[0:24]Hello, I'm Zeina Badawi. Welcome to the Emmanuel Center in London for this Intelligence Squared debate. This weekend, Donald Trump marks his 100th day in office as President of the United States. And what a tumultuous period it's been. We've seen his travel ban on seven Muslim majority countries thwarted, relations with Russia have soured, and his critics have said this has vindicated their fears. But Trump supporters say, no, not at all. He's made a tremendous impact by reasserting US leadership. For instance, he dropped the mother of all bombs on militants in Afghanistan, and he's fired cruise missiles on Syrian military bases. So, how is the 46th President of the United States doing? Well, that is our motion today. Trump is making America great again. And we have an excellent panel for you arguing for the motion. Conrad Black, the Canadian-born financier, historian and former owner of the Telegraph newspapers and Aaron Banks, a big backer of Brexit in the UK. He was one of the first British politicians to visit President-elect Trump. And arguing against the motion, Khizer Khan, the Muslim-American lawyer and father of the US Army captain who was killed in action in Iraq. And Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and columnist on the Washington Post. That is our panel, welcome to you all.
[2:03]So, shortly you will hear from the panelists, two for the motion and two against. I'm then going to throw open the debate to the floor. Now, you in the audience, you know you were asked to vote as you were coming into the hall before the debate. Because we want to know what your thinking is before you hear what our speakers have to say, and then we're going to ask you to vote again when you've heard the arguments for and against the motion to see if any views have been swung. So, let's have the opening statements from the panelists. And speaking first for the motion, Trump is making America great again. Conrad Black. He's former chairman of the Telegraph newspapers and numerous other publications. He's written biographies of presidents FD Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, as well as a strategic history of the United States. Conrad Black, please make your way to the election. Thank you.
[3:03]Thank you, Zeinab. I will start with facts, which I believe are Germain to the the question as it's formulated. Uh and just cite some statistics. I know that statistics can always be made to prove anything, but in this case, I give you my word that they are objectively selected and are not misleading. In the first 16 years of this new century, the GDP per capita of the United States has grown by 1%.
[3:39]And if it had grown in this period at the rate that it did in the last 20 years of the 20th century, the people, the families and individuals of the United States would be on average 20% wealthier than they are. In this period, 15 million people have fallen out of the workforce. The percentage of Americans above the age of 20 who work has declined by nearly 5% and the number of hours worked, any kind of legitimate work in the United States, in that period has declined by the shocking total of 12%. These, uh, these are very dangerous figures and a very dangerous trend. And the impact of this is is a very burdensome to the country and it's very worrisome to the country. And you must remember that the ethos of the United States is one of such optimism and such ambition that it is not a country accustomed to the concept of decline at any time. And it has never had a period of absolute or comparative decline such as it has had in the last 15 to 20 years. And it it very much concerns the whole country, but coming up to the election, it must be said, this was not mentioned by the established elements of either party. It was very little mentioned in the media.
[5:01]And, and it was really only seized upon by outlier candidates, to some degree, Senator Sanders, who is, uh, a democratic quasi Marxist, and on the other side, on the Republican right, Senator Cruz. Now, if you people are startled by Donald Trump, you will really be shocked if you get a good look at Senator Cruz. He's pitched his whole campaign to the corn cobbers and the wool hats and the people with automatic weapons in the rear windows of their pickup trucks. And, and he, uh, as far as I can see, would hand over the Pentagon to the National Rifle Association, and he declared in Indianapolis last spring that God told him to run for president. And in this last election year, in policy terms, Trump was a moderate. He was, he is in favor of universal health care. It's obviously going to be with some difficulty that he gets there, but he's in favor of it at least as a concept. And he is in favor of lower taxes for lower income people and higher taxes for higher wealth people. And in policy terms, he's a very reasonable person. The fact that Mrs. Clinton referred to half of Trump's supporters as deplorable, was extremely unwise. Given that she was after all running for the highest office in the country, and these people are worried. And what occurred was an assault by Trump upon the entire political establishment. He ran against all factions of both parties. He ran against practically all the media, almost all of audible and visible academia. He ran against the lobbyists, the polling organizations, the bureaucracy, Wall Street, and quite explicitly that infestation of useless, to his enemies, idiots in Hollywood. He ran against all of them, and he won. Uh, and he has won with a program that is quite radical. He has a tax plan, which I understand he intends to reveal at the end of this week, uh, which will include taxes sharply reduced for all corporations, sharply reduced for lower income groups. A tax incentives to start a decades late renovation of national infrastructure incentivizing $2 trillion of retained profit overseas to return to the US.
[7:43]Uh, and, and he has already dismantled the nonsense of global warming. And he has a, he has already shown that he will, um, give the country, as has been mentioned, a foreign policy that is neither the trigger-happy belligerency of George W, or the Panglossian fantasy of Obama telling America's enemies and allies to change roles and places. Thank you.
