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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 60: Anthony Scaramucci
Episode Overview
In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics
Leading*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview Anthony Scaramucci, former Communications Director for Donald Trump. Scaramucci discusses his brief tenure in the White House, the implications of a potential second Trump presidency, and the current political landscape in the United States.
Key Themes and Discussions
Scaramucci's Background
- Early Life: Grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood; father was a crane operator.
- Education: Attended Tufts University and Harvard Law School.
- Career Path: Transitioned from finance (Goldman Sachs) to politics, using fundraising to network with influential political figures.
Tenure in the Trump Administration
- Short-lived Role: Served as Communications Director for only 11 days.
- Initial Excitement: Joined the administration out of a mix of pride, ego, and opportunity.
- Chaos in the White House: Described the Trump campaign and administration as chaotic, likening it to a "Keystone Cops" operation.
Insights on Trump
- Leadership Style: Characterized Trump as highly insecure, often reacting poorly to direct communication or criticism.
- Decision-Making: Trump preferred to avoid complex issues, making decisions based on instinct rather than informed analysis.
- Potential Second Term: Warned that a second Trump presidency would likely be more organized and destructive to American democratic institutions.
Political Commentary
- Trump as a Threat: Scaramucci argues that Trump poses a significant threat to the separation of powers and democratic norms.
- Isolationist Policies: Discussed Trump's desire to disengage from global alliances and institutions, drawing parallels to past nativist movements in America.
- Public Perception: Scaramucci highlighted the divide between economic statistics and the feelings of ordinary Americans, focusing on their economic desperation.
The Role of Fundraising in Politics
- Fundraising Dynamics: Explained the intricacies of fundraising within U.S. politics, particularly after the *Citizens United* ruling which allowed unlimited spending by Super PACs.
- Impact on Democracy: Scaramucci believes that the current fundraising landscape has distorted American democracy, benefiting the wealthy disproportionately.
Current Political Landscape
- Biden vs. Trump: Expressed confidence that Biden could defeat Trump in a potential rematch, citing Biden's legislative achievements and the shifting demographics of the electorate.
- Challenges for Biden: Acknowledged concerns about Biden's age and health, while also critiquing the Democrats for focusing on identity politics over performance.
- Coalition Building: Noted the unusual alliances forming against Trump, including support from disillusioned Republicans.
Cultural References
- Taylor Swift: Discussed the political implications of celebrity endorsements and Swift's influence, particularly among young voters, in the context of the upcoming election.
Key Takeaways
- Scaramucci's Evolution: Transitioned from a Trump supporter to a vocal critic, emphasizing the importance of preserving democratic norms.
- Concerns for Future Elections: Highlighted the unpredictability of U.S. elections and the potential for Trump's populism to resurface.
- The Importance of Communication: Both Scaramucci's and Trump's communication styles were examined, with Scaramucci's directness contrasting Trump's often chaotic messaging.
Closing Thoughts This episode provides a comprehensive look at Scaramucci's experiences within the Trump administration, his critique of Trump's potential return to power, and insightful commentary on the current political climate in the United States. It highlights the complexities of American politics, the influence of money in elections, and the cultural factors at play in shaping voter sentiment.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. Thank you. Dana, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.
0:48Welcome to The Rest is Polities Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, our guest today is an American, an Italian American. He's a financer. He's an entrepreneur. he's got a fair few strings to his bow. He's now 60, though he looks about 40. We'll find out why. But such is the shadow that Donald Trump casts over America right now, that just as when I die, I suspect the words Tony and Blair will be in the first paragraph of my obituaries, there's a very good chance that Donald Trump might be in Mr. Anthony Scaramucci's obituaries, because he was famously in charge of Trump's communications in the White House for 10 glorious days.
1:35Sorry, for 11 glorious days. You're chipping me at a 9.1 % of my federal career. Okay. I mean, this is how we're getting started. You're already starting out by hurting my feelings. I mean, it's like unbelievable. 11 days. 11 days. You can also tell Mr. Scamish was a financier that he does the 9.1 % calculation in his head on the spot. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, look, I mean, it's also, Roar, it's 954 ,000 seconds for those of you that are counting at home. Okay, sometimes I say that to my therapist, it makes me feel better. But keep going, Alistair. Okay, so I'm nearly done. I'm nearly done.
2:10So you were there for 11 days as his comms director, and then you kind of, you left in an explosion, having upset a few people in the White House, including Trump. And since when, you became one of the most vehement anti-Trump voices that we saw in the Trump-Biden campaign. And you're now probably going to have to do it again because it looks like this guy is going to be on the ticket again. But I want to start really, Anthony, first of all, thanks for your time. It's a great, great honor to be on, actually. No, honestly, it's great to have you. But first of all, I want to start just looking back now a few years on.
