Donald Trump Has No Friends ft. Anthony Scaramucci

24:44Bad shit, crazy things came out of Trump's mouth. And Jared was there to block the shots on net that could harm our alliances. You know, he wanted to rack up tariffs. He wanted to end NATO. He wanted to sympathize with Vladimir Putin overly. He wanted to attack Iran. And a lot of those things got blocked by people like Mnuchin, Gary Cohen, Jared Kushner. Mnuchin was an underappreciated. No, and Stephen was great. And Stephen was also great during the COVID situation. Another very safe pair of hands. So the problem now is, you know, Trump hates Jared. And people think, oh, he doesn't hate Jared.

25:26He's his son-in-law. He hates Jared. He s***s on Jared everywhere, excoriates Jared. Yeah. But he needs Jared. OK, and he sends Jared into these areas and he trusts Jared more than other people. OK, even though he shits on him. That's the dichotomy of Trump. Right. But Jared doesn't have the influence that he had when he was working inside the White House. Right. But I do like Jared. You know Wickhoff at all? I like Steve. I got along with Steve. I used to go to Rayo's with Steve. Yeah. I saw Steve in Davos. We were hanging out at the Hilton Garden Inn together and had a nice conversation. You know, listen, my attitude with these guys always is I disdain Trump.

26:07I disdain what he's done to the country. I disdain the decision making. He's in 15 months, Carlo. He's wreaked havoc on the economy, unnecessary. He's wreaked havoc on the world. He's gone after our allies. He's praised our adversaries. He's shooting people in the streets of Minnesota. I mean, this is not necessary. All this craziness is not necessary. Whatever you think of Joe Biden, I was out with a guy last night, a 70-year-old guy. And he says to me, look, I'm not a huge fan of Joe Biden, but you know what? There was some sense of normalcy and we could all return back to business. You know, Trump wants your attention.

26:44He's this like wounded animal. He wants to make money for himself and he wants your eyeballs on him to the point where he's now upset the whole apple cart of the world. And he's also really damaged. He's unbelievably damaged the image of the United States around the world. Yeah. People think that we're like batshit crazy because we've got Trump in charge. So for all of these reasons, I disdain Trump. But there are people that work for Trump that I still talk to. Okay. And there are people that work for Trump that I like. I was a lifetime Republican. And Steve Witkoff and I had a very good relationship.

27:21We did a lot of panels together here in New York, the Raos together. Yeah. And I think Steve gets unfairly treated by the press. I think he's an incredibly smart guy. And, you know, could they come up with a resolution? Sure. I think they were close in Oman. I don't know what happened in Oman because the Imani foreign minister said the deal was there on the 27th of February. Was that all subterfuge, right? Or was there a deal in Whitcoff and Jarrett? Not close enough to the situation. I don't know what happened. So I don't want to accuse them, but I like Wyckoff and Jared. You know, the rap on Trump has always been, even when he doesn't have people in his administration who can keep him centered, he's always got these two guardrails.

28:06And the guardrails are the polls and the markets, right? It's unclear if the polls are still much of a guardrail because, you know, he's a lame duck. Even if he pretends he's going to run for a third term, he's obviously not. I don't think he really gives a s*** what happens to the GOP as a party. The polls mattered when he was running for re-election. The market mattered when he was running for an election. Does the market still go real? I don't think either of those things matter. And let me give your podcast listeners a newsflash. He doesn't give a shit about the Republicans. Right. Okay, so he doesn't want them to win.

28:37His attitude is, you guys were nobody until I got here. You're going to be nobody after I leave. Yeah. Okay, so the notion that he's going to work with them, forget about it. He didn't even endorse Cornyn. All the right strategies to do for the Republicans, he didn't do. He hasn't done so far. Right. And so he wants his successor to be Gavin Newsom. Because let me explain why. Because you were nobodies until I arrived. Yeah. I'm going to pardon myself on the way out after I take$20 billion of plunder from being in the job and violating every sentence of the emoluments clause. I'm going to pardon myself on the way out, and I'm going to laugh at you guys.

