296. Could Donald Trump drop out?

What will the impact be of Trump's nightmare week? Will he make it to polling day? Why do evangelicals stick by him no matter what? Join Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci as they answer all these questions and more on The Rest Is Politics US. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Producer: Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  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. 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:42Katty Kay?

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

• 1:46Anthony Scaramucci?

  And me, Anthony Scaramucci.

• 1:47Katty Kay?

  So Anthony, how are you doing?

• 1:49Anthony Scaramucci?

  I'm doing well, Katty. We've survived another week in political firestorms, right?

• 1:54Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm thinking back to three weeks ago. It was only three weeks ago that we saw that photograph, you and I, of Donald Trump after he had just been shot on that stage in Pennsylvania with the American flag behind him and the blue sky behind him. And we both texted each other, this is the winning shot of the campaign. That was three weeks ago. And I kind of think this has been a wonderfully humbling reminder of the fact that elections are not set in stone.

• 2:20Anthony Scaramucci?

  I agree. And essentially on my iPhone, that picture shows up as 1,024 A.D. It looks like it's a thousand years ago.

• 2:29Katty Kay?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Anthony Scaramucci?

  So, so this is what happens now. The cycle is moving so quickly. I thought that that moment for him was a signature moment. And if you and I asked if the election was held the day after, he would have won that election. But the chess piece has changed now, right? And it's a chess game. Some of it is game theory, some of it is selection, but they've now got a candidate, and let's just call it for what it is. They have a candidate that, other than Fox News and some right wing leaning websites, the entire media establishment is behind the candidate. They are building for the candidate. They're building up the candidate.

• 3:06Anthony Scaramucci?

  And they're building a persona and a profile of the candidate as a savior of not democracy alone, Katty. The new buzzword is freedom.

• 3:15Katty Kay?

  And future.

• 3:16Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, we choose freedom, we choose future. We're not going back. Okay, so they've changed all of the messaging. And she is a great salesperson, okay? And you need a salesperson at the top of the ticket. Now, she's improbable, Katty, because she got 1% of the vote in the primaries. She was selected during the George Floyd crisis in the United States. But she's the accidental candidate, the accidental nominee. And as you and I both talk about, this is a surfing situation where there are candidates are on their surfboards with their platforms. And a wave is coming in. What wave is it? Is it a return to 1947?

• 3:55Anthony Scaramucci?

  That's the Trump wave? Or are we going into 2025 with a imperfect union that's trying to make itself more perfect?

• 4:04Anthony Scaramucci?

  That's the issue.

• 4:04Katty Kay?

  We won't get into all of that. Anthony, you are a producer's nightmare, by the way, because there is an order. I'm meant to come in, we do a bit of chit chat, and then I do the show menu. It's called the menu. It's there and it's highlighted. Poor Fiona, our producer is at this point having palpitations. So on this show, we are going to talk about the nightmare week that Trump has had. His time that he spent with a roomful of black journalists in Chicago at a conference that did not go, I think, the way that he planned it to go. I think he deliberately went there for a fight. I want to get your take on that. But actually, the fight was against him. He was not winning it. We're going to look at Kamala Harris's week and then a little bit on the Veep stakes. We know that next Tuesday, she is planning to have the big rollout

• 4:47Katty Kay?

  in Pennsylvania of her vice presidential pick. We will talk about all of that. Then we're going to take a quick break and we're going to answer some of your questions because you do have a lot of questions. We're going to look particularly at why evangelical Christians have become the bedrock of Trump support. So let's start with that National Association of Black Journalists meeting conference up in Chicago where Donald Trump was invited onto the stage with three exceptional black women journalists. And I think he went there thinking to himself that he's going to get a fight, that it's a fight he felt he was going to win. He was then going to replay all of the clips from that fight of him up on the stage talking about race to his supporters, to his MAGA supporters.

• 5:29Katty Kay?

  But actually, what happened during the course of that is that he came across as a bully, as kind of old fashioned. His views about America seemed to be exposed in a way that was also old fashioned. He kept calling the female journalists nasty and rude. At one point, the room laughed at him, which I'm sure he didn't love. And I'm not sure that that black journalists' conference went quite the way he hoped it was going to go. What do you think, Anthony? Was that a win for him or not a win for him? I'm not sure that it helped his campaign because I'm not sure it grew his base of support.

• 6:02Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, let me just start out by saying for sure it was not a win for him. He lost something there and he has very good to great, let's call it great, political instincts. And he was extremely angry after that. And the reason I know that is the way the Pennsylvania event started. He went back to Pennsylvania, as you know. David McCormick, who's a friend of mine, and I believe you know David McCormick and Deena Powell. David is running for the Senate and he was so flustered and he had teleprompters in front of him. He said, "Your great, strong, great courageous leader who's running for governor, do you want to come up on the stage?" But David's running for the Senate. And he made five or six major gaffes like that. And they are not typical Trump gaffes where he'll mispronounce a word because he's not

• 6:47Anthony Scaramucci?

  a great reader. They were just gaffes based on, because I've seen him, remember, I did 71 campaign stops with him. When he loses his temper, and I guarantee you, on that flight to Pennsylvania, he was off the hook, upset about how that went down for him.

• 7:03Katty Kay?

  Because it didn't go the way he expected.

• 7:04Anthony Scaramucci?

