Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 258. DONALD TRUMP FOUND GUILTY About this episode What does Donald Trump's guilty verdict mean for the 2024 election? Do the nine Justices of the Supreme Court have too much power? What do Democrats really mean when they say Trump will ‘end democracy as we know it’?
Join Anthony and Katty for episode 6 of TRIP US, as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 10,472 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:27 Speaker 06 Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics US. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. You're about to hear Katty Kay recording from the airport where she just got off a plane in DC to hear the news that Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 counts. We're going to look at what all of this means and what happens next. Now, we recorded our regular episode before this news came out where we talk about the Supreme Court and its fight for impartiality and what a second Trump presidency would look like if it happens. But first, Catty, talk us through what we've just found out.
3:03 Speaker 07 Anthony, I've been reaching out to people on the Biden campaign and on the Trump campaign. I'm sure you're hearing from people as well. The initial things that I've heard from the Biden campaign is interesting. I think it's been increasing their confidence that this extraordinary news that President Trump has now been found criminally guilty increases their chances of winning the election in November. That's what I'm reading from the text that I'm getting from them. They do say that this is, we have long thought that the only way to beat Donald Trump is at the ballot box. I'm hearing from the Trump people that they think this is going to be overturned on appeal.
3:42 Speaker 07 They're not shocked by the news, some of them are saying, but a lot of moving parts here. What's your initial take?
3:50 Speaker 06 A couple of things, I think. Some of them are predictable, some of them are less predictable. So I'll just make my three points quickly. He is projecting in the court, so I know him very well. He knows the system isn't rigged. He says it's a rigged system. He knows the judge is not corrupt. He says it's a corrupt judge. He says he got 5% or 6% in that district. That's also not true in terms of the number of people that voted for him. I just want to point out to our viewers and listeners that he got over 75 million votes in 2020. If you have 12 people on the jury, mathematically, it's likely that three or
4:31 Speaker 06 four of them voted for him, and they were willing to set aside that political inclination or opinion to rule on the case and rule on the law. So the democracy and the system is actually working. And what I'm very afraid of, Catty, is the way he's talking about the system. He actually wants to break the system. He wants millions of people to feel that the system is not working, when in fact, the system is working. And so the Biden campaign has to be careful with this as well. And my last point is the sycophant Republicans are all up on Twitter enforcing the lies of Donald Trump, like many of them enforce
5:16 Speaker 06 the election lies. It's also very, very dangerous. Imagine another candidate being convicted as a felon. Every person in Republican Party leadership or Democratic Party leadership, Democratic Party leadership would ask them to stand down. So he has this cult-like power over this group of Republicans. And this is the Whig Party, Catty K. And just to give historical context, the Whigs split on slavery in the 1850s, and they died, a result of which a new center-right party called the Republicans rose. And obviously, Abraham Lincoln became the nominee. This party is dying right now because you have a group of people that are going to support a convicted felon.
6:01 Speaker 07 And I think, you know, what you are intimating there, what I'm hearing from you there, Anthony, is obviously something that everybody in America has to be concerned about. And that is the prospect. Of any kind of political violence as a result of this news, right? And that's exactly, I landed at Washington Airport. The news had happened while I was in the plane. I had no wifi. And as soon as I saw it, my thought went to all of those people in Trump world, those ardent Trump supporters who I've interviewed over the last few years, who have told me that they think there is a civil war coming in the country and they're prepared to take up arms. And this is not hyperbole. We saw on January the sixth that there are people prepared to take up arms to defend Donald Trump.
6:45 Speaker 07 Tonight, as I'm speaking to you from Washington, I know that in New York, there's already news that they're stepping up security precautions. So there are, I mean, there, this is just happening. There are a lot of moving parts. I'm not somebody who tends to jump to the worst case scenario. Talk of a civil war has been overblown before. It was overblown in the 2022 midterm elections when Donald Trump said, if we lose the election, you know, you should go out onto the streets and people didn't. But there is something about, you know, the way people in the Trump world have used political rhetoric. There is something so dramatic about the fact that he was found guilty on all 34 counts. There just doesn't seem to have been much wavering on the part of this jury.
7:30 Speaker 07 And he will use this, as he's already doing, to tell his supporters, this is not just about me, Donald Trump, this is about you. You too are downtrodden by this system. And I think that's where the potential for some kind of, in a world where we're hearing more politically violent rhetoric, that is a world in which there is more risk of, I think, security concerns here. I can see why the New York police are stepping up security precautions in New York City. Am I being too pessimistic here?
8:01 Speaker 06 I don't, I don't, I don't think so because of the, the, the history dictates that you're not being too pessimistic. You know, this is the language of fascism. The language of fascism is the system is against you. You're the victim. I represent you as an avatar. I'm an avatar of your victimhood. Moreover, the system is rigged. Therefore, it's unfair. You should become angry about that. And then the last piece of this, which is also very, very dangerous. Uh, he has scapegoated people. He is scapegoating large groups of people and he's calling for 15 million people being deported. So again,
8:43 Speaker 06 if you just step back and maybe one day on our show, I'll read all the things that he's saying. And then I would ask you as someone who I see as a very normal, rational person, say, does any of that sound normal? And then the secondary question would be, why are Republicans that absolutely hate his guts, Katty Kay? And you know this because you live in Washington. They hate his guts, but they'll turn to a journalist like you and say, you know, I hate his guts, but I gotta go out there and say he's great because I'm worried. I'm worried. I fear him. I fear his base. I fear what he's capable of where if one person, one large person stood up, it was an elected leader, a Mitch McConnell, a Speaker Johnson.
