244. How to buy the White House

Is there too much money in US politics? Why do people donate to presidential campaigns? Who are the two women vying to be Mexico’s next president? Join Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci for this week's episode of The Rest Is Politics: US as they answer all these questions and more. 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?

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• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:27Anthony Scaramucci?

  Hello and welcome to the second episode of The Rest is Politics US with me, Anthony Scaramucci.

• 2:33Katty Kay?

  And me, Katty Kay.

• 2:35Anthony Scaramucci?

  So, Katty, we're recording on Thursday morning, the day after we met in person for the first time ever on Morning Show yesterday. It was nice to finally meet you, Katty, after all these years.

• 2:46Katty Kay?

  I was wondering whether we finally met, which is a weird way to meet somebody, right? You meet them on a TV set in a live program for about 10 minutes. But I was wondering whether you were slightly regretting your decision to go into this venture.

• 2:57Anthony Scaramucci?

  Obviously, you leave a very good first impression. I was very happy to have makeup on when I met you, Katty. See that? I could hide the bags under my eyes for 10 minutes. But it was great to be with you. What are we going to talk about today?

• 3:10Katty Kay?

  I want to pick up on something that you had referenced last week that caught my attention about this idea that everything in America, and particularly in American politics, can be traced back to money and to donations. So, in the first half of this program this week, we're going to discuss the millions, actually, you know what? Let's make that billions of dollars, because this election is going to cost billions of dollars, that are pumped into presidential campaigns. This year's race is expected to be the most expensive race ever. And we're going to get a better idea of the kind of mysterious, murky, dark world of campaign financing and political mega donations. We'll get into PACs and super PACs, and Anthony's going to tell you what they mean, because he has a great history in this.

• 3:53Katty Kay?

  And then in the second half, I want to go south of the border and look at Mexico, where there is an election coming up next month that, honestly, hardly anyone here in America is talking about. But, of course, it could have huge consequences for this election in November, because whoever is elected the next president of Mexico is going to control, to some extent, the border with the United States, and we know that that's a big issue in the US election. So, before that, though, Anthony, campaign financing, and I think we should declare your own background and interest in this, and tell the listeners how you became a mover of shaker, not just in the world of Republican campaigns, but also in the world of Democratic fundraising as well.

• 4:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so I think I've told you my background, but I'll just repeat it for this podcast briefly. I am not even an outer borough person. So, so Trump is an outer borough person. So what does that mean in New York parlance? Well, Katty, I'm sitting in my office right now, which is in midtown Manhattan. You could probably hear the traffic going by. Well, he wasn't born where the action is in the island of Manhattan. He was born in Queens. Okay, I'm from Nassau County, so that's even further out. Okay, so maybe that's the Midlands for the UK or something like that. I just want to explain how out of it I actually am. And I had my first job interview at Goldman Sachs. I was wearing 100% polyester, Katty K.

• 5:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  And the partner at Goldman Sachs said, I can't bring you to Goldman like this. You gotta go buy natural fiber clothing. I was fully flammable for my first job interview. So, yes, I went to Harvard, posh school, but my dad was a crane operator. So you have to understand my connection into all of this came through politics. When I got the job at Goldman Sachs, they said, we want to go meet rich people and we want you to open accounts for rich people. Well, I had never been inside a country club, never swung a golf club or a tennis racket. And so the way to do this, Katty, was through politics. And I made my first political donation at the age of 29 in 1993 to Rudolph Giuliani for mayor. I was Young Republicans for mayor.

• 5:59Anthony Scaramucci?

  Why is this important? Because wealthy people gravitate to politics. They go to these events. It helped me build my business. When Rudy won, I got a parking pass on my car. I could park on two wheels on Madison Avenue on a fire hydrant. No problem. I had the most exclusive parking pass in New York City.

• 6:20Katty Kay?

  You'd made the big time with your natural fiber.

• 6:23Anthony Scaramucci?

  Now, Trump has a chip on his shoulder for being an outer borough person. I could care less if they don't want to let me into a country club or anything like that. It doesn't bother me. Trump didn't get into the exclusive country club out here on Long Island. He built 18 golf courses. You don't like me, I'm gonna go run for president so that you have to deal with me. Okay, I'm trying to explain to you the differences in people's personalities. But what's important about this as it relates to fundraising is that is where the action is in the United States. Very wealthy people go to these fundraisers to name drop politicians, but also to influence politicians. And so we had limits in fundraising back in the day.