  It did not go the way he expected. What he wanted to do was, he wanted to blow up Kamala Harris's spot about being black. He thought that was going to go over well for some reason. I don't know who told him that was going to go over well. I'm going to give you what I learned from the campaign on that in a second. But the second thing that he did is he wanted to leave there scaring the Democrats. Because he, in his mind, believes that the African-American community loves him and that they're going to embrace him, even though they're actually not going to embrace him. And he dug himself a very big hole. But just two quick things. When he uses the word nasty, it worked with Megyn Kelly in 2016. He called her nasty, then he, excuse me for saying this, I apologize, but I want to say

• 7:47Anthony Scaramucci?

  to our listeners, it's crazy, is he talked literally about her menstrual cycle to Don Lemon four days later, and it worked for him. Okay, but remember what I said earlier, right? 20.2 million baby boomers have died. We have 33 million people in the country that are of voting age, that identify as racially mixed, they have different parents, from different places, God bless them, the story of America.

• 8:08Katty Kay?

  It's the fastest growing racial group in America is people who are biracial. They were 3% of the American electorate in 2010, 10% of the American population today.

• 8:16Anthony Scaramucci?

  So she went to a black, historically black, college and university, Howard, right? She has identified her whole life as African-American. And South Asian, her mother was of Indian origin. First of all, Katty, in 2024, how on God's earth could this possibly matter? Okay, but it does matter to a group of people that Trump is trying to galvanize. So he was out there, he has shed La Cavita and he has shed Wiles for the moment.

• 8:46Katty Kay?

  Those are the two people running his campaign who actually up until now have kept a pretty, done a pretty good job of keeping him kind of on the straight and narrow.

• 8:54Anthony Scaramucci?

  By the way, I think they've done an amazing job. I've said that I got Harris people mad at me for saying that they're extremely disciplined.

• 9:00Katty Kay?

  But they've done an amazing job while he was ahead in the polls. When he's behind in the polls, it's a different story.

• 9:05Anthony Scaramucci?

  But let me tell you, and again, I'm sorry I'm hogging this, but I, because I got this information from people that know what's going on and I want to share it with everybody. So, so here's what happened. Okay. They're doing great. Project 2025 is a thorn in their side. It's not polling well. People think it's a fascist racist movement. And this is classic Trump. He put 85 people, I have the list in front of me, 85 people into Project 225. They're all his people. He's met with them many times. The person that wrote the foreword to the book, Project 2025, is a gentleman by the name of J D Vance. Anybody know who that is? And so now he's trying to disavow it. This is what he does. When he fired me, he said he barely knew me.

• 9:47Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay. If you look at the tweets when he started attacking me, he said that he barely knew who I was and I claimed to know who he is. That's his MO. He goes to that MO. You could play golf with him, Katty K, for 40 years. You could be at the ninth hole at the halfway house, drop dead of a heart attack. He'll turn around and say, who the hell was that? And who could play the last half of this round with me? That is Donald Trump, the most transactional person you ever meet. So he's now run over those 85 people and he's got guys like Mike Cernovich, who are with him saying this is mutiny, this is blasphemy. You've blown out all of the people that have been with you, all your loyalists, and you're listening to La Cavita and you're listening to Susie Wiles,

• 10:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  who are Bush people, who are DeSantis people. They're from the original group of GOP. And you're leaving the people behind. So now he shed those guys for a moment and he went back to the maggots. Make America great again. I add the T because it sounds like maggots, like things that eat your flesh, right? And the maggots are telling him, blow the racial dog whistle as hard as possible. Let's get every racist in the country. You know, you identify with that when you want to, right? And as I said on Twitter, he's not a white racist cracker because he's orange. He's more like a Ritz racist cracker. And that's him. Okay. So he's out there blowing the dog whistle and it's not working, Katty. And now he's got a struggle tug of war between the maggots that are like, you blew up 2025.

• 11:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  Why did you do that to all of us? We're so loyal to you. And La Cavita and Wiles are saying, do you want to win this goddamn thing or not? What are you doing?

• 11:21Katty Kay?

  I think you're right. And he is torn. Look, so here's what J D Vance actually wrote in that forward to Kevin Roberts's book, which who is the leader of Project 2025. He wrote, the Heritage Foundation, which is the group that came up with this, Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation isn't some random outpost on Capitol Hill. It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. This is the problem for Trump. He's put in place, somebody who is a kind of conservative policy geek. And I think Trump is much more comfortable when things are personal, when he can go on attack about personal things. He doesn't like things to be written down. He doesn't like to be pinned down on policy. And there is Vance, who he is now, by the

• 12:05Katty Kay?

  way, given the most tepid endorsement of any presidential candidate I have ever heard of their vice presidential candidate was Donald Trump this week suggesting that actually at this same conference, well, the vice presidential pick doesn't matter very much. Anyway, people are really only voting for me. He's probably right about that. But it's not exactly if you, by the way, Anthony, if you ever go on a show and somebody asks you, what do you think of your co-host? And you say about me that I don't matter. That Lamborghini of yours is going to end up wrapped around a lamppost. That is not the kind of thing that you say.

• 12:38Anthony Scaramucci?

  Are you gonna like hire somebody to drive?

• 12:40Katty Kay?

  Yeah, I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna take it and wrap it around a lamppost.

• 12:44Anthony Scaramucci?

  Holy, like James Bond, like the British. Female James Bond.

• 12:47Katty Kay?

  Like Jane Bond.

• 12:48Anthony Scaramucci?

  You're gonna, you're gonna roll.

• 12:49Katty Kay?

  That's it.

• 12:50Anthony Scaramucci?

  You're gonna roll the car and roll out of the car.

• 12:52Katty Kay?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, I'm letting Tony Bastard know he owes me a Lamborghini. Because I'm gonna go say some bad shit about you now. To see you do this.

