Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 289. TRIP US: The Week Trump Won? About this episode What does Trump’s new running mate mean for the direction of the Republican Party? Have the Democrats given up on a 2024 win? Is there anything now that can stand in Trump’s way?
Join Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci as they answer all these questions and more on The Rest Is Politics US.
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Transcript 8,480 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
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1:06 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.
1:40 Katty Kay? Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics US with me, Catty Kay.
1:44 Anthony Scaramucci? And me, Anthony Scaramucci.
1:45 Katty Kay? Anthony, I was going to ask you how you are, but if you're anything like me, you're kind of hidden under the bed because of the deluge of news that is coming on our heads at the moment. I like news. I'm a news person. I've been a news junkie my whole life. But Jesus, the last few days have been mad.
1:59 Anthony Scaramucci? I'm in an undisclosed location again, Katty, okay? As the news continues, it gets worse on the side of the reformation of the Republicans. Okay, so this is not the Republican Party I grew up in. I registered as a Republican in nineteen eighty-two at the age of eighteen. Ronald Reagan was president and this, I don't think Ronald Reagan actually would be welcomed at the convention that we're witnessing. Certainly none of the acolytes of his, like George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. This is a totally new party. So yeah, I'm, I am as far from Milwaukee as I can be and still have a great wifi connection.
2:36 Katty Kay? Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I think we're looking at the kind of funeral of Reaganism, potentially the funeral of the post-war era of American leadership around the world. We'll get into all of that. So what we want to talk about today is everything that's been going on in this crazy week. It's been a whirlwind. We recorded that emergency episode on Sunday after Trump's attempted assassination. We're going to talk more about the aftermath of that in this podcast, what it means for the campaign, and of course, what's happening at the Milwaukee Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump has entered like some kind of Messiah and has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. He is leading now in all of the key swing states, and that was before he was shot. The Democrats, they're still in disarray as we're recording
3:19 Katty Kay? this, and in the second half, we are going to look a little bit at what the Democrats can do as they try and hedge their bets, not just on this election, on the twenty twenty-eight election as well, and whether really they have any options.
3:31 Anthony Scaramucci? And we'll talk about the documents case quickly, right? I think it's also important to talk about that.
3:35 Katty Kay? The documents case which was thrown out in Florida, which was the strongest of all the cases against Donald Trump, but which has now been thrown out. I mean, maybe we just start there. How lucky is this guy, Antony? Donald Trump was born under fifty-eight million lucky stars.
3:49 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, no, I mean, there's no question. I asked Alastair Campbell on a scale of one to ten, how lucky is Donald Trump? And, you know, he's, he's at a two hundred. Of course, on the internet, you can see how close it was. His slight turn of his head saved his life, thank God, and obviously the bullet grazed him. And there was a lot of mishaps. If you looked at the rerun of what happened, there were several minutes where people knew that there was a shooter. The Secret Service didn't handle it well. The local police didn't handle it well. All one of the local policemen had to do is shoot his gun in the air a few times, Gaddy, and they were to pull President Trump off the stage. And it would have been less dramatic and less harmful and perhaps the life of
4:29 Anthony Scaramucci? that retired fireman would have been saved. And so there's a real tragedy all around there. But luck plus guile, and let's just give Trump the credit that he deserves. He is an incredible physical animal. If we invited David Attenborough, so David Attenborough on the show this morning, he would have to describe Trump as a alpha male squared. His physicality, pressure that he can put on other people, the nonstop relentlessness. I mean, Katty, this is a man that's almost 80 years old and he is hustling around the country, or the way a 40-year-old would hustle around the country. And frankly, he
5:13 Anthony Scaramucci? picked a person to be his vice president under 40. And there's stuff about that I'd like to grade, you know, in terms of the positives of that for Donald Trump, and also potentially the negatives for the for the country and the new world order. But yes, he's he's the luckiest SOB that we've ever seen. And he's ahead now as a result of all of this.
5:32 Katty Kay? In some ways, I think Donald Trump makes his own luck. He appointed a whole slew of conservative judges during his own administration, and that has now come back to help him reap the benefits of some of the cases that we've seen go through the Supreme Court that have helped him. The fact that the Mar-a-Lago case got thrown out, it was being handled by a Trump-appointed judge. So to some extent, he makes his luck, but he is also somebody who things seem to have, at least in the last couple of weeks, they seem to have fallen very firmly his way. Let's let's talk about J.D. Vance. Both of us have met J.D. Vance before. He came to fame writing a book called Hillbilly Elegy, which was a short biography, which was a portrait of downtrodden Appalachia in Ohio. His mother was an addict. He was
6:16 Katty Kay? brought up by his grandparents. They lived on food stamps. And it was really a portrait of forgotten America and a plea for help. And when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, that book, Hillbilly Elegy, became the kind of guide for liberals across America who wanted to understand what the hell has happened and how did we miss Donald Trump. And Hillbilly Elegy came to kind of describe that world, and J.D. Vance was the author of that. And he was kind of darling of the left, really. And he hated Donald Trump. He was very rude about Donald Trump. He called himself a never Trumper. But then, then he flipped and went down to Mar-a-Lago and told Donald Trump that he'd been duped by the media. And actually, now he loved Donald Trump and was looking for Donald Trump's endorsement when he ran for the Senate. And it seems to
7:00 Katty Kay? have worked. This is somebody who has a, an ability to put a kind of ideological framework, I think, around Donald Trump's MAGA instincts.