9:28 Speaker 06 And say, hey, you know what? This is nonsense. Let me read you everything that he wants to do to the country. He's a felon. Get him off the ballot. Get him off the ballot before we destroy this entire party. And so I don't, I don't, I don't see that happening across because we have a bunch of babies and spineless people in the Republican Party. But, but that's where this country is right now. And that's why it's fascinating, but it's also sad for me as somebody that loves America, uh, was born here, has lived a good part of the American dream. It's sad for me that we're facing this without real moral leadership, uh, in the Republican Party.
10:05 Speaker 07 Yeah, certainly fascinating. I've got a text on my phone just now from somebody close to Donald Trump and just texted me hashtag never boring. Never boring it might be, but I think you're, you're right. Both of us are expressing, you know, for two people that are not prone to expressing alarm, we're both expressing a certain amount of alarm about the possible consequences of this. We have a whole episode that we've recorded that is great. People should listen to it. It's super interesting and still stands in the context of all of this. But before we, um, throw to that, Anthony, remind us and remind our listeners, what happens to Donald Trump now that he's been found guilty? What's the procedure?
10:43 Speaker 06 So he is a first time offender as a felon and it's a nonviolent felony and so he's not incarcerated at this time. He was able to leave the court on his own free will. Obviously, the bail that he posted prior still stands. He's been told that he's being sentenced on July the 11th, so he is free as a free citizen until that sentencing. So they're not providing any restrictions on his mobility around the country. On the 11th, he will be sentenced. And then, Catty, they give a suspension period in the United States. So if you're sentenced on July 11th,
11:24 Speaker 06 you likely have until November to prepare yourself for jail. It'll be interesting to see what Judge Marshon says about him going to jail or not going to jail. But you have a situation here where he's sentenced four days before the Republican Convention, and he could end up having to do confinement somewhere after the election. Okay, and so what's at odds right now, is he still going to be the nominee? I predict that he will be because these guys are frankly, a bunch of babies. They don't have the moral courage to knock him out. And if they did, they could probably put up a really good run against Joe Biden. But I believe this has weakened Donald Trump substantially. And I do believe
12:08 Speaker 06 that these independents will turn on Trump once the whole list of things. And remember, he has ceded the women's reproductive rights to the Democratic Party. It is a big issue. You know this. You witnessed this in the 2022 election. And so the midterm election. So I think he ends up with a suspended sentence. And he knows right now, he's going to Trump Tower as you and I are speaking. And he knows, man, if I don't win this election, I'm going to get hit with the documents case. I'm going to get hit with the insurrection case where Mark Meadows, my chief of staff, knows I premeditated some of that violence. I am likely to be the first jailed president, ex-president.
12:52 Speaker 06 In US history, he knows that right now. And he's boiling inside related to that. And you know, my guess is he'll start to act erratic or even more erratic and more irrational. And that will also help the Biden campaign.
13:05 Speaker 07 Okay, we'll leave it there and and give you the rest of our episode that we recorded earlier. And we will, of course, come back with more on this pretty dramatic news.
13:18 Speaker 08 Today, we're going to look at the Supreme Court's growing role in US elections and tied into this Justice Alito flying a kind of pro MAGA flag or a flag that has been, you know, used in pro MAGA in the insurrection in January the sixth, for example, casting doubt on the court's impartiality or on his impartiality. I spoke to a former Supreme Court clerk about that, and he had some interesting things to say. Then, in the second half, we're going to take another look at what a Trump presidency would mean for the United States. I think it's really worthwhile us digging into kind of actually his policies and what
14:02 Speaker 08 his plans are for America. And we're going to have a look at kind of what he plans to do with the civil service, the Department of Justice, and whether he can actually pull that off. But first, let's move on to the Supreme Court. I was sitting up in Maine, looking out over the harbor, very pretty harbor of Camden, Maine. If you ever have a chance to visit America, go and visit it. It's delightful. And I'm looking at all these ships, boats, and they all have this flag. And I'm thinking to myself, God, that's strange. I didn't realize there were so many MAGA supporters in Maine until my husband smartly pointed out to me, no, you dummy, that's not a MAGA flag. That is the state flag of Maine, which, of course, I should have known. It is a pine tree. And the reason I'm bringing up Maine's state flag is because there has been this huge
14:45 Speaker 08 Fuss in the press recently about the fact that a Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who is the most conservative of the nine Supreme Court justices, had flown outside his house a flag that was flown commonly during the January the 6th insurrection, which looks very like the state flag of Maine. It's a pine tree on a white background, and it's called the Appeal to Heaven flag. It's a very old flag in American politics. And also, outside his home in Virginia, an upside-down version of the Star Spangled Banner, which is seen as a sign or a flag that you put up in distress, and again, has been used by some of the MAGA movement to say that the election was stolen. Samuel Alito
15:26 Speaker 08 has come out and said, "This was not me. This was my wife flew these flags. She likes flying flags. I'm not very keen on them, but it's her property. She has rights to fly whatever flag she wants." The Democrats said, "You need to recuse yourself from every case concerning January the 6th and the elections." And Samuel Alito, unsurprisingly, has come back and said, "No, I do not have to recuse myself." And this is being, I think, what's interesting about this, that it has raised again the question of whether the US Court, Supreme Court, is impartial, can be impartial, should be impartial, given that these nine justices are appointed by political presidents. And for me, another interesting point about
16:08 Speaker 08 how the Supreme Court is just going to get more and more involved in deciding American elections, because American elections are so close.
