Naomi Klein, writer and activist HARDtalk

third round contest against Italy's Fabio Fanini at Wimbledon. And that

is BBC World News and its headlines. And now, it is time for HARDtalk.

Welcome to HARDtalk with me, Zeinab Badawi.

President Trump is meeting his fellow leaders of the G20 summit

in Hamburg this week when big issues like international trade and climate

My guest is the progressive Canadian-American writer

She says Donald Trump's rise to power is a product of our time

and that his becoming president amounts to a corporate takeover

She's calling for mass protests against him.

But are her radical policies a panacea for the current ills

You have just written a new book, No Is Not Enough.

Is it anything more than just another liberal critique of Donald

What I am trying to do with the book is really focus less on Donald Trump

the personality, the extremist, the shock machine who has everybody

into the context really off the past 40 years of economic history and how

And he makes sense in this culture where we have had the triumph

of lifestyle brands where we have humans merging with corporations,

we worship wealth, consumption is a way of life.

We have a dominance-based logic in our economy at every level

so I think Trump makes sense and I want to put him in context.

And in what way does he epitomise or that the personification

of the merger of humans and corporations because you say,

he has become a one-man mega brand with his children and wife

He does kind of breed brands within his family.

This is the first time we have had a political figure of this stature

who is a fully commercialised superbrand.

The Trump Corporation is built around his personality so it isn't

just that he has refused to divest from his business,

which would be problematic enough, it's that the business is Trump.

So this relates to the first book I ever wrote called No Logo

which is about how many corporations restructured themselves

in the 1990s so they were less about selling and making products

and more about building ideas and then creating these branded

cocooned lifestyles that they extended into all of these

He started off building buildings but then he just started

building Brand Trump especially once he had The Apprentice.

But his Trump organisation employs 34,000 people and if you take

in all of their families and so on, that's a lot of people

I don't see what that really has to do with the fact

Well, he's more than a brand, he's more than a brand

and if his employees at Trump Organisation amount

Look, the people who make most of the buildings that bear the

Trump logo are not employed directly by Trump.

His main business model is to build his name and certainly

there are people employed in marketing brand Trump,

That's the figure from last year's CNN Money and they looked

into the whole Trump organisation and that's the figure

they came up with, so, one way or another...

That he doesn't build...he leases brand Trump...

I'm just saying that there is 34,000 employees under the Trump

organisation so he's more than a brand.

A lot of people rely on him for his livelihoods.

Isn't he also more than a brand in that he stands for policies,

very clear policies and he taps into the zeitgeist

when he says, look, I'm not happy about globalisation.

He said, in particular about globalisation in June

last year, "it has made the financial elite who donate

to politicians very wealthy but it's left millions of our workers

with nothing but poverty and heartache".

And you know, he's not the only political figure on the right

that is tapping into huge levels of dissatisfaction around corporate

Marine Le Pen is doing the same in France and the Brexit campaign

in the UK tapped into that same energy and he ran on this campaign

to bring back jobs, to stand up for the working class.

What he is doing in power is very, very different and that's why

as you said in your introduction, I said this is a takeover.

But not just of brand Trump, it's really ExxonMobil,

who has taken over the State Department.

Rex Tillerson worked at Exxon for his entire adult

After campaigning against Goldman Sachs and Wall Street,

accusing Hillary Clinton of being in the pocket

of Goldman Sachs, accusing his Republican rivals like Ted Cruz

of the same, Trump has turned around and appointed five former

Goldman Sachs executives to his Cabinet which is absolutely

So you are saying big money is associated with Donald Trump.

What I'm saying is that the way he is governing is quite

different from the way he campaigned.

There was this political brand called Make America Great Again.

But what he has ended up doing is pushing policies that

systematically redistribute wealth to the 1% of the 1%.

He is doing it with tax policy infrastructure plans,

Interesting you bring up the campaign when you say it's not

what he campaigned on because the Democratic candidate,

Hillary Clinton, spent $1.2 billion on her campaign.