29:14And by the way, let's let Newsom take over. Right. Because that'll be my big middle finger to you guys because I don't care about you guys. And Newsom is sort of Trump-like in a lot of ways. And the fact that they don't understand that makes me laugh. They're like, okay, let's coddle him this way. Let's kiss his a** away. The guy that really makes me laugh is this guy, Mark Rutta. You know who this guy is? The NATO guy. This guy's unbelievable. I was teasing on my podcast. He's got Trump's number, doesn't he? In what way? He's a huge a** kisser. Yeah, well, I'm saying. It's humiliating. It's humiliating.

29:45I was teasing people on my podcast saying I talked to Mark Rudder's trainer, and they're going to do deeper squats so he can get deeper up Trump's ****. But he is the **** kisser of **** kissers. And Mark Rudder should pick up the phone and call Mark Carney and get some life coaching from Mark Carney. And what are you doing? Right. First of all, Trump doesn't even respond to that. Number two, he's laughing at that. Yeah. If you think when you're in the cabinet meeting with Trump and you're telling Trump he's beautiful and he's tall and thin. You can tell it kind of disgusts him a little bit, right?

30:14He's laughing at these guys. Let me tell you something, okay? I was on the campaign with him when he was getting his a** kissed by somebody. And he would walk behind the thing. He'd look over at me and go, you believe this guy? Right. Believe this guy? That wasn't me. That would never be me. Okay? And by the way, he doesn't even like that. He doesn't even respect that. Right. So Mark Rudd, you probably don't listen to Newsweek's podcast, but if you do, get your head out of Trump's a**. What are you getting out of it? Right. I mean, actually, I think he's got, I mean, you probably only see his ankles dangling from Trump's a**.

30:41I mean, it's just revolting. I mean, I think it would be, it would, you, I, It would be one thing if he got something out of it, right? But all Trump does is **** all over NATO. But this is the other problem with the Republicans. Dudes, knock him around, man. Right. Knock him around. Force him into compliance. He responds to that. He responds to that. Get on the phone and say, hey, I just got off the phone with Schumer. We are going to throw you out. Just give me the heads up. If you don't stop your nonsense and take a deep breath and stop acting like a nut, But you blew up half the White House with a wrecking ball.

31:17Yeah. You got the other half of the White House decorated like your Liberace. It just looks terrible. Cut it out. Cut it out. Take a chill pill. Otherwise, we're going to throw you out. Yeah. And by the way, we got your number. We know you don't want us to win next time. And we have, unfortunately, overly kissed your a**. We're going to stop kissing your a** now because we've still got some time before the midterms. Knock it off. But they won't do that. You want to know why they won't do that? They got no spines. That's exactly right. That's right. This profile is in characters. That's why they won't do that.

31:45No, it really—I mean, it'd be interesting to see. Do any Republicans in Congress come out a little more forceful after they get shellacked in November? I don't know. But it's true that they— They're not going to do it. They're afraid of them. They want personal power more than they want to serve the people. Right. Right? What's Dan's name with the eyepatch? You know the guy I'm talking about? Oh, Crenshaw? Yeah. That guy? He just lost. Okay, so just think about it. Dan Crenshaw voted 99 % with Donald Trump. He still... Bye-bye. John Cornyn, 99 % he voted with Donald Trump. One time he voted, bye-bye.

32:22You know, I was on a Bill Maher show in 2019, trying to defend Trump. I was still on the Trump train. And I said something that Trump didn't like, because he was talking about the squad and going back to the countries. These are the four women in Congress. Whereas go back to the countries you originally came from. Three of them were born here. One was naturalized from Africa. I'm like, that's American nativism. That's racism. You shouldn't talk like that. So Bill hit me after this show. He said, oh, Trump's going to light you up tomorrow. He said, Trump's going to light me up. I said, I was out here defending him.

32:53He goes, no, no, no. You were 7 for 8 for Donald Trump. You've got to be 8 for 8. You've got to go 13 for 10. You've got to be 8 for 8. You've got to be, you know, I mean, in other words, the math kit doesn't work. Right. It's all or nothing. All or nothing. And so Cornyn, 99 % votes for the guy. Forget about it. Crenshaw, 99 % votes for the guy. Forget about it. That's how it works. And it's amazing that some of them still don't pick up on this years later, right? I mean, I saw Cornyn out there reading the art of the deal, like taking pictures of himself, like basting, glazing the president. And he's still not even going to get anything out of it.