• 12:59Katty Kay?

  To see if we do this. Yeah. This will be great television.

• 13:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  Fantastic.

• 13:02Katty Kay?

  I mean, who talks about their vice presidential candidate like that? I have never heard a presidential candidate talk about a vice presidential candidate in such dismissive ways. But who knows if he can get rid of him? I think he's, he's found himself, when he was riding high, you embraced things like Project 2025, you put the ticket on J D Vance. And then the problem for Donald Trump is he doesn't know how to run an effective campaign when he's behind in the polls. And what's happened in the last three seismic weeks in American politics is he's gone from being ahead in all of the polls to starting to slip in some of those swing state polls. And he can't figure out how to run a campaign like that.

• 13:40Anthony Scaramucci?

  So I wanna, I wanna test something on you. Okay, and I wanna get your reaction to it. So we have said, and you've agreed with me, or I've agreed with you, I can't remember who said it first, but we've said he's able to take, say two contradictory things at the same time, simultaneously and get away with it. And I now believe that people are getting a little tired of that. And he was able to do that because he was running it up against an 81 year old that was in heavy decline. Joe Biden, great guy, he'll go down in history well, but he was not capable of running the campaign that Vice President Harris can run. And so now he's caught in a tongue twister. He can't do the things that he was doing to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. Do I have that right? Or is he getting caught up?

• 14:21Katty Kay?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Anthony Scaramucci?

  Or am I missing that?

• 14:23Katty Kay?

  I think he thinks he's still back in 2015, 2016, when this played well and America is changing. My feeling, and it always has been about Donald Trump, is that the backdrop to a lot of Donald Trump's support is that in 2044, America becomes a minority white country. And you have a whole load of white men, in particular men, out there who by virtue of their race and the fact that they have a Y chromosome, have been given historically for centuries a position of power in every society, but in the United States as well. And they can see that power slipping away. Women are starting to earn more than them. They are better educated than them. There are more of them in Congress. God damn it, there might be one of them in the White House soon. And I think that's producing this real

• 15:08Katty Kay?

  fear, which is what gave us Donald Trump elected in 2016. The problem is, the country has changed, as we discussed last week. The country has changed since 2016. Those numbers of people who are biracial in America are just one sign of that changing. And people are like, this isn't even interesting anymore. And I think when Kamala Harris dismissed all of his comments at the Black Journalist Conference as same old show, by the way, I think that word old was very pointed, very, it was not a mistake that she used the word old in reference to Donald Trump. I think that's the way, that's the way Democrats handle this. It's sort of boring. And I don't think it has the traction that it had in 2016.

• 15:46Anthony Scaramucci?

  All right. So I, you know, you and I agree on all this. I think it's obviously very insightful. There's another Harris here. And I don't know if you picked it up, but I watched the tape four times. The woman's name is Harris Faulkner. And I think you know Harris, and I know Harris very well. I've been on the air with her at Fox. She's an amazingly gifted African American female journalist. She was the last woman on the panel. She was to the far right of the president. And by the way, she's a fan of the president's and she works at Fox News. She gasped, Katty Kay, when he called Rachel Scott a nasty, nasty woman in that bullying way that he's done successfully for eight years. She gasped. Okay, I don't remember exactly what she said.

• 16:27Katty Kay?

  I think she even said something like, you're serious? Seriously?

• 16:29Anthony Scaramucci?

  Oh, God, are you serious? Something like that. Okay. That's when he deflated. That's when the anger started because he's not a dummy. When he lost Harris Faulkner, who's an African American that he sees as part of his African American base, when he lost her on the stage, that's when he started losing his way in the conversation. That's when the conversation went completely haywire on him. And that's when he got back on the plane and he blew a gasket on the plane. I've seen that gasket blow, by the way, and that's not a fun thing for staff when his gasket blows. So now she went on Hannity last night. Okay, so Sean Hannity, obviously been famous talk show host on Fox last 20 years, high rated show, and she tried to dig herself out of her body

• 17:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  language by praising Donald Trump on Hannity's show last night. But if you watch that tape, which I did, it's quite active last night, Katty Kay, in preparation for this.

• 17:24Katty Kay?

  It was when I was getting the 3am text, I was a little worried. Yeah, time for sleeping.

• 17:28Anthony Scaramucci?

  I know, I was still up. But anyway, I, she was so blah, like the wind was out of her and she was so, oh my God, this guy's losing it. Okay, now, if he is losing it, it could be very, very bad for him. But you know that three weeks ago, we thought he was winning the election. So in three weeks' time, we'll have to see what happens. But if I were on the Kamala Harris staff, stay disciplined, stay on message, do things that work with your crowd, go into unexpected territory, but that's safe for you. Do, do things that will keep you in the spotlight and on message that we're not going back. If I was Donald Trump, I would say, hey, man, go into the bathroom, the gold plated toilet bathroom

• 18:13Anthony Scaramucci?

  with the gold plated faucets, splash some water on your face, and go back to La Cavita and Susie and say, what the hell is going on here? And how do I change myself?

• 18:23Katty Kay?

  Yeah, chances of that, Donald Trump changing himself, I mean, one of the things we've learned about Donald Trump is that he doesn't change himself and he's immutable. He's the same guy he was in 2016. He tried for a very little while to be nice.

• 18:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  But he was on, he was on message, discipline for a while, Katty.

• 18:40Katty Kay?

  Okay, so listen, you tweeted something that I want to bring up, which is that you think, and it's making headlines in the States, you think there is a possibility that Donald Trump drops out of the race. Talk to me about that, where that thinking comes from and how that would happen.