• 7:04Anthony Scaramucci?

  In January of 2010, the Supreme Court passed a very famous case in the United States. It was Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. And in that decision, Justice Scalia said, well, you know, it's a First Amendment right. You've got a billion dollars. You can spend all of it on a political campaign. That's your exercise of your First Amendment right. And so we set up these things called political action committees. And people like me, Katty Kay, a billionaire, Elon Musk can dump tens of billions of dollars theoretically into a political action committee to do whatever we want to affect policy. Now, the nuance is there has to be a Chinese wall between that and the political campaign itself.

• 7:49Anthony Scaramucci?

  And the campaign is still limited in terms of hard dollar donations to the campaign. Why this is monumental is that it has absolutely skewed the policies and the legislation over the last 14 years. If you want chlorinated chicken in the United States, and you don't have that in the UK, but if you want it, you go to these fundraisers, you light up these congressional representatives, the senators, et cetera, and then they'll show up and they'll pass legislation to help big food, big pharma, big military. And the little guy, Katty, has been left out of this equation over the last 14 years. And I'll just leave you with this one last thought.

• 8:33Anthony Scaramucci?

  Harry Truman said when he got the job of the presidency, He said, you know, this is the only job that every single eligible voter in the United States actually votes on. You know, the other jobs are a representative in my district, a senator in my state, or local politicians. The presidency is the one job where everybody votes on it. And Truman said that he was a lobbyist there for, for everybody. We don't have that anymore. There's no lobbyists for the little guy in the country, and it has affected the political system.

• 9:04Katty Kay?

  So that is a great explanation of why Citizens United is so important. And I think it's also worth looking at some of the numbers that have resulted in that. Because what happens, my understanding, Antony, is that with these super PACs, you get all of these wealthy billionaires, right, who can dump, as you say, all of that money there. And in America, it's called dark money, right? We don't really know where it comes from. It doesn't have to be declared. It's not like campaign funds that have to be declared. You have to say, has this come from spool donors? Has this come from other people? The dark money in America has increased by 900% since Citizens United was passed. And I think that gives people some sense of the impact on the political system of

• 9:48Katty Kay?

  these wealthy individuals. But it's also, I don't think Americans even understand how out of whack the sums are in their politics compared to other countries. You know, Donald Trump raising $50 million at one fundraiser in Florida last month almost seems kind of normal by American standards. You look at other countries, though, and you look at, like, 2019, and Alastair's going to jump on me because I've probably got this number wrong, but as far as my research tells me, Boris Johnson spent $21 million in today's money, the equivalent of 2019. A year later, Joe Biden, in his presidential campaign,

• 10:32Katty Kay?

  not even the super PACs, this is just his presidential committee, spent $1.6 billion. That is a multiple of 76 times.

• 10:41Anthony Scaramucci?

  Staggering.

• 10:42Katty Kay?

  So I don't know whether the United Kingdom has bargain basement democracy, or Whether the US is spending a whole lot of money on something that is not necessarily working any better, but that's seventy six times. You know what the difference is? It's the difference between buying a latte at Starbucks and buying a DeLonghi Italian espresso machine. That's the difference. That's how out of whack American politics is in terms of its money. No wonder that. So let's say you're running for neighborhood dog walker. Anthony Scaramucci wants to become the town dog walker. The day before the interview, I go and buy you a cup of coffee, but my wealthy neighbor down the road, he buys you a freaking DeLonghi espresso machine. Whose dog are you going to look after better?

• 11:27Anthony Scaramucci?

  Is he gonna operate the DeLonghi espresso machine for me? Because I would be absolutely clueless on how to operate it. But if he if he's operating it for me, I'm going with him. But but let me let me make this point to UK listeners, and perhaps some of the American listeners will get this as well. There are five hundred and thirty five people in our Congress, a hundred in the Senate, four thirty five in the House, one president. There are five hundred and thirty six people that are controlling twenty six percent of the GDP of the United States, eight percent of the world's GDP. So I just want to put that in perspective for people. You've got five hundred and thirty six people that are descended on every year.

• 12:09Anthony Scaramucci?