33:26It's amazing, right? Have a little respect. Been in the Senate 36 years. You know, take a powder. Why don't you grow some balls like Adam Kissinger and take a powder at this point and tell the people the truth. They know it already. Tell them the truth. By the way, Trump's approval rate. He's minus 45. Yeah. He's not a popular president. He's down by where Jimmy Carter is right now. And he doesn't care because he's not running for re-election. And he, you know, I don't know. Maybe we'll never know why he did this. But, you know, I've got Epstein up there as one of the reasons. You know, who knows?

34:01Who knows what's going on? We do know that Trump's trying to make money off the White House. That we know. I think it's that. And I think that he wants to be a great— I would just say follow the money. Sure. You guys are investigative reporters. Follow the money, and then we'll get a real answer why Trump is where he is. Well, so while I have you, I want to ask you a little bit on sort of economics. You're a hedge fund guy, business guy. I've been around. So we're about a year out today, this week, from Liberation Day. You called it the Trump slump, the tariffs. They're hardest. But, I mean, to me, the tariffs seem idiotic, but I don't really know anything.

34:36But all these people that were saying that the economy was going to go into a recession or we were going to spark a global downturn with this hasn't happened. Was that all overblown or is it because of the backlash in the markets that got Trump to back down? Well, that's what happened. So, I mean, you took in$200 billion, which on the overall size and scale of the GDP wasn't monumental. If you left the tariffs at 140 percent here. Remember when he came down from Mount Evil like Orange Moses with the tablet? Yeah. Okay. You know, so, I mean, that was a ridiculous thing. So he had to walk all of that back.

35:11But he put a consumption tax on the American people. And the consumption tax was roughly$200 billion. And it was illegal. and the Supreme Court said it was illegal because you can't tax the American public without representation. That's the whole point of the revolution. So the Supreme Court ruled against them. He cried like a baby. The 121 section that he's using won't be enforceable either. So the tariffs have to be rolled back and rebated. So it was just an asinine thing to do to the country. It did slow down growth. It did slow down consumption. He inherited a growing economy from Biden with a declining inflation.

35:49Now he's got a flatlining economy with rising inflation. So he's done everything that you could do wrong, he's done, okay? Create tremendous amount of uncertainty for businesses, large and small, corporations, et cetera, through the tariffs, the push-pull on the tariffs. Go to war, okay? Knock prices through the roof. Energy shock. Particularly on energy. go after people in the streets, okay, and have violent demonstrations of going after people in the streets. Because what we know about that is that it actually dims economic innovation and it creates a lot of fear. I don't know the number of people that we have living in the country that shouldn't be here.

36:29But again, you could like those people or dislike those people. I'm not a xenophobe. They're in the country and they're working and they're probably paying sales taxes and other forms of taxes, and they're actually contributing to the GDP. If you want to scare the living daylights out of them, you're going to dim innovation. So he has caused slower growth. He has caused greater uncertainty. He has crushed the tourism market. Yeah. I noticed that coming back into the country from Mexico last month. Nobody. Crushed it. Okay. You know, I was down in Florida. I take the kids on the Disney cruise. Don't judge me.

37:05I'm always going to Disney cruise in August. And the guy drives me around. I said, how are we doing? He said, there's no Canadians. They won't come anymore. The Canadians are all in Mexico. Yeah. So the Canadians are going to Mexico. He took them$85 billion taken out of tourism. Right. Jackass. I mean, there's no reason for this. Yeah. He's hurt us in every which way possible. But we're a Brazilian economy. You didn't bring this up, but I'm a crypto guy. He hurt the crypto markets. Because he had a grift on them. Right. So he said, okay, we're going to launch a Melania and a Trump coin before I become a Norgue.