• 18:54Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, remember, I still have friends with Trump. I still talk to a lot of US Republican senators on many of their donor lists. You'll find me there. They're tolerating Trump. They're putting up with Trump because they want to stay in power, but he's not their cup of tea because of the way he handles himself. And some of these people have suggested to me, particularly people, political insiders, he does not want to go to jail. His number one thing, I'm running because it looks like the Supreme Court is going to give me broad immunity. It looks like I can pardon myself from every bad thing that I've done and I can play golf, let other people run the country. It sounds like I could bring in all these Project 225ers eventually. They'll run and dismantle the democracy while I'm playing golf.

• 19:36Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I'll be free and I'll probably make a couple billion dollars off the presidency. So I want to do this. Okay, fine. So he's doing it, but if he drops in the polls, number one, he's lost the popular vote twice. He's the worst presidential candidate for Republicans since Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover lost the House, the Senate and the presidency. Only two Republicans have done that in 125 years. That's him and Herbert Hoover, Donald Trump and Herbert Hoover. So he does not want to lose to Kamala Harris. Trust me on that. Okay. And if he could figure out a way to cut a deal. And I don't think they pardon him, but could he go to Hochul, Governor of New York, Biden? And Brian Kemp, the Governor of Georgia, and could he say, hey, I want to be commuted, have a sentence commutation, I'll plead to something.

• 20:21Anthony Scaramucci?

  No jail time for me. He steps out. He could do that. The other thing he could do is he could say, you know what? XYZ is going on. He's always hints at health issues. He could designate, he could kick Vance off the ticket because that's not going to work. He's got negative ratings. We'll talk about Vance in a second. And he could go with Haley and he could go with DeSantis. They would be formidable. Against Vice President Harris and ever her pick is, we'll go into those in a second. But, but my point is there's paths for him, if he drops in the polls and the predictive markets shoot up and he starts to panic, there's paths for him to get out of the race, blame it on a health issue, cut a deal and avoid jail. So there are three things in Trump's brain. Money, attention, it's not running the country or serving people.

• 21:03Anthony Scaramucci?

  It's money, attention, and the third thing is avoid jail. And if he starts losing, he's going to see the bars. You ever play Monopoly, Katty? Look at me.

• 21:12Katty Kay?

  Yeah, of course. I was always the car, your Lamborghini ideally.

• 21:15Anthony Scaramucci?

  You were the car. Oh, my God. If you smash my Lamborghini, I mean, because you know, I'm like a social media whore. Could you imagine how good that would be on social media? Your kids would be upset with you, though. I know a few of your kids like Lambos.

• 21:27Katty Kay?

  It would be an expensive social media hit for you. But anyway, yeah. So basically, Trump is trying to get that $50 get out of jail free card.

• 21:34Anthony Scaramucci?

  100%. So, so I know people say, okay, where are you getting this all from? I know how this man thinks. This is not sourced. I just want to make sure that people know that. This is an analysis based on his personality and talking to a few insiders. Sourced was Kamala Harris is replacing Joe Biden before the end of July. Here's how it's going to go down. That was sourced. But this is just analysis based on knowing him and knowing what he's now up against. Okay, he's up against an Obama-like movement. Okay, there are women in this country that are saying, hmm, I'd like my reproductive freedom. I would like my daughter and granddaughter to have reproductive freedom. Is Kamala Harris going to take that from me? I don't think so.

• 22:16Anthony Scaramucci?

  And oh, by the way, I want to see a woman president in my lifetime. Hmm. You see what's going on?

• 22:22Katty Kay?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Anthony Scaramucci?

  And he's trying to rationalize his way through that, and he's having a hard time.

• 22:25Katty Kay?

  Well, look, this has been a campaign of weird and wonderful events happening that neither of us a month ago would have predicted. Or even before that debate would have predicted. I didn't predict how badly that debate was going to go. And I didn't predict the speed with which everything was going to unfold, although I was hearing the same stuff as you were hearing about Joe Biden stepping down. So let's see what happens. I mean, you know, I'm so reluctant at the moment to call this election for November because so much has happened that has changed it. And Harold McMillan was right. Events are the thing that every politician worries about. And let's see what more events there are going to be between now and November the 5th.

• 23:03Anthony Scaramucci?

  Do you think J D Vance is going to stay in the race?

• 23:05Katty Kay?

  I think if Donald Trump stays in the race, God, we're doing so many permutations. If Donald Trump stays in the race, I think he keeps J D Vance because it's very hard for him to admit he's made a mistake.

• 23:15Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so I think he comes out of the race. I think Trump has already realized that he's made a mistake. He fires people. And I think it's, remember, he loves attention more than anything else. And I think he's trying to figure out a way, how do I fire this guy after the Democratic National Convention? Because I'm going to fire him, I'm going to reach out to Nikki Haley, I'm going to reach out to some of these other people. Because, you know, I got to make a calculation here. I'm now running against a woman. Haley's very politically ambitious. Can I get her on the ticket and swap out J D Vance and go the last 70 days with Nikki Haley? And so if I'm Donald Trump and I want to win, he's gone. He's already talking about him like he's yesterday's news and we rap fish

• 23:55Anthony Scaramucci?

  in yesterday's news. And so, and remember, he just blew up Project 225. And so he's like Tony Soprano, he'll run over you in the gas station. He'll squash your head like a melon. That was the last season of Sopranos, in case you have Soprano fans out there. And that's Donald Trump. He'll run these people over. So I think he's out of the race. I know it's a long shot call, but I'm going to say that. I understand why you think he's in the race. Who do you think is going to be Kamala Harris's VP?

