April 2026 Q&A: What Trump is Really Like, Repeal Citizens United, Declining US Dollar

0:00Well, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. This is our monthly Q &A episode. And by the way, it's April 2026, and I'm super flattered by the response to our Q &A episode. And we're looking at all of your comments. I just want to make sure people know that. YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. Always great stuff coming in, and I do appreciate the support for the show, but also the questions and the commentary, the good, bad, and the ugly, because I believe it or not, all comments are either making the show better or causing us to question ourselves, which is both really, really good in the world of programming.

0:41So let's start with YouTube H2H Cami. All right, ready? How do we repeal Citizens United? Why did the Dems let that one slip through. So interestingly enough, the Dems didn't actually let it slip through. The conservatives had the majority on the court. The real question is, if the court was a liberal court, they probably would have blocked it. But Justice Scalia said that that was a First Amendment right for rich people to throw money at politics and policy. There are several movements. If you Google repeal Citizens United, there are several NGOs, non-governmental organizations that are working on this.

1:23And one of the things that would probably have to happen is you would need an amendment to the constitution. So you'd need 37 states to ratify it. The state of Montana is already working on it. They're like, hey, we've had enough of this. It's separate, but equal democracy between the poor and the rich. The country's really suffering from this. The country's a major need of reform. And it is a great question. And it won't be easy to do, but it's something that we need to do. We have to start calling out our political leaders about the nonsense that's going on here. Okay. This is from Instagram and it's from Alistair Campbell.

2:01And he is asking me if I was breastfed as a child. And this is an inside joke. And so sort of crazy, but it's an inside joke, and I'll share this with you. Alistair and I were on a live show in Dublin, and an 83-year-old woman came rushing over to us and wanted our photograph. And the minute she was taking the photograph, she said, which one of you lads would like to be breastfed? I'm sorry, that I found to be absolutely hysterical, classic Irish humor. The woman was 83, which is my demo apparently. And Alistair, no, I wasn't breastfed. And I just letting you know that the answer to the question of which one of you would like to be breastfed, that was you, Alistair Campbell.

2:52Okay, so let's just go to the next question. I'm sure some are revolted by that one, but not me. I loved every minute of that story. LinkedIn, Anthony N, with everything on your plate. What's your process for capturing key ideas from books and implementing them without overcomplicating things? You know, it's a really good question. And so I try to read a book. And then when I'm done with the book, I try to then say to myself, okay, I can remember the whole book, of course, but what do I remember about the book? And so let me just take one of them as an example. Heather was on the show. This is Fear and Fury.

3:33So what did I take out of the book that our race relationships and the dynamic between the rich and poor, white and black in the country is way more complicated than people want to admit, which is basically the theme that I'm taking from that book. But I do, Anthony, and I do try to think about what I've read. And then in my mind, I try to conceptualize what it is that I've read from this. Okay, this is another great book right here. and Bill was on the show running down a dream. This is you're running down the dream, but you're also never giving up. You got to keep running. No matter what happens in your life, as long as you're breathing, you got to keep running.

4:17Okay. And so that's the big story there. Thank you. X, Saucier Terre 35 to 12. I mean, I don't know where you guys come up with these, but it's amazing. What is the likelihood of a third party for the moderates? Zero. How about that? Zero. Country's not set up for that. This is a very tight duopoly. A moderate would have to hijack one of the parties the way Trump hijacked the Republican Party and decapitate the nonsense on the party, then try to create it inside one of the two parties. They just have done an amazing job procedurally to protect themselves from a third-party entry. Maybe that'll be different 10 years from now.

5:05Maybe not, but I really feel like it won't be. All right, let's keep going. YouTube, Brian Pinto, 785. I'm in my 60s and retired. And I tell my kids who are in their 20s and other young folks that they're in for a wild ride over the next 10 to 20 years. What are your thoughts on what the younger generation will experience? So I got so many thoughts on that, but I think that the main thing, just stepping back, I would say that the main thing is the advent of artificial intelligence and the exponential nature of it. I think it's going to make us incredibly more productive and incredibly more profitable.

