think that he'll never really
appreciate what a lot of folks in his own country are going through. And to go back
to this question of being part of the same American nation, I don't think that many people
actually empathize with the experiences that are shared by Americans, even those who live,
you know, 10 miles down the road. And I really don't want my kid to be like that. He's going
to live in this incredible bubble. He's going to have a lot of money. He's going to have
access to books and educational opportunities and so forth. But I want him to feel, if he
meets a kid who grew up like I did, I want him to feel like he actually has some kinship with that person.
J.D. Vance. If you haven't read "Hillbilly Elegy," what the hell is wrong with you?
Thanks a lot, man.
Thanks.
See you soon.
Appreciate it. Yeah.
Look. Vladimir here, ok? He doesn't understand my life, ok? I have to deal with Congress,
the failing media. There are courts. And the treatment of me by all of these people is just very, very unfair.
Cry me a river, Donald.
No, Crimea again.
If you don't like media, courts, just get rid of them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You think it's so easy, ok? But you, I see you up there on your -
You see what I mean? You see?
Look, he won't publicly acknowledge our relationship, ok?
I acknowledge. I - I acknowledge.
Every time our relationship comes into public, he just starts -
Radical Islamic terrorism, Ian.
Uranium.
Football.
ISIS.
Ok, ok. Let me - let me interrupt. Let me interrupt. Can you guys think of some things
that you still do share? I mean, look. Neither of you loves NATO. Neither of you wants America
to be a superpower, right? I mean, you both spent the 1990s broke and hanging out with Russian criminals.
Not broke, Ian. I was not broke.
Your outfit in 1990s was criminal, Ian. I have seen picture.
Ok. Well, you guys both love...
Steven Seagal.
Steven.
Is this what will sound like when doves will cry?
I don't know what I'm feeling right now. But I'm feeling something. That is a feeling.
I also am feeling this. How do I crush this feel -
Take.
My.
Hand.
Your hand.
Your tiny, little -
My tiny little what? You son of a -
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