• 24:21Katty Kay?

  So I interviewed Mark Kelly, the guy you like, who is the Senator from Arizona this week, the former astronaut, 25 years in the US Navy. It was the first interview, I interviewed him on Morning Joe, it was the first interview that he had done since Joe Biden. Step down from being the nominee. I thought he was, he was good. He's solid. He has a great resume. He's not a world on fire communicator. And I didn't see him as easily as I see some of the others up on a stage with JD Vance, if that's who the VP pick is. I asked him if he was going to be the VP pick. He demurred, as they all do in Veepstakes weeks, although of course, they're actually there auditioning and hoping that she's watching. He said it's

• 25:02Katty Kay?

  not about him. She's got a lot of great choices out there. He made the point of saying that he'd served 25 years in the US Navy. He praised Joe Biden. So he said all of the things that you need to say if you're auditioning to be vice presidential pick. He just didn't say them in an amazingly punchy, succinct, charismatic way. I have to say, if I was going for pure political athlete, the person to take on JD Vance is clearly Pete Buttigieg. He is the one who, who does it super articulately. He relishes the role. He's been very good on Fox News. I still don't think that you're going to have a woman, a woman of color, and a gay

• 25:46Katty Kay?

  guy as the VP pick. It's kind of sad to say that about any country at the moment, but I suspect that's where we are. So I'm still with, I'm still thinking it's Josh Shapiro because of the Pennsylvania thing. I don't think that actually any vice presidential candidate brings a state. And anyway, he's already governor of Pennsylvania. But he ticks a lot of boxes. He's super articulate. And I think he's going to be a better fighter on television than Mark Kelly is.

• 26:09Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, I just want to state for the record, Katty, that my friends and family that listen to this podcast, they listen because of you. It has absolutely nothing to do with me. Because you just said in the most elegant way that we're not going to have a black and a gay guy on the ticket together. And you said it in a way that didn't offend anybody. Of course, if I said the same exact thing, people would have set their hair on fire. So I have admiration for you like you cannot believe. Okay?

• 26:34Katty Kay?

  We'll, we'll, we'll do etiquette lessons.

• 26:37Anthony Scaramucci?

  My first mother in law told me I needed elocution lessons. I was 20 years old. I was like, I didn't even know what elocution meant. I had to go look it up in the dictionary. It was bad, Katty. It went down, it went downhill from there.

• 26:47Katty Kay?

  That is why you're on your second mother in law at the moment.

• 26:50Anthony Scaramucci?

  That's true. She likes me, though. She, she makes coffee for me. She's very nice. But anyway, the first one, I don't know, whatever, we probably should cut that out of the podcast. But anyway, back on to the, back on to the real show. I think it's gonna be Shapiro now. So I know I changed my mind a lot, forgive me, because facts are changing, so I have to change my line.

• 27:06Katty Kay?

  No, I like that you, I like that you changed your mind and that you are...

• 27:09Anthony Scaramucci?

  It's not that I don't like Kelly. Kelly's bringing Virginia and he's bringing Arizona. He's in the military. But I, everyone's gonna be mad at me and the most mad at me is gonna be Senator Tim Kaine, if he listens, and I like you, Tim, you're a great guy. But Tim didn't give Hillary Clinton what she needed, because he was a moderate white male. Okay? Josh Shapiro has got firecracker in him.

• 27:32Katty Kay?

  And he says young, he says young, he says new, he says we're turning the page, he's competent. He fixed a bridge that had fallen down in the space of a week. He's...

• 27:41Anthony Scaramucci?

  He is Mike Bloomberg's protege. And my favorite politician of my lifetime, okay, at the state level, Mitt Romney, for me at the national level, is Mike Bloomberg. You know, I served on Mike's Financial Services Committee for five years. He is a brilliant man, he's a generous man. He did so many things privately and quietly, and he has mentored Josh Shapiro. He's one of Josh Shapiro's mentors. I think Josh Shapiro, who I had the opportunity to meet, my friend David Urban, I think you know David, he's on CNN, he's a Trump supporter, I worked with David in Pennsylvania. David Urban introduced me to Josh Shapiro at the Army-Navy game, and what a cast of characters was there, right?

• 28:23Anthony Scaramucci?

  We had Bill Barr, we had Mark Milley, we had Josh Shapiro, we were in Philadelphia. It was quite a cast of characters. My wife was like, this was like a zoo of political has-beens. And I was like, am I a political has-been? You better be a political has-been, is what she said. But anyway, but Shapiro is bright, he's competent, they like each other, and they know each other a long time, and he won't Bigfoot her.

• 28:50Katty Kay?

  He's smart.

• 28:50Anthony Scaramucci?

  If I'm her and Doug, I want somebody that's not gonna Bigfoot me. J.D. Vance, I don't know who's advising him, he tried to Bigfoot Trump, he didn't do it on purpose, but he tried to Bigfoot Trump at the convention. You can't do that to Trump. One minute on yourself, J.D., 35 minutes on how great Trump is. I mean, come on, over a minute, over a minute, you're losing the audience, fellas.

• 29:12Katty Kay?

  Josh Shapiro is a grown-up, he's sensible, he's smart, he gets that.

• 29:16Anthony Scaramucci?

  And also, water, a waterfall of money, Katty, a waterfall of money from Wall Street for him.

• 29:21Katty Kay?

  We're gonna take a quick break, and we will be right back.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 29:41Speaker 06

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

• 29:45Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 29:59Katty Kay?