5:46And I think we're going to end up in a society where we're going to have a little bit more free time for ourselves. And I'm just hoping that we can figure this out from a sociological perspective where we don't create 10 trillionaires and lots and lots of poor people. That would be dystopian. The goal here would be to create a bounty for everybody and to share that bounty, to share that abundance. It's really an amazing planet. Now that we've seen Artemis 50 plus years since we got back up to the moon, when you look back on earth, it's an amazing spaceship. it's got unbelievable resources for the billions of people that live here and we can resource allocate in a way that I think will make lots of people happy and so that's really what I'm hoping for for the next 20 years and it's going to require some good government this is from River Shannon Girl on Instagram what are your all-time favorite non-fiction book about World War II.

6:42My all-time favorite nonfiction book. Well, Rick Atkinson has a trilogy on the battles. And so I would say those books are probably phenomenal. But my all-time favorite is actually what Nigel Hamilton did for FDR. And he basically, he wrote a three-part series. I have it up here in my office. It's basically the one I would read is The War Years, and that's FDR with Churchill, and then FDR goes to war. And the titles of those books are Commander-in-Chief and War and Peace by Nigel Hamilton. Basically what Nigel Hamilton is doing, FDR unfortunately died in April of 1945, didn't get a chance to write a memoir, but Hamilton's trying to recreate that from his diaries and from stuff that he found in the FDR library.

7:37So those are my favorites. and thank you for asking that question. Anything that James Holland has written about World War II, I would also recommend, and he has a new book coming out, which we'll be interviewing him for, called The Visionaries, about what happened in post-World War II construction, which really FDR and Harry Truman led. So those books I would highly recommend. So anything by Atkinson or Holland, go out and read those books if you don't mind. Okay. Do you have a new book in the works? And the answer is I do. I have a new book, and this is from Tracy Angels or Angles. The title of the new book is All the Wrong Moves, coming out in September.

8:21I've talked about it before here. I'm just trying to put the pieces together for after the Berlin Wall falling, some of the policy decisions that the Americans made that ended up hurting us and ended up creating this populist rise. and lots of societal anger. And I'm tying things together, I think, that really haven't been tied together before. So it's a little bit of a history spin plus Wall Street. And it's sort of the intersection of things that have happened in my career that I'm trying to relay to the public through this book. I hope you'll consider buying it. And I also just finished, or in the process of finishing, the audio recording for the book, which was a lot of fun to put together.

9:04Okay, X, add Sage Futures. Our political system is broken, and those who could fix it are ones who benefit most by it being broken. 90 million people felt so disenfranchised that they didn't vote last time. How do we fix this? Well, this is apropos to the book that I'm writing, Sage Futures. I think it is totally fixable, but it will require reform. In America, unfortunately, we have periods of decline and despair, and then we have reformation, reflection, and reform, and ultimately renewal. So just a couple things. End Citizens United, make the gerrymandering go away, or at least make it fair so that we have less craziness, extremes, and more competition in these campaigns.

9:54And we have 435 congressional districts. There's probably only 25 of them are gonna be contested in 2026. That's the direct result of gerrymandering. So we need to end those things. And then we have to have a budgetary process where we start thinking about this now in 10, 15 year units of time. And we get back to some, instead of these continuing resolutions, we get back to some legitimate budgetary process. And of course, America's role in the world is changing. which means our military footprint is going to have to change in terms of the way we think about that as well. And so those things, we can do those things and we can fix this.

10:34And I believe America is always nearly plastic. We got through the Civil War, the Great Depression, so many different things. We will fix this. We just have to stay optimistic about that and try to find leaders that really want to help us fix it. Okay, LinkedIn, John Fairfield. How vulnerable do you think the U.S. dollar is relative to other currencies at the moment? And why does it matter? It's vulnerable. The U.S. dollar, which we've had dollar hegemony since 1974, when we linked the U.S. dollar to the oil coming out of the Middle East, we called that the petrodollar economy. It sort of forced everybody to have bank reserves in U.S.