  You said it's nine hundred percent. There's twenty six billion dollars in lobbying spent on descending on Washington. Boeing started in Seattle. They moved their headquarters to Chicago, Caddy, wasn't close enough. So they brought it to Virginia to sit outside the Pentagon and lobby that government. Okay, and why is it going up exponentially? Because it works, Caddy. And these people, unfortunately, they want to stay in power more than they necessarily want to serve the public. And so the public is getting processed food, seed oils, coronated chicken. It's getting drug therapies that some are working,

• 12:53Anthony Scaramucci?

  some are not working, but there's been a laxity in standards by the FDA, at least most people feel that way. And there's been no audit of the Pentagon in 50 years, Katty. And so we have trillions of dollars going into the Pentagon, but we don't account for it. And all of this can be traced back to campaign finance spending and lobbying. And I think it's very, very important for people to understand this because these are the things that go on inside of Washington that the average American or the average British citizen perhaps is cynical about or disinterested or apathetic. But if they understood it, they would say, okay, you know what?

• 13:33Anthony Scaramucci?

  We probably could come up with better ideas and more efficient incentives for our politicians. The incentives are so misaligned to treat the man on the street or the woman on the street properly in the current society.

• 13:49Katty Kay?

  I mean, they must be, you know, every member of Congress I speak to pulls their hair out about campaign finance as well because members of Congress, because of the large summers of money, have to, you have to raise a lot of money. Unless you have your own money and you're willing to spend it, you have to raise a lot of money and it's taking up to about 30 to 40% of their time is what members tell me routinely is spent on raising money, not on legislating for the American people, not on doing the job they were elected to do.

• 14:17Anthony Scaramucci?

  I don't want to interrupt you, Katty, but I think they're underselling that. I think it's closer to 50 or 60, but they're embarrassed to tell you that larger number.

• 14:25Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I think you may be right, but what it means as well is it's not just the little person, me with my latte, trying to get you to walk my dog properly up against my wealthy neighbor. It's if I'm running for politics, there is starting to be a kind of favoritism, if you like, amongst the party to have wealthy candidates running, right? Because if you are a wealthy candidate running and you're prepared to give your own money. Then the party's not going to have to support you with its own finances in order to get you to win that election that you're in. So you look at, there's a good case of this actually just across the border from DC in Maryland where there's a Democratic

• 15:05Katty Kay?

  primary going on for the Senate and there's Congressman David Trone, who is super wealthy and has made it very clear to voters that he is prepared to spend his own money if they elect him as the Democratic candidate. He's up against an African American woman, Angela Alsobrooks, who is the kind of darling of the Democratic establishment in Maryland, but she doesn't have money. And you can see, if you're Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, you're thinking to yourself, if I get this wealthy guy when it comes to November, then I'm not going to have to support him so much with campaign funds. So the little guy is being squeezed out in terms of representation with elected officials. The little guy is being squeezed out in terms of being able to run for politics potentially because

• 15:49Katty Kay?

  they have to raise so much money. And you wonder whether, I mean, I hear your point about if Americans thought about this more, they would lobby to change the system. But there is such an entrenched value and look at the degree to which, I mean, soon that DeLonghi espresso machine is going to be a Lamborghini because this is just going up.

• 16:07Anthony Scaramucci?

  Now you're talking because I'm a Long Island guy that loves cars. So yeah, I want the Lamborghini.

• 16:12Katty Kay?

  I knew I'd get you there. But this is, this is, this is going up, Antony. There's no record. You look at the curves, it's a curve that is rising. It's not a curve that shows any signs of the American public saying, we have to change this. I mean, and the Roberts Court, by the way, doesn't look like it's a court that sees anything other than out bribery as a form of campaign finance violation.

• 16:32Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, my, my short-lived experience in Washington, somebody said to me, well, how did you like the swamp? I said, well, it's not a swamp. It's a gold-plated hot tub. These guys sit in the hot tub together. And if you're willing to play with them, they'll drop you two champagne bottles and Cuban cigars. And if you're not willing to play with them, they'll make up stories to get you out of Washington. And so we have to at least explain it to people so that they know about it, at which point they can at least ask their politicians about it. And how do you get reform? If you think like an entrepreneur, which I happen to be, entrepreneurs think zero to one. How do you take something that is nothing and turn it into something?

• 17:17Anthony Scaramucci?