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

• 30:02Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

• 30:04Katty Kay?

  So we have been getting so many of your questions. Thank you for those. Keep sending them on Twitter, on Instagram, at RestPoliticsUS, that we thought we would spend this half answering some of the ones that have come in. They're great. We're not going to get to all of them, but we're going to try and get to as many as we can, which means, Anthony, we have to keep it snappy.

• 30:24Anthony Scaramucci?

  We're going to keep it snappy, but where can they send more questions? Because I love these questions, Katty. So where do they send them?

• 30:29Katty Kay?

  At RestPoliticsUS on Instagram and on Twitter.

• 30:33Anthony Scaramucci?

  I sent in several anonymously, by the way, just so you know.

• 30:36Katty Kay?

  I know. It's like when you get a book out on Amazon, you've got to write your own reviews.

• 30:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  Well, I've been there and done that, and I've also bought my own book. This is like a confessional, this podcast. I feel better now.

• 30:45Katty Kay?

  Now, the first one comes from Justin. Justin has written to us, Justin Meltzer has written to us, "Considering that religion is such a talking point in American politics, how do you feel the steady rise of irreligion, atheism, agnosticism, none, and how it skews younger affects this and future elections?" You take that one, Anthony.

• 31:05Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so I think it's a great question because I think it is a factor, but I don't think it's going to be a factor in this election personally. I think this election... Is a pivotal one demographically where the baby boomers are the biggest block of voters still because they're older, they want to vote in their Medicare and they want to vote in their social security and they're still reasonably to very religious. But I do think this is a big factor. I will point out to our European listeners and our UK listeners that for whatever reason here in the United States, there are more practicing religious people still as a percentage of the population is less agnosticism. I don't think it's a

• 31:45Anthony Scaramucci?

  factor in this election. It's a great question, but this is a 28 32 thing that has to be addressed.

• 31:52Katty Kay?

  Yes, 68% of Americans still identify with the Christian religion and Donald Trump gets about 81% of the white evangelical Protestant vote. We've mentioned this book before. I can't recommend it enough. If you want to read Tim Alberta's book, The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory, it explains really well why the evangelical movement has become so enthralled with Donald Trump. And yes, part of it, as many of you know, is about Supreme Court positions and judge positions and getting conservatives into those positions. But Tim Alberta makes this compelling argument that the evangelical movement has become a more nationalist movement than it is a religious movement. He talks about them putting America

• 32:37Katty Kay?

  over the kingdom of heaven and over Christ. And I think that's such an interesting way of framing what's happened to the evangelical movement that it has shifted into this kind of nationalist mode and they see Donald Trump as their standard bearer. And so they're, they show no signs really of abandoning him. But it's a great question and I think we should do, we'll make sure we do a program really diving into the evangelical movement because I think they're fascinating and how Trump kind of co-opted them and what they would want out of a second Trump term. Okay, second question from Alex Baxter. What do you make of Trump's bizarre comments about Jewish Democrats? So this week, Donald Trump gave an interesting interview in which he sort of complained, it was kind of a grievance

• 33:22Katty Kay?

  interview in which he complained about the fact that he had done all of these things. For Israel, and yet Jewish voters didn't support him in the kinds of numbers he would want. He said, "Look, I got 25% support from Jewish voters in 2016, and then it only went up by 1% in 2020, despite all of the things that I had done for Jewish voters, like moving the embassy, the American embassy to Jerusalem in Israel, all of the things that he had done around the Golan Heights." Anyway, there was a whole, it was a sort of weird litany of complaints about the fact that he doesn't get more Jewish voters. And some Jewish voters that I have spoken to since he made those comments have really been offended by that,

• 34:05Katty Kay?

  because there's something similar to what I think he did up at the National Association of Black Journalists thing, which is where he felt, as a white guy, I'm not quite sure why he feels as a white man, that he can define what it means to be black, or he can define what a good Jew should do. And there is this kind of old trope that, well, you know, Jews have a dual identity and a dual loyalty, and that they should be, you know, they should behave in a certain way. It's like, nobody would say to an American, "You can't say that you hate Joe Biden or that you hate Donald Trump," right? But somehow, being a Jew means that you have to feel certain ways about Israel. Anyway, I think, I think that's kind of, I think that's where he's going there. What do you think?

• 34:46Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yeah, well, I'll say three quick things. He called Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, "a bad Jew." Okay, so that was like a ridiculous comment. Who the hell says that? But remember, the Orthodox, when you say 25%, just for our viewers and listeners, it's primarily the Orthodox community. And so what's interesting is, you mentioned 87% of the evangelical Christians, and so they're the literal interpretation of the New Testament, and the literal interpretation of the Old Testament, the Orthodox Jews are for Trump. So he's, he's got the orthodoxy of both of those religions, because they believe he's malleable caddy, and they believe that he will do what they want. As an example, for 50 years, we're not moving the embassy, it's staying in Tel Aviv.

• 35:31Anthony Scaramucci?

  Donald, here's some dough, move the embassy. You give me some dough, great, let's move the embassy. That's what happened with J D Vance. You're getting, we're getting some dough into the campaign, great. Ah, I'm gonna win anybody, nobody gives a S H I T about the vice president, let's put in J D Vance. And so he's smalleable. And so these, these guys know this, they can get their judges in. And the Orthodox Jews can get what they want for Israel. But the Jews that are non Orthodox, again, these are my opinions, I just wanna open up and share them. They believe in more tolerance. And they don't like his intolerance. And they feel that he blows these dog whistles. And these dog whistles open up Pandora's box of hatred. And some of that hatred does land on the Jews. And of course, we have seen globally a rise in antisemitism.