16:17 Speaker 06 Okay, well, I think, I think it's important to point something out about Sam Alito. Sam Alito was always perceived to be the intellectual inferior to Justice Scalia. And it really bothered him. I just want to point that out. Number two, I've actually met Justice Alito and his wife. They were with me, and we sat at the same table together. When the Prime Minister, this is back in maybe April of 2017, the Prime Minister of Italy came. For a state visit and the Italian ambassador to the United States, they have that beautiful estate. Perhaps you've been on that estate where they smoke cigars out there with the US senators and the House of Representatives and so forth. They invited me this dinner.
16:59 Speaker 06 I actually think Kellyanne Conway, who's half Italian, half Irish, she got me the invitation. I sat with him and his wife. And, you know, my old law school professor Larry Tribe, who taught constitutional law, wrote the treatise on constitutional law here in the United States, legendary professor. When I compared notes with him about Alito and just general conversation with Alito, very superficial guy. Now, of course, Justice Alito is not going to be listening to this podcast. But if you were listening to the podcast, he'd be very upset with me because he has always been viewed as the intellectual lightweight. Why is this important in this analysis? It's important because he has taken
17:41 Speaker 06 to the right wing movement and he is exposing himself. A man that's supposed to be impartial is exposing himself to his lack of impartiality. And I think this has to do with frankly, his dim-wittedness, Katty Kay. And I think this has to do with the fact that he is seeking some form of retribution for his reputation.
18:07 Speaker 08 I would never have the
18:08 Speaker 06 Dimwit.
18:09 Speaker 08 I would never have the audacity to call a member of the Supreme Court a dimwit.
18:14 Speaker 06 And by the way, by the way, Elena Kagan, who I know very well, who was the dean of the Harvard Law School, and she hit me up for huge dough for some stupid hall that she was building when she was dean. Okay, she knows that Alito is a dimwit. I'm just letting you know that she knows that. Okay, but keep going. Go ahead. I'm off my soapbox. Go ahead, keep going.
18:30 Speaker 08 I like the self-confidence. So I called up Professor Jack Goldsmith, who I'm sure you know as well, who's also a Harvard constitutional law professor and used to clerk at the Supreme Court under Justice Kennedy. And he made the point that there is no legal reason for Alito to have to recuse himself in this position. But he also said, look, Justice Roberts, who's the chief justice, is not going to love this. Justice Roberts is bending over backwards. At a time when he sees the opinion polls surrounding the Supreme Court plummeting, he is trying in this highly politicized environment to keep the Supreme Court as impartial as possible. And this is kind of an own goal from Samuel Alito. He doesn't have to recuse himself legally around this,
19:13 Speaker 08 but it doesn't help the reputation of the Supreme Court. And look, Goldsmith also, Jack Goldsmith also made the point that it's a bit naive to think that members of the Supreme Court are totally impartial. Everybody knows that Elena Kagan, who you just mentioned, is on the left of American politics. And she makes not many bones about expressing that in private certainly, but enough that the word gets around, expressing her political convictions. Now, maybe she doesn't put an upside down flag outside her cell house, or a right side up flag, or a Joe Biden 2024 flag outside her house. That would not be a smart move. But it's not that we think that Elena Kagan is not on the left.
19:52 Speaker 08 What Jack said I thought was interesting was that this taps into something where there has been a sea change in the politics of the court that the left is still struggling to come to terms with. So the United States Supreme Court for decades was associated with progressive movements. It was the Supreme Court that gave us Brown versus Board of Education in the civil rights movement, gave us Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in America, gave us gay marriage rights in the United States. So for decades, you had the Supreme Court leaning left, and now the Supreme Court is very firmly leaning right. And that is just something that the left of American politics is finding hard to come to terms with. They just, they really don't like the fact that they have lost control of the Supreme Court.
20:37 Speaker 08 And I thought that seeing the court in that historical context and knowing that as elections get tighter in this country, as we spoke about last week, we're going to have more and more situations like 2000, like 2020, where elections could be decided by the US Supreme Court. And, and how does a court that is seen as political weigh out those elections impartially? That's going to be interesting.
20:58 Speaker 06 Okay, so all great commentary. I've got questions I want to ask you.
21:01 Speaker 08 Yeah.
21:02 Speaker 06 Been thinking about this all week. So question number one, justice. Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by Barack Obama, a liberal, like you said about Justice Kagan. Also known liberal, we have known liberals, known conservatives, all trying for some level of impartiality. She says she cries when she reads certain decisions. And I'm wondering if she's foretelling the case related to immunity that Mr. Trump and his minions are arguing before the court. And just for our listeners to understand this, Mr. Trump is saying that he could shoot people, including his political adversaries, and that would fall under the cloak of presidential
21:42 Speaker 06 immunity, and that the president should have full-scale, widespread immunity above and beyond the office of the presidency. So God forbid if there's a drone strike somewhere in a war-torn area, the president initiated that and there was a civilian guild, while the US says, well, of course, he has immunity for that. But Mr. Trump is calling for broader immunity. So my first question is related to Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Is she foretelling some doom related to that immunity case?
22:12 Speaker 08 You mean, is she suggesting that this court will decide that, in this case, Donald Trump?
