205. Anthony Scaramucci: Why America Keeps Making the Same Mistakes

22:29That is horrific, greasy charm. Yeah, well, it's not charm. Okay, and that was the point that Gavin would make. I'm just telling you that it worked. By the way, he lost Iowa to Ted Cruz, but it was very close. And you remember he stepped out of the Iowa debate. You remember that whole nonsense? That's the reason he lost Iowa. Okay. If he hadn't stepped out of the Iowa debate to pull all that theatrical nonsense, he would have won in Iowa. He won in New Hampshire a week later. He won in South Carolina. He marched into Super Tuesday. And of course, that's when Jeb Bush dropped out after Trump slayed him in South Carolina.

23:07But listen, he's a politician, guys. He's a formidable politician. Oh yeah, listen. I get that. He's a formidable politician. And he has done ag, he is a virus. He got into the system and then he started exploding inside the system to hurt the system. And weirdly, my 11 day ill-fated career, at least I now had standing to intellectually articulate what he is doing, okay, to force the conversation. Okay. Now, he rarely comes after me now because it explodes my Twitter feed. It explodes my Instagram feed. And his attitude is, I'm just going to ignore the son of a bitch because he's a New Yorker like me.

23:55He's going to punch back. I'm not Ted Cruz where I'm going to sit there and take it. You know, our newsletter the week that Carney pulled the plug on these talks, we had a couple of interviews with some Canadian economists and professors. And one of them said that he made this really interesting comparison, said that Mark Carney was like Muhammad Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. And I just wonder, you see, I think the reason I heard you last week, I heard you on a recent episode of The Rest of the Politics of the US saying that Carney's now like the leader of the free world. Now, he's certainly become one of the most impressive political leaders in the world right now.

24:31But in part, I think that's because he is in so many ways an antidote to Trump. Carney's charming. Carney's genuinely charming. Carney's clever in a way that Trump's not. Carney understands the world economy in a way that Trump doesn't. And Carney also has really deep-rooted values. And I think it's the lack of values in your president that I think people find so utterly repellent. I'll say something to you, Alistair. You and I interviewed, I think Rory was unavailable at that time. So you and I, I stepped in for Rory and we interviewed Mark Carney prior to the primary race with Christian Phelan.

25:06And I think you guys also offered her a spot as well. I don't know if you remember that interview, but he said something in that interview and I called you after. I said, he is very tough, this guy, because he had preached in the interview about core principles. And he preached in the interview about not budging from those core principles. And that's what real leadership is, right? We both know politicians that are thermostats. That's Carney. Sets the coordinates. He tries to bring you there. And then we know politicians like Trump who are thermometers. They feel the heat in the room and then they express the heat back to the public.

25:45Carney's the guy that will try to cool the thing off and bring it directionally in a different direction. But the thing that's so impressive about Carney to me, and I've said this repeatedly, when you fight Trump, he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do. He flubbed this week. His team said, oh no, we didn't bait and switch Carney at the end. That's a bunch of lies. and then Trump's in the Oval Office saying yeah that's me of course I added more things and baited and switched them at the end okay so to me what I love about Carney is that you can predict what Carney's gonna do because because of those core principles that you're describing you're quite interesting

26:24Rory Stewart:because obviously unlike Alastair me you very much come from York you come from the finance industry you know Trump well and one of the things I've picked up talking to you is that you've also had deep connections into the United Arab Emirates, into Israel, both of which have become increasingly close to Trump. I mean, something quite interesting seems to be happening in the Gulf at the moment, where Saudi and Qatar are increasingly at loggerheads with the UAE. What do you think's going on there? What's the shift there that you're sensing? And what is Trump sensing there? And how does Israel and the UAE play into this whole game in Iran?

26:59I think that those areas, I'm going to make a very broad statement because I talk to a lot of people in those areas and I'm friends with a lot of people. Some of the families are actually clients of mine. But I think those areas welcome the return of Donald Trump. And I think if they would say to you, oh, he runs his country the way we run our countries, it's a family-centered governmental country. I say about the UAE, I don't know if they like me saying this or not, but I feel like that that's MBZ's home. I don't see it as a country as much as I see it as his home. You go to his home, you say nice things, you're polite to him, he'll treat you with unbelievable generosity and respect.