2:50Just what's your kind of sense of that, of those 10 days plus? Well, first of all, again, thanks, guys, for having me on. I think there's a little bit of a backstory required, which I think would help because it'll form some of the analysis. But, you know, I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. My dad was a crane operator, hourly worker, had the opportunity, thank God, due to good grades to go to Tufts University up in Boston and then on to Harvard Law School. I was the underachiever there, though, Alistair, because I was there with Barack Obama, who went on to become president. and Neil Gorsuch, who went on to the Supreme Court.
3:32So, I was the underachiever. But I landed a job at Goldman Sachs, which was very hard to do at that time, coming from my background. And the first job interview I had, I was in 100 % polyester, okay, because I didn't have a dress. So, I had a$90 suit from a discount store. My mother thought I looked great, as Italian-American moms think you do. But the Goldman Sachs interviewer told me I looked like a young Italian undertaker from Brooklyn and that he couldn't invite me back to Goldman if I didn't upgrade my wardrobe. I was 100 % flammable for my job interview. I was in full petroleum products from top to bottom.
4:12And so why is that important? Because I grew up in this very sheltered blue collar area, never traveled, didn't know how to dress. And it was an odyssey for me going into an austere investment bank like that, and then eventually into the world of politics and building my own businesses. And so a lot of naivete, a lot of mistakes were made in that process. But one of the things I did, because I didn't have access to the elite, I never hit a golf ball, I never swung a tennis racket. I wrote checks to American political figures to go to fundraisers where I could meet wealthy people and meet movers and shakers.
4:55And so, the first check I wrote, I was 27 years old. It was 1991. I wrote a check to Rudy Giuliani for$250. I mean, he's completely Meshuggah today, but back then he was running for mayor. He lost one race, went on to win the race. That was very good for me because it opened up a full network for me. And I'm starting the story there for a reason because I never wanted to be in politics. I had no ambition to be a political figure. I always just wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I was using politics to help me in business. And so, you have to imagine fast-forwarding now having worked for Bush and worked for Romney and worked for Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, to transition into the Donald Trump campaign, where this was one of the most haphazard Keystone cop-like campaigns in 2016.
5:46And I'll just say this to you guys. There was no way that campaign could collude with the Russians because we weren't even colluding with each other. I mean, we were fighting with each other all day and so on and so forth. You're 11 days. Yes, sir. In a word, in a sentence, just sum it up for us. How crazy, how awful, and how alarmed should we be that that guy could get back? Well, it's a five alarm situation if he comes back because he has a better team. He's more organized and he wants to do destructive damage to the institutions of the American system. And so to really understand the American system, the most valuable part of it is the separation of powers.
6:27And so that diffusion of power at the top has provided all of this aspirational meritocracy. People like me can come from peasants in Southern Italy and rise to independent wealth in a country like this because there's a flatness to the country and there's a diffusion of the power. Trump doesn't want that. He wants to abrogate that. He's been very honest about it. He talks about being a dictator for a day. He talks about using the system to persecute his adversaries. He talks about pulling FCC licenses from people like the two of you who, if you disagree with them, he wants to take you off the air and cut your air supply.
7:07He's been very, very open about all this. Most recently, he's talking about the abrogation of the NATO treaty, where he'd like to pull the United States out of NATO. And he said that openly, by the way, in 2016, moving on in the campaign. We all thought, okay, he's kidding. He's a little bit of a crackpot. He'll never do that. If he does win the presidency, of course, none of us thought he was going to win, but if he does win the presidency, he'll end up mainstreaming or maturing as a result of all of the information that's going to be hitting him about the troubles around the world. He got worse, not better.
7:41And so the very bad news is it's a five alarm fire. You ask about one sentence for me, I would say it was frenetic and it was short lived, but it was relieving to be fired. When I look back on it, I was bummed out that I got fired. I got obviously nationally desecrated. I was the butt of late night comedian jokes. I was ripped up in the national press, destroyed and politically disfigured. People forgot that I went to Harvard Law School. They brought up all kinds of racial tropes. I was a Jersey Shore cast member, Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I think that was Lionel Barber from the Financial Times said that about me.
8:23And so this was like an avalanche of negativity towards me. And as you know, because you've worked on political campaigns, I got disfigured and two-dimensionalized as a person. I became a cartoon character as opposed to, okay, well, what has this guy done with his career? He started with nothing. And so you go through the Shawshank Redemption tunnel of that and you come out the other side and you learn a lot about yourself. You know, are you able to handle it? When you got the call, why did you say yes? Ego, pride. This is a cautionary tale for your listeners and your viewers. When you make your decisions based on your pride and your ego, you often make very bad decisions.