7:08 Anthony Scaramucci? Yes, I think, I think the only thing I would like to add, for non-Americans, the Appalachians, they're called Appalachian for people that don't live there, they're called Appalachian for people that do live there.
7:21 Katty Kay? An important distinction.
7:22 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, but I, I'm gonna tell you why that's an important distinction. If you say Appalachian, chances are you've been there and you know how abject the poverty actually is. And so, about 20 years ago, my old boss from Goldman Sachs was a trustee at a, at a college called Berea College, which is right on the Appalachian Mountain Trail. And it's a college that's dedicated to giving these very poor, indigent people, free college tuition. And so, I've been down there many times. I was a donor to that school for quite some time until he came off the board there. And why am I bringing this up? It's important because this is as abject of poverty as you're going to see in the United States. Many of these
8:04 Anthony Scaramucci? coal miners are out of work now. They're, they're living in shacks or huts. It's very, very, very downtrodden. Homer Hickam, in the book Rocket Boys, describes how he grew up. He was a rocket scientist and an engineer for NASA. And so, The Hillbilly Elegy is about this area. And so, when I read the book, I was blown away about how honest J.D. Vance was in the book. He is a brilliant writer.
8:29 Katty Kay? It's a beautifully written book. For anyone who hasn't read it, pick it up. It's worth reading.
8:32 Anthony Scaramucci? It, it is worth reading. You know, and the, the, the left is trying to cancel him now. I think that's a huge mistake. I think these cancel culture wars are only fueling. The far right, what upsets me about J D Vance and one of my political mentors, one of my political heroes is Governor Mitt Romney, now Senator from Utah, about to retire, elder statesman in the Republican Party, obviously lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. He was the Republican nominee 12 years ago, how far we've come. But Governor Romney took to J D Vance and invited him to the Park City Utah Republican Symposium that Mitt does every single year.
9:14 Anthony Scaramucci? And I've got to tell you, I was blown away by the intellect that J D Vance has, Caddy. He's a very, very smart human being. Yale Law School, editor of the Yale Law Journal. These are things you can't get to unless you have incredible energy, IQ, et cetera. He's a U.S. Marine. He served in the Gulf for the United States. And what Governor Romney said is that the person that he has the least amount of respect for in American politics is J D Vance. Now, why does he say that? He's saying that because J D Vance is now wedded to his political ambition and the personal power and the trappings that come with that as opposed to the principles that
9:59 Anthony Scaramucci? he started with. And, you know, we can, you know, people that are on the hard right that are listening to me, they could be mad at me for saying that, but that's fine. What J D Vance stood for was something totally different than the policies that he and Donald Trump are espousing. And I'll just be brief on this. He wants to devalue the dollar. He believes that we allowed the Chinese to trounce us by allowing them to link their currency to our currency. And Richard Nixon actually allowed this to happen in the early 1970s. Why was this bad for America? There was an industrial rise in China. That usually means that their value of their currency is going to go up.
10:39 Anthony Scaramucci? We are a deficit spending country. We have to devalue our currency in order to stay in deficit spending. We pay our debts back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that we borrowed. And so we allowed the Chinese to devalue their currency at a time when they had major manufacturing. It enabled them to boost their economy, not in the 3%, 4% GDP growth, but the 10%, 12% for many years. And they've now become the second largest economy in the world. People like J.D. Vance, many others now in the United States bipartisan, frankly, think all of this was a mistake. We saw the Chinese as an ally and potential global partner. We now see them as an adversary and a competitor.
11:22 Anthony Scaramucci? But what J.D. Vance wants to do is devalue our dollar further to boost our manufacturing. Katty K, that would be an economic disaster for the United States and an economic disaster for the world. And so I can go line by line what they want to do and what the J.D. Vance strategy is. But he wants to disengage the United States from Europe. He wants to, like the Steve Bannon's of the world, wall it off from the rest of the world and see if we can internally drive our consumption and manufacturing here in our country.