27:41If you're going to do things in his home like soil his carpet or throw China into the patio, he's going to be upset. And so it's not a country like the UK where you have civil rights, civil liberties and freedoms or in the United States, it's somebody's house. And so these guys looked at Trump's return and they said, okay, this is good for us because we know how to deal with him. He'll want a plane. He'll want us to make an investment in World Liberty Financial. He'll want us to do things to lucre up his family and therefore we'll have influence with him. But they learned the nasty thing about Trump that the loyalty is asymmetrical and it's asypical behavior.

28:22You don't get any reciprocity from Trump. He's the man that you take care of and that he does absolutely nothing for you. So those governments right now are sitting there flummoxed and they're frustrated. And if they were going to be honest, which of course they can't be, but if they were going to be honest, they say, well, if I prefer a Joe Biden, a Bill Clinton, or somebody that's more of a traditional politician than Donald Trump. But I don't think they're as close as you may think from the surface. I think there's a lot of anxiety about dealing with Trump. And I think in the Israeli perspective, there's also a lot of anxiety, guys.

28:59Maybe Netanyahu doesn't have the anxiety because he wants to stay out of jail. But I think the general population in Israel doesn't like the direction that Israel's brand has taken over the last three years. Rory mentioned Iran there. We get the feeling, and I think this is probably your view as well, that whatever the objectives and the reasons for him taking this action, that the Iranians are sitting there thinking, okay, we've taken quite a big hit, but we're winning this. Your second big catastrophe in the book relates to the US and war, and particularly what you call the mistake of war without taxes.

29:36And this is the post-911, the Bush administration, first Afghanistan, then Iraq, triple trillion dollar wars, where basically they were saying to the American people, don't worry, this isn't going to cost you too much. So just talk us through that. And also whether you think that Trump's Iran mistake is on a par with those. Yeah. Well, it's heading that way, but I think it's important because on the dark web, bin Laden, let's just go back to bin Laden. It's very important. Okay. We start a defensive response to Iraq invading Kuwait. And what do we do? We put two airstrips in Saudi Arabia, near Mecca and Medina.

30:18Bin Laden says, I don't like that. That's crusading. That's sacrilegious. Get those airstrips out of there. And Dick Cheney gives him the bird. Now let's remind everybody that bin Laden, Osama bin Laden was one of our allies. We were sending surface to air missiles to take out Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan to You beat the Russians out of Afghanistan or the USSR. So bin Laden then goes to the Americans and says, you gave me all the military stuff. That's great. I want money for schools here in Afghanistan. The Americans say no, because they're madrasses and they'll be fomenting radicalism. So bin Laden is actually mad about that, but he's okay with it.

31:01He gets super mad when they put the air bases in Saudi Arabia. And so the terrorism starts. right? You bomb the World Trade Center, February 1993. You take out the embassies in Africa, 1998, right? Remember, Clinton is shooting missiles into bin Laden's tents in 1998, in August of 1998. And then, of course, you have the USS Cole in Yemen explodes, okay? And so we have this, bin Laden is writing on the dark web, I took out the Russians, I'm now going to destroy the American empire. Well, how are you going to do that? I'm going to hit them on their soil. They're going to wildly overreact and come here and bomb my mud huts.

31:42And of course, this life is temporary for us and we believe in a post-life and we don't care. Bomb our mud huts. You're going to bleed out your treasury. You're going to spill your blood and guts in our homeland trying to beat us. Oh, and the other thing is you're going to take away your own civil liberties. Look at the Patriot Act and look what that was in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9-11. And so what I write in the book is that it was catastrophic to go to war and overreact like that. Now, George Soros is a pariah to the conservatives, but he wrote an op-ed in late 2001, and he begged the United States not to overreact in the Middle East.

32:21He said, please, I know 3 ,000 people died, unspeakable tragedy. Do not overreact in the Middle East because you're going to get into a quagmire like the Soviets did in Afghanistan. Nobody listened to him, guys. And then remember the Bush versus Gore debate in 2000 was about our surplus. We had printed a governmental surplus in 2000,$240 billion. I write about how we were able to do that, right? With all those pay as you go laws. Bush eliminates those. He cuts the taxes in March of 2001. And then he goes to war in Afghanistan, October 2001. He goes to war in Iraq, March of 2003. He cuts taxes twice going into those wars.