If you look at your argument, actually, just looking

at the campaign, it would seem that big money flowed more

to the Democratic candidate than it did to Donald Trump.

No, just, it's a point to make though, isn't it?

But the argument I make in the book is that Hillary Clinton paved

the way for Donald Trump, in that he did not win the election

but she lost at the election, because she was uniquely unsuited

to be an opposition to this hollow promise that he represented.

Of course this billionaire in his golden throne was not

going to be a saviour to the working class.

The reason he won is not because he had a landslide,

he won because the Democrats were not able to energise their base

and that is why I say that no is not enough.

It is not enough just to critique trump.

There has to be an economic project on the progressive side

of the political spectrum that speak to that need for jobs and security

Well, I'm sure he wouldn't say he was selling lies because one

thing he has done is teared up the Trans-Pacific Partnership

agreement because he thinks that trade has not served

the United States well and says he wants to renegotiate Nafta...

To make it more like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

He says he wants to hire American, buy American and that's what I mean

about the fact that he taps into the zeitgeist.

He's criticised countries like Japan and Germany because they have

He wants to bring jobs to the United States.

I think if we look at what he is doing,

he will actually end up driving down wages.

His Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, has been out there reassuring

business audiences that when they renegotiate Nafta,

they're going to do to make it more like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

which is exactly what Trump campaigned against.

So of course he raised these hopes but I don't believe

he is going to bring the jobs back and support middle-class lifestyles.

He did it to get elected and it was a resonant promise

but that is why my argument is that progressives need

to step up into this moment with a real 21st-century

jobs programme and I'm passionate about climate change

and the fact that we need jobs that are going to support middle-class

families and working-class families but also bring emissions down

Luckily we can do this, we can create huge numbers of jobs

in efficiency, public transit, renewable energy.

This is the future, not bringing back coal jobs

But I mean, he wants to bring back jobs, even if they might not be

as well paid as you might like, at least he wants

He's criticised outsourcing, I know you say in your book

that there is outsourcing in Trump's organisations but he says he wants

He wants to bring back some labour to the United States and I think

you would have to accept that time might tell if he does do that.

He is saying that free trade isn't all it is cracked up to be.

I mean, there are people who are worried about protectionism

So I'm saying there must be some things that you agree with him on.

What I believe is that the reason why Trump and the Brexit campaign

and Le Pen have been able to be as successful as they have been

is because this terrain which is rightfully progressive has been

seeded because centrist political parties that originally opposed

these trade deals ended up negotiating them

Bill Clinton and this is a huge reason why Hillary Clinton was not

trusted among working-class voters in the US is that Bill Clinton

originally campaigned against Nafta, promised to renegotiate the whole

agreement, and ended up pushing the free trade agenda much further.

So when she campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership,

as she did, it just wasn't credible and this is why we are seeing a wave

of support for figures like Jeremy Cameron

and Bernie Sanders who are just seen as more credible messengers

for a message of progressive economic populism.

But there is some overlap, you must accept, between progressive

voices such as yours and what Donald Trump is advocating.

There is overlap, there is overlap...

What I don't accept is that he's actually going to do it.

What I believe is that he saw that there was fertile political

He's changing the corporate culture a bit.

I'll tell you what Jeff Immelt, the outgoing CEO of General

He said, "Global thinkers have grown increasingly distant from the needs

We ignored the impact on communities and hid behind trade deals that

were better for companies than workers."

Donald Trump arguably has opened up the space where you have corporate

leaders such as Jeff Immelt saying these things.

You know, shifting the debate, it doesn't matter.

He's opened a debate amongst senior corporate figures.

Absolutely, there is a shifting political ground and that is

The economic project that began under Reagan and Thatcher has been

in crisis since the 2008 financial crash.

Where this ideological project of privatisation,

deregulation, corporate free-trade deals used to be.

On the right you have these populist figures who are coming in and mixing

a feeling that economic decisions are all being made by these remote

bureaucracies which is true, that economic conditions

are becoming more and more precarious

and mixing it up with xenophobia, with racism, with misogyny.