11:55 Katty Kay? Look, I think we're both agreed that J.D. Vance is the pick that Donald Trump made because he's feeling confident about winning this race. He didn't go for expanding with somebody like Marco Rubio, who perhaps could have helped him with Hispanic voters. He didn't go for somebody like Nikki Haley, who could have reached out to suburban women voters. He looked at his own internal poll numbers, and you and I have discussed those, and he sees the prospect of them doing extremely well. And so he can go for somebody who, like him, is a fighter. Donald Trump went into this Republican National Convention after that assassination attempt, saying this is going to be a moment of unity, and this is the time to pull together the country. And we may hear that from him at his speech
12:38 Katty Kay? at the convention on Thursday night. We're recording before that. But J D Vance, like Donald Trump, is a tough talking fighter. And I think that's this campaign. This is the extension of all of the things that Donald Trump himself has kind of failed to sort of articulate in a coherent intellectual framework, but feels in his gut. A sense that the rest of the world is out to get America, that America has had a raw deal, that America should pull back from foreign entanglements. And what J D Vance does is he takes all of those instincts of Donald Trump's and he puts them into a kind of policy framework. So were J D Vance controlling policy? And we don't know the degree to which Donald Trump is ever going to let any vice president or anyone else, you know, push him into doing anything.
13:22 Katty Kay? But it would suggest that this is the extension of economic populism. The party of Ronald Reagan is having its funeral in Milwaukee this week. A party that is engaged in the world, believes in globalism, is internationalist, believes in free markets. That is not the party of Donald Trump and J D Vance. If Donald Trump had chosen Marco Rubio, somebody much more in line in many ways with Mitt Romney on foreign policy, it would have been a different signal. But the signal that Donald Trump is sending is very firmly that the MAGA movement has taken control of the Republican Party. And not just, I think, for this election. This is a signal for 2028. This is Donald Trump choosing his heir apparent and a signal to the rest of America that
14:07 Katty Kay? in 2028, the Republican Party is going to look the same.
14:10 Anthony Scaramucci? A couple of reactions. So the best meme I've seen, because the internet is undefeated, is a picture of J D Vance and Mike Pence and say, did you call the last guy that had the job just to see how it was going, you know? And it's a big joke, obviously, because the former vice president will not endorse Donald Trump alongside of 40 people. Second thought on this is that I know Trump and I was, I was part of the process when he was interviewing people like Chris Christie and Mike Pence back in 2016. And the one thing about Trump is the narcissism is so pure, he does not want anybody catty to take any credit or any potential add to his electoral outcome.
14:50 Katty Kay? I think there's going to be trouble in paradise here. I mean, I think the issue is going to be if they win, when they're actually trying to work together. How does Donald Trump handle somebody? And J D Vance is smart. He knew how to flip from being anti-Trump and calling him cultural heroin or whatever it was, to being pro-Trump. And he knows that if Donald Trump says you've got to back off, he's going to back off. But he's ambitious. He wants to be president.
15:15 Anthony Scaramucci? He's going to get annihilated by Donald Trump because he's smarter than Donald Trump. And he's younger than Donald Trump, so Donald Trump is comfortable with that. Donald Trump does not do well in his own peer group. He gets very insecure. He does better with the people that are younger than them because they're generally intimidated by him. But let me tell you something, Katty Kay, J D Vance is smarter than Donald Trump. Donald Trump did not go to Yale Law School or go on the Yale Law Review, and this will grate on Donald Trump over time. If Trump does win, I see an isolated J D Vance in the office of the presidency. Remember, the vice president has an office down the hall, just past the chief of staff,
15:57 Anthony Scaramucci? over by the national security advisor in the west wing of the White House. It's very close to the Oval Office. Many vice presidents, though, get isolated. You know, Harry Truman was only vice president for four months. He said he had no idea what was going on in the government. But this last point, which I think is an important one to make to people about the J D Vance dynamic, he's tight with Donald Trump's older sons, Eric Trump and Don Trump Jr. You know, I said on this podcast that Trump hates beards. I got a lot of different reactions from that. A lot of people that know Trump well say he absolutely hates beards. However, he accepts the fact that his two sons wear them. So it's seemingly okay for the next generation. That's what the pushback has been to me.
16:42 Anthony Scaramucci? But when you look at J D Vance, he looks like a totalitarian Care Bear, Katty Kay. That's what he looks like to me. A little cuddly, but totalitarian underneath the Care Bear persona.