22:17 Speaker 06 They'll grant Trump full immunity. They know President Biden is not going to use that power, but this is a right-leaning court, they're hoping Trump gets into office, and they're going to give him that power.
22:28 Speaker 08 We're expecting a ruling on that fairly soon, probably not in time for the January the 6th case to get heard before the US election, or at least to get heard and have a result for the US election. If Sonia Sotomayor is transmitting, you know, a prejudgment, as it were, that's a little bit like leaking that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned, as happened a couple of years ago.
22:55 Speaker 06 Well, she's being more subtle. She's being more subtle.
22:57 Speaker 08 She's being more subtle, but it's not that different. I mean, it's in the same kind of vein, and it would, I think it would suggest a certain dysfunctionality in the court. I mean, if we get back to the idea that, yes, of course justices have private opinions, but they should be keeping them private, is it appropriate for a justice, be they conservative or in this case liberal, to be foretelling how the court is going to rule on something it hasn't yet ruled on? I answered with a question, but there we go. We'll let that slide go.
23:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, because I don't know the answer to your questions. You're smarter than me, so I don't know the answer to your questions, that's why I'm not answering them. Well, let me ask you this next question. Ready?
23:32 Speaker 08 Yeah.
23:32 Speaker 06 We had a president in this country, Franklin Roosevelt, that tried to pack the court. And so the justices have expanded to nine. It's been that way for 100-plus years.
23:43 Speaker 08 Though, of course, there's nothing in the Constitution that says it has to be nine.
23:46 Speaker 06 Nothing in the Constitution, and of course, it expanded to nine. And so now Franklin Roosevelt didn't like the decisions that were going against him in the New Deal in the 1930s, and so he had a lot of power back then. He wanted to pack the court, and he was rebuked by both Democrats and Republicans in a bipartisan way, saying, "No, you can't pack the court." There's a movement by the Democrats where they're looking at these nine justices and they're saying, "Hmm, this may not be what we want. We may want to have more people on the court so that we're not overly reliant on a few people who could strike a match that could blow up our democracy." And let me just provide some historical context quickly. You know, Merrick Garland,
24:27 Speaker 06 who's now the Attorney General for the United States, he runs the Department of Justice, he was up for the court six months prior to Barack Obama's end of his term. And Mitch McConnell would not allow for a hearing related to this. So these people have to be appointed by the president, and then they have to be voted on by the members of the Senate to be approved or confirmed. And so Obama lost his ability to appoint that justice, and that seat went to Neil Gorsuch. Actually, he went to law school with me, Neil, and he's a conservative. And a result of which, they were able to get three Supreme Court justices nominated and confirmed by the Senate under Donald Trump.
25:09 Speaker 06 And most interesting, just to expose full American political hypocrisy, it was a few weeks where, before the end of Donald Trump's term, a month or two before the end of his term, where they were able to get the last one nominated. So what are your thoughts there on court packing?
25:23 Speaker 08 This is a movement that was actually led by Pete Buttigieg when he was running for president. In 2020, and he was very explicit about saying that if he was the Democratic nominee and then the Democratic president, he would expand the court, and it was time to do so. Joe Biden has been asked about this multiple times and has kind of hedged on it. But I've heard the same thing from people in the White House, that they are not opposed to looking at expanding the number of people on the Supreme Court. And some of this is for cynical politics, because they see that Donald Trump got three Supreme Court justices. Joe Biden has only had one. I mean, it was just kind of the luck of the draw that Donald Trump got three, and he put in three young justices who are going to be there for a long time.
26:07 Speaker 08 And the argument, the kind of cynical argument is, you just want to dilute those conservatives. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine the political legal argument is that you need major decisions. And I think people around the world don't really understand this, the degree to which the Supreme Court decides a lot of what goes on in American households and American bedrooms. And it's just nine people who are not term limited. And our reforms to that in this day and age, especially when the Supreme Court is actually out of step with American public opinion on several major issues, gun control, abortion, for example, should nine people have that much power?
26:51 Speaker 08 Or should that number be diluted? But then where do you, the counterargument is, where do you stop? Is it 11? Is it 13? Is it 21?
27:00 Speaker 06 Well, Katty Kay, should they? So I'll answer, but I want to hear your answer first. Should they? Should nine people have that much power?
27:06 Speaker 08 I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but just as an observer of politics, nine people having that much power for life, I think reform of the Supreme Court could help American democracy. Something is not working in American democracy at the moment. The organs of American democracy, the structures of American democracy, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, Congress, gerrymandering, districts, they're not working to further American democratic aims, or even the will of the American people. So something has to change. I'm going to get a whole load of constitutional lawyers, you know, screaming at me because this is heresy. This is heresy. I realize it's heresy, but something's not working.
27:50 Speaker 06 I am in agreement with you and I want to just back up for a second because I want to provide some context for people. We have 27 amendments to the US Constitution and so just for viewers and listeners. The founders set up the Constitution. They said, okay, listen, this is a living document. We know it's going to have to change generationally. Your iPhone went from iPhone one to iPhone 15 in 15 years and we're going to have a living document. We're going to make changes to the document. The first 10 amendments are going to be the Bill of Rights and these are going to be your freedoms for freedom of religion, right? The privacy, all of these sorts of things. And then we got into the Civil War and even though Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation,
28:31 Speaker 06 we had to have an amendment to the Constitution because slavery was allowed in the original documents and so we amended the Constitution. And here's my point. We have 27 amendments to that Constitution. The Constitution, the document's about 240 years old. You're getting an amendment roughly once every eight years and yet in the United States, because of the great polarity, we have not amended that document since 1993. 27th Amendment was a procedural amendment, but the big amendment, caddy, was in 1965. Okay, that was the last one. That's 59 years ago. That's the Voting Rights Act, which gave more freedom to African Americans to vote in the United States. And so why am I bringing this up?
