271. TRIP US: Biden really losing Hispanic and Black voters?

Why are Black and Hispanic voters increasingly warming to Donald Trump? How will Trump and Biden prepare for their first debate? What is Biden’s plan to give legal status to 500,000 undocumented spouses? Join Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci as they answer all these questions and more on The Rest Is Politics US. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @RestPoliticsUS Twitter: @RestPoliticsUS Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I get so many headaches every month.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Botox on a botulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 1:58Speaker 03

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• 2:05Speaker 05

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• 2:27Katty Kay?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay.

• 2:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  And me, Anthony Scaramucci.

• 2:33Katty Kay?

  Anthony, we're being very Euro on The Rest Is Politics US this week because you're in Greece. I'm in Cannes, where I went to it, by the way, you have a big fan. I went to a dinner and there was a member of the British royal family, a princess. And I was introduced to speak and I suddenly heard this gasp of delight. And it was this princess saying, oh, my God, I love the show. I really love Anthony. So look, I think we're going to upgrade your refuge from America possibilities.

• 3:02Anthony Scaramucci?

  See that? I can hide in one of the castles?

• 3:04Katty Kay?

  Exactly. I'm now going to start a kind of, you know, crowdsourcing. But if you haven't got a castle, get to the back of the queue. Because Anthony has high standards, as we can see from his lovely room in Athens.

• 3:15Anthony Scaramucci?

  I do have high standards. I may be more posh than you. Remember, when I call you posh, it could be projecting, Katty. Remember that.

• 3:23Katty Kay?

  Projecting or confession. And there you are on the Athens Riviera, just trying to make everybody jealous.

• 3:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  Economy is really coming around here, you know, 12 years ago, obviously, there was a big problem here. They've resolved that for the most part and it's nice to see they're a very hospitable country. What are we talking about today?

• 3:43Katty Kay?

  On today's podcast, we are going to look at why black and Hispanic voters may be warming to Donald Trump. Whether Democrats should be worried about that as we head into the November election. And of course, it comes after Joe Biden this week announced a new policy that would protect hundreds of thousands of undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation, which follows the earlier order earlier this month, shutting the border against asylum seekers. So he's kind of trying to have it both ways, it looks like, on immigration, appeal to progressives, but also appeal to the centrists who are worried about the border. So we'll talk about all of that. In the second half of the program, I think this is the week to look at presidential debate, right?

• 4:28Katty Kay?

  And what the prep actually looks like. The first debate of the election campaign comes up next week. We want to have a look at what we can learn from history about how important these debates are. But I really want to get into what the preparations are looking like. Joe Biden has flown already to Camp David and is prepping now until the next debate. So we'll get into how the two men go about debate prep. But first of all, let's talk about this coalition, Antony, this border move that President Biden instituted at the beginning of this month. And then this week, he follows that up with this move to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens.

• 5:07Katty Kay?

  So people who have come into the country illegally and are married to American citizens are now going to get some respite and won't necessarily be deported. This is clearly a move to appeal to progressives in the Democratic Party who didn't like him shutting down on the border. And a way to to say to them, look, you know, I hear that you're angry. I don't know if he's trying to have it both ways. I don't know if this looks like the Biden campaign being a little unclear on immigration. What is their position? Are they trying to shut down the border? Or are they trying to help people who are in the country illegally? I think what Joe Biden's team are saying is, look, if you're out of the country, we're going to try and stop you coming in. We're going to protect the border. But if you're in the country already and you've been here for a long time, you're married to an American,

• 5:51Katty Kay?

  then we'll try and help you work and live in the country legally. I don't know how it how it washes with the progressives. And I don't know whether it it just looks a bit muddled. What's your reading on it?

• 6:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, so I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind, because I know you're a great journalist. Do you think he's gotten a green light from the left, the hard left progressives? Some people in the United States call them the woke progressives, if you will, to tack to the middle? Or do you think he's doing this on his own, not worried about losing them or having them disaffect or not vote? Because he said he has an issue in Dearborn County. We can talk about Dearborn, Michigan in a second, related to the Arab community. But I'm going to tell you why what he did is a brilliant move in my mind. But I just want to understand from your mind, do you think he's been given a green light? Or you think he's doing this unilaterally?

• 6:39Katty Kay?

  So I think Joe Biden's instincts would be to help migrants in the country, particularly people here illegally. When he was in the Obama administration, Barack Obama tried to help the parents of kids who had been born in the United States. The parents were in the case country illegally. The kids were born here and therefore were American citizens. The Obama Biden administration tried to help those people. And I think Joe Biden's instinct is to try to help people who are here. But when he shut down the border, that felt to me like a move to the center and to try and mitigate some of the anger there has been over the US border. But he got blowback from progressives in the country. Now, are those progressives going to go somewhere else? No.