16:52 Katty Kay? Yeah, there's nothing that Europe is thinking is very cuddly about J D Vance at the moment. We should talk about his installations. I had a conversation over the weekend. When it was looking like it might be Vance with a conservative who said to me that he really likes Vance, two things he likes about him is that he's tough on illegal immigration. And the second thing he liked about him was that he's going to push Trump to do that deal on Ukraine in one day. I mean, this is the guy, J D Vance is the guy who has said, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other. His priority is to get out of that entanglement, to get Europe out of that entanglement. The charitable interpretation of that from one conservative I spoke to was that, look, there's a lot of people dying
17:33 Katty Kay? in Ukraine. Why are we facilitating that? The Ukrainians are going to lose territory anyway. Let's just do the deal as soon as we can and stench the bleeding of more lives because Ukraine is never going to get all of its territory back. But the message to Europe, J D Vance, I don't think Donald Trump has much love lost for Europe, but J D Vance, some of the things that he said that about Ukraine, he's been very rude about the Germans, he's talked about the Islamification of the United Kingdom, and he kind of seems to take pleasure almost in insulting America's allies. So there's a, you know, a little nervousness here in Europe about the pick of J D Vance, who kind of embodies the id of Donald Trump.
18:16 Katty Kay? And the feeling is, if Trump wants to fight and Vance wants to fight, is Europe in the in the target sites of America in a Vance-Trump administration?
18:25 Anthony Scaramucci? Out of the Capitol rioters, are they political prisoners and their captivity is an assault on democracy? Is that what they are? Because that's what J D Vance thinks.
18:34 Katty Kay? And you didn't get the message. They're hostages. They're obviously, they're all hostages who were taken prisoner illegally and thrown into jail without due process, who were just happening. And weren't they there for a day of tourism? I think that was what they were doing on January the sixth.
18:47 Anthony Scaramucci? Yes, they they had their, you know, they bought those Kodak old fashioned cameras to the Capitol riot. The incendiary rhetoric is coming from the left or the right because when you poll it in the United States, the majority of people polled think it's coming from Donald Trump. You know, he's he's called for all types of violence. And so violence was brought upon him and now somehow they have deflected that to say that it's the left. But J D Vance says that. He says that this claim that Trump is a potential authoritarian fascist has led to the violence against Donald Trump. Do you believe that, Katty K? Do you think that the left is the one that's fomenting the violence?
19:27 Katty Kay? Actually, I mean, there's data on this, Anthony. It's not a question of whether I believe it or not, or whether I feel it or not. There is numerous reports have been done on this. I think one by Pew, which is probably the most comprehensive, which has looked at where the majority of the violent rhetoric has come from. And Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has actually spoken about this. It comes from the right, that there is more violent rhetoric that comes from the right. I'm not saying there is none that comes from the left. There certainly is. And I think, you know, Joe Biden gave a an interview to NBC's Lester Holt this week in which he got as close, and I think he should have gone further, in apologizing for saying that it was time to put Donald Trump in the crosshairs. And I think that's the kind of language that clearly doesn't
20:10 Katty Kay? help. And Lester Holt called Joe Biden on it. But statistically, the majority of that kind of language has come from the right.
20:17 Anthony Scaramucci? Katty, do you think the the media was against this pick? By the way, Rupert Murdoch didn't like it.
20:23 Katty Kay? I saw that.
20:24 Anthony Scaramucci? Several of the top donors. Well, anybody that was in their Reagan orthodoxy did not like the pick.
20:30 Katty Kay? Because of the kinds of comments about Ukraine, for example.
20:33 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, 100%. And so so my question, though, is the suits. Now, you're in interesting business. Okay, I'm I'm not in the media. I just play a media person on television or on podcasts. But you are actually in the media, and we have something in the media called suits. These are the business executives, the men and women that are not in front of the camera, but they make decisions related to the people that are on camera. Do you think that these people are intimidated by Donald Trump?
21:01 Katty Kay? Well, I mean, you know, it's an interesting question. Are they intimidated? I think they have Donald Trump wrong. I think they think that Donald Trump is going to be good for their business. I mean, I think they think you're talking about media executives in particular.
21:16 Anthony Scaramucci? But I'm also talking about the fear that they have of this man, where they're they may want to throttle back. Some of their media personalities, or they may wanna.
21:24 Katty Kay? I know what you're referring to. You're referring to whether Morning Joe, the show that I'm on quite often on Monday morning was not aired. And there's speculation that that was because the report, and I have to say, I have, I was not due to be on that morning. I was up in a family event. But Morning Joe didn't air on Monday morning. And the speculation is that that was because MSNBC was afraid that somebody on the show might say something inappropriate about Donald Trump on the couple of days after he'd had an assassination attempt. Uh, there's also an argument that it was just a rolling news coverage and that it was better to do rolling news. And that's what the network was in. So I don't have any insight. I know that Donald Trump has said in the past
22:05 Katty Kay? that he hates MSNBC and that he would like to take some kind of action, whether that would be by, we've spoken about this before, by making the Federal Communications Commission more politicized so that they could take some kind of action to shut down MSNBC. I don't quite see how you could do that. I think that would get tied up in courts. He doesn't like MSNBC and would like to see some kind of toning down of MSNBC. I don't know that that's why Morning Joe didn't run on Monday morning.