33:08We could have had a millionaire patriotic tax and restored the Clinton tax code for people making over a half million dollars a year with a closed deficit gap. He doesn't do that, guys. And so he ends his term. I want you you guys to think about this. We go from George Washington to George W. Bush,$7 trillion of deficit spending. The ensuing presidents,$33 trillion of deficit spending, and you can trace it back. So my American friends are not going to like me saying this. Bin Laden is winning. Okay. And you guys are Brits. You probably want to understand this baseball expression, but it's the bottom of the ninth.

33:45It's the bottom of the sixth inning. Bin Laden is up 6-1. He's dead, but what he said we would do is actually happened to America. He's crippled us because we didn't take a beat and look at what he was doing. So this second catastrophic decision, I think, has been a disaster for us. And I think it's also, even the way we handle our lobbying circuit with the military, and we got ourselves down. Guys, we got ourselves down to five defense contractors. Remember, we're going to have a peace dividend. We have 51 defense contractors. We allowed them to consolidate. And now we've crippled the way we procure equipment.

34:25Guys, we're spending a trillion dollars. How about Iran? We're spending a trillion dollars on the military. We got five months worth of munitions. What are you guys doing with the money? What are you guys doing with the money? So yes, this is all tied in. And you're saying, is this a disaster in Iran? It's an unmitigated disaster. And they were planning for this for 20 years. That's why they had the Mosaic Defense Doctrine. That's why when they got decapitated, all those leaders jumped up. Why they have semi-autonomous units. Why they closed the Strait of Hormuz. Anthony, let's… It's all there.

34:57I'm sorry I'm ventilating like that, but I'm just trying to explain to you what I saw, you know?

35:03Rory Stewart:Well, so one of the interesting things, I guess, is that in some ways, if you're in Europe, the narrative is not the United States is a disaster. The narrative in Europe is often, and you'll find this with the kind of fancy conferences you go to, that the U.S. is doing very well. The European economies were the same size as the U.S. economy in 2008. The U.S. economy is now 50 % larger. Famously, the GDP per capita in Mississippi is now greater than that in the United Kingdom. The U.S. stock market is now 70 % of global stock markets. We feel that we're being completely left behind in defense, security, cloud computing, AI.

35:41Rory Stewart:So, there's a very interesting thing that maybe you need to explain to a European audience, which is how does your kind of gloomer narrative sit with the fact that many other people, particularly in your industry, looking at the United States says, wow, this is really impressive. And in fact, the US's relative position against China has significantly improved over the last few years. So, Rory, everything you're saying is true, but this could have been handled so much better. We could have had a rainy day fund in the United States. We didn't need to have$40 trillion of debt. We could have had better strategic planning.

36:18The United States is benefiting from a culture of risk-taking and a culture of innovation. And what you're saying may bail us out. I am an optimist like you. Tom Malthus said we were going to starve. We out-innovated the way we delivered food. We had more people dying from obesity than we did starvation. We were told that we were going to run out of oil. We figured out fracking and better offshore drilling and better energy efficiency for our air conditioning. So I'm a believer that we're going to fix all of this, but no, this is a disaster for the United States. And Europe is a different problem.

36:53Too much bureaucracy, not enough culturalization for risk-taking. You've got a lot of stratification in Europe and people are afraid to lose their standing if they fail at something. That's a totally different problem. But this is about how do you make the United States better? And what did we do wrong? Can we reflect on what we did wrong so that we can stop repeating the mistakes and create what I think will be a fairer, more economically aspirational society? So I'm not trying to compare it to Europe, but I get you. People came here, Gary and I toured Little Italy together, Gary Lineker. And he said to me, man, all these Europeans can't believe how wealthy the US is comparatively.

37:34And I get all of that. But let me tell you something. We are staring at a$40 trillion potential debt crisis. It's gotten so bad that one of the guys that broke the Bank of England in 1992, the Secretary of Treasury, is trying to manipulate the treasury markets in the United States by bringing down the long end of the curve. Okay. And I'm telling you that that usually ends in tears, Rory. So I hear you. I mean, I love this country. I wrote, this is a love note to the country, by the way. This is not a, I hate that. This is, hey, this is some mistakes we made. We got a great group of people here.

38:12Can we dial down the rancor and the partisan rhetoric? And can we work on things that could fix the country?