37:42I'm going to take$600 million,$800 million for myself. Those coins are down 97%. And all it did was slow down all of the regulatory promise. We couldn't get the Clarity Act done because of that. And other reasons. Interesting. He's a ****. You want to go after our NATO allies? You got Army captains hiring lawyers, and they're asking the lawyers the following questions. If they tell me to go fight and take over Greenland, which is a violation of the NATO treaty, is that an illegal order, and should I accept the legal? They've got to have legal advice. Right. This is what Trump's doing to our people.

38:19Terrible. No, I know. We didn't even talk about Hegseth. I mean, another moron. Yeah, what's— Do you know what you're saying? Yeah, I work with him at Fox. He's not a dumb guy. He went to Princeton. He was in the Army. He's a dumb guy. He's not a dumb guy, but he's nuts. Yeah. Okay? And he's out to prove something, and he's a yes man for Donald Trump, and it's revolting. Yeah. I mean, you went from Jim Mattis to Pete Eggson. Yeah. Oh, my God. Right. A weekend Fox News anchor is now running a global war. It's a little bit terrifying. Anthony, you had a good essay on fortune. You know, I'm going to just say something about that.

38:56I wouldn't mind that if they took a servant leadership role. I actually believe you could put somebody in a position like that if the first thing that they have in their brain is, okay, I don't know anything. So I'm going to surround myself with experts. Remember, the best presidents don't have the answers. The best presidents know how to ask the questions. And then they can formulate an answer as a result of good questions. Right? That was Jack Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I don't mind dropping somebody like Hegseth into the Department of Defense, which I will never call it the other thing.

39:32I don't mind that, but I mind the approach. Right. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Put him there as a figurehead, as kind of like this raw, raw cheerleader, get recruitment back up. If that's what the troops like, by all means. But him as a war planner is terrifying. Yeah. Well, because of the way – because of his attitude. Also, his rhetoric. Yeah. You like talking about this stuff like sinking ships and bombing people. Right. Like raining death from the sky. Right. Can you imagine Dwight Eisenhower talking about that? These guys did pain these people that civilians were getting killed. Pain these people that the war was causing all of this havoc.

40:09It's the same way. It's like their social media strategy of putting up these thrill videos or these sizzle reels of us bombing different things and then interspersed with clips of NFL touchdowns. It's like it's gross. Even if you're the most rah-rah patriot pro-war guy, it's just gross. That's not what it is. It's a terrible look for the United States. It's a terrible look. I wanted to ask you about this fortune essay that you wrote where you invoke the hubris generally and also the fall of Rome. And you sort of make this argument that there's a small number of people that have accumulated all of this influence that now rivals some sovereign governments and how that happened in Rome and how it's happening now.

40:50With all due respect, though, you're a hedge fund guy. Aren't you one of those sort of influential elites? Yeah, I'm not as rich as a lot of those. Listen, I'm a financially independent guy. I've done quite well. And I would say that I'm in that sphere of influence, which is why I think I feel I have some standing to criticize it. I think that what Cicero said and the point that I was making in that essay is that the process, we have to subordinate ourselves to the process. The founders understood that we had to shackle ourselves due to our greed, our impulses of ego, our self-aggrandizement, our willingness and need for power.

41:30Which, by the way, I am susceptible to that, which I've written about. I went to go work for Trump. So you have to do—remember what Ulysses—remember what he did. He tied himself to the mast. He told his sailors, don't listen to the siren call of the mermaids. you're going to fall into the gharibnus, you're going to fall into the whirlpool. And he tied himself to the mast. That was Homer giving you a metaphor about we need systems, we need processes in place to protect ourselves from our own human nature. So what did the founders wanted? They wanted decentralization of power. The founders wanted the government off your back so that you could experience what J.S.

42:11Mill and John Locke talked about was your individual liberty, It's sort of this Western canon of Western individualism, right? And so what's happening now, what always happens is a group of people figure out the system. They gain the system. They use their power and influence over the system. And then they corrupt the system and they tilt the system. So the system's tilting now. That's very bad because a guy like me, the 1972 version of me at age eight, I'm looking up thinking, hey, man, I'm going to make it in this country. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption in the 70s. I'm not saying there wasn't diabolical behavior.