[8:18]Thank you very much indeed, Conrad Black. Now, the first voice against the motion, Khizer Khan, is a Muslim-American lawyer whose son was killed in action in Iraq. At the 2016 US Democratic Party convention, he denounced Trump's call for a ban on migrants from some Muslim countries and questioned his understanding of the US Constitution. Khizer Khan, please make your way to the election. Thank you.
[8:52]Good evening. America is discovering the true nature of this President. And the motion is, Trump is making America great again, and I stand before you against the motion. Here are the facts. You remember the very loudly pronounced bigoted statement by candidate Trump was, I will build the wall, and Mexico will pay for the wall. Well, friends, we all know Mexico is not paying for the wall. And the wall is not being built. The reason is that to build the wall, you need funding.
[9:43]And Congress has loudly announced that they will not allocate any funding for the building of the wall. So we are waiting. Remember, the second promise and loudest promise was we will repeal and replace Affordable Care Act in United States. He promised that during the election campaign, and then he tried, and you saw three weeks ago how it was defeated when it went to the Congress. His party is the majority party in the Congress, yet that proposal was defeated. Third, jobs. I will create thousands of jobs in United States. And where are the jobs? We don't see them. Even in the near future, we don't see them. So that is the job promise. I am a Muslim-American. I am a patriotic Muslim-American. I consider myself responsible for the safety and security of the United States. We heard Muslim ban number one, and Muslim ban number two. You all know where the ban is. Rule of law has prevailed. The fifth and much talked about accomplishment is the appointment of Judge Gorsuch to Supreme Court. He's going to make America great again. No, he's not. Senate rule were changed, instead of 60 votes were changed to simple majority. That is the only accomplishment that you know that he had been able to do. Remember, within 100 days, within 100 days, his national security adviser,
[11:53]agent of foreign governments was disgracefully walked out of White House, was asked to resign. Keep these issues that I mentioned to you. Is this the way to govern one of the most enviable democracy in the world? I oppose this motion. You heard my brief statements and my story that continues, my journey that continues is in opposition of Donald Trump,
[12:33]in support of democracy, democratic values, safety and security of my country, safety and security of Europe, safety and security of mankind. Thank you very much.
[13:03]Thank you, Khizer Khan. Now, our second speaker for the motion is Aaron Banks. He's a former major donor to UKIP, the UK Independence Party and co-founder of Leave.EU. He recently quit UKIP to set up a new populist political force called the Patriotic Alliance, whose aim is to bring Trump-style politics to the UK. He's also launched the anti-establishment news website Westmonster, which is modeled on the American websites Breitbart and the Drudge Report. Aaron, please make your way to the election. Thank you.
[13:42]Good evening. Um, I just want to tackle the the last point that the last speaker made. As a businessman, to achieve anything in 100 days is pretty much impossible, let alone make America great. So I think Donald Trump has set out to actually do the things he said he was going to be elected to do. The fact that the establishment, both in the Republican Party and elsewhere, have tried to stop him is not an indictment of his presidency after 100 days. What I wanted to do was reel back the clock a little bit and look about the reason Donald Trump was elected in the first place. Globalization has caused massive dislocations within the world.
[14:28]We've seen huge amounts of money transferred from the poor to the rich. And in fact, just today, I I I left Mayfair in the morning, we went down to Clacton and visited what is the poorest part of England in a place called Jaywick. It's overlooked, it's uh, it's a shambolic place. The contrast between Mayfair and that area that was, you know, utterly, just hollowed out, to be frank. And it takes us where we we joined the Trump story in Mississippi, where we were asked to go down, or Nigel was asked to go down and speak in Jackson, Mississippi. And 20,000 people came out to talk to to listen to Trump and to listen to Farage, and there were another 20,000 queued down the road. And the reason was that in essence, the they were disappointed with the political class. And the fact, I think Conrad mentioned all the economic stats, but the only one you need to know is a a salary of a normal American have flat lined for over eight years. It you know, the the the communities were hollowed out. And so John Donald Trump was a response, a kind of almost anti-political response. Now, I would agree with some of the comments of the previous speaker. He's a deeply flawed candidate, a deeply flawed president. But what he represents is a catalyst. And I don't think that Donald Trump will make America great again. I think the people of America will. And when we look at the major policies, which, you know, is to bring back jobs into America, to look at how you could, uh, change the tax system to actually bring companies back in. There's something like $2 trillion parked offshore out of America because the tax system of America means that corporation tax there is 38%, the highest in the western world. And I think he's got a whole range of policies that will be very beneficial. But I think we have to see it in the context. The same as Brexit, why did Brexit happen? People in London didn't see it coming because they didn't go out and look. If you actually look at what's happened to communities in our country, they've been hollowed out. And actually it was a reaction from the poorest in our society that thought the politicians and the the the sort of corporations, it just wasn't in in their benefit. And I think that's very much where Donald Trump has come in. I think, you know, I I watched the French election. Macron's going to win. I can tell you, if the entire British establishment line up and say, pick that guy and and not Marine Le Pen, in the same way that everybody lined up against Trump, there's going to be big trouble. And, and don't rule it out. So I think from my perspective, it's not a question of whether Donald Trump will make America great again. It's whether he will free up Americans to once again make America great again. And that's my that's my key point I had to make.