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39:52Your third big catastrophic betrayal mistake, call it what you want, relates to the post-crash decisions that were taken. And there, I think we are, you know, you can see directly the kind of thread to populism and Trump and all that's gone with it. and you know what i guess the problem there tell me if i've read your book right on this is that essentially what you had was socialism which i know is a dirty word in the united states for most americans you had socialism for the bankers who basically had screwed the whole world and you had austerity for the poor yeah right and we had a we had a version of that here as well so but what i can't get my head around is how did the people who were the victims of that see donald trump who is this sort of predator, inherited wealth billionaire, corrupt, crooked, all the stuff that people have known about.

40:46He's been one of the most famous people in America for years. How did they see him as the guy to get them out of this? All right. So that third decision was, I basically say, we gave a trillion to the banks. We gave no money for middle income or low income relief. It got everybody angry. And said differently, 5 ,000 people on Wall Street made$1 million or more in a bonus in 2008 as a result of that bank bailout. And that really upset a lot of people. But Trump, and I saw it, guys, again, 71 campaign stops. Trump was an avatar for their anger. Trump always felt left out. Trump always had a grievance.

41:25So maybe he was just channeling that. But those people galvanized around him. And I think I told you guys this story once and I'll repeat it. I'm in New Mexico asking people why they are at the Trump rally. And they're saying, oh, well, the factory closed here. You think you're in New Mexico, new New Mexico, that would be Mexico. That's where the factory went. Mr. Trump is going to bring the jobs back. He's a multi-billionaire. He's a business leader. This was this imaging that the apprentice gave him, you see. And Mark Burnett sort of crafted that image for him. Okay. And so people believed it.

41:57And when he showed up with his hat on and he said some derisive things or derogatory things about the establishment, people are like, yeah, burn it down. Guys, you know how this works, right? Bono had one of the best lines about Ireland, right? He said, you know, when I drive around and I see the house in America, I say, oh, I could probably live in that house someday if I work hard enough. When I see that same house in Ireland, burn it down. I'm never going to get there. Bono has got there, by the way. Bono's made it. Don't worry. Okay, but he tells a great story about culture. When you feel left out and you feel there's a ceiling over your head you can't bust through, burn it down.

42:33And so those people looked at Trump and said, he's going to burn it down. I want him to burn it down. He'll have Alistair Rory talking shit about him. He's going to have Anthony Scaramucci talking shit about him. Good. They're part of the media. They're part of the elite. Burn it down. And that's something that he understood better than anybody else. And then he flipped it on him. He said, oh, no more forever wars. Now we got a forever war. Oh, you're going to get the Epstein files. Poor Pam Bondi, very naive. She thought he meant that. He's calling her and saying, hey, idiot, I'm actually in the Epstein files.

43:06We're not letting the Epstein files out. Okay, let's get Todd in the position. And then he said, oh, affordability? No, no, I don't care about affordability. I'm going to dope you guys on meme coins. I'm going to grift the plane from the Middle East. I'm going to make hundreds of millions of dollars insider trading because I'm technically allowed to do it. And by the way, your gas prices are going to$5. So what? And by the way, you saw him in the Oval Office last week said, oh, gas prices are lower. The journalist said, no, they're not, sir. They're up 37%. Fake news, he said. It was fake news.

43:43Rory Stewart:so anthony one of the things that was surprising in the first trump victory but even more surprising the second trump victory because it became clearer there is that you can't explain the majority of his vote just by post-industrial areas that were wiped out by chinese competition he's getting a huge number of votes from rural service areas that were less affected by china he's getting a huge out a vote, frankly, just from white men, like the majority of white men in the United States vote for Trump. 54 % of the white women. A lot of traditional Republicans. So, I mean, I sometimes wonder whether we don't put too much emphasis on the kind of J.D.

44:22Rory Stewart:Vance vision of these kind of terrible stories around factories that were wiped out and China and industrial policy. But if you look at the map of Trump's election, there are many, many areas which are not like that that voted for Trump. Many people who are not like that who voted for Trump. So I appreciate that analysis, but I'm going to simplify it for you, okay? We have a crazy uncle. He's spewing nonsense from the White House, and we're in the middle of COVID. Okay, you know what? Let's get rid of the crazy uncle, and we'll bring in the benevolent but very benign, inert grandfather. So knock out the crazy uncle.