11:17dollar. The dollar became what is known as the reserve currency of the world. Gives us a lot of flexibility at the Federal Reserve and a lot of flexibility in our deficit spending to sort of finance ourselves. Because of the way we're acting around the world, by the way, countries are saying, hey, we want to move away from that. And some of that's happening. You see some of the movement in the Strait of Hormuz right now. Some of that's being denominated in Ren MB or the Chinese currency. I don't think the dollar is going to be overly weakened anytime soon. but this is something we do have to look at and it would put a big impact on our on our economy so we got to be very careful about it evans org one give us a little background on your famous uncle's motorcycle shop okay well my uncle sal de feo had a motorcycle shop in port washington new york 1953 the year 2000 uh he died in 2021 at the age of 94 four.

12:19What a hell of a guy. Total entrepreneur. Looked like a hell's angel, but he was like a gentle lamb. He was more of an angel than a hell's angel. Super hardworking. Taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and work ethic and customer service. I'll just tell a really funny quick story about him because he was such a character, a World War II veteran, et cetera. But we used to have these classified ads, which we don't do anymore because of Google, et cetera. But we had a newspaper called the bylines he would take out an ad every week and he would list our used motorcycles some of those bikes he would say call for the price and so there was a ducati 750 1978 commando it's a hot bike people would call for the price and i would answer the phone a low ghost motorcycle i'm looking for the price on that ducati i'd say to my uncle uncle sal what's the price.

13:16Does the guy want the ballpark price? I said, sir, do you want the ballpark price? Yeah, yeah. Give me the ballpark price. So my uncle would say 3 ,000 is the ballpark price. Well, the problem is, you know, that bike was probably worth 6 ,000. And so they'd go, oh my God, 3 ,000. I'll be right there. And I was then instructed to tell them to bring cash, make a deal. They'd show up at the store. Guy would walk in. I'm here to buy the Ducati 3 ,000. I talked to some young kid on the phone. My uncle would say, did you ask him for the ballpark price? Yeah, I asked him for the ballpark price. Well, you know what?

13:49We had a ballpark next door to the shop. It was attached to my old elementary school. My uncle would go to the front of the store. He'd write down that price and he'd crumble it up into a piece of paper. He'd walk out of the front of the store and throw it into the ballpark. So, okay, yeah, that's the price in the ballpark, but the price here in the store is 7 ,000. And it was, let me tell you, it was some funny shit. Okay, I just have to tell you that. And by the way, the guy ends up paying$6 ,000 for the bike and leaving. So this probably doesn't reflect well on me, my family, or some of the shenanigans that we did in the shop.

14:25But, you know, that's what we did. By the way, if you pissed us off in the shop and you had to use the bathroom, we would hook a diehard car battery to the men's room door. and so we would clip it on with the two jumper cable clamps and you're trying to get out of the bathroom you know you would be electrocuted by us so I don't know probably shouldn't be telling you all this but that was life in the 1970s at Ghost Motorcycle and I got a lot of my street education at Ghost so I'm very happy about all that all right let's keep going here We've gone from breastfeeding to electrocuting customers coming out of the men's room, okay?

15:11That's why I love doing these Q &A sessions. YouTube, Scott Cunda, 187VW, as someone who is very new to Bitcoin, how is Bitcoin useful now and in the future for a common shlove like me? So, listen, it's complicated. If you own Bitcoin, I recommend you stay in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a very cyclical, hard to understand piece of technology right now, but I do think it's continuing its adoption and expansion. And I think it's going to be an operating system to the future of money. And I want you to hold on to it and learn more about it. And the more you learn about it, I think the more you'll like it.

