AVOID DEPENDENCY

“Trump's vanity and narcissism is such that he doesn't really see Kierstheimer as his opposite number because he sees himself as the king. He wants to be an emperor. He wants to be a unelected monarch. He behaves like one. He surrounds himself by sycophants in the way that A medieval monarch would.”

“I think people are sick of these gotcha interviews. I just I watched one the other day. It was Lewis Goodall doing an interview with Darren Jones, Keir Starmer's chief secretary. It was unwatchable after a few minutes. It's this whole gotcha thing. You're a bad person. I'm a good person. I'm speaking on behalf of the public. It actually is populist. It's playing into the idea as opposed to with Vucic, you're an interesting person. You're a very complicated person, and we're gonna try and find out a little bit more about who you are.”

“The main story that seems to have appeared in surf media was when he said to me, some of us are principals, Alastair, which was seen as a sort of direct hit. We had an interesting series of meetings with bits of staff, and they were very much insisting that he doesn't control the media. My goodness, the coverage demonstrates just how much influence he has over certain really key bits of media. One of them actually said, you know, Belgrade welcomes the return of the NATO bomber, right, which I thought was a bit off.”

“So why does Donald Trump constantly say constantly say that he's cut drug prices by variously 300%, 400%, 500%, and 1200%. And why is that not covered anywhere in the world's media? Kennedy didn't answer the question, but he said he said this, president Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There are two ways of calculating percentages. He then says, if you have a $600 drug and it goes to $10, that's a 600% reduction. So why have we got somebody so stupid as president, and why do we treat them as normal?”

“Potentially, the whole world is locked in a kind of abusive marriage where, essentially, the Trump administration is saying to everybody else, you can't afford to leave me. You know? Yeah. Okay. You might complain, and I might humiliate you and beat you up, but the fact is you'd never be able to make it on your own.”

“It's that we don't really know how to think about having a nuclear deterrent which isn't basically being covered by the Americans. We don't really remotely know how we could build up our own large language model like a ChatGBT or Claude. We've no idea, really, what we would do without American cloud computing or the dollar or five eyes. In other words, we've spent eight years becoming completely dependent.”

“One of the leaders, it's claimed by somebody who knows a lot, gave $20,000,000 to somebody who'd been part of Trump's first administration, believing the guy would get him into the Trump second administration, and feels cheated and ripped off because the individual got a job in a different part of the Trump administration, didn't help him. Another one of the leaders has apparently handed over all the mines in the territory that he controls and in return gets to swagger around in Mar A Lago.”

“I worry, as you know, as you call him my friend Emmanuel Macron, but I do worry that he doesn't necessarily share this vision. I worry that actually Macron is the one who is most reluctant on enlargement. France is now the only independent nuclear deterrent in Europe, that gives them an extra strength. I think he sees that as a strength that should be exploited. But I think this is about politics. I think they're genuinely worried about their politics and the impact of enlargement.”