45:01Okay, it turns out that the benevolent grandfather is sun setting on us. Okay. So it looks like he's heading into the house of dementia. So let's bring in the younger sister. Oh, wait a minute. We don't even know who the younger sister is. And you guys know this the day prior to the election, people were Googling in the United States, did Joe Biden drop out? That was the most searchable term on Google. So now I've got the unknown untested sister versus the crazy uncle. Oh, wait a minute. It wasn't so bad with the crazy uncle you know what let's bring back the crazy uncle and forget about the unknown sister so i appreciate the analysis that you're talking about but this was a lesser of evil to evil's decisions by the americans that's why he got the popular vote that's why he won the seven swing

45:52Rory Stewart:states one small thing and then back to alice because i'm talking too much but the other thing that i pick up from trump supporters in the states is how many people continue to be very very angry with what they call woke culture. You know, I just got an email from a guy that I used to teach with, who I very much thought was from the left, saying that he hated Trump, but he was going to vote for him anyway because he was so angry. And then he lists off a whole series of complaints, which are basically culture war complaints. And that's pretty uncomfortable for Alistair and I, because I guess we're pretty woke.

46:27Rory Stewart:But talk us through that and try to, you know, to help European, American, British listeners understand why a kind of moderate American might be angry with the Democratic Party and be tempted to vote for Trump. So, okay, raise your hand on this podcast if you're an atheist. Okay, raise your hand. Oh, there's two people that are not raising their hand, but there are two people on the podcast that are athlete atheists, and we have one practicing Catholic. Okay, so you've got to understand the country. This is a religious country. You've got to understand the country. There's a Bible belt. There's even a buckle on the Bible belt where there's extreme religious orthodoxy.

47:01So when the woke culture steps in with all this identity politics in the United States, country doesn't like it. 15 % of the people like the woke culture. 85 % of the people really don't like the woke culture. And in comes the general, the general Napoleon of the culture war. That would be Donald Trump. Trump, nobody understands the culture war in this country better than Donald Trump. And what did they write about Napoleon? He could see the battlefield. He could anticipate where the generals were moving, the opposing generals, even before they made the decisions. Napoleon said, okay, he's going in that direction.

47:39I got to do this to beat him. And Trump does that every single time. Example, we had 10 transgender kids transition and play women's athletics in high schools. 10, population 340 million people. Trump spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that issue and flooded the zone in those states. He definitely is a malicious dude. He's a horrific dude. You know who runs the Democratic Party in the United States? Nobody. Okay. That would be Donald J. Trump. He's the leader. He's the leader of the Democratic Party because he's the white cue ball on the billiard table. He smashes into them and they go in 15 different directions on the billiard table rather than consolidating and saying, hey, we're going with Newsom.

48:24I hate his non-woke policies, but he's a big, tall white guy. And in this culture right now, he'll probably win. We're going with Newsom. No, we're not going to do that. We got to go with the alt-left or the lunatic. And by the way, AOC is a good general in the culture. We're not as smart as Trump, but AOC did two things after the November 2024 election. She dropped her pronoun usage on her Twitter feed. She said, well, a lot of people in my district split the vote. They voted for me and voted for Trump. I asked them why. They hate the woke culture. And then she said two weeks ago, woke one was crazy.

49:02What did she mean by that? She meant that all the stuff that the Democrats had got hung up on damaged the Democrats. Hey, this is a religious country and these people don't like the woke shit and we better or knock it off if we want to win. That's what she said. Mooch, you keep telling me it's a religious country, right? This feels like the least Christian government. I am an atheist. This feels like the least Christian government pretty much anywhere on the planet right now. Oh, that's true. Okay. No question. And the other thing, going back to Europe, I've just spent two and a half weeks going around Europe into nine European countries.

49:35You know one of the nicest things about the whole trip was constantly running into Americans, telling me how much nicer it was here. The Trump, Vance, Musk, MAGA crowd are deliberately trying to destroy the reputation of the UK and of Europe. Why are they doing that? And what's your advice to us about how we fight back against that? Well, they're doing that because they're threatened by it. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so the number one threat for conservatives for 30 years was a woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So they spent multiple billions of dollars to destroy her. Okay. The number one threat right now is Gavin Newsom.