29:10 Speaker 06 This document's supposed to be a living document. The United States is no longer amending it. They could amend it and say, no more gerrymandering. And so for UK listeners, what does that mean? I'm in my district. I don't like certain people. I don't think they're going to vote for me. I figure out a way to cut out their households from my district.
29:28 Speaker 08 Which, by the way, in the UK is this map of districts is drawn up by civil servants, not by politicians. In America, it's drawn up by politicians.
29:35 Speaker 06 Drawn up by politicians and this is, this is not favoring democracy because what ends up happening, I submit to you, are we in a real democracy if the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters are supposed to pick the politicians. And so when I was growing up, these districts looked like geometric shapes that you and I could recognize from ninth grade geometry. Today, they look like jigsaw puzzles. Okay, you know this, right? And so this is unfair, right? And so that's number one. We have to fix that. And then number two. The court is now become dangerous because of the sclerosis of change in our living documents. And so we got to fix one or the other, either reform the documents, make
30:17 Speaker 06 the situation flatter and fair and less of an oligarchic duopoly, i.e. Bobby Kennedy can't get on, he's being blocked in certain states, he can't get on the ballot. Okay, so either fix that, or add people to the court to liquidate the potential extremists on the court. Okay, so now I've got everybody upset, but anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
30:37 Speaker 08 No, I think it's a very good point. I think the founding fathers were more flexible and more humble and realized they'd written something that would need to change and that should change. And at the moment, it's not able to because of the partisan nature of American politics. But if we expanded the Supreme Court or did some kind of reform there, if it unblocked the system, I think that would be a good thing. Okay, we're going to move on to to talk about domestic policy under Trump. But I have one question for you before we go on this. Do you think it's possible that a Republican Senate will ever approve a Democratic nominee for the Supreme Court or vice versa? By the way, for our viewers around the world and in the States, Supreme Court justices used to be confirmed by about
31:22 Speaker 08 90% of the Senate.
31:24 Speaker 06 Yes, no question.
31:25 Speaker 08 And now it's strictly on partisan lines. I wonder if the days of being able to confirm a justice from the other side are possible anymore.
31:31 Speaker 06 Well, so just very famously, Justice Anthony Scalia, the first Italian American to be added to the Supreme Court, Teddy Kennedy, then Senator Kennedy, voted for him. People said, well, he's against everything you're for. He goes, hey, I got all these Italians in the North End. If I don't vote for this guy, they're going to go crazy on me. And of course, my mother was cooking sauce, meatballs, all kinds of stuff that we finally had an Italian American on the Supreme Court, different time in America, 99 to 0 confirmed. Now it's heresy. If you support a justice nominated by the other party,
32:07 Speaker 06 It's heresy, you could get primaried by the radical parts of your party if that were to happen. And so I think the answer to the question is no, Catty, but I will say this, what if it happens in the first year? What if I'm the Democratic president with a Republican-controlled Senate, I nominate somebody, what are they going to leave that position open for three years? Think about what they're doing to the system now. They've lost this common values, they've lost this common set of civic virtues where they were allowing each other to have their way, which is exactly what the founders wanted. The founders in the Federalist Papers, Hay and Hamilton, write about the need for consensus and compromise, which is why they set the documents up the way they did.
32:51 Speaker 08 Yeah, and now we have a kind of a system that was built on and for compromise, living in a world where compromise is a dirty word. We have a presidential system acting like a parliamentary system. Democrats have tried in the past to use Supreme Court, though, as a voting issue. Hillary Clinton did it in 2016, warning that if Donald Trump was elected, then the Supreme Court would swing to the right, and it didn't seem to rally votes for her. So let's see if Joe Biden raises this on the campaign trail. He may do. He may say, look, if you elect Donald Trump and there are any more liberal justices, one of them is elderly and is reported to have some health problems, if we lose another liberal justice, we're going to get an even more conservative Supreme Court. He may try
33:33 Speaker 08 and raise that on the campaign trail. I'm not sure that it's going to be a massive vote decider either way. Expect to hear more about the Supreme Court during American elections because they are going to play this bigger role. The closer American elections are, the more court cases we're going to have, the more of those cases are going to end up in the Supreme Court. One final thought, it's worth remembering, this is a conservative court with conservative members appointed by Donald Trump, but in 2020, when presented with election challenges by lawyers on Trump's side, this Supreme Court repeatedly sided against Donald Trump. So the court is capable of looking at election cases and saying Donald Trump did not have a leg to stand on legally, and the election was free and fair, and they
34:16 Speaker 08 sided with Joe Biden on that. We're going to take a quick break. Afterwards, we'll be back to look at more of Trump's domestic policy, ties in a little bit, because we're going to look at the Department of Justice, but what Donald Trump's plans are if he gets elected to a second term.
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36:21 Speaker 06 Welcome back to The Rest is Politics U.S. It's me, Anthony Scaramucci.
