Q&A: Trump's staying power, the rise of the far-right & Israel's nuclear double standard

**Jamie Rubin** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:05)
Listen, lighten up. You can't just bomb a whole residential building in Beirut because one Hezbollah walked into that building. The result in the by-election that will make Andy Burnham pretty much almost a foregone conclusion, the next Prime Minister, that he has the skills to unite the country against the far right.

**Jamie Rubin** (0:25)
I don't think people see the possibility of Israel having up its nuclear weapons.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:30)
Or even declaring them, Jamie. They don't even say they have them. Go on, defend it. Defend it, Jamie.

**Jamie Rubin** (0:36)
It's pretty tough to justify.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:39)
David, you're a man after my own heart. You believe in cooperation and collaboration for a greater good. Hello everyone and welcome to the Q&A episode of The Ex Files with me, Christiane Amanpour in London.

**Jamie Rubin** (0:57)
And Jamie Rubin here in New York.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:59)
Of course, this is where we answer your questions. Let's get started. Jamie, you want to take the first one?

**Jamie Rubin** (1:03)
Absolutely. Cameron on Instagram asks the following, Keir Starmer came to power with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history and has now resigned less than two years later. At the same time, Donald Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to retain the loyalty of a large segment of voters despite repeated controversies. What does that contrast tell us about the changing nature of public trust, political accountability, and leadership in Western democracies? Well, it's a really good question. It's one that all of us wonder about every day, and I think the short answer is that's the advantage of a parliamentary system.
In a parliamentary system, Keir Starmer has to win a vote of confidence, and if he loses the confidence of his own party, and obviously much of the other parties, he can lose a vote of confidence. In the United States, a president is elected and stays in power no matter what, unless he's impeached and convicted. And that's a very different system, and so the mood of the country doesn't, and mistakes that are made, and changes in political realities don't necessarily translate during that four-year period into changes in government. A parliamentary system permits that, in a way that the presidential system does not. And clearly, yes, Trump has a strong majority in his own party that are for him, but he wouldn't win a vote of confidence necessarily. You might find enough Republicans to defect if it were a parliamentary system, where they had to decide over whether to have a different president. And so that's the system that we have. And obviously, the founders had reasons for it. It's the way it is.
And we're just going to have to live with it. It's not something that I have any great solution for, unfortunately.

**Christiane Amanpour** (3:00)
Yeah. And of course, obviously, he didn't formally lose a vote of confidence. It was more like he would have done or he might have done, even though he has, as Cameron says, one of the biggest majorities in election history, just two years ago. But he was losing based on sort of trust, as they mentioned, public trust, political accountability, leadership in our democracies have been very much pummeled, all of that, by actions, by politicians, and also by the whole sort of, I think, attempt to destroy these public institutions as a way of just making everything controllable by the strongest person in the room. That's not necessarily what's happened here, because even though he did meet some of the promises he made, which was about the NHS, our national health system, about immigration and boats across the channel, he met some of the pledges to cut waiting times and cut immigration. But people's salaries, the economic outlook, the economic reality, the rising inequality between so many people is really bad. And we don't know what Andy Burnham is going to do. He had an incredible election in a by-election up in Greater Manchester, where he's been mayor for the last several years. I've interviewed him before. He has been in government, in a cabinet before, in a labor cabinet. And it's very possible that he might be prime minister shortly after July 9th, because nobody's challenging him. And Starmer has made July 9th a sort of cut-off point for people to decide to run. And he's just announced and nobody else is announcing.
But I do think that the question raises something super important, and that is we've lost trust. And I tell you what, in my short experience, and I don't really do internal politics, but you remember during the Brexit debate, you were here, Jamie. All these Brexiteers, all these highly-educated, British public school boys, who kept telling us that who needs experts anymore? The Brits have had enough of expertise and all of that kind of stuff. And that came back, you remember, during the COVID as well, when the idea that we should have experts telling us how to look after ourselves or national health policy and this and that, was sort of poo-pooed.