50:19And they are spending, and Fox News spends an hour a night trying to take out Gavin Newsom. And I don't get texts from Corny, but I do get texts from Gavin because he watches the show and he texts me. And I said, Gavin, you know what? You have the hottest economy right now. There are more startups in California, which is quote unquote a liberal state. than any other state in the nation. You can combine Florida and Texas. He's got way more startups. Okay. And he would be the fourth largest economy if you took him out of the United States. And when he got the job, it was the fifth largest economy.

50:54So Gavin, you better shut down this narrative because the conservatives are very smart. Okay. British culture and your freedoms there and the freedom of press. Let me shit on those. Let me take your shot. You know what good politicians do, they find your strength and they start dumping on it. Remember what Obama did to Romney. He said, you're losing jobs and your healthcare with Romney. And Romney was a job creator. What did Bush do to Kerry? He was on a airstrip in Texas drinking beer. Kerry was fighting and got the Purple Heart in Vietnam. He got swift boat guys together and he said, Kerry was a coward in Vietnam.

51:35Okay, so he took Carrie's strength and he went right after it. And so what the conservatives are doing to the UK and Europe, they're looking at the strength of your culture and they're attacking it to create an us versus them. And there's only one way to stop that and that is to rebut it. Grow some carny cajonis and have your politicians push back on it and invite people to the country.

52:02Rory Stewart:Final one for me, Anthony, and strong recommendation on people to look at your book. But one of the terrifying things is we're not even half the way through Trump. Yeah, 29 months ago. It's unbelievable what he's managed to pull off in less than half his presidency. I mean, it feels completely different to the 2016 presidency. And when we think about Greenland, when we think about Canada, when we think about Iran, when we think about the far-right populists in Europe, when we think about tariff wars, when we think about immigration, when we think about ICE. What's your fear of what this guy can do in the next two and a half years?

52:35Rory Stewart:What is the world looking at? What could he do to the world in the next two and a half years? I think it's very sad for me. And again, I'm not trying to be doom and gloom because I do believe we can fix this stuff unless the Congress can check him. If you're telling me the Democrats win the House, seems likely, and he doesn't have any election interference and that happens, they'll probably be able to slow him down a little bit, Rory. If he loses in Texas and Tallarico wins, they're going to slow him down a little. But if they don't slow him down, I think he goes exponential after the midterms because he's 80 years old, on his way to 81.

53:11He's going to want to make 20 to 40 more billion dollars for himself. And he doesn't care. He's a nihilist. He'll want a rampage. And I also think he's a cipher for Vladimir Putin. And I think he's got a checklist from Vladimir Putin. I think he's afraid of Putin and he lets Putin know at every opportunity that he can that he's there for him. He's going to help him to stand he can in Ukraine. He's going to do all the different things that Vlad wants him to do. I'm going to split Canada and America. You want me to do that? I'm going to piss off the UK. You want me to do that? I'm going to break our alliances.

53:44I'm going to bring America down a peg and I'm going to make the world think about America the way they think about Russia and China. Isn't that what you want me to do, Vlad? Yes, that's what I want you to do. Okay. So he's going to spend two more years trying to do that. And so either the American political leaders are going to say, hey, that's enough now. We're not going to take it anymore. Or they're going to let him continue to do that. And my biggest upset is with these Republicans in the Senate, because they've been told by their political consultants, look how powerful he is. He just got Darlene Graham to win in South Carolina.

54:17Look how powerful he is. take a back seat, wait the son of a bitch out. But it's 29 months, guys. That's a car lease. We got a car lease to go with this nut job running the country. And he's going to do heavy damage to the country. And he's going to do heavy damage to the world. And by the way, it's systemic stuff, guys. It's not like a lot of guys say, oh, Trump's leaving, and then we're going to go back to where That's not going to happen. No, no. What you've just described there is a KGB agent managing a Russian asset. Now, normally when that happens, it's either because the agent, Philby style, has an ideological attachment to the politics and values of the people who are running them, or the agency has got something on the agent.

55:06So what has he got on Trump? Come on, Mooch, you can tell me. Well, I believe that. And I believe that it's hard to prove what he's got. I don't have the smoking gun. Okay. But if you read the Steele dossier, and a lot of people have tried to discredit the Steele dossier, but just remember one thing about the Steele dossier, it was commissioned by the Rubio campaign. And there were billionaires that helped to pay for the thing. And when they read it, they took some things out of the Steele dossier. Okay. Because they said, Okay, we don't want that out in the public domain. So they took it out of the dossier.