22:30 Anthony Scaramucci? I mean, listen, he's taken it a step further than that. He has said that, uh, people on the air that are against him, he will go after. I mean, he's been very clear about that. He's also said he would pull the FCC licenses of people, uh, that.
22:45 Katty Kay? It's not clear he can do that, by the way.
22:47 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, it's not clear that he can do that now, but if you control the courts and you've got your acolytes on the judiciary and you've got your acolytes in the FCC and there's something in this project 2025 that you and I have talked about called Schedule F, where they let go 50,000 career bureaucrats that work in the government. Okay. This would be for the British, your civil service, which is, uh, supposed to be agnostic politically. Uh, you let go those 50,000 people, you hire 50,000 people that take a loyalty test at MAGA and all things Donald Trump. All of a sudden, things start to change. Now, people say to me, when I say, well, Erdogan
23:30 Anthony Scaramucci? in Turkey was democratically elected, look at him today, one of years later, people get very mad at me. My business partner who went to law school with me says, well, this isn't Turkey. And I said, no, it isn't Turkey. You don't get to Turkey day one. You get to Turkey day, you know, 10,000. And so what I'm worried about here is the gradualism that Donald Trump is capable of in his team of distorting the things that you're saying, which I agree with. Well, he's not capable of doing that right now. He won't have the control right now. But these guys are really plotting and preparing to figure out ways to gain that control by staffing where all the checks and balances are in our system. Well, let's
24:15 Anthony Scaramucci? just staff it in a way that tilts the scales towards us. And so before we go to the break, though, if you don't mind, I have to talk to you about my billionaire boys, the billionaire boys. I'm not a billionaire, except in Zimbabwe, I just want to point that out. But I have a lot of friends that are billionaires, many of which have thrown their support in for Donald Trump. I'm not friends with Elon Musk, but he is also one of them. What is your reaction to all of that?
24:42 Katty Kay? I think Silicon Valley and the billionaire boys are seeing the same kind of polling that we're seeing. They're seeing that Joe Biden had a very bad debate night and the Democrats, and we'll talk about this after the break, the Democrats have failed to respond in a way to that debate night that gives them a better chance of winning in November. And they are putting money where power is going to be. If you think Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States, and you are purely thinking about your bottom line, then you decide that you're going to donate to Donald Trump so that you can have influence in the Trump campaign. And we can talk about the economics of this and the fact that On the first night of the RNC, you had the president of the Teamsters Union,
25:25 Katty Kay? Sean O'Brien, lambasting corporate America. I mean, that sounded more like a Democratic National Convention speech than a Republican National Convention speech. And all apparently people in the audience were looking a little squeamish about that, suddenly hearing big business being critiqued in that way at a Republican National Convention. So I'm not sure they're right, that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are going to be great for their business and great for the economic environment, and that the tariffs they intend to impose are going to be great for the American economy or the world economy. But they may be thinking economics, they may be thinking far more cynically than that, they may just be thinking access. I suspect it's the latter, don't you?
26:05 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, listen, it's a cursory analysis. I was with Trump in 2016. I understand exactly how they're thinking and where they're going. They see lower taxes, less regulation. They see all of that, but they're missing the sinisterism. And it's going to be interesting to follow, because as they go into the steel jaws of Donald Trump, and they all get a little mangled by him, it'll be interesting to see how many of them say, wow, jeez, I got that wrong. Why did I get that wrong? Because there's a group of us, again, 40 or so people, work directly for Donald Trump, and that are saying, jeez, you know, this is very, very dangerous. Now, interestingly enough, there's probably 38 now, because there are a few people that are quietly walking themselves back to Donald Trump for the same
26:50 Anthony Scaramucci? reasons that you just described in the billionaire boy. So it'll be, it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds. But, you know, power attracts people, Katty, and money, people that have money and power are going to go towards the powerful.
27:02 Katty Kay? Yeah. And certainly, the pick of J.D. Vance is going to be a very interesting pick for American big business to contend with, because he is a guy who wants to raise the minimum wage, do a lot of things that traditionally, and cut down on immigration a lot. And it's a lot of things that traditionally, big business in America has said that they are not in favor of. But this is a new era. I think we're in a new era in the Republican Party, and we are entering a new era for America's role around the world. And it's not the one that we have been used to for the last 70 years of multilateral organizations and American-led world. The Vance-Trump ticket, if they get into the White House, which at the moment, I think both of us would say they have a very strong chance of doing.
27:43 Anthony Scaramucci? It's theirs to lose.