  And in our politics right now, we need entrepreneurial politicians to think about how to reset the system or how to reform the system. And I'll submit this to you, there are 27 amendments to that constitution. That constitution is approximately 230 years old, which means that you should be getting an amendment every seven to eight years. And yet, we've only had two amendments in the last 30 years. One was a procedural one in 1993, and of course, the big Kahuna amendment was in 1965, the Voting Rights Act. But if we're going to have a constitutional Republican democracy, or representative democracy

• 17:58Anthony Scaramucci?

  in the United States, with a living document known as the Constitution, we have to reset that social contract every generation for a new group of Americans. And some of the things that we would need to do, in my opinion, is to reform this outlandish spending. We have created a separate but equal democracy, and I think it's really going to hurt the country long term.

• 18:21Katty Kay?

  I love your Long Island optimism, Anthony, that this is actually going to happen. Because I don't see either of the parties, and we should make this clear, people, I think, associate money with the Republican Party, and that is not the case. If you look at the current state of the election, actually, it's Joe Biden has a lot more money on hand, that is money ready to spend, than Donald Trump does. And I know, because I had a conversation with two Democratic donors last night, who had just hosted a fundraiser where they raised $1.4 million for the Biden campaign, and they were surprised they hadn't been asked before. They said it was easy to raise $1.4 million. This is as much on the Democratic side as it is on the Republican side, and I don't see the lobbying.

• 19:05Katty Kay?

  In the country to change. I don't see the political will in either party, which is in a kind of arms race of money at the moment to try and change it. I mean, maybe you're right, maybe that, maybe that is-

• 19:15Anthony Scaramucci?

  No, we agree. No, no, listen, I, I agree with you. Uh, I, but what I am suggesting, it is changeable. I think what happens in our society is the cynicism pervades and we look at it and say, okay, they have no incentive to change it. I'm just talking about the potentiality of having a reformer that could come in and honestly explain the situation to the American people. And remember, think like an entrepreneur for one second. There's one voting block in the United States, 144 million people, they vote the exact same way in every single election. You know who that is? The non-voter, Gaddy. They don't vote, they don't show up at the polls. Imagine an entrepreneurial politician who could

• 19:59Anthony Scaramucci?

  go after that market and create a new market of voters. And you don't have to get that many of them to scare the daylights out of the current political establishment.

• 20:09Katty Kay?

  Which, by the way, is what your old boss said he was gonna do, and did do to some extent in 2016. He, he brought a whole load of people that hadn't voted before into the electorate. Let's see if he does it this time around. Okay, take us a little bit behind the scenes, Anthony. We've, we've given people the history and the kind of politics of this, but you've been there, you've been there on campaigns where people were fundraising, you've donated to campaigns yourself. What's it like when you're being, you know, tapped up for money, or what's it like when you're asking for people to, how hard is it to get this cash?

• 20:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  It's about as horrifying as you would imagine it to be, okay? It is literally like a first-century brothel, okay? It's like the stuff that you see-

• 20:47Katty Kay?

  Never been in one, but I can just imagine.

• 20:49Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, I would just say, just go to Pompeii and look at the murals, okay? I mean, this is as horrifying of an experience as you can imagine, because they're all loosey-goosey with you, and they're all flirtatious and flattering. The money gets wired, or the check gets right, and it's bye-bye, on to the next transaction. And whether we like it or not, that's exactly what happens. However, why do people- Do it. Okay. Well, some people are idealists. They do it because they they're going to affect change, but other people do it because they want the relationship with the relationship with their political leaders, or they have a big business incentive where they're going to sit before those

• 21:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  leaders and lobby for a policy or lobby for a deregulation or make it easier for a plane to get up in the air when they should be making it harder for a plane to get up in the air, or they should make it harder for a drug to pass through the FDA. And so that's why they do it, and it's very unseemly. And by the way, I've done it. I admit to it. You can see all of my donations online.

• 21:56Katty Kay?

  Go on, tell us. Were they all were those donations you made, like, you know, Obama in 2008, you donated to, was that idealism? When you, you know, donated to the Romney campaign, was that idealism? Was it, were you hoping to get something out of these campaigns that would serve your own business interests, for example?

• 22:13Anthony Scaramucci?