42:47There certainly was. But there was way more respect for the system and way more respect, military respect, U.S. Army respect. Remember, 80 percent of the Congress was in the Army. Yeah. And they've all fought in the Second World War, the Korean War. So they had a respect for the Constitution and for the checks and balances in the system. We don't have that anymore. And I'm saying that's a very big danger. If you read Gibbon on the fall of the Roman Empire, you got a huge concentration of power, and then you got an end of the processes. Cicero said it better than me. We are slaves to the law in order to be free.

43:22And so what the United States needs right now is a renewal and a restatement. Hey, fellas, ladies and gentlemen, how did we get here? How did we become the most prosperous country ever in the history of the world? Because we abided by the system. We subordinate ourselves to the system. So that included monopolies getting broken up. That included people recognizing that they had some nobles obliged. It wasn't people standing around saying, hey, I got to be the first trillionaire. So what have I got to do to game the system, right? So Citizens United, to me, is one of the most terrible Supreme Court decisions.

43:57One of the original sins, I think, of where we are now. Yeah. So there was a Supreme Court case called Plessy v. Ferguson. And so just briefly, the court ruled in Plessy versus Ferguson after the Civil War that you could have segregation. You could have separate but equal facilities for people. And this really intensified the racism and the segregation, particularly in the South. It took 80 years. The Supreme Court case, Brown versus Board of Education, sort of rectified Plessy. Right. Plessy is what gave us Jim Crow and then Brown. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and Brown sort of created the process of desegregation and ultimately the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which tried to make the country fairer.

44:42The Supreme Court has its own plessy of today. They've created a separate but equal democracy. The Citizens United, you're doing seven times the donations in 15 years to political activism, political action committees. candidates and what's happening. The whole legislative agenda has skewed towards big business, big pharma, tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate welfare. United States believes in socialism. We believe in agra subsidies, pharma subsidies, big business subsidies, accelerated depreciation and tax cuts for the rich. We don't like giving it to the poor people, But we are huge corporate socialist fans.

45:33Yeah. And this is all a direct byproduct of Citizens United, and that has to be ended or has to be repealed or needs a new Supreme Court case to say, hey, we got this wrong, like we got Plessy versus Ferguson. Yeah. I want to play, before I let you go, Anthony, this clip from your show, or I think maybe it was just from your social media. Mickey, can we bring it up? You're talking about the American dream. The American dream, is it still alive? I believe it is. Could we do things to renew the American dream? And could we come up with policies that would be better for us as Americans? Yes, I do believe that.

46:07I don't want to be that negative bandwagon person saying that it's dead. It's not dead. It's just been impaired. We've made things for the middle income people and for the working class people harder to afford. And so that complicates things. You know, my dad, $32 ,000 a year, he bought a$16 ,000 house and we lived in it very comfortably. That house is like $780 ,000 now. It's not a house that my parents could have afforded even today. His 1976 wages, when I priced them in 2016, 40 years later, David, they were down about 27%. So meaning his purchasing power was way down and it would have been impossible for him to afford the lifestyle that he was able to provide for us.

46:49I think that's an important thing. And I think there's some tragedy in that. I think we, as a group of people, we can fix that, but we need people in the jobs to think about it in a more macro way, less about their own political preservation and their own political power and more about serving the public. That really struck a chord with me because it just reminded me of, you know, I believe that, Carl. No, I think you're absolutely right. Totally fixable, but it's not fixable if we don't shift away from what we're doing right now. Well, I just remember, right, my dad, you know, we grew up in sort of like you, like suburban New York City, one income.

47:26My dad worked for the city, right? But we had a nice middle-class life. I could not have the life, my daughter could not have the life that I had, and that was only 20, 30 years ago. Now, with one, you know, it has to, my wife and I are both working, and even then it's a struggle to provide what my dad was able to provide on one income. So what What I'm saying is, what is a policy? What is the actual policy that one could run on that gets to this? There was an article in the New York Times this week about, you know, Democrats should run just like how JFK or FDR ran on like a chicken in every pot.