• 36:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  And so, uh, th- th- those are the seventy five percent that are worried about that.

• 36:18Katty Kay?

  Politics generally is about addition, not subtraction. Telling voters that they should be happier with you and that you've done more for them, doesn't seem to me the most successful way of winning them over. It just seems like a fairly sure way of pissing some people off. I'm hogging all the questions here, here's another one.

• 36:36Anthony Scaramucci?

  No, no, no, please.

• 36:36Katty Kay?

  This is on a, this is from Graham Lucas, this is an interesting one too. It would appear that the Harris VP pick has to be a successful male politician, preferably a governor from a swing state. Is that cast in stone? Or are there other picks conceivable? We spoke about this a little bit in the last half, there was one other thing I want to say on this, that I think it's pretty clear that Kamala Harris has become the nominee, almost, I think you called her in the first half of this program, accidental. And I think that's kind of a really interesting word, because getting through the American primary system as a woman or a person of color is really hard.

• 37:18Katty Kay?

  Um, you, you, you're asking primary voters to choose somebody as a candidate, as a nominee for the presidency, who doesn't look like any other president in American history. We've, we've never had a female president. So you're asking them to kind of say, does this look like a president, this guy? Or does this look like a president, this woman? And so often ask, you know, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, all very qualified women who ran for the presidency in twenty twenty and were all Basically discounted by primary voters because they didn't look like what the image of a president has always been, with the exception of one black guy, all white guys.

• 38:00Katty Kay?

  And I think Kamala Harris has managed to be so successful so fast because she avoided the primary process and now she's been presented as the solution. But it doesn't mean that American voters or that the Democratic Party feels that American voters are ready for either two women or two black people or or any other permutation. It looks like the feeling in the Democrat Party is that she has to have a white man and probably a straight white man alongside her.

• 38:30Anthony Scaramucci?

  Very well said, and I agree with you. I just want to bring up a historical reference, and if people have an interest in this, Google Gerald Ford on woman president. In 1989, the former president, he was out of office, he left the presidency, obviously, in 1977. He gave a speech, and they were asked him at the end of speech, will there ever be a woman president? He said presciently, yes, there will be. What will happen is there will be a candidate for the presidency that puts a woman on the ticket, like Geraldine Ferraro, took place in 1984, five years later. He said, and that woman will rise to the presidency. She'll either rise to the presidency through a death or illness, or she will be the next

• 39:14Anthony Scaramucci?

  person to run as the nominee. And he he literally laid out what happened 35 years later. And so it's a weird part about our country, because this is an amazing country, Gaddy. You know, I have a love affair with this country. I've talked about my ancestry coming from Italy as peasants and what we've been able to build here in this country. So I have this unconditional, undying love affair for the country, and it's a nation of varying political sects and varying ethnicities, et cetera. But there are some stridency things in this nation. One of them is the hyper masculinity in the nation. It has sexism in the nation. You and I both talked about this. So her breakthrough. Will be an amazing event for the country.

• 39:58Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I think she's going to have historic voter turnout as a result of this. I know there are women out there that would typically vote Republican that are saying, geez, I really want to see a woman president in my lifetime. She's going to protect mine, my daughter, my granddaughter's reproductive freedom. You know what? When I close the curtain, I'm voting for her no matter what I say to my friends at a cocktail party.

• 40:19Katty Kay?

  Yeah, and I think what she's doing that's smart at the moment is she's not playing up the female card, she's not playing up the race card. I think this campaign has learned quite a lot from Hillary Clinton's campaign in how to handle the attacks. Reportedly, I'm hearing they are getting so many attacks online, aimed at her race, aimed at her gender, but she's kind of brushing them off. And I think that's, you know, this stuff about it's the same old story, the way she's dismissing it, I think that's a really smart strategy because women can't dwell on that. They've got to keep playing up her strengths, keep people, reminding people she was a prosecutor. She was, she's been a vice president, she's been a senator. Keep reminding people of her reasons why she can do this job, not get caught in the

• 41:02Katty Kay?

  morass of sexism and racism because you will never get out of it.

• 41:05Anthony Scaramucci?

  Can I just say one last thing? She's got a secret weapon on that campaign. David Plouffe, P L O U F F E. I think I spelled that right. He is helping her rebuild and re-energize that Obama coalition. He's one of the smartest campaign strategists that I've ever met. He has spoken at my Saul conference, as have you, Katty, and he's a brilliant guy. And watch how this unfolds for over the next two months.

• 41:30Katty Kay?

  Yeah, and he was responsible for getting Barack Obama elected in 2008, so he's a great addition to the campaign.

• 41:35Anthony Scaramucci?

  That is correct.

• 41:35Katty Kay?

  Nick Birch, this is definitely for you. I wanted to ask you about Donald Trump's sense of humor. Does he have one? I can't recall ever seeing him laugh, and his smile looks like a black mamba about to strike. Okay, I'm struggling to envisage that, but can Anthony tell us that he's a different person in private?

• 41:52Anthony Scaramucci?

  Yes, I can tell you that he's a different person in private. I can tell you that he is offhandedly and will take you off-guard.