• 7:24Katty Kay?

  Most of those progressives are going to turn out and vote for him anyway. A few of them may defect to RFK Junior, the third party candidate, Kennedy. But most of the progressives are going to vote for Biden. They haven't got another home to go to. So I think in that sense, you're probably right. He has a green light, but he's still clearly with this move coming just a couple of weeks after the border move, felt like appeasement.

• 7:46Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so just two comments, and this is always happening. When I sat in on these campaign strategy meetings and you were tacking to the middle for the purposes of trying to get the independents who are ultimately going to decide the election. What we found in a lot of these campaigns is some of the people on the hard right, at least again, I was a Republican, so they defected. And I'll give you an example. In the Romney campaign, 2012, the evangelicals did not show up for Mitt Romney. Had they showed up proportionally for like they did for John McCain or for George W. Bush, I'm not saying he would have won the election because he lost by a wide margin, but it would have been a lot closer of an election. So they're always worried about, not that they're going to vote for the other side, but they just don't turn out and vote.

• 8:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  But I think the move with this exception on marriage is a brilliant one, and let me explain why. He's going to come into the fall, he's going to say you have one side that wants to deport 15 million people, and they want to have a Handmaid's Tale armored car going door to door, house to house, to pull people out. You and I unfortunately are old enough to remember the Elian Gonzalez situation with the Clinton administration where they had to unfortunately deport him. The child did not want to leave his aunt and uncle. They had to bring the SWAT team in to pull him out of the house. And I think Joe Biden is trying to tell people with this move, if you're here, we're going to make it work for you.

• 9:11Anthony Scaramucci?

  I think they need to do a better job, however, on explaining what you and I talked about last week or two weeks ago about the economy. The 15 million people that are here are actually helping the economy. They're adding wages, they're adding tax revenue to the base. They're paying your social security taxes. They're keeping us from being upside down demographically like most of the Western nations. And so it's not a great argument to make on Fox News. The hard right conservatives, not a great move for them because they are so fearful. They're going to steal our jobs. There's lots of xenophobia in the country and lots of isolationism. But I think it's a great narrative for his campaign, Katty, and I think it's going to work for him.

• 9:52Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I think it's something that we could hear more of from Democrats. I think it's something that we could, as I said last week, the business community is not making that case. People who are in favor of immigration could be making more strongly the Democratic case. I want to look, you know, that coalition that the Democrats have always had, is it as solid this time around with black and brown voters as it has been in previous elections? So there are two things you have to do, right? To win an election in the United States, you've got to, as you've just said, keep your base together. Your base has to show up and vote for you. And you have to reach as many of those people in the middle, the swing voters, as you can. The assumption has been on the Democratic side that their base is solid, that they've got the progressives, that they've got black and brown voters,

• 10:37Katty Kay?

  and so they can focus on those independent voters particularly. There are questions in this election campaign because of some of the polling numbers, and we can get into that a little bit, about whether Democrats are losing some of those black and brown voters. And I think the Hispanic vote is particularly interesting because you've got a very different Hispanic vote. When you were running the Romney campaign back in, or working on the Romney campaign back in 2012, the Hispanic vote was a lot of people who Had come into the country even then, more recently. But since 2012, even in a couple of election cycles, 12 years, the nature of the Hispanic vote is changing. So here's why.

• 11:19Katty Kay?

  Every 30 seconds in the US, a young Latino turns 18, becomes a voting age. The Latino population in America is young, and many of them are people who were born in the United States. They are third or fourth generation. It's their grandparents who came here in the 1960s. That was the huge, big wave when you got people coming into the US. And these are now American born. They speak English as their primary language. They may speak Spanglish at home, right? This mixture of Spanish and English. But when you look at them in terms of issues, these are people who pollsters are saying, and people who are studying this. There's a great book on this, by the way, a guy called Mike Madrid, called The Latino Century, and he lays out this argument. You look at these young Hispanics.

• 12:03Katty Kay?

  They are socially liberal on things like abortion. They're socially liberal on gun rights, for example, gun control. But when it comes to the border, they want the border shut down. They actually sound more like white Americans than they do like their Hispanic grandparents and great grandparents. So if you're trying to reach that group of Hispanics, your message has to be, I think, a little bit what the Biden campaign was doing. It's not necessarily true that when the Biden campaign shuts the border, like they tried to the other day by limiting asylum opportunities for people coming into the border, that may play well with this young group of Hispanic voters. It's interesting to me how the Hispanic population. I know that we've always seen it as a monolith,

• 12:47Katty Kay?

  that Cubans are the same as Venezuelans are the same as Mexicans, and clearly they're not. They have very different priorities. But you now have a kind of generational thing amongst Hispanic voters, which people who study this are looking at more closely.