  So, so I, I, I think this will either make this podcast incredibly successful, Katty, or people will be horrified and they'll shut it off right now, because I'm going to be very real with you. The Obama donation, I had gone to law school with President Obama. We were not classmates. I was a few years ahead of him, even though he's older than me. And one of my closest friends knew him. It was 2007. I went to one of the social clubs here in New York to meet him. I think it was the University Club. And we were behind stage before he gave his formal remarks. He was then Senator Obama. I had a check in my breast pocket. I went over to the Senator. I said, Senator, I said, you and I didn't really know each other in law school, but I'm about to

• 22:57Anthony Scaramucci?

  hand you a big check. Can I lie to my friends and tell them that you and I knew each other in law school? Well, Obama, Obama looks at me, had the best smile in American politics since Jack Kennedy.

• 23:09Katty Kay?

  Forever.

• 23:10Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, he, he lights up. He looks at me, he said, I'll tell you what, if you double the amount of the check, we'll take it back to Hawaii, okay? And I looked at him, I said, you're done. I had another check in my pocket. I ripped it up, I doubled the amount of the check. And I'm going to tell you right now, I've been to more White House Christmas parties during the Obama administration than the Trump administration, because I've been to zero Trump administration Christmas parties. But that was total idealism, and that was total naivete on my part. I was 44 years old at the time, and I said, I'm never going to meet a president, I'm never going to know somebody personally that's running for the presidency, so I'm going to write this guy a check, and then I'm going to tell people I did it. And that's how superficial it was.

• 23:53Katty Kay?

  Let's just take from that, you know, the message of what you've just been saying. You wrote President Obama a check, you even doubled it, you had a good joke about it. And then you got access. You got invitations to White House Christmas parties. Now, maybe that helped your business, maybe it didn't help your business.

• 24:07Anthony Scaramucci?

  It was unbelievable, it was great name dropping.

• 24:09Katty Kay?

  Exactly. It made you look great with your friends, right? So, actually, you have just given us a prime example of how the system works.

• 24:18Anthony Scaramucci?

  This is a-

• 24:19Katty Kay?

  For a wealthy individual.

• 24:20Anthony Scaramucci?

  Just remember, significance matters to a lot of people, not just for their own personal ego, but they want someone to walk into their office and see a picture of them with the president and think, oh, they must be somebody, right? Dom, our producer, is asking me, did I play basketball with him? And my friends swear that we did, okay? My friends swear that we did. But, you know, I don't remember it 100%, but my friend Jeff Moslow is like, Mooch, what are you talking about? Obama had that great outside shot, I used to foul the daylights out of him. I said, okay, I don't remember it, okay? And by the way, every professor at Harvard has said that they taught the guy. Now, that was also mathematically impossible, okay? But I apparently played basketball with him, God bless, but I wrote that check-

• 25:05Anthony Scaramucci?

  For very superficial reasons. The Romney stuff was different. I was a lifelong Republican. I wasn't in love with some of the policies that Obama had put together in the first term. And so I returned to my Republican roots and I got heavy into the Romney campaign. I donated to his PAC. I was on his finance team. I got heavy into his campaign, so much so that by the time 2016 came around, you know, I was one of the guys. I was the chairman of the Finance Committee for Walker. When he dropped out of the race, I rolled into Bush. Trump wanted me to be the Finance Chairman. I told him I couldn't do it because I was hosting Wall Street Week at the time for Fox and I would have had to leave the show and I didn't

• 25:48Anthony Scaramucci?

  want to do that. And so Mnuchin took the job and Stephen is a very good friend and still to this day, this is the great thing about politics in America, and you know this, Katty, I still talk to Trump campaign staffers, current staffers. In fact, I called one last week and he got on the phone. He says, "Munch, is this a butt dial? What the hell are you doing?" I said, "No, I'm calling you because I need a favor." Okay. And so you know how it works, okay, in the war zone of politics. I still have friends on the campaign. I still have friends in the Obama quarters, the Trump quarters, and money is a liquid asset to these politicians. You know, if you give $5 million to Joe Biden,

• 26:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  the Republicans light up because they're like, "Okay, this guy's rich enough. Maybe he'll give me 5 million." And that's how it works. That's the inside baseball or the inside football of the system.

• 26:42Katty Kay?