55:43And again, conservatives did a good job of discrediting Chris and discrediting the Steele dossier. But I think they nailed Trump. Okay, and I don't think it's a pee-pee tape. Okay, that's always the sideshow, guys. You know, we're going to Moscow to tell them not to attack NATO. That's the sideshow. That's the lie. That's the lie. Yeah, that's the lie. Okay, and so the lie is the pee-pee tape. I think it's way worse than that. and I think it's something that would really question Trump's personal identity and his misrepresentations that he's making about himself to his conservative groups and I think it's something that paralyzes Trump and I'll leave it there Alistair because you know to me I don't have the smoking gun proof and this is a British broadcast and you've got you know you guys have to have some qualifiers in there but I think they got them and just read Craig Unger's book you'll see all the different things that they've done to Trump over the years.

56:37And by the way, guys, when the windows open and you hear clippity-clop, it is a horse. It's not a zebra. Don't overthink the goddamn thing. Everything that he does, he goes right down the Putin checklist to hurt our country. Every single thing he does. He's not the only guy bought by Putin in this country. There's a lot of other Republicans that are bought by Putin. Well, he's not the only one in this country. We've got one of them went to jail recently. Right, exactly. So these guys do a good job of infiltrating us. Yeah. When the fool story is finally out there, you and I will know that we've been ahead of the game on this.

57:09But as you say, you have to put qualifiers in there from time to time. Yeah. I put the qualifiers in there, but they got them. They got the guy. And he acts like a guy that's been got. And listen, let me say something, okay? Because Rory brought it up. Trump won. He was a fraidy cat going into the presidency. I was there. So he brought in all establishment Republicans. Rory, we would have been better off if he won in 2020. There would have been no insurrection. He would have been in the rearview mirror and we would have had establishment Republicans working with him in his second term. He would have done batshit crazy stuff, but we would have corrected him.

57:46He had four years in the wilderness to say, hey man, I didn't steal enough money first time. If we get back, we're going to steal a lot more money. Oh, hey, we had Republicans in here that were holding me back. No, no, we're not going to have any of those guys. We're going to have sycophants in here. They're going to let me do whatever the hell I want. Oh, and then because I got Vlad, we got to challenge the electoral integrity of the United States to make people think that our elections are falsified. Okay. So all those things happened because of that interregnum period of Joe Biden. So to me, it's been way worse than people thought, way worse than I thought.

58:27And unfortunately, unless the Republicans check him, it's going to be worse after the midterms. But if you want to read about how he got to the son of a bitch, I gave a 35-year distillation. No, we don't want to read that. I want you to read about it. All right, there you go. I've already read it. I read it before it came out. Can I do a plug, Anthony, on your behalf? I mean, it's unbelievable. The guy read it and praised it. Now he's shitting on it, the guy.

58:52Rory Stewart:It's called All the Wrong Moves, Anthony Scaramucci. It's an extraordinary account where Anthony attempts to get into very deep questions of American identity, history, economics, culture, take us to where he thinks the problems are and where the solutions are. And spoiler alert, you'll find that Anthony in some ways, Wall Street phenomenon though he is, is surprisingly a little bit more left wing than people might expect. But anyway, open the book and I think you'll find it something that's interesting to read. I got left wing when I got older because I realized what you guys said, the corporations believe in the welfare and they believe in socialism for me, not for thee.

59:30See, that's the problem. So you have to even the playing field now. So I got more left leaning as I got older because we have to recreate that aspirational society that I grew up in. But I am a free market person. I am about unequal outcomes, but we have to create a platform of equal opportunity in this country that is sorely missing right now. And it's something I write about in the book. Well, Mooch, it's lovely, lovely to talk to you. And we'll see you very, very soon. So guys, just a shout out on the book tour. I'll be in the UK with Intelligence Squared from September 14th to the 18th. And of course, I'll be in the United States, October 2nd to the 11th, touring different cities.

1:00:11Of course, I'll be there to sign books, answer questions. And I appreciate you guys bringing me on. Thank you. You made me famous. You made my career, Alistair. Made you popular. I'm admitting that to all of your loyal followers. We made you popular. You're my brand manager, Alistair Campbell. You made my career. But you did tell me, oh, the podcast will be one hour a week. It turns out that I'm off one hour a week. That's what it turns out. You didn't mention the one hour a week was the time that I would be able to have to myself. See you soon.

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