• 12:59Anthony Scaramucci?

  I want to add a paragraph to what you're saying. I think it's a brilliant analysis, but I want to take it one step further into the African American community or the or the black community. The black community is not omnibus either. You have immigrant blacks that are coming in from Africa or from the islands. You have fully assimilated blacks, you have several generation blacks who unfortunately whose great grandparents or great great grandparents were slaves. And you have a very interesting collection that you can no longer call omnibus. But what you can talk about in our society is the sociology of assimilation. And I'll just tell a personal story. My grandfather, on my mother's side, actually born in the United States.

• 13:43Anthony Scaramucci?

  They have to go back to Italy because somebody is sick. So he's an American citizen, born in the United States. He goes back to Italy for 10 years. He returns to the United States at the age of 10. And him and my great grandfather, they find the United States to be nativistic towards them. Meaning, you know, at that time, it was Italians go back to the country that you came from. At that time, there were signs in the storefronts that said Nina, which meant no Italians need to apply for the job. And so, you know, they ended up doing construction or the day worker jobs and things like that to create money. And they weren't fully assimilated. In the mid 1900, the 1905 period, Teddy Roosevelt assigned legislation that for immigration

• 14:28Anthony Scaramucci?

  purposes, Italian Americans or Italians were to come into the country as non Caucasian. So when they were filling out quotas, okay, so that means non white, obviously. And so this bothered the Italian American community, and especially my grandfather. He didn't like it. He felt he was European. This is at a time where, you know, hey, white and black and all of this racial segregation was in the country. And so it's four generations later for the Italian Americans, they see themselves as white catty. And very large blocks of the Italian American community voting for Donald Trump. You know, I'm not saying all of them, but just trying to explain the genealogy and the sociology of American assimilation. You go one, two, three generations, you think you're American.

• 15:13Anthony Scaramucci?

  You look in the mirror.

• 15:14Katty Kay?

  Which is what we're seeing happen, right? We're seeing this happen with these young Hispanic kids.

• 15:18Anthony Scaramucci?

  I had dinner here in Greece last night. One of my friends is with me, he's a Greek American. I said, you know, the Greeks are much more tied to this country than the Italian Americans, the Greek Americans. I said, why is that? He says, I'm a first generation kid. My father was born here in Greece. Was your father born in the United States or was he born in Italy? My father was born in the United States, so was my mom. And so we've lost some of the connectivity to the old world. And this is happening in the Latin community. And this is very, very important to explain to people why America is different from Europe, why America is different from Asia. You come here to America based on an idea

• 16:00Anthony Scaramucci?

  and you're expecting your family to fully assimilate. And when you do, guess what you look like? You look like the average American voter. And I think the Biden campaign strategy now is, you know what? We've got to make this seismic change. We've got to start adjusting to how these people see themselves as opposed to the way we see them.

• 16:21Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I think it's increasingly with these younger, particularly with these younger Hispanic voters, it's about class, not race. It's about where do I identify socially? Where do I identify economically? I mean, that figure, you know this. I remember the postmortem that you guys did after Romney lost the election in 2012. And the argument was, we must expand the Republican Party. And that figure I just gave you, every 30 seconds, a Hispanic voter turns 18 and becomes a voter. If those Hispanics were all going to vote Democratic, which is what the Democratic Party used to think, that would be terrifying for Republicans. I mean, that is the end of the Republican majority ever.

• 17:05Katty Kay?

  But then it turns out that actually those young Hispanic voters are more like young white voters. Some of them are voting Democratic and some of them are voting Republican. Actually, what we're starting to see is that a lot of them are pretty populist. So this was interesting. I went through some of the numbers. Many of the precincts that Trump won, the kind of little micro areas that Donald Trump won in Twenty sixteen, in the primary campaigns Bernie Sanders had won them. So these are Hispanic voters who are voting for Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. But what they're voting for is anti-establishment.

• 17:49Katty Kay?

  We don't like either party. We think the parties are corrupt. We think the system is rigged against us. And they vote for these populist figures Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump. And I don't know that that those young people are necessarily going to look at Joe Biden. And I know historically Hispanics, even when they've polled as drifting away from the Democratic Party, they've come back in the election to vote for the Democrats. I think this is a new group of voters. It's not voters who used to vote one way and now are voting another way. This is a new group of voters who are looking and saying, I don't really like either of these parties.

• 18:24Anthony Scaramucci?

  I agree with you and I think it's going to require a change by both parties eventually. So this is, uh, I don't know, it's probably going to get me in trouble. At some point, I'm going to say something and I'm sure our producers are going to-

• 18:36Katty Kay?