15:53I think that's been my position for a long period of time related to Bitcoin. Max Giuliana from Instagram. How would you suggest a young person go about finding a job they can learn and grow in? This is the best question of all time about careers. And I would just tell you something you really like. I don't know what it is, but there's something you really like. For me as a kid, I loved business. Wall Street is the business of understanding other businesses. I also like books, which is why I'm doing this podcast. But remember, I started this podcast in my late 50s, and I started my Wall Street career in my mid-20s.

16:35So find something you really like and just go do that. Whatever the hell that is, go do it. Okay? And lo and behold, before you know it, you're never working a day in your life, and you'll be successful. Okay? But you got to have passion in what you're doing. You got to get up early and hit things hard. And when you get a setback, you got to dust yourself off. Those are the number one things. Okay, LinkedIn. Kate Doak, I believe, I hope. What was Deirdre's response to your April Fool's prank? Next question. Going right to the next question. No, I'm just kidding. She was perturbed slightly, but also amused.

17:15Guys, I was pretty flattered by the whole thing. I don't know, there's some haters on there. I mean, there was one person that said to me, my hubris has no browns. And I'm thinking, well, maybe that's true, but your IQ obviously does have some bounds, but you know what doesn't have any bounds? My sense of humor. Okay, so let's keep things real. But, you know, Deirdre wasn't in love with the idea. Let's just put it that way. Okay, Instagram, Jen Morris. How do you stay looking so young? I thought you were maybe 50.

17:52All right, Jen, blowing kisses. even if Deirdre's pissed off about that. Flattery will get you everywhere with me. And I think you got to moisturize from the inside. And I don't mind telling people that I dye my hair and I probably have enough Botox on my... Are we seeing any movement there? I sort of feel like we have a little bit of movement, but I have a lot of Botox on my forehead. Okay, so Botox, hair dye, lots of water. Those are the three things. Stay out of the sun and probably avoid alcohol and you'll stay pretty young. But also you have to not give a shit. Okay, just remember that too, okay?

18:29Like, you think I give a shit what other people think of me? I do not. Do you think I give a shit about the short-term market gyrations? I do not. And so you have to not give a shit. And if you don't give a shit, you can sleep well. And then remember the immortal words of Mel Brooks, relax, none of us are getting out of here alive. So not giving a shit will also help you stay young, Jen. But those are my tips there. Okay, Instagram, Samantha J. Bent. Behind the scenes, is there anything human or normal about Trump? Sure, of course. Of course, that's the complexity of human life. You know, he looks like a caricature.

19:06He acts like a caricature. He mocks himself with his own caricature-like behavior. But of course, there's some human stuff. I'll tell you something, you know. I think I've shared this before, and if I have, forgive me, but I'll share it again because it was meaningful to me. I'm in the Oval Office. It's probably my first or second day on the job. I'm looking up. He's got everything painted gold now. But if you looked up on the ceiling, there's this presidential seal on the ceiling of the Oval Office. I looked up, looked at it with him. And I said, hey, we're in the Oval Office. I said, you know, I mean, come on, we're in the Oval Office.

19:39I said, did that ever intimidate you? And he very honestly looked at me and said, oh, yeah, the first time I was in here, I was unnerved. And then I got a call from White House Protocol. and they said that I'm going to meet Teresa May. She's going to be my first head of state visit. And they told me to go to the North Portico. And I'm like, where the hell is the North Portico? And I thought that was very human to Trump. So listen, you know, I don't like him. I think he's been a danger to the society and so forth. But let's not underestimate the fact that he's human. Okay. At Instagram, WS Ford, Sean Ford, very good friend of mine.

20:16How important are real relationships in business? Well, I think it's everything, Sean. I think you know that. I know that. I take everything personally. I know you take everything personally. And most people say, oh, it's not personal. It's business. They're full of shit. Of course it's personal. Take everything personally and make your relationships as real as possible. It's a great question from Sean. Okay. Instagram, the sub 2003. What did you dislike most about working in the Trump White House? you know a lot of shots fired you know people shooting at each other you know weren't on a team everyone was out for themselves very very grabby very weird a lot of backstabbing no front stabbing someone hated my guts they would be like golly gee to my face while they were trying to plunge the knife on my back or drop a dime on me to a journalist say something that isn't true about me that would hurt my reputation.