36:26 Speaker 08 And me, Katty Kay. We are going to talk in this half of the show about a little bit more on domestic politics. I want to do this, Anthony, partly because in Washington, as you know, everybody's obsessed with the horse race, right? It's all about the polls and who's up and who's down, and who's going to win and who's not going to win. And there's not actually, I think, ever enough talk about actual policies. So we hear Donald Trump, he's pretty open about what he wants to do. And one of the things that... People on the democratic side are most alarmed about when they talk about Donald Trump signalling the end of American democracy as we know it is not really that anyone thinks he's going to run for a third term or he's going to make this a full-blown dictatorship.
37:09 Speaker 08 It's that he is going to exert a change in the American civil service that will make it much more bound to the president. So Donald Trump will basically have much more control over organisations, agencies like the Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and that will make the American government, including the American civil service, more pro-MAGA and will bend to the will of Donald Trump. He will try to do in the United States a little bit what
37:48 Speaker 08 Viktor Orban has done in Hungary by putting his people into the courts and his people into the media. And he's pretty open about this. I mean, he has said at one rally after another, he says he wants to demolish the deep state and his supporters say that it's going to be groundbreaking. They're going to clean out all of what they call the corrupt actors in the government apparatus and end all the kind of woke appointments and put in their own people. Do you think we're looking at a big change in the way American democracy will work if Donald Trump gets in for a second term?
38:25 Speaker 06 Okay, so my problem is obviously people think I'm biased against Mr. Trump and they think it's personal and all this other stuff, but it's really not personal. It's just an objective observation of what he's doing. And he is threatening the system. And so if you read the Heritage Foundation plan, the 1,000 pages of things that they want to do to liquidate what they call the deep state.
38:49 Speaker 08 This is the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that's come up with this plan, Trump 2025.
38:54 Speaker 06 Yes. So let me give some context here. Trump announces he's running for president. The Republicans think it's a joke. They think he's not going to win. They make everybody sign a pledge that they have to support the nominee. They don't think it's going to be him. He signs the pledge, he becomes the nominee. Okay, he doesn't even know what the deep state is at this point. Trust me, I know because I worked on the campaign. But the narrative of what the deep state is, just for our listeners outside the United States, is the Steve Bannon right-wing Breitbart, this conservative newsletter that goes out and this blog, is that there's a very large group of people that work inside the United States government that are by and large liberals. They have permanent jobs, and there's actually even a union associated with them. And the reason they have permanent
39:39 Speaker 06 jobs is that there's a lot of things that happen in the government that aren't political and are not partisan. And so they want these people to have some security to their jobs, depending on the political whims. And when I, when I got to the White House and I had my first intelligence briefing, Catty, the analyst said to me that there are workhorses in the government and there are show horses in the government. And you're going to learn very quickly who the workhorses are in the government. And so right now, we have, at the civil servant level, to equate it to the UK, we have 2.9 million people that work in the United States government as civil servants. We have over 12 million people that are in the government, if you take it out to the military, the Pentagon, armed services, everything. It's literally the largest, most powerful entity in the world.
40:24 Speaker 06 And so the question is, do you want somebody that's elected for four years to totally dismantle and disrupt that? The right wing wants that. But if you are a traditionalist and you are a believer in the American system, you actually don't want that. And there were reasons why it was set up this way. It was to prevent partisans from meddling in the day-to-day affairs that have to happen in the government. And, and I'll say one last thing, okay? Those people in the government, who are permanent in the government, they view the politicians, the elected leaders, as the Christmas help. Okay, you know how you get the Christmas help to come into the department store for two weeks? Okay, these are temporary people that are showboating around Washington. They're the holiday surge.
41:08 Speaker 06 They're the holiday surge. They call them the Christmas help. So I'm showing my biases here because I am a traditionalist. I love my country, and I love the system of government. I love the flatness. Okay, what's different from Europe in this country is there's really no power structure at the top. It's totally diffused. A result of which people like me that grow up in a middle-class environment or low-middle-class environment can rise, okay, or to quote Abraham Lincoln, two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, he rendered it, he wrote in his diary, "There is no permanent labor class in the United States." And in order to keep that going, you got to get nonsense like Donald Trump out of the
41:49 Speaker 06 mix, and he can do a lot of damage to this infrastructure through executive order, and I would encourage people, we don't have time on this podcast, but go read the things from the Heritage Foundation, a very organized group of people, Trump is running a very organized campaign, these people believe this nonsense and they want to execute it on the American government.
42:09 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think, I mean, that is worth pointing out, and you, you mentioned the 2016 campaign, casting no aspersions on your good self, Anthony Scaramucci, but it was a little bit chaotic, right? They were not ready for primetime.
42:23 Speaker 06 I said this to the Senate Intelligence Committee when I had to get, had to spend all this money to go down there and I got subpoenaed on, I said, "Guys, we weren't even colluding with ourselves, how the hell are we going to collude with the Russians, okay?" Steve Bannon and I were in a food fight almost every day on that campaign.
42:37 Speaker 08 And I know, because I was, I mean, I was speaking to people on the other side in the Biden campaign, and they were saying, "We don't understand it, we're drawing up all of these documents, and we're drawing up all of these transition papers to help them understand how stuff works in all the different branches of government, and nobody's reading any of them." And they felt a little bit like their nose was put out of joint because they'd done their homework and the teacher wasn't reading the homework, but they were pretty surprised at how unprepared the Trump people were when they came in. If you think that is the replica for what's happening this time around, you're very wrong. This is a much more disciplined, much more focused campaign, they are drawing up policy papers on everything from abortion to trade to communications regulation, and there is
43:18 Speaker 08 this plan known as Schedule F, if you want to sound kind of, you know, super geeky about American politics at the moment, you, you flash around the word Schedule F a lot, which is the way you would make civil servants, you would take them out of the category of being lifelong civil servants who had permanent jobs.