  You like getting in trouble. You know, you, this is, this is what you like.

• 18:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, I'm sure somebody's going to cut what I'm saying. Yeah, it is my happy place. So, you know, and I, but I think it's the last gasp of whiteness. So, you know, I like making up words like George W. Bush, you know, like, don't misunderestimate me. This is the last gasp of whiteness for the Republican Party. So the Republicans would have been wiser to have adopted some of those things that we discussed in two thousand twelve and made the party look like the beautiful mosaic of the American people.

• 19:06Katty Kay?

  Less nativist.

• 19:07Anthony Scaramucci?

  Less nativist, but this is it. They're going hard and now they're saying to themselves, okay, if we can get this, if we can win it, we're going to really whitify the government. Here's our project two zero two five. We're going to whitify the government with our whiteness. And if they don't get it, which I predict that they won't, and we'll discuss why, even though the polls are very close, but if they do get it, I do think it spells trouble for the American democracy. If they, if, if they don't get it, they're going to have to retrench and they're going to have to recreate that party. They won't be able to be successful in two thousand twenty eight with this strategy.

• 19:38Katty Kay?

  But this is why the dream, and you're the predictor, not me, but let's go for it. The dream of the Republican Party would be to have a black or brown.

• 19:50Katty Kay?

  Hispanic president, right? So this is the argument for Donald Trump nominating a vice president who is Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and if they could be the, you know, the party that has a black or brown vice president, then they feel they can shore up that group. But there's some very interesting polling on black voters suggesting that black voters who are interested in Donald Trump are less likely to vote for him if he nominates a black vice presidential candidate, which I found super fascinating, but that they're not, that is not what's going to sway them. I, I think the idea of kind of tokenism is not what people are interested when they're these.

• 20:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  Let me, let me spell more trouble for you. So if, if Barack Obama had a white wife, he would have got elected president of the United States?

• 20:36Katty Kay?

  Well, we've talked about this before, Anthony. No, I think, I think that's a problem.

• 20:40Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay. So at some point, I hope this is like a sports podcast where you and I are going through the players and we do like, you know, I, I go through the, the vice presidential selections, but there's no way this guy's going with a white guy. Let me tell you something. He's such a narcissist. He can't pick Tim Scott and then have somebody say to him, well, Tim Scott helped you with the black vote. And so that's why you won the presidency. No, no, no. You have to understand something. I won the presidency because of me, Donald J. Trump. I didn't win the presidency because of who I picked. I'm going to pick this nondescript backseater. Okay. I'm looking for Mike Pence 2.0. And so we have to go over that at some point, but, but that's, that's what I honestly think.

• 21:21Katty Kay?

  He may think that Marco Rubio helps him with Hispanic voters. Marco Rubio, of course, is Cuban American. That is very different from being Mexican American. The two have very little in common at this point. So I don't know that you, I don't know that it would even help him with the Hispanic vote.

• 21:34Anthony Scaramucci?

  Marco Rubio called Donald, he, look at, this is Donald Trump's hands. Okay. Okay. I mean, Donald Trump. Has microscopic hands. It's weird. When you look at his body, you look at these little tiny hands coming out of those cuff-linked shirts, you're like, okay, this is a little weird. The guy's sensitive about it. Marco called it out on the campaign. There is no way he's picking Marco Rubio. There's no way. Because he doesn't want that replay on all the liberal media.

• 22:01Katty Kay?

  Which it would be, nonstop, on all of the media.

• 22:03Anthony Scaramucci?

  Of course, of course. Yeah, he's not gonna go with that.

• 22:05Katty Kay?

  We're gonna take a break and then come back and talk about debate prep. I realize we have not really spoken very much about the black vote, which is super interesting. And the polling on black voters is complicated at the moment. Some polling suggests that black men are drifting away from Donald Trump. The Pew Research Foundation, which is the polling I always look to, it really is nonpartisan. It's very thorough. They take much bigger sample sizes, suggests that actually the Democrats still have a huge amount of black support, and there hasn't been very much drift in black support. So, I mean, I know that the Biden campaign is hoping that both Hispanic voters and black voters will come home to the Democratic Party in November. And they are looking at black

• 22:49Katty Kay?

  men who have a history of being a little bit more Republican. Twenty-five percent of black men voted for Richard Nixon. So there is, has always been a bit more of a Republican streak amongst black men than black women. I think Donald Trump only got four percent of the black female vote in 2020. So, black women are very firmly in the Democratic camp. But they are also pretty confident that the black vote will come home. There's lots to talk about here, and we'll do a deeper dive on black voters at some other time. And let's take a quick break, and we'll come back and talk about debate prep.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine. Fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Botox, otobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have fourteen or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 24:14Speaker 03

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• 25:10Katty Kay?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics U.S. with me, Katty Kay.