48:02Democrats should run on a house by 30. A house by 30. We're going to figure out how to get every American who wants a home into a home by the age of 30 via subsidies or whatever. I'm pretty sure it was Hoover that ran on a chicken. Is it Hoover? Yeah. Sorry. But it's really not that complicated of a question. Yeah. But again, you got to change the macro thought process. You have to change the vision. So let me just say this quickly. This is an amazing country, but it's a new country. Yeah. And this country doesn't have the ancestral cultures of Italy, France, Germany. Even though our government is the longest existing form of government currently, you know, it's a 250-year running story.

48:43and the other governments have switched over in these other countries. They have ancestral cultures. We don't. They also have this gigantic melting pot. So let me tell you what happens in this country. We get our a** kicked every 80 years. Why is 80 years important? Because we lose generational memory. After 80 years, whoever fought in the Revolutionary War is dead by the time you get to the Civil War. Okay, and so we go to the Revolution 1776. Eighty years later, we have the great dunking of the Civil War. right we can't resolve the stain in the constitution through diplomacy or through politics so it ends up in a war right war is an extension of politics 600 ,000 people die we try to fix the constitution Lincoln dies we go 80 years again into the great depression okay so think of the United States as three 80 year or 83 year epics right right revolutionary war civil War, Civil War to the Depression, leads to the Second World War.

49:39And guess what, Carla? We're now 80 years out again. And so we have all of this institutional memory is gone. There's no political leaders in our sphere. I mean, the last veterans are 100 years old of the Second World War. Remember, after a war, you want to come together. 80 years later, you don't remember why, and now you start fighting with each other, right? Barbara Tuchman wrote about this in The Guns of August. So the first meta thing is how do we rebuild, renew, and redeem ourselves? We've done it every 80 years. You get the s*** beaten out of us, and then we look around and say, okay, this is screwed up.

50:14So how do you do that? Well, the first thing I do is you've got to restate the agenda. What's the agenda? The American government needs 25 to 50-year plans, and there has to be a bipartisan commitment to right-sizing education, fixing the K-12 system, rebuilding the infrastructure in the United States, jobs training, and we've got to work on deficit spending. We've got to figure out a way to curb our excessive expenditures, all of which are very resolvable, but it requires long-term planning. And then the second thing, you talk about having a house by the age of 30, well, you know how to do that.

50:50You have to incentivize the supply of housing. There's plenty of land. You've got to spill more houses, and you got to get the government off the backs of certain areas. It could be enterprise zones around the country that offer these huge tax savings, but you got to get people to get along. You know, AOC blocked 100 ,000 jobs going into Long Island City at 150 - Was that Amazon? For Amazon for$150 ,000 a year. That project went to Northern Virginia. Right. And Northern Virginia is thriving as a result of that. She didn't like the notion that that big corporation got the multi-billion dollar tax cut.

51:25I get that aspect of it. I sort of write about it. You're creating a lot of anger in the country, and the anger delves politically into populism. You get right-wing populism and left-wing populism, but I'm not about that. See, this is why I could never run for anything, because I'm not left or right. I really want to be about what's right or wrong for the country. Why could you run? Why could you run on that, on a popularist? Well, what party would I run in? Run as an independent. Well, first of all, run as a Democrat. So let's say I ran as a Democrat. The Democrats hate my a**. I work for Trump.

51:57Forget it. The hard left Democrats hate my a**. I can't run as a Republican. They're with Trump. Yeah. Can't run as a Democrat. If I ran as an independent, I'll lose like Ross Perot. How are you going to run? You can't run. So to me, I would rather be an agent of change and somebody that speaks the truth to the American people who offers this political and economic analysis and tells you, look, this is what we need to do. Now, if you want to do it, I'm there. Okay. I got a lot of life in me and a lot of energy, and I'm there to help do it. But that's where you got to start. You got to say, okay, we're going to a 25-year plan.

52:30You got to dial down the rhetoric. We have to end gerrymandering. We have to repeal Citizens United. We have to get these congressional districts to look more like the geometric shapes we would have recognized from middle school, not these jigsaw puzzles. You know, are we in a real democracy where the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians. If we do those things, we will heal and reset the country. This is a country of unbelievable innovation and resilience, okay? We're a quarter of a block away from where the Twin Towers stood, and we're in the new tower.