You have populist sentiment from the left wing and populist

sentiment on the right wing and arguably, Donald Trump

There are populists from the centre-left such as,

you mentioned Jeremy Corbyn, Syriza in Greece, and arguably

And the Sanders campaign which got 13 million votes.

Sure, and there's common ground is what I'm saying.

There's common ground, certainly, in this tapping in of the

anti-establishment feeling out there.

But surely you would acknowledge that there's a contradiction to run

an anti-establishment campaign, saying, "I'm going to stand

up their money" and then bringing in five Goldman Sachs executives

into your cabinet, and then appointing the CEO of Exxon

And what I'm saying is we can't just expose...

I mean, it's so obvious to expose that Donald Trump is a fraud

but the real issue is what are progressives going to do

And this is a real concern because this is a malleable moment.

There is a moment now, especially what we are seeing

with healthcare where their plan to replace ObamaCare is to kick

millions of people off their health insurance coverage.

And in this moment, we are seeing a rise of interest in universal

public healthcare, single-payer healthcare, but who is blocking that

This is why the road to Donald Trump is not one we can

just pin on the Republican side of the political spectrum.

You've mentioned twice now that he is associated with big

money and so on, but some of the most greatly admired figures

in the United States and in Europe are extremely

You have Bill Gates who was applauded for his efforts

You have Richard Branson with whom Barack Obama holidayed

You've got Mike Bloomberg who is doing a great deal on climate

change, an agenda you are very, very attached to, so,

what is the matter if these people have a great deal of money

So the argument I make is that that whole idea that we can outsource

the most pressing problems that we face as global citizens,

whether it is climate change or infectious diseases,

whether it is poverty itself, to the Davos class.

You know, rather than doing this with democracies,

with accountability, with transparency, we are going

to hand it over to, as you say, Bill Gates, Richard Branson,

No, I wasn't saying that, but I mean, I know you've said that

Bill Gates, you know, we've got to this assertion that...

Nobody's saying that Bill Gates can fix Africa but his efforts

in helping fix Africa have to be a applauded.

What I say in the book is that, I don't have a problem with charity

but we're at a moment where the Gates Foundation has

arguably more power than the World Health Organisation

..talk about being absolutely stunned by the amount of power

wielded by private, unaccountable wealth.

And this is something I have written about in the past

with Richard Branson and the wild claims he has made about how

he is going to use his billions from fossil fuel burning to fix

climate change and there is no accountability for that money.

Are you saying we should do away with philanthropy?

Tax them at a fair level and use that money democratically

That logic created a situation where we acquainted great wealth

If you make money in software, it must mean you know everything

about everything - health, agriculture, education.

That created a context for Donald Trump to say,

"Vote for me, I don't know anything about governing and I have never

held public office but I am so rich" - this was his pitch.

He has surrounded himself with other rich people,

he has HR McMaster, National Security Advisor.

He has outsourced half the government to his son-in-law.

You say he has outsourced half of the government.

I have to say he was criticised for not appointing enough people.

5% of 556 Federal positions have been filled, which means...

He argues against the fact that you say there is

Steve Bannon has been open about the master plan.

He said the goal is to deconstruct the administrative state,

and that is why they have appointed people to head up government

agencies who don't believe in the existence it

This is true for energy, the EPA, education -

Betsy Davos doesn't believe in public education!

He won't get anything done if he hasn't filled 550 positions.

There is a grand master plan and that is the same we have lived

in for 40 years, which is what Reagan said,

"Government isn't the solution, it is the problem."

It is Margaret Thatcher's vision, that there is no such thing

Donald Trump went before the people and said he would protect healthcare

and social security, and it is finishing the job that

Margaret Thatcher believed in a community of communities,

Donald Trump has tapped into the zeitgeist.

Two thirds of American voters who don't have a degree

I don't know if it was the zeitgeist.

145 academics and writers issued a statement in support of Trump,

and one was a philosophy professor at the University of Texas,

he said Trump is pro-American, concerned about immigration

because of economic effects and about factories closing down.