• 25:13Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

• 25:15Katty Kay?

  And Anthony, in this half, we wanted to talk about debate prep, because this is debate prep week, right? We are a week out from the first presidential debate, and this is the time when both candidates, in theory, are holed up, doing practice sessions, going through their talking points. Joe Biden is in Camp David. He's come off a busy period. He was at the G7 meetings in Italy. He went to a fundraiser in California. And then his team tell me now it is rest and prep, rest and prep, rinse and repeat. And that is what they're going to be doing until the debate. Now, historically, debates haven't mattered terribly much. You get somebody who wins, but the data suggests that when it comes to the actual election, they haven't made a huge amount of difference. But my understanding from the Biden campaign is they do think this is a very

• 26:00Katty Kay?

  big moment, that for the American public to see the two candidates up on stage together, this is a choice election. Do you want Joe Biden or do you want Donald Trump? And that's why they were pushing to have this in June. And they think this is the moment that those people who have not really woken up to the election, not woken up to the fact that this is a choice between these two guys are going to wake up to this. And I spoke to both the Biden and the Trump campaign this week ahead of recording this, and they both sound pretty confident about it. That's what they're telling the press, that they think this is a good moment for their guy. What do you think Donald Trump is going through this week?

• 26:35Anthony Scaramucci?

  So just a couple of things. The debate is going to be televised on CNN on June 27th. It's 9:00 PM Eastern Time on the East Coast of the United States. We're going to be going live on YouTube immediately after the debate with our feedback and our sort of analysis. Of course, if you're in bed by then, it'll be on our regular podcast feed when you wake up on Friday morning. So just a public service announcement on the debate. But here's the thing I would say, Katty, I don't agree with the debates don't matter. Because in 2020, Trump dropped five points in the polls. He never recovered from those two debates. And I know what's going on with the Trump team right now. They're

• 27:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  showing him video of him. This is like Tom Brady, where you pick a footballer in the UK, they're showing him video of how he missed the play, or showing him video he missed the wide receiver. And they're explaining to Donald Trump that you were talking wildly over him. They're practicing Trump getting his mic shut off as he goes into one of his full-on stem winders. And they're trying to tell Donald Trump, you can't do what you did in 2020. Now, he hates debate prep. You know, Kellyanne Conway scheduled debate prep in 2016. He used to take it out of the schedule. She finally said, okay, you know what, I'm gonna have a lunch with Donald Trump. And she would sit down in his office and have lunch with him. And she'd have the debate prep in like, these little index

• 27:58Anthony Scaramucci?

  cards. And she'd try to have a debate prep with him over lunch. And he would look at her and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, this feels like debate prep. I don't want to do debate prep. So the president, President Trump, does not like debate prep.

• 28:12Katty Kay?

  So he doesn't do the classic thing then that most presidential candidates do of standing with a surrogate who stands in and pretends to be that president and they

• 28:21Anthony Scaramucci?

  He does at the end. He will certainly do that before he shows up on June 27.

• 28:27Katty Kay?

  Somebody will play Joe Biden.

• 28:29Anthony Scaramucci?

  I don't know the number of times Hillary Clinton did that before debate prep, but I guarantee that it was more than Donald Trump did that, standing in front of the podium.

• 28:37Katty Kay?

  And Joe Biden does it a lot. He has a lot of people who come in and pretend to be Donald Trump and he games out the whole thing.

• 28:43Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so now Governor Christie has met with the Biden team to discuss debate prep and to discuss with them how Trump does his debate prep. But I think Anita Dunn, okay?

• 28:53Katty Kay?

  Who is the White House advisor, who's a campaign advisor to Joe Biden.

• 28:57Anthony Scaramucci?

  So I think she's an unsung hero and an unsung genius of the Democratic Party. Not a lot of people know who she is, but she was heavily involved in that debate prep in 2020. And she said something very insightful to me on a COVID Zoom call midsummer of 2020 that I'll share with people. She said, you know, when Trump's on the stage with a younger guy and he's berating them and he's calling them the nicknames and they're trying to fight back, their stature, image-wise, from an age perspective, doesn't work for them. But what we're gonna do is, if Trump engages like that with Joe Biden, who is a contemporary of his, a few years older, same height,

• 29:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  he was also the former Vice President of the United States, we're not gonna do anything. We're not gonna rebut him. We're just gonna let him ventilate. And you remember this moment, I remember this moment, our producers remember the moment, where Biden said, will you shut up, man? Will you shut up, man? And it was a moment of genuineness where everybody looked at each other and said, okay, this guy's Looney Tunes. The other guy's an elder statesman trying to pull the country back together after COVID. And those debates mattered, Katty, and Trump never recovered from those debates.