• 42:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  With his charm. I'm gonna tell you that. A lot of people that don't like Trump won't like that. But he will even, he could light you up on Twitter. He could say the meanest nastiest things about you. And when he sees you, oh, there's my caddy, or oh, there's my Anthony. Mark Milley makes me laugh. Okay, he's the former general, the joint, he's a, oh, there's my general. He's like, when he says that, I'm looking for the cruise missile to come at me, you know. My, my point is, is that he is charming. The reason why you don't see him laugh, however, is that his jokes are funny, your jokes are not funny. So if he tells a joke, he wants you to laugh. He has good delivery. He's got good timing. He told a funny joke the other night at the, at the Philadelphia thing, it was very funny. Oh,

• 42:45Anthony Scaramucci?

  you know, Kamala Harris just happened to get this emergency phone call from Michelle and Barack Obama. Oh, are you guys together? There's four cameras in front of him. You know, he knows how to tell a story. And he has good timing. He's a stage actor. Okay, he told me once on Air Force One, that he won't eat before he goes on stage. I said, well, why won't you eat before he goes on stage? Well, Frank Sinatra told me once, that he doesn't eat before he goes on stage. I said, well, why didn't Frank Sinatra eat? Because he didn't go on stage. He go, well, he wanted his belly filled. He wanted all the blood up in his brain. And he didn't want to feel, you know, overfed, or somewhat tired when he got on the stage. I won't eat anything, two or three hours before stage.

• 43:29Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, why am I saying this to you? Because he's a stage actor in love with himself. He's funny. And Mr. Birch, you're not funny. Maybe he'll find Katty Kay funny, but he won't find you funny. He definitely doesn't find Anthony Scaramucci funny. I can promise you that. Okay. So he doesn't like other people's humor, only his own. But he is charming. And that's one of the reasons why people are always taken aback by him when they meet him in person.

• 43:53Katty Kay?

  Yeah, everybody says that. I've only interviewed him once. And he is a lot more charming than in private, and in one on one meetings, than, than people give him credit for. And that he comes across, when you saw him on the stage, at the National Association of Black Journalists, he was not charming. But when he's in private, and when he's in a good mood.

• 44:11Anthony Scaramucci?

  When he's using the nasty word. Look out, okay, and then someone's gonna get yelled at after the thing's over.

• 44:18Katty Kay?

  I think the problem, and this is why this week is so critical. When things are going well for Donald Trump, he can play nice. He can try to be magnanimous. He can be the showman, he can be the charmer. It's when things are going badly for him and when he's slipping in the polls, he watches polls like a hawk, like he watches crowd sizes. And when things are slipping for him in the polls, that's when he starts getting into trouble, and that's what we have seen this week. Okay, let's do one more question. I think this is kind of, this is a slightly non-politics one, but it's one I keep getting and it's one you're going to enjoy, and it's on the American economy. Darrell Henry, what are your thoughts on why the US economy is growing so much more than other advanced economies? I have one thing I think we should point out, and we've said it before on this podcast. America has seen a huge influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, over the last 10 years.

• 45:03Katty Kay?

  They are a massive driver of economic growth in the country. And one of the reasons that America came out of COVID so much stronger than other countries is because of the immigration. Because immigrants pay taxes, which is something that, you know, Republicans sometimes omit to say. Even illegal immigrants in the United States, people that are undocumented, often pay their taxes. And they work, they work hard. They often work multiple jobs and they get things done. So that's one of the reasons the American economy's been doing so well.

• 45:36Anthony Scaramucci?

  Okay, so I'll just be quick on this, but there's four things. It's the fiscal and monetary policy that was inducted into the economy during COVID, Katty. Dropped interest rates to zero, sent $6 trillion into the economy, flooded the economy with money, which did cause the inflation, by the way. That would have been Donald Trump's inflation or Joe Biden's, that's part of it.

• 46:00Katty Kay?

  But gave people a lot of disposable income.

• 46:01Anthony Scaramucci?

  It did, and so we're still burning that. And the Fed knows that, and the Fed is now gonna start cutting rates, likely September, November, which is very good for the economy again. The immigrants you touched upon, so I'm not going to address that. But this is the number one thing for me, and I really want people to listen to this. This is the only thing you listen to from me this this week. Our decentralized system. Okay, people talk about Bitcoin being a decentralized technology. The country has a decentralized government and it protects people. It allows for broader freedoms and much more meritocracy. And this is right out of the Federalist Papers from several hundred years ago. Less people at the top crowding the power.

• 46:43Anthony Scaramucci?

  More people can flourish in kleptocracies and authoritarian regimes. Smaller groups of people get ahead, they get ahead and they get very rich. This is why I'm upset with my billionaire friends. What are you guys going to do? You're going to make more money? You want to be in a land of oligarchs running the country? You make $100 billion. What the hell are you going to do with the money? You're going to be dead anyway. Help the people around you. I don't want to live in a McMansion with a barbed wire fence. When my fellow neighbors are suffering. Let's create equal opportunity in the country like like it is now. Make it better. And a result of which we will continue to flourish and have another American century.

• 47:20Katty Kay?

  There you go. With that, we are going to wrap up this week. But listen, keep sending these questions in. They're great for us. They give us a sense of what you're interested in and will other subjects that we could explore as well in future weeks. So thanks for all of the questions. Keep them coming. At Rest Politics US on Instagram and on Twitter.

• 47:39Anthony Scaramucci?

  And if you want to see my co-host crash my Lamborghini, Katty Kay in the Lamborghini crashing it. Please write to Goalhanger and see if they want to subsidize that.

• 47:51Katty Kay?

  Thanks for listening this week. We'll be back next Friday with more American politics. I'm Katty Kay.

• 47:58Anthony Scaramucci?

  And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Thank you for listening. Hopefully you'll join us next Friday. We hope to see you.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 48:31Speaker 06

  I'm not the earth daddy.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.