Trump is concerned about Donald Trump.

This is his animating mission in life.

It is to enrich himself and build himself up.

Anybody who tells themselves otherwise is...

You are dismissing a lot of people who voted for him.

I am not dismissing all of the people who voted for him.

He ran a deeply dishonest campaign at a moment which,

as you say, he tapped into the antiestablishment

zeitgeist, running against an extremely establishment candidate

with a message that was, "All is hell," to which Hillary Clinton

said, "All is well," and it isn't well.

There is a tremendous amount of fear.

Those who didn't vote for Donald Trump, the majority

of American people, too many were not excited about Hillary

She had depressed voter turnout compared with Obama in 2012.

They felt the system had failed them.

I believe the Democratic Party has abandoned workers,

not just white workers, the working class generally.

And those most vulnerable in the working class in the US

So, what they peddled was identity politics mostly about name-checking

different groups, recognising them, "I see you," and not offering

Hillary Clinton opposed the strong campaign for a 15 dollar minimum

This is what it means to fight for women's rights,

who are overwhelmingly the women who are in those precarious jobs,

working multiple jobs to pay the bills.

She represents a particular kind of identity politics,

a leaf in feminism that benefits elites.

To go back to the white working class, it is the white male working

class who feel neglected who voted for Donald Trump.

Professor Angus Steed and Anne Cates, Nobel laureate,

they are at Princeton university, they have done a great deal of study

They showed that the mortality rate for the poorly educated for white

They are more likely to die than black or Hispanic males.

They are likely to be at the bottom of the rung.

That is what I said, they have been perhaps neglected

That is where Trump spoke to them and they heard him.

The solution is not to say, "Well, forget identity politics,

we will just focus on the white working class."

They are not the only ones discarded by this system.

It is true that they are the ones who had the highest

They had the better jobs, they tended to have those

manufacturing jobs that paid enough to support a family,

you know, in the auto sector and so on.

So it is untrue that they have suffered the most under

In fact the wealth gap between white and black in the United States has

widened, because, since 2008, since the financial crisis,

it was overwhelmingly black Americans targeted

They have lost an enormous amount of wealth.

If you are in the higher part of the economic hierarchy you have

There is more a sense of betrayal perhaps among those white men that

are taking their own lives, whether drugs, suicide and that

death by despair study is in the book.

So are you not with your arguments now playing into people's fear,

uncertainty and doubt, by saying, "Look what's happening," you know,

"Donald Trump could spark a war," for instance,

"to push up oil prices," and that kind of thing.

Are you not playing into people's fears?

What I am trying to offer is a plan that goes beyond just saying no

to Trump, resistance to Trump, this hashtag in response to "Trump

I think we need to resist the most dangerous of his policies.

We have seen some inspiring resistance in response

We saw the huge women's march on Trump's first day on the job.

The problem is, even if we resist every one of the attacks,

we would still end up in the same place we were when Donald Trump

was elected, and that was the ground that produced Donald Trump.

We have to get to the issues he was able to play on in order

Jeremy Corbyn's campaign shows the power of a bold,

The leader of the Labour Party in the UK.

He was dozens of seats less than the Conservatives.

He started to do better when they issued their manifesto,

which was so bold, which was about healthcare,

which was about jobs, which was about free education.

That is what you want to promote for the United States?

I think it is the only way of resisting and defeating Trumpism.

People get exhausted by only protesting.

I think what will keep people in the long haul is a vision

Who has that vision among the leaders in the United States'

I am not sure we have seen exactly who that leader is yet.

Bernie Sanders has part of it, Elizabeth Warren has part of it,

Nina Turner has part of it, the new head of Our Revolution,

which is the congressional wing of Bernie Sanders's campaign.

I also think a social movements have it at the grassroots,

and that is where I'm putting a lot of my hope right now.

Naomi Klein, thank you very much indeed for coming on HARDtalk.

We may only be early on in summer but on Friday we saw the seventh

occasional ready where we saw temperatures beat 30