27:44 Katty Kay? It's their election to lose, and they are going to change the way. America sees the world and the world sees America. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back to talk more about how the Democrats respond to all of this.
27:56 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.
28:28 Katty Kay? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay.
28:32 Anthony Scaramucci? And I'm Anthony Scaramucci.
28:34 Katty Kay? And we are, in this half of the program, going to look at the Democrats and how they respond to everything that's happened in Donald Trump's orbit in the last few days. And I'm going to start with two questions for you. Anthony, do you still believe that Joe Biden wins the election? And do you still believe Joe Biden is going to be the candidate?
28:52 Anthony Scaramucci? So, I mean, these are really tough for me because I've gotten these things wrong. I have to confess that to people. My analysis was based on what I thought was a good presidency, a good legislative agenda for Joe Biden. And I thought we were going to get a version of the 2020 Joe Biden that was going to do a legitimate job of advocating his case and do a legitimate job of being a good salesman for his accomplishments. We don't have that. We have a 2024 candidate, presidential candidate, that is showing signs of aging. We have a presidential candidate that can't read off the teleprompter even.
29:33 Anthony Scaramucci? He's, he's trying to cap rents in the United States at 5%. You can't have anything more than a 5% increase. This is a very, very big mistake. Anytime the government enters the markets like this, it disrupts the markets and it causes a lot of damage to the formation and the allocation of capital. But he was reading at a speech in the NAACP this week. National advancement for colored people at their convention in Las Vegas. And Caddy, he was squinting. He couldn't see the prompter. I'm going to cap the wages at fifty five dollars. Okay, and so these are gaffes that he's making now regularly. He couldn't read the five percent, so he said fifty five dollars.
30:18 Katty Kay? He gave that interview for NBC, and even that was, he got through it, but it was pretty painful. I mean, I think any Democrat I know who was watching that would have had their kind of heart in their mouth, waiting for him to make a mess up.
30:31 Anthony Scaramucci? Strong liar versus weak competence. United States is going to go with strong liar. So, and so that's all right. So I got wrong. I think he's now going to lose, have to confess that. The second thing I got wrong is I thought he would be brave enough to step down. I thought he would look at the situation and say, if we went with a Newsom or Pritzker or Whitmer, even a Kamala Harris, we might have a better chance. He's saying something that is very disingenuous, Caddy. He's saying that fourteen million people voted for me to be the nominee. Okay, and so I'm listening to them. However, they rigged the system. Okay, so they talk about our democracy and the preservation of our democracy. Why not open the party primary system?
31:15 Anthony Scaramucci? Why not give RFK Junior a chance to compete against you? Jimmy Carter did that with RFK Junior's uncle, Teddy Kennedy. Why not open the system? They didn't. They shut down the system in different states. They wouldn't even let the primaries exist, took people off the ballots, blah, blah.
31:31 Katty Kay? And by the way, circumstances change. Political landscapes change and events change. And those things change people's perception. There was a CBS poll out this week. Only twenty eight percent of voters think that President Biden has the mental ability to serve as president. Twenty eight percent. I think the interesting thing now.
31:53 Anthony Scaramucci? I'm in the, I'm in the seventy two percent. I, I look at him today and say, this guy shouldn't be the president. And so I'm in the seventy two percent. I, I don't want Donald Trump to be the president because of the mendacity and the worldview and so forth. And I would like the Joe Biden team to figure that out because if they can get through and win the election, they will extinguish large elements of Trumpism. That movement, part of that movement will fall off the cliff, Katty. But you're not going to be able to do it if you don't have a surrogate or an advocate at the top of the food chain that can make the case.
32:31 Katty Kay? So yesterday I texted a whole bunch of Democrats I know in Congress, strategists, people in around the White House, and just asked them, is the movement to get rid of Joe Biden over? And do any other Democrats want to run against Donald Trump in 2024? And I had a ton of texts back from people saying, look, there may be one last push after the Republican National Convention because it's not that the fear has gone away. People have all seen the numbers. But what's changed is that it looks much more likely that Donald Trump is going to win after the assassination attempt and after that debate performance and after this Republican National Convention. And Democrats who are ambitious
33:13 Katty Kay? and want to be president are looking at 2024 and thinking, if this cycle is lost, I'm better holding my fire and going for 2028. So I think you're gonna, you may have one more push to try to get Joe Biden to step aside. And there are plenty of Democrats who are still saying it is their only chance. That if they go into this election with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, they lose the White House, they lose the House, they lose the Senate, they've already lost the Supreme Court, the whole slew of the apparatus of American government is in Republican hands. And that the only way they can try to stop that from happening is by changing the top of the ticket. But because of the way Donald Trump is performing, because of what we spoke about in the last half of the episode, the
33:56 Katty Kay? extraordinary luck he's been having, including getting rid of that documents case, I don't know how many top Democrats now are going to want to take the risk. I think the, I feel the air has gone out of the balloon on that one.