53:06We're in the Freedom Tower, right? Think about this country, okay? We know how to rebuild. We know how to regrow. We understand resilience. We understand how to dust ourselves off. We have a culture that embraces failure, okay, on the way to success. Okay, so all of these things, we could marshal all these resources, but if you're a trillionaire listening or a trillionaire wannabe listening, dial it back. First of all, it's a very bad look. Dial it back. Okay, you want to go on your yacht, stop posting it on Instagram because you're making yourself look bad, number one. A little bit of discretion.

53:39You're making yourself look bad, number one. Number two, we don't need this kind of jealousy. Yeah. And the other problem is do what Henry Ford did. Now, he was an anti-Semite and a bad guy in many ways, but he looked around and said, I'm doubling the wages of my workers. They've got to be able to afford the car that they're making in the assembly line. They've got to be in a single-family house, and the kids have got to go to a good public school. I don't want them descending on my Dearborn, Michigan mansion while I'm carving up my filet mignon, eating my caviar, and they're coming at me with a pitch pork and a torch.

54:10I don't want that. Right. So come on, guys. Cut it out. Here's the big problem. Ready? Talk to house. Realtor.com says the median household is about$380 ,000, the price of the house. So if you reverse engineer, you need about$160 ,000 not to be house rich and cash poor. What do you mean you could afford things? The median income in the country is$83 ,000. So people are missing dental appointments. They're missing prescription drugs. They get a fender bender. They won't go to the collision expert. You know, we've tightened these people because we're hitting them with the most regressive and the most pernicious form of taxation.

54:52That's inflation. Yeah. OK, you're spending the money. The money, the deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. Somebody's got to pay it. And so how are you going to pay it? You're going to inflate the money away. OK, my mother's house goes from$16 ,000 to$780 ,000. But if you priced it in gold, it was 450 ounces of gold in 1962 when they bought the house. It's 249 ounces of gold today. Because remember, gold was$35 an ounce back then. Now it's$4 ,300. So it's actually the house has actually gone down in value. Okay, but inflation tricks people because it looks like a big number. See what I mean?

55:31But the purchasing power is not there. Purchasing power, right. $100 goes where it used to. Forget about it. So come on, guys. We can fix it. Yeah. But you've got to wake up out of the fever that we're all in and out of the trance that we're all in. You know, Donald Trump's tweeting and his general stupidity about the world is not helping us. OK, moreover, the Democrats, that's probably the best thing that Trump has going for them. They're in complete disarray. Useless, yeah. And they're like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Which is why I think that if there ever was a time for a person to run on an independent platform, a common sense platform like this, I mean, I understand that the system can't.

56:04But there's a great duopoly. There's a great party duopoly. They choked it. They won't let it happen. After Ross Perot, you got to get 10 ,000. You came a little too close. You got to get 10 ,000 here, 10 ,000. It cost you 20. In 1992, it cost Ross Perot$18 million to get on the ballot of all 50 states. Over$100 million today. Yeah. So first of all, okay, I'm running for president. I'm raising money. The first$100 million, forget about the advertising, the social media. It's got to go to ballot processing to get my a** on the ballot. You see the barriers of entry that these people put together?

56:39Which, of course, is the point. To keep it. The point, yeah, you got to keep it. But this is so stupid because you're grinding the country into a period of time where half of the people are going to feel economically desperate and they're going to get pissed off at you in a way that's going to really change the country. You don't want that. You want to go back to something that we can all believe in. I think that's a great place to leave it. But Anthony Scaramucci, it's a real pleasure. Carl, thanks for inviting me. Thank you for knocking down the light behind you for dramatic effect during the whole podcast.

57:15You can tell we're running a real professional op here. The podcast is The Rest is Politics U.S. with Katty Kay, who's awesome in her own right. I wanted to ask you more about it. No, she's great. But, yeah, go check that out. You can find Anthony on CNN some nights. I really appreciate you bringing me down here to your beautiful studio. Yeah, no, the Mooch is great. thank you Anthony God bless man see you guys soon