[17:25]Thank you very much indeed, Aaron Banks. Now, speaking secondly against the motion, Trump is making America great again, is Anne Applebaum, American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She's a regular columnist on the Washington Post and is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where she runs a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. Anne, please make your way to the lecture. Thank you.
[17:58]Thank you. Um, I have to start by saying, I'm terribly sorry. Um, no, Mr. Black, no, Mr. Banks. Trump is not making America great again. You've been conned. Um, we are,
[18:18]it was amusing to hear Conrad Black speak about facts. This is not a president who respects facts. We already know by now that he's lied to his supporters. He's lied to the people in the heartlands who voted for him. He's not kept any of the legislative promises that he made for his first 100 days. And yes, he did make them, they're on a piece of paper, you can find them. He may never keep them. Uh, we know that his populism was a total farce. His allegiance is not to the people who elected him, you know, or his allegiance is to the billionaires and to the lobbyists and to Wall Street and to the people who filled his cabinet. And who run much of his White House, and above all, his allegiance is to himself. We know that he spent more time golfing in his first 100 days than the previous four occupants of the White House put together. We know he spends even more time watching cable television because since he doesn't have the attention span to read or listen to briefings, he tweets and makes policy in response to whatever he sees. We also know that he will do profound damage to American democracy, as you've heard already from Mr. Khan. Um, but Trump has already done really profound damage to America's reputation around the world as an ally, as a trading partner, and even as a serious country. And this is going to get worse and it's going to get much worse. Every day the incoherence deepens. He's never going to intervene in Syria, he says. But then he saw, or perhaps Ivanka saw, pictures of dead children on television, and he changed his mind. He's going to get Mexico to pay for a wall, but actually, it will cost 12 to 15 billion dollars of US taxpayers money. He has a secret plan to defeat ISIS, but actually his strategy is no different from Obama's. He's going to challenge China on trade, on Taiwan. But now he isn't. He's going to make friends with Russia, but after the press exposed his campaign's deep connections to Russia, he's decided for the moment at least to drop that idea. He's unable to name the leader of North Korea with whom he would like to tussle. Against whom he appears to want to go to war. He claimed to have sent an aircraft towards the Korean peninsula, but actually it was heading in the opposite direction. He had dinner with the Chinese dictator, and then offended South Korea, who our allies were defending, by declaring, incorrectly, that Korea actually used to be part of China. He lies repeatedly about crowd sizes, about wiretapping, about his campaign team's relationship with Russian officials, about the crime rate, about employment figures, about the trade deficit. Uh, he's lied about what he said he would do. He's lied to his supporters. He insults our allies. Not only South Korea, but Mexico, Australia, Germany, Sweden, uh, while fawning over dictators like CC and Erdogan, especially if he owns property in their countries. Teams of people, the defense secretary of the United States, the Vice President, have to be sent around the world to apologize for the foolish statements that Trump has made. But everybody knows it doesn't really help. Every day he's teaching our allies, and they are learning that we will not stand up for them, that the American President's word cannot be trusted. Since taking office, Trump has never displayed the remotest concern for American national interests or for American values or indeed for most Americans. But he is obsessively interested in his own business. He's refused to separate himself from his companies, which are nominally run by his sons, or from the multiple conflicts of interest that they represent all over the world. Where does this leave us? America used to fight kleptocracies. This was actually a policy of the US government. But now America is becoming a kleptocracy. You know, American governments used to encourage others to be more transparent. This was part of our foreign policy was to encourage our partners and and our our our our allies around the world to increase transparency. America used to stand for democracy, but now America stands for nepotism. As a nation, our ability to influence others and shape the world has long derived not just from military and economic power, but from the power of our ideas and from the solidity of our system. All of that's gone. You know, so, no, America is not being made great. Uh, America is being made corrupt and inconsequential and tawdry and laughable by Donald Trump, who is the most dishonest, most venal, and most malevolent president that we've had in living memory. Thank you.
[45:26]Thank you very much indeed. Well, we've had the debate, but before I announce the final vote, um, to see who's won this debate, let me remind you of how you, the audience, voted before you heard our speakers today. So, the pre-debate results for the motion, Trump is making America great again, for the motion, 13%, against the motion, 67%, don't know, 20%. And the final results of this Intelligence Squared debate, for the motion, 20%, against the motion, 76%, and the don't know, 4%. So congratulations to against the motion, you won. You also enjoyed the greatest swing.
[46:17]Thank you very much indeed to our panel, Conrad Black, Aaron Banks, Anne Applebaum and Khizer Khan. Thank you all very much.