34:07 Anthony Scaramucci? Let me ask you this, because you, you live in Washington, and I could only last 11 days in Washington. So you. Know Washington a lot better than me. So let me, let me ask you this question. If Donald Trump is an existential threat to the democracy, isn't it hypocritical then to say, well, I'm gonna wait till 2028 before I contest Donald Trump or contest the minions of Donald Trump. But I thought you said it was an existential threat to the democracy. So, so the hypocrisy of these political leaders is absolutely sickening, catty catty.
34:38 Katty Kay? That was exactly the point that a Western ambassador made to me last week, that he couldn't believe the cynicism of these Democrats who are saying Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but at the same time saying, yeah, but we're not actually gonna
34:51 Anthony Scaramucci? You're not gonna wait till 2028.
34:53 Katty Kay? But I still want to be president, so I'm gonna give myself the best shot.
34:56 Anthony Scaramucci? So, so the other, the other question I have for you, and I hope, again, just because you live there, why, why do that if you're Joe Biden? Is it just 100% the ego? Took me 50 years to get this job. My wife and I need the job. Hunter needs the job. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for the gusto for the next four months, even if my party and everything that I work for is gonna be historically tarnished. And you left something out, which I have to bring up to other listeners around the world. It's the House and Senate, but you know what could really hurt the Democrats are the state and the local legislatures. And let me explain this quickly. If those state and local legislatures all go red, they start to gerrymander the country. And what does this mean? They redistrict the country
35:41 Anthony Scaramucci? to favor their party. And so the, the redistricting comes from the local governments working with the national government to redistrict to favor themselves when they're in power. So just imagine a scenario now where even the Democrats have more registrants, but the Republicans redistrict in a way that favors them for 2028 and 2032. So, so my question to you is, go ahead, help me with Joe Biden. Help me understand that. So, you know what? I actually don't care about that. I'm Mr. Malapropter on the teleprompter. Don't care. I'm gonna ride this thing over the cliff. And so my question to you is why?
36:24 Anthony Scaramucci? Why allow himself and his wife to be the Thelma and Louise of American politics and ride off the cliff here as opposed to help his party and his legacy?
36:35 Katty Kay? Well, Thelma and Louise, the couple that I've heard Democrats mention is the Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It's very hard to understand.
36:43 Anthony Scaramucci? It's a better analogy.
36:44 Katty Kay? I don't think Jill Biden is Lady Macbeth, by the way. I've met Jill Biden. She is a woman who has taught all her life. She's committed to her own career. She's done impressive things. But she is very committed to her husband and she always stands by him and to the family. And I have heard that this is about protecting Hunter, who is the only living son from that car crash that Joe Biden's family suffered when they were young, Hunter, who has his own legal issues, and that this is a lot about him. But whatever this is, and Joe Biden in that NBC interview said, was asked, you know, who do you turn to for counsel? And he said, me. He turns to himself. But we know that there is Jill Biden, Hunter Biden,
37:29 Katty Kay? Val Biden, and this little group of advisers around him. And there is a Shakespearean quality to this. I mean, take Macbeth, take King Lear, whichever one you want to take, the king who holds on to power for too long and won't let it go, and takes the counsel of people around him who are not giving him the best counsel. And there are a lot of Democrats who are frustrated and concerned that Joe Biden is not getting the full range of information he should be getting, that he's not getting all of the latest polling data, that he's not getting the bad news. And I'm particularly interested in the fact, I think it's notable, that you have the heads of the intelligence committees, the Democratic
38:10 Katty Kay? heads of the intelligence committees in the House, people like Jim Himes, who has recently come out and said that Joe Biden should not run, Adam Schiff, who made it pretty clear on Meet the Press recently that there was a path out for Joe Biden, and that these people are seeing foreign intelligence and they are seeing what the impact is on adversaries and allies of having a president who is not in his full mental capacity. And it just strikes me that when you have the top intelligence officials, Democratic intelligence officials in the House. Still not endorsing Joe Biden, that suggests to me that they are seeing what the problems are.
38:52 Anthony Scaramucci? So I want you to be Pollyanna for a second.
38:55 Katty Kay? Oh, good. I like this role. Miss glass half full.
38:58 Anthony Scaramucci? Yes, exactly. And I want you to tell me how Joe Biden wins. Paint for me the inside straight and that Donald Trump, despite all the momentum he has, paint for me the inside straight that leads Joe Biden back to the White House.