• 30:14Katty Kay?

  No, I agree. That first 2020 debate, which I can almost hardly think about because it was such a It was so crazy to cover. It was not a debate. I mean, it was, as I've said before, it was a shit show. I think that did clearly hurt Donald Trump. And this time around, even if the numbers of people every cycle, the numbers of people who watch it live on television is declining in the US, it's all about the clips afterwards. It's about that moment that you just described, the moment that comes to define who these two candidates are. I'm interested in the format, though, in this one, because for the first time ever, it's a debater first. The first time ever the debate is held in June and not in the autumn, closer to the election, and the first time that the microphones are going to actually be muted. So the format's going to be each candidate

• 30:57Katty Kay?

  gets two minutes to answer the question, during which time the other guy's microphone is muted, and there is a one-minute rebuttal. If you are not speaking, your microphone is muted. Now, the Biden campaign pushed for this format. I've spoken to enough people around Donald Trump now to start wondering whether actually that was a mistake, because the reason Joe Biden won that debate in 2020 was because of what you've just described. There was Donald Trump interrupting him all the time. This time around, Donald Trump is not going to be able to interrupt him, at least not in terms of what the public is going to hear. His microphone's going to be muted.

• 31:37Katty Kay?

  So does that mean, then, that Donald Trump is not going to look like the kind of crazy, rude, bullying interrupter, because his mic is going to be muted? I mean, the caveat to that is, of course, that if he does talk in that two minutes, Joe Biden will be able to hear it, and will that rattle Joe Biden, but the audience won't be hearing it. I'm less sure that this format is the dream format that the Biden campaign thought it was going to be.

• 32:03Anthony Scaramucci?

  But let me push it back on you for a second. Suppose they see the president as malaproping, they see the president as sometimes getting disorganized in his sentences, and maybe they want him to talk for two minutes and they don't want him to talk for more than that. Maybe they've got it, you know, maybe they've got it in a position where, okay, he's great for two minutes, he can get a lot of soundbites out, it'll help us on TikTok, it'll help us on social media. We're three to one on advertising spend with Meta versus the Trump campaign. They're spending their money on legal fees. We were out there in social media and we're going to practice with Joe Biden. Two minute soundbites that we're going to cut, clip and broadcast on social media.

• 32:45Anthony Scaramucci?

  So we don't really see this as a debate as much as we see this as a soundbite machine for Joe Biden post debate. And I'm just throwing that out at you in terms of what their strategy might be.

• 32:56Katty Kay?

  I think that's clearly what they're going to do and they're going to focus on policy. We know that he's getting a lot of, he's, he's doing quite a classic, traditional debate prep up in Camp David. He's going through the policy. He's timing his answers to be two minutes. I think that's where there may be a little concern because Joe Biden tends to give longer answers. And then he'll be up against a surrogate who stands in for Donald Trump. I don't know who that surrogate is. I've asked around, but I haven't managed to get an answer on who that is at the moment. But we know that there have been various surrogates who stand in and played Donald Trump. What they need to do in that debate prep session on the Biden side is have that Donald Trump figure go after Joe Biden personally. Try to get under Joe Biden's skin. That's what Donald Trump is going to do. He's going to-

• 33:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  Will he bring up Hunter Biden?

• 33:41Katty Kay?

  He may well do. That's a very good question. How does Donald Trump get under Joe Biden's skin? He goes after him on his record. He goes after him on inflation. He goes after him on the border. He goes after him on the wars. America's now involved in these wars. So he goes after him on issues. Does he also go after him on Hunter Biden? That might be a way. And that's what the Biden campaign will be prepping for. If he comes after you on your son, Mr. President, you need to not get rattled. So both sides think this is an opportunity because they both think, my conversations with both teams, they think this is an opportunity for them because they want the country to see the other candidate as they are. So the Biden campaign wants Trump to be his most extreme version of himself.

• 34:26Katty Kay?

  The Trump campaign wants exactly the same thing. They want Biden to be the most extreme version of himself. And that is how they think they're going to win it. And they think they get there by needling each other. Okay, this is interesting. One person from the Trump campaign pointed out to me that one thing that they are going to be prepping Donald Trump on is his facial expressions. Because even if the audience can't see him, remember they have that split screen image. It's these two guys. One is talking and the other one you're just looking at. And he said, if, if I was in Donald Trump's ear over the next few days, I would say to him, watch your facial expressions. When you're off my watch what you're doing.

• 35:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  All right. So I, I, you know, cause you know, I'm a very sensitive and very shy and

• 35:06Katty Kay?