  Just before everybody wants to go and, you know, slit their wrists because American politics looks like it's just mired in corruption and money and favors that everybody's doing us, from Anthony getting to the Christmas parties to chlorinated chicken. I think it is worth reminding people that in 2016 Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a ratio of two to one.

• 27:04Anthony Scaramucci?

  No question. She was also, she had twice the personnel.

• 27:08Katty Kay?

  Because she had more money, right?

• 27:10Anthony Scaramucci?

  She did.

• 27:10Katty Kay?

  She had more money, so she could have more offices. She had more of the infrastructure. She spent more on advertising. She did more of all of those things that that cash allows you to do. And yet she still lost the 2016 election. So I'm just wondering, are we getting into a world where not just because of television advertising, which is, takes up an awful lot of the spending of these political action committees. And television advertising isn't where people are getting their news anymore. And so Joe Biden, look at his campaign, he's actually doing a lot more on TikTok than he is on traditional advertising because that's where he thinks he can reach young voters. Are we getting into a world where it's not that the laws will change, but maybe because the mechanism of reaching voters becomes cheaper?

• 27:55Katty Kay?

  Or maybe because voters themselves are less easily bought. These huge amounts of money that you raise just might not be as determinative of your potential for actually winning an election? Or am I being optimistic?

• 28:09Anthony Scaramucci?

  No, I think it's very insightful and I think that is the future. I think it's going to be cheaper. The same way technology has allowed us to deliver things for lower cost. But one thing quickly before we go to break, Hillary Clinton, what she lacked in that campaign was her presence. She had the money, but she didn't go to Wisconsin one time after the convention. And it was felt in Wisconsin and she lost it.

• 28:38Katty Kay?

  One thought for our American audience. Just look at Norway where they don't allow any political ads on radio and television. Elections are cheap. And I don't know, I'd argue Norway's democracy functions pretty well. What do you reckon, Antony? Maybe that's just, just, just a little thought out there.

• 28:54Anthony Scaramucci?

  Hey, hey, I'm, I'm not going anywhere. Okay. I'm a New Yorker. I love America, but Norway seems a pretty good place to travel to.

• 29:01Katty Kay?

  We'll record this podcast in Oslo before the end of the year. It'll be chilly, but we'll be there. Okay. We're going to take a break and we'll be back talking about a little trip I just did down to Mexico and an election that people here in the United States aren't even really aware is happening very much.

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• 31:06Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics, U.S. edition. I'm Anthony Scaramucci with Catty Kay. Catty, I heard you had a wonderful trip last week to Mexico. And you and I both know Mexico has huge implications for the United States and for the November presidential election. Tell us a little bit about what you've learned down there and the significance of the presidential election going on in Mexico right now.

• 31:32Katty Kay?

  Yeah, full disclosure, first off, I was down there. Entirely for pleasure with my daughter. I took her for a long weekend. It was a very good way, by the way, to escape nerd prom, White House Correspondence Dinner Weekend, which I'm always happy to get away. I'm sure you love that fest of journalists and politicians schmoozing it up in Washington, but I'm always happy to get away.

• 31:53Anthony Scaramucci?

  I get an allergic reaction when I enter Washington. Okay, just so you know.

• 31:57Katty Kay?

  Full stop.

• 31:57Anthony Scaramucci?

  But go ahead. Go ahead.

• 31:58Katty Kay?

  So my daughter, who just defended her PhD thesis, is called Maya. And so she wanted to go to Mexico. And I thought, well, we'll go to the land of the Maya. And we went down to Merida, which is this very cool city in the Yucatan. And to be completely honest, full disclosure, I knew there was a Mexican election going on this year. I kind of wasn't aware that I was going to land there in full election campaign season. And the great thing about Mexico is you land, you drive around, there's tons of political ads painted on every wall. And Mexico, on June the 2nd, is about to elect its first female president. So it's way ahead of the United States on that one. And the reason it's got these two women, there's the candidate who is 25 points ahead, who's the candidate from the ruling

• 32:43Katty Kay?