39:14 Katty Kay? So I am conscious that we are recording this podcast at a time where things are going very well for Donald Trump. He survived an assassination attempt. He's being described as a kind of martyr figure at the Republican National Convention. He's chosen this young, energetic vice president. He's had a very important legal case against him thrown out. He came out of a debate where he was the very clear winner. However, there are ways that Donald Trump could throw away this extraordinary advantage that he currently holds. He could forget the talk about unity, which I don't think is going to last terribly long anyway,
39:52 Katty Kay? and the kind of undisciplined, angry, grievance-filled Donald Trump could still reemerge. His relationship with J.D. Vance is not particularly tested. There could be tensions in that relationship. So I think that Donald Trump could throw this away by being Donald Trump at his worst. He could remind people around the country, suburban women voters, for example, of all the reasons they didn't like him. There are still three months to go for Donald Trump to get riled up. If he feels he's on the back foot at all, I think you could see more of that. This is more about Donald Trump being Donald Trump than actively the things Joe Biden can do to win. The only card, really, that the Democrats have at the moment is
40:36 Katty Kay? abortion and playing that card as hard as they can in the suburbs. And J.D. Vance is somebody who opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. And I think they can push that to paint Vance and Trump as extremists. And the other thing that they have going for them, the Democrats, is the sense that Donald Trump was a chaos candidate and unreliable and extreme. It's a long shot. I'm saying it's a long shot, but you're asking for Pollyanna.
41:03 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, yeah, you sound, yeah, you sound pretty convincing, though, on a few issues because I, I don't think the Republicans, despite having some space in their platform, you know, what is the platform? They write down the principles of the party going into the convention and the goal is that the candidate will adhere to those principles. They've been pretty open, or as you would say, loosey goosey on the abortion issue.
41:27 Katty Kay? They don't want, they've said they don't want a national abortion ban.
41:30 Anthony Scaramucci? Right. So I don't know if that's going to be enough, the parsing that they're doing in the platform related to what they actually are. But the flip side is J D Vance, Trump sees him as a surrogate that can help him in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And so we'll have to see the, the women of the country are going to make a big decision here in terms of the presidency. Because if you look at the numbers and you look at the data, if the suburban women swing for Joe Biden, he actually still does have a chance. And I think this is one of the reasons why, if I'm Joe Biden, let me just give this out to people. I'm Joe Biden, I'm eighty one years old, I'm looking at the polls, I beat Donald Trump
42:12 Anthony Scaramucci? once, I've had the worst week in presidential, modern political politics, okay? My opponent survived an assassination attempt that's galvanized his base and I flubbed the debate to the point where sixty percent of my party wanted to kick me off the top of the ticket. I'm having the worst week of my political career and the polls have only moved two points, Katty Kay. So you know what? I'm staying in the race to give it a good fight.
42:40 Katty Kay? And that is exactly what the Biden campaign keeps saying. Look at the polls, hasn't moved that much, I'm staying in the race. I'm not hearing from anyone now that he's getting out. Let's see. We, I feel like we have to be doing these podcasts on a regular basis, two or three times a week, because there's so much crazy news happening in the United States. I don't know that you'll manage to drag Anthony out of his very, you know, nice Tuscan lair to do that. But if there anything else happens, guys, we will be back with you.
43:04 Anthony Scaramucci? These missiles have like a wide circumference. Don't be giving up too...
43:07 Katty Kay? Yeah, don't worry, it's just small.
43:08 Anthony Scaramucci? It could be in Tuscany, I might be in a Malfe. You've got to be careful because it has a very wide circumference when these missiles land, okay?
43:15 Katty Kay? I'm so happy. I'm happy you managed to get a nice anniversary wedding week, seriously.
43:20 Anthony Scaramucci? Thank you.
43:20 Katty Kay? Despite all of the news. I know we dragged you away, but I'm glad that you managed to enjoy it anyway, Anthony.
43:25 Anthony Scaramucci? It's been very, very good fun. And the good news is you and I both know there'll be a lot of news that's discussed next week. And I look forward to it.
43:33 Katty Kay? And we'll be back. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics US with me, Katty Kay.
43:37 Anthony Scaramucci? And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. We'll be back next Friday. And thank you again.
43:57 Speaker 05 The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.
44:05 Speaker 06 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
44:11 Speaker 07 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
44:13 Speaker 08 They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
44:16 Speaker 05 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
44:29 Speaker 09 We would need to understand the policy context.
44:31 Speaker 05 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
44:40 Speaker 10 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
44:45 Speaker 05 Yes.
44:47 Speaker 07 New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?
44:51 Speaker 05 You're my soldier, are you?
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44:56 Speaker 07 An audio drama journey like no other.
44:58 Speaker 11 Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.
45:01 Speaker 07 Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.
45:05 Speaker 09 We have two times friendly key.
45:06 Speaker 07 Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
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