  Terribly introverted. I do worry. I worry.

• 35:09Anthony Scaramucci?

  You're, you're, you're bringing me out of my shell, but

• 35:10Katty Kay?

  I know.

• 35:11Anthony Scaramucci?

  You've also, you've also sent me to my therapist because I've never gotten a trivia question right on this podcast. So I'm going to fire one out at you right now.

• 35:19Katty Kay?

  Okay.

• 35:19Anthony Scaramucci?

  Ready?

• 35:20Katty Kay?

  Good. I like this.

• 35:21Anthony Scaramucci?

  I'm going to say the words Kimoi and Matsui. What are those two words? What do they mean to you? They mean anything to you? Kimoi and Matsui?

• 35:28Katty Kay?

  I feel like they're associated with Iwo Jima or something.

• 35:32Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay.

• 35:33Katty Kay?

  Second World War.

• 35:33Anthony Scaramucci?

  All right. So you see that? So you're probably going to win on Jeopardy if you're playing American Jeopardy.

• 35:37Katty Kay?

  I've been on Jeopardy.

• 35:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I'm sure you won. I'm sure you won.

• 35:40Katty Kay?

  I came second, unfortunately. I'd never seen Jeopardy before when I agreed to be on it, but that was a mistake.

• 35:47Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay. So Kimoi and Matsui were relevant to the 1960 debate. And you're going to say, what is this guy talking about? John Kennedy debating the Vice President of the United States. He needed that debate because he needed to show that he could handle himself presidentially versus Richard Nixon. And they were debating about Kamoi and Matsui, which were two islands off the coast of Taiwan. Remember, we had a full on Truman Doctrine going in the United States. We were fighting a Cold War with the Russians, but we, we drew a very red line in the sand with Chairman Mao related to Taiwan. And we did not want any military on the two islands of Kamoi and Matsui. How do I know this? I went back

• 36:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  this week and watched that debate. And why am I bringing this up? We were talking with great granularity about American policy. We're talking with great granularity about the direction that the country was going. We weren't saying things like little Marco, sleepy Joe Biden, tiny hands Donald Trump. We were not doing that 60 years ago or 64 years ago. And I'm, I'm worried, Katty. I'm worried, Katty Kay, because we've lost our sense for, for history and we've lost this direction. You know, Governor Romney tried to warn people about Russia. You remember that debate? It was the last debate. It was, he was sitting down. I was at That debate, it was in the second row, but I'm just telling you, we don't do that anymore.

• 37:13Anthony Scaramucci?

  There's no granularity or substance in these debates. And if you say that to somebody, they laugh, they say, well, the American people don't want that. This is an entertainment contest. This is a popularity contest. This is no longer a hiring decision. It's not like a board at a public company. Here are the resumes, who are we hiring to be CEO?

• 37:32Katty Kay?

  I mean, they were, even in that 1960 debate, there was some kind of, you know, tricks, debate tricks going on, right? That was the debate where John F. Kennedy and Nixon were standing there and Nixon starts sweating. And Kennedy looks young and fresh, and it turns out that the Kennedy team had made sure that the temperature was set higher than the Nixon team wanted it. And that made Nixon sweat. So they had that capacity to try it, but you're right. It was a lot more serious and I remember, I followed you around all of those Romney Obama debates. I went to all of them in St. Louis and then in Denver and then in Florida. And they were more serious.

• 38:11Katty Kay?

  And, and actually Mitt Romney was roundly, you know, laughed at for saying that Russia represented the greatest foreign policy threat facing the United States, and he turned out to have been right. I mean, he was, you know, he was on the money. It well, didn't seem to be fashionable at the time. You were in the front row, I was in the press pen.

• 38:28Anthony Scaramucci?

  I paid for that seat, Kay. That was a lot of money going to that campaign.

• 38:32Katty Kay?

  And then you, you know, then you come out and talk to all of the journalists afterwards. You're right that there's, I don't think, certainly the 2020 debate was not a serious debate. The American public was massively ill-served by that performance. What they have tried to do with this debate is give themselves a format where there is room for more seriousness. And it's possible that we will do, Antony. I mean, I think it's possible that in that two silent minutes, Joe Biden will give thoughtful expositions of policy and Donald Trump will have gone away and talked about policy. And he will have two minutes to talk about what he will do for the United States. I mean, it could be that the format actually, I don't know how it works better for Joe Biden or Donald Trump. And maybe the Trump team is right, but it could be that the American public is better served by this format.

• 39:17Anthony Scaramucci?