43:37 Speaker 08 And you would make them at-will jobs. And if you do that to hundreds of thousands of civil servants, this is the rationale of the Trump campaign, you can get rid of all of these people who are permanent employees and who are blocking the kind of MAGA agenda. And you can put in their place effectively hundreds of thousands of political appointees who are allies of Donald Trump's, loyalists to his cause, and who will allow them to move much faster to make, for example, the Department of Justice more beholden to Donald Trump. So he could, as he has said he wants to do, launch investigations against Joe Biden,
44:20 Speaker 08 for example, or launch investigations against his political enemies, or get rid of the lawsuits that are pending against him. He has talked about wanting to put more Trump allies, for example, into the Federal Communications Commission, which is the organization that controls the media. Some Trump allies have said that there are left-wing television outlets here that he, like MSNBC, that he would like to effectively get rid of, so that they don't have hosts talking about Trump in a negative way on television. So there are things that you can see that he wants to do with this Schedule F. My question is, even though I keep hearing that this is a much more organized, disciplined
45:01 Speaker 08 campaign, this would be a massive change to the way that American democracy has worked. And it wouldn't just last for this four years, it would potentially work, I mean, then a Democratic president could come in and do exactly the same thing. Do you think they could actually pull it off? Do you think they can make the American professional civil service a political body?
45:21 Speaker 06 They can do a lot of damage, Catty. They have a lot of things they can do through executive power. He's a norm pusher, okay? So he will push the norms. If you're, as he's doing with the immunity case, the founders are like, okay, there'll be gentle men and maybe possibly 100, 200 years from now, gentle women that are heads of state. They're not going to be sociopathic, crazy people that are heads of state. So they didn't get that right because... We got one and he will push the norms. And by the way, if he gets elected, we'll be doing this podcast. Okay. And I'll probably have a voice modulator and I'll be like in an undisclosed location.
45:58 Speaker 08 We're going to be in Oslo. We've, we've already had offers to go and host the show in Oslo.
46:01 Speaker 06 I might, I might be in Oslo. I'll likely be in Antarctica. Maybe Trump will make me the ambassador to Antarctica. I have a good rapport with the Penguins down there, but, but he's coming for people like me because I am a person that speaks out against him. And Ben has already said he's got his list. They're ready to go. That is un-American, by the way, as you know, that is un-American.
46:20 Speaker 08 I realize that and it's kind of super weird that we're even having this conversation because I've now covered six American elections and I have never heard Republicans, when a Democrat gets elected, say to me, oh my God, this Democratic president's going to come after me or vice versa. I did not hear the John Kerry people in 2004, when George Bush was elected, re-elected saying, oh my God, now the Bush people are going to come after me because I opposed him. This conversation isn't a normal American political conversation to be having. When you say, and I hear other people who have opposed Trump say the same thing to me, that he's going to come after me. What do you actually mean? What, how would he come after? And would it be Trump and the organs of government coming after you?
47:03 Speaker 08 Or kind of separately, would it be like Trump supporters going rogue?
47:08 Speaker 06 So if he's capable of fully corrupting the Justice Department, as he's saying, and he, he's told some of his defense attorneys, he wants to use the FBI as a Gestapo. Uh, they will do certain things, you know, I'll be under IRS audit, they'll view all documents, yeah, tax audits, they'll accuse me of fraud. You know, Trump is very upset that he's been accused of business fraud. And so he'll go out and accuse people of business fraud, whether it's specious or otherwise. It'll tie you up in the court system. It'll hurt your reputation, hurt your business. If he's capable of weaponizing the Department of Justice, and it's an interesting thing because the executive branch controls the Department of Justice.
47:50 Speaker 06 But there was a gentleman or gentlewoman's agreement that even though it's controlled by a Republican or a Democrat, it's justice. There are two scales. We're going to make sure that this is nonpartisan. It's an infliction of justice that's nonpartisan. It's the immortal words of Cicero from 2,200 years ago. We are slaves to the law in order to be free. So no one is above the law and we'll treat it with objectivity and impartiality. Trump is saying, no, I don't want to do that. I'm going to slant this to favor me. Okay, but these are all problems. No big deal. Of course, I'll be living here in America, part of the healthy vocal opposition, you know, but if I
48:33 Speaker 06 have to move to Oslo, you can find me in Oslo. The other thing is, we have to put this out there, if he is convicted in this current case, and he is a felon, they will be running advertising from now until election day that he's a convicted felon and you have a convicted felon on the ballot. And I am telling you, Catty, I know the country reasonably well. I traveled all over this country with Donald Trump and I travel for business. This would be a nightmare for the Trump campaign because they gotta get some of these independents and they're already under the gun with the women's rights issues. They've ceded the women's rights issues to the Democrats. Now they're telling you that we're going to remove Hispanics that we think are illegal and they may or may not be legal.