  Morena party. She's the successor to the current president. Her name is Claudia Scheinbaum. And she's up against a sitting senator called Socitl, and I'm sure I've mangled that pronunciation, Galvez. And you see the signs for Scheinbaum and Galvez all over Mexico. And the current president, AMLO, had a policy of bringing women into his cabinet. He had a 50% female cabinet. He upped the number of women in parliament to 50%. And he wanted a woman to succeed him. Mexican presidents are term limited. They only get one term. AMLO has served his term. He's up. He wants his successor, Claudia Scheinbaum, from the Morena party,

• 33:25Katty Kay?

  to succeed him. And so the opposition group from the right, which is a coalition of opposition parties, more from the center right, have decided that the only way they can beat this female candidate is to field a female candidate their own, which is kind of an interesting, it's kind of fun, that the idea that you've got two women running for president of Mexico. So I think you're right, that Americans are not very aware of this election, which has enormous implications because of the border, that the... Current President AMLO has actually stopped border crossings since December. They've declined by something like forty percent since December. And he's done that by instituting new visa rules and by sending people back from the border and by deporting people.

• 34:10Katty Kay?

  So the Biden administration is happy, but what they're worried about is that AMLO, who has, who's a sort of populist and who is very much an incredibly popular figure in Mexico, and even if he's about to be out of the presidency and his successor, Scheinbaum, is going to take over, he's still going to be a huge force in American politics. What the Biden campaign is kind of worried about is, is he going to turn back the spigot of migrants crossing the border in October? Because he's, AMLO sort of likes Trump. I mean, they're both populists. They both feel they're up against the establishment. They both kind of rolled back some of the democratic norms and customs that we're used to. And that's why the Biden administration has been very quiet on some of the things that

• 34:54Katty Kay?

  AMLO has done around human rights, around institutions of democracy, around the flood of fentanyl into the United States. And the border has become a kind of political football between these two countries, and now it's caught in the middle of two enormous elections. This is going to be the biggest ever election in Mexico. A hundred million Mexicans are going to go to the polls next month. They're going to go to the polls to elect a woman, and they're going to go to the polls in a way that's going to have a consequence, I think, I mean, we've talked about this, the border issue, Anthony, it's going to have a consequence in America's own election in November, and Americans are kind of not even really aware that it's happening.

• 35:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  So I want to play strategist with you for a second. So if you were on the Trump campaign, what would you like to see happen in Mexico? And then conversely, if you were on the Biden campaign, what would you like to see happen? And what do you think their strategies are in terms of dealing with this situation?

• 35:47Katty Kay?

  I mean, you would assume that the Trump campaign would like to see Galvez, who is more from the center-right, win, right? Because Republican Party, Republican coalition. But actually, I think because everybody in Mexico seems to think that AMLO, who's this big popular force in American politics, is still going to be there with a lot of influence, and that AMLO seems to like Trump in this strange, paradoxical, wonderful way that politics works, maybe actually Trump would be kind of happy to have Scheinbaum win next month and assume that AMLO is going to do him a solid when it comes to the border in October. Now, all of this, you know, this shouldn't be

• 36:32Katty Kay?

  the way that they're thinking, but I think if I was a Republican strategist, that's probably on the Trump campaign, that's probably how I'd be positioning myself. Either way, they're going to have to deal with the Mexican border. This is America's biggest trading partner. It's a huge en route for fentanyl, which is killing Americans all over the country. The border crisis is a crisis, and whoever becomes president of Mexico, they're going to have to have, the United States is going to have to deal with that. Now, Trump just gave this fascinating, I don't know if you read it, Anthony, this great interview in Time Magazine, which, by the way, anyone who ever interviews Trump, do it in print and not on television, because you get a lot more out of him, and it's a lot more nuanced. And he gave this interview in Time Magazine this week in which he says

• 37:13Katty Kay?

  that he's going to deport millions of undocumented migrants in the United States, he's going to use the US military to round them up, put them in camps, send them back home. All pretty base play stuff for Donald Trump. It'd be interesting to see how that goes down with whoever is the next Mexican president, and whether, if it's the woman from the right, Galvez, whether she would actually have more sympathy for Trump on dealing with his hardline tactics.

• 37:41Anthony Scaramucci?

  Couple of things, I just want to mention to people, if they're interested in the Mexican-American relationship, the Mexicans see the relationship differently than the Americans. The Mexican-American war... Which took place in the 1830s and led to a monstrous land grab by the United States, where we pushed the Mexican government south of the Rio Grande, millions of casualties to citizens of Mexico, and the pain is still felt in that country. So it's just interesting thing. The Americans don't think about it that much. There's a great book written about this 10 years ago called The Wicked War, and it'll give you some contrast and comparison between the way the Mexicans look at it and the Americans. But on the Time Magazine,

• 38:25Anthony Scaramucci?