  I agree, and I just want to say something about us being human. These are two human beings. Donald Trump had COVID in the first debate. We all know that now that affected him. And, and I, I went back, Robert Dalek wrote a great book about John Kennedy called The Unfinished Life. And here's what Kennedy did for debate prep. He went up to the roof of the hotel. He had a mirror and he tanned himself using a mirror. He then got the injections in his back from a guy called Dr. Feelgood. It was like a form of amphetamines and some novocaine for his back. There's some suggestions that he was visited by a call girl, although that's not completely confirmed. That was Kennedy's prep on the day of the debate.

• 39:58Anthony Scaramucci?

  Richard Nixon had phlebitis and he came out of the car and he smashed his leg. He had phlebitis in his leg and he smashed his leg coming out of the car, entering the hotel. He stacked himself with books like The Nerd at the High School as opposed to The High School Quarterback and he had a fever going into that debate. And so when they showed up at the debate prep, Kennedy said, do you want makeup? Kennedy was bright tanned. He said, no, I don't need the makeup. Nixon did not want the press to say that he needed it, so he didn't take it. He looked ghastly.

• 40:29Katty Kay?

  Which is also why he was sweating, right? Because of the fever. It was partly because the Kennedy team wanted the temperature

• 40:35Anthony Scaramucci?

  Exactly.

• 40:35Katty Kay?

  turned up in the room.

• 40:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  So, so these are human beings, okay? How are they gonna, who feels what on June 27th during the day? Do they feel energized? You know, Barack Obama, there's a very famous scene. Valerie Jarrett told me this, his, his senior advisor. She knocked on the door to his hotel room during one of the John McCain debates in 2008. Are you ready? Obama gave that smile, the best smile in American politics since Jack Kennedy and said, I got this. And when he closed the door on her, she's like, he's gonna win this debate. He was clear thinking, in a very healthy position, and he was very versatile in terms of what he knew and how to handle himself on the debate day. So this is a human experience as much as anything else.

• 41:19Katty Kay?

  And then you have to remember that the impact of the debate, right? So I remember one of those debates, the first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Everybody assumed Barack Obama was gonna win. And actually Mitt Romney did really well. And so that then pushed Barack Obama to prep harder for the next debate. It changed his performance. He had to up his game. I wonder what happens after this debate. If Donald Trump is widely seen to have been the winner of this debate, then there will be a lot of hand wringing on the Democratic side. Because a lot of the Biden camp have been telling reporters like me, this is a big moment for us. This is important. We think this is going to show the country

• 42:02Katty Kay?

  that the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump means they have to go for Joe Biden. Because Donald Trump will come out there as crazy Donald Trump. If he doesn't, if he's disciplined and he comes out with his talking points and he's widely seen to have won, then I wonder what the kind of hand wringing and the anxiety that's going to happen on the Democratic side.

• 42:20Anthony Scaramucci?

  I know we have to go, but I have to ask you this last question because you talk to the Trumpers. The Trumpers are always beating the drum that Joe Biden is going to drop out. After this debate, they made it so early. Okay, I've got to make that very clear to people. Joe Biden is not dropping, but he's he's going to run through the tape at the end of this thing. But it's just interesting how they are constantly chanting that, which is a little bit of projection on their side. Because in addition to Joe Biden malaproping all over the country, so is Donald Trump. He's telling people, Ronnie Johnson, oh, excuse me, the doctor was Ronnie Jackson. I'm a genius. I passed my cognitive test. Ask Ronnie Johnson. No, that's not the name of the doctor guy. You know what I mean? So so so we're all over the map with these two. It'll be very interesting to see what happens this week.

• 43:04Katty Kay?

  And the other thing that's happening is there's a little bit of kind of slight dog whistle happening on Fox News at the moment about is Joe Biden going to be on something? The guy we saw at the State of the Union was hyper caffeinated or something. Or he's on caffeine pills.

• 43:19Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, they like that too.

• 43:20Katty Kay?

  This kind of slight kind of implication that Joe Biden will be on drugs.

• 43:24Anthony Scaramucci?

  He's dropping out, he's on drugs, right.

• 43:25Katty Kay?

  He won't be. Joe Biden doesn't even drink, you know, a glass of wine, which actually a lot of presidents don't. That's another interesting step. We'll do that episode one time. How many presidents don't drink?

• 43:35Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, Trump's not a drinker. We know that.

• 43:37Katty Kay?

  Trump is not a drinker. No, there'll be Coke, Diet Coke going into this one. We have to leave it there, but we'll be back next week with, as Anthony said, our special episode, which will stream live on YouTube after the debate with both of our reactions and see whether the American public has been well-served by the 90 minutes of debate that they will see between the two candidates. We'll be back next week. It was good to be here.

• 44:00Anthony Scaramucci?

  Thank you so much for joining me, Anthony Scaramucci and Caddy K. We'll see you next week.

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