21:12But, you know, it's a shitty place, to be honest. Okay, Mary Colonino. Hopefully I'm saying it right, Marie. It's Marie Colonino, Instagram. You get more enjoyment out of your day job or podcasting. So I like both. You know, I also like traveling. I do some public speeches, and I like getting out on the road and meeting people. I think the thing I get the most enjoyment out of, Marie, is meeting new people. How about that? So if you see me somewhere and I'm like, you know, I'm a big packer, everyone likes to quote unquote pack light. Not me. I like bring like a, almost like a walk-in closet with me.

21:53So if I'm waiting somewhere, baggage claim, come over and say hello. Okay, I like meeting the people. All right, here we go. Nadia S. Gill. This is from Instagram. Why do you still consider yourself a Republican? Okay, it's such a great question. You know, if you are supporting Manchester United and they win some championships and now they suck, do you give up the team? Or let's say you're a Manchester City fan. I'll let's say, look, I'm a Jet. I mean, just look about how, you know, sad my life is from a sports perspective. I'm a Jet Met Ranger Knick fan. So my whole life has been like a house of pain and my whole life has been waiting for the collapse.

22:37But what are you going to do? Are you now going to switch to like be a Dodger fan or something like that because they're winning? I mean, come on, you know, we got to fix this party. The system is not going to survive with this high level of function. So, yes, I'm not a Republican in terms of being a MAGA Republican, but I'm a Republican where, you know, I'm more of a socially inclusive Republican. I don't want to get involved with people's lives or make their personal decisions for them and all that nonsense. but I also, you know, I believed in certain tenets of free business, policy-free thinking about business and growth.

23:14So got to fix the Republican Party, Nadia. So that's why I'm still a Republican. Instagram, stand.wall.5. I mean, where do you guys come up with these names? What is one thing everyone can do to make this world a nicer and better place to live? Well, you know the answer to that, okay? Yeah, there's a group of people that you're hanging out with. Be nice. Okay, don't be arrogant. Don't snap at the waiter. Don't, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're pissed off about one of your family members. Of course you have to be. I mean, they're family members. Forgive them, move on. You know, I think the big thing for me, and I will say this to people, about making the world a nicer or better place starts with you.

24:04Just be nice. you know there's a butterfly effect to that stuff you're a little bit nicer and who the hell knows and who the hell knows what's going on in somebody else's life you know you don't know the baggage that somebody else is sharing in their life there's a there's a word called sonder s-o-n-d-e-r you guys should look up that word what does sonder mean you know i'm living in my own world my own level of self-importance and my own friends and my own frenetic life and maybe that's all important and all-consuming to me. But guess what? The person that I'm walking by on the street also has their sonder, has their complexity, has their life, their health issues, their people that they're worried about.

24:50And when you start thinking in that way, you become way more psychologically minded. And by the way, you become way more open to the idea that they're human, just like you. How about that? How about them apples? Okay? And if you remember that reference, how about them apples? I came from Goodwill hunting. Remember that? Matt Damon said, how do you like those apples? All right. So that's a wrap on today's Q &A episode of Open Book. Remember, I'm reading all these comments, and I love listening to what's on your mind. Keep sending the questions, please. Okay? And listen, subscribe. There's a button on YouTube somewhere, subscribe.

25:31and if any of you were offended by me electrocuting somebody in the 1970s, get over it, okay? And if you didn't like the fact that we told somebody that there was a ballpark price, actually it was a ballpark price, we just happened to throw the price into the ballpark. So get over that too, all right? But in the meantime, enjoy Open Book, and I really do appreciate you tuning in. We're going to be back next month with this question and answer session. Again, something I love doing, and so please continue to send your questions. And we're really looking forward to doing our best to answer them.