  Mr. Trump has basically unapologetically told people that, hey, people like dictatorships, and I like dictatorships, and I can see myself acting somewhat dictatorial. Isn't that what he more or less said? I mean, it took me 26 minutes to read that article, and I read it very carefully.

• 38:43Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I mean, I would recommend everyone to read it, because there's really interesting stuff that he says on abortion, and whether he would allow, I mean, he basically says, hands off the state, it's up to states whether they prosecute a pregnant woman who terminates a pregnancy, or a doctor who terminates a pregnancy, and he says that would be up to the states to decide. He, as I said, he says he's going to round up illegal migrants and send them back. He's talked about millions of them. And when he's asked, well, is the military's not actually allowed to act against citizens in the United States? He says, well, these people aren't citizens. He kind of describes them as a combating force. He talks about, obviously, he talks about NATO. He doesn't say that he wouldn't pull out of NATO. He

• 39:27Katty Kay?

  says it's legitimate to try and, you know, use tactics that, just to try and get them to spend more money, and use the threat of pulling out. He doesn't seem to be very inclined to supporting Taiwan. So there's a whole load of kind of American foreign policy stuff that he's interesting on. Interestingly, he's pretty tough on Bibi Netanyahu in the interview, more than you might think so. You're right, by the way, just before we finish up on the Mexico stuff, you're right on the Mexico stuff. It seemed very differently from that side of the border. And there is a lot of criticism in Mexico of the fact that it's American demand that makes Mexico the conduit country.

• 40:02Katty Kay?

  For drugs into the United States. And if the US could tackle the demand side of things, Mexico wouldn't be this violent country that was messed up because of the drug cartels. And, you know, that's a very commonly held perception in Mexico.

• 40:17Anthony Scaramucci?

  It's fascinating, but you you brought up Netanyahu, so I just have to interject because 11 days in the White House, but a year on the campaign with Trump, so I can tell you exactly how he operates. Netanyahu praised President Biden. And he also congratulated President Biden after the election. And that's all you need to do with that borderline personality, you notice Donald Trump. Those are two eggshells that cracked inside of Trump's brain. And now he's on the warpath against Bibi Netanyahu. Okay, and so that happens to everybody that comes in contact with Mr. Trump, just so you know.

• 40:59Katty Kay?

  Yeah, so if you are looking to be the next president of Mexico or the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or any other leader that is being elected in the, whatever it is, biggest election year in global history, you have got to figure out how you're going to deal with Donald Trump. And that is why you see a stream of foreign leaders, including David Cameron, go down to Mar-a-Lago to figure out if Donald Trump gets elected, what does that mean for my country? And how am I going to manage to deal with him?

• 41:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, the only thing that works, Gaddy, is all praise all the time. That's the only thing that works. And as political leaders know, particularly foreign leaders that have their own interests in their own countries, that's an impossibility, all praise all the time.

• 41:46Katty Kay?

  You know who figured this out was Shinzo Abe, the late Prime Minister of Japan, who, in his memoirs that were published posthumously. Wrote that the way to deal with Trump is to give him the food he likes, hamburgers, give him lots of expensive gifts, gold-plated golf clubs, and give him entertainment like karaoke and whatever, so that he actually feels that he's having a good time, and make the diplomacy totally transactional. Don't make it about ideology. Don't make it about America's leadership role in the world. Don't make it about democracy or autocracy. Just make it a transaction and keep it economics. And then you can deal with Donald Trump.

• 42:27Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, if Goalhanger would let us do a podcast exclusively on Trump's insecurities, it would be a 24-hour podcast, Katty, okay? We could spend 24 hours on that topic.

• 42:39Katty Kay?

  Well, I think we've gone right around the world there, Anthony. So we're going to leave it there for this week, and we will see you all next week.

• 42:45Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, well, it's always great to be with you, Katty. Hopefully, I get the chance to see you again in person soon. Please join us again this coming Friday.

• 42:59Speaker 09

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• 43:14Speaker 10

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 43:30Speaker 11

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 43:35Speaker 10

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 43:38Speaker 11

  I'm not the first then.

• 43:39Speaker 10

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

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