49:17 Speaker 06 Maybe, maybe there's some of them speaking out against Trump and they decide, well, you know what, we're going to put him in the illegal bucket. Let's get him deported. This is so dangerous. He has created a Trump vaccine for all of us where our immune systems are now down from all the outrageous stuff. If you were in 2004 and John Kerry was talking like this, there are World War II veterans that were still alive. They'd be hitting every alarm bell in the system. But it's now 2024 and we have 10 years of him talking like this. And we're used to it and we don't even overreact to it. But he's got a group of very serious people that want to work with him to affect this. And that's the danger, Kathy.
50:00 Speaker 08 Yeah, and and people who felt they were thwarted back in 2016, that they came in with this agenda that they had that was particularly around immigration, right? And then they kept finding that they were hitting up against the civil service that, as you said earlier, they said was left leaning, deliberately trying to stop Donald Trump, didn't like Donald Trump. And this time around, they're not going to, they've say they've identified the roadblocks to their agenda and they're going to get rid of them. And I actually think another thing that will be a problem for him electorally is that actually, as you go around, these civil servants, of course, even though they always describe it as draining the Washington swamp, they're all around the country. I mean, people work for the federal government in every state of the United States.
50:45 Speaker 08 And I can't believe that if they get to hear about these plans and start focusing on these plans, that they're going to love those plans very much because it could put their jobs at risk. Do you think there is any justification in the idea that the Trump, having, you know, from what you saw in government, that the Trump campaign puts out, that the American civil service is left leaning and opposed to a conservative agenda? Do you think that, is there validity in that?
51:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, I think there is validity in that, yes. I do think that the civil service is left leaning. And I'll just put this to you this way. If you make a decision, if your career ambition is to go work for the government, you generally believe that the government is there to help people and solve problems. That's a left leaning proposition. You know, Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address that the most dangerous words in life is I'm, I am from the government and I'm here to help, right? That's a right leaning position. And so generally, if you're going to go work for the government, you're probably center left. But you're probably a moderate at the end of the day. And so, you know, whether you like it or not, right or left in the country, you need these people and you need
51:56 Speaker 06 these people to have stability and security in their jobs while the elites are circulating at the top.
52:03 Speaker 08 Yeah, and they bring with them technical expertise. They're not beholden to any one president. It minimizes, I think, the risk of political corruption that, you know, if your boss comes along and tells you to do something that is stupid or illegal or impractical, you can turn around and say, no, that doesn't make sense. Whereas if you're a kind of political appointee, you're going to suck up to your boss, right? As somebody has said, a conservative actually said, it's going to create a government of suckups. But the plans are there and it's a much more organized campaign. Okay, before we go, I have a question that came in to me from the young British actor Lewis Landau, who has asked, what is the history of non-partisanship in American politics? And why does it now appear dead?
52:48 Speaker 06 It's a great question. I'll be brief. And I would ask Lewis to look at three different cases. The first case I think is most inspiring to me is Wendell Wilkie. Wendell Wilkie in 1940 ran against Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, Roosevelt was breaking George Washington's tradition and running for a third term. Wilkie lost the election. He went to the Oval Office to visit with President Roosevelt, and he said, I'm here to help you. You're my president. So Roosevelt said, I need three things. I need you to support the war, even though your fellow Republicans are isolationists. And I need you to help me put down the first America First movement, which was started by Yui Long and Charles Lindbergh. And imagine if Kevin McCarthy had done that for Joe Biden. Okay. Number two is Arthur Vanderburgh was
53:33 Speaker 06 against the New Deal. But when the war ended, he went to Harry Truman and said, I'm here to help you build the architecture for peace in the post-World War II era, which is the Truman Doctrine. And lastly, when things got miserable in our country, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, they didn't like each other, and they were adversaries and mudslingers. But they did get together in the 1994, 1995 time period to reframe the budget.
54:01 Speaker 06 And the budget was actually working, Catty, back then, and we ran a budget surplus at the end of 2000 as a result of that bipartisan work. It's not working today because of what we talked about earlier. They have an oligarchic system now where in order to stay in power, they have to play to the extremes. And we have to figure out through a constitutional amendment or bringing in apathetic voters to liquidate the current oligarchy. We have a duopoly in the country, have an oligarchic duopoly in the country, that we have to figure out a way to bust to make it fairer and more democratic again.
54:36 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think that's exactly what has happened. A very quick pop quiz for you. I'm so sorry to do this to you, Anthony. I know how much you love them. And it's triggered by Lewis's question. In the mid 1980s, there were 144 House Republicans who were less conservative than the most conservative Democrat. How many House Democrats were less liberal than the most liberal Republicans?
55:03 Speaker 06 First of all, that's like even a tongue twister. Okay, so you've-
55:06 Speaker 08 Do you even know what I'm talking about?
55:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, I do. And you've exposed my low IQ as I'm going to try to fumble my way through answering this question. But, but I'm going to say that it was roughly symmetrical. I'm going to say it was more or less equal. Am I right?
55:21 Speaker 08 There were only 52 House Democrats who were less liberal than the most liberal Republicans. I think what this shows you is how much, actually, it's the Republican Party that's really changed. If you look at all of those, all of the graphs, yes, the Democratic Party has become more liberal, but it is the Republican Party that's really become more conservative. Lewis, thank you for sending in the question. Keep them coming, everybody. That is it for today. We will be back next Friday with more American politics and elections and what's going on in this extraordinary country.
55:55 Speaker 06 Thank you, guys, so much for joining us, and we hope to see you again next week.
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56:42 Speaker 05 I'm not the first then.
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