9:08You know this from Greek tragedy. My pride and my ego will lead to my downfall. This is a hubristic decision. Did you think that you could mature him, control him, make him be better than he is? No. Remember, I worked for him for almost a full year on the campaign, so I knew I couldn't mature or control him. It was more selfish than that. And so I went into the administration because I was a blue collar kid, went to Tufts and Harvard, built a successful business. And now I'm still relatively young. I've had the opportunity to work in the White House for the American president. Now, my wife hates Donald Trump almost as much as Melania hates him.
9:48And so, I mean, Melania is at the highest standard of hate for him. But my wife is very close. I mean, I think Mark Milley, General Milley, probably hates Trump as much as Melania. He's the first person I met in my career that hates him as much as Melania, but my wife hated him almost as much as Melania hates him. And she didn't want me to do it, but I didn't listen to her. I was going to take a round block and I was going to put it in a square hole. And you get the point. And when I got there, I was mismatched for the job. And also, you know, his ego and my personality, like you guys think I got fired because of what I said about Steve Bannon.
10:26I didn't get fired for that reason. I got fired because I was arguing with him and I got fired because I think my press conference, I think 40 million people saw it globally and it really upset him. He doesn't like sharing the spotlight with anybody. And so I got fired for that and other reasons. Although it was a really funny comment I made about Steve Bannon. It's probably not appropriate for this podcast. No, it is. It is totally appropriate. I mean, it was one of the best comments ever to come out of the White House, actually. And it was really effing funny. It's got to come with your accent, so you have to say it.
10:58No, I said that he was, you know, said a little bit more crudely, but I said he was sort of performing autofillatio on himself in his office. Okay, he was one of the most treacherous and malevolent people in our civilization. But, you know, you two look like atheists, but I believe in God. Can I tell you why I believe in God? Do you want to hear why? Yeah, come on. I'm desperate to know why you believe in God. Okay, so listen, okay. Steve Bannon is a very articulate guy. He's incredibly well read. He's a bit of a historian. And if you listen to him on the telephone, he's a suave guy. Okay. But God made him so motherfucking ugly to save the civilization from him.
11:40Right. And he dresses like a contemporary hobo. He looks like a partially deceased alcoholic. And these are things that God did to protect the republic and the American democracy. Because let me tell you something about that guy. He's very well read. He understands the Trump doctrine better than Trump. Because remember, Trump is ill read and he is not a historian. He doesn't understand anything about these treaties. He wouldn't know the Sykes-Picot's treaty if it hit him in the head. He doesn't understand anything about this stuff. But Bannon does. And so, if you want to hear the Trump doctrine, I can articulate it through the eyes of Steve Bannon, and then you guys should be really, really worried.
12:24Your sphincters should be tightening as I described the Trump doctrine because it is very anti-American and it is very polarizing. Just take us back so that listeners can understand a little bit of the background. Why did these prominent politicians like Jeb Bush and others get you onto the campaign? I mean, honestly, why are they interested in having somebody whose expertise is banking on their staff, on their teams? Number one reason, Rory, is money, money, money. And that's the number 2000 reason. I had a pretty large Rolodex. I'm a decent networker. I built a conference business. It's a global conference business called SALT.
13:03We get over 2 ,000 delegates to each of these events. We're doing one in Abu Dhabi at the end of February. And so, the politicians were interested in the fundraising aspect. They certainly weren't interested in me for policy or anything like that. And Anthony, just once more on this, because again, we don't really understand fundraising. And obviously, it's a hugely important part of the US system. So, for international listeners, we're aware that, of course, there are limits on how much an individual can give to a campaign, which on the surface would suggest there's no point having a billionaire donor because he can give just the same as somebody with much less money.
13:36But the truth is, there are ways in which people can support campaigns. Tell us a little about how the money works in American politics. Okay. So, I mean, I think this is very, very important to understand the United States and the stress that the United States is under. The fundraising apparatus in the United States was exactly as you said. You're limited to$2 ,000 a person for a couple. It's now$13 ,000 for a couple, $6 ,600 per person. But you were limited and a result of which I was very valuable because now I got to go out to 2 ,000, 3 ,000 people to help you scale the money that you need and be part of a bundling system to help you rise as a national candidate.
14:18In 2011, there was a very famous Supreme court case in the United States called Citizens United. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for the majority. And he basically said in that case that your First Amendment right allows you to spend unlimited dollars using a political action committee, or also known as a PAC. And so, if I'm a mega billionaire, I want to put$2 billion in a campaign, and I want Alistair to be running for the Senate and here in New York, I can dump unlimited amounts of money into his campaign, but I have to do it outside of his campaign, right? I can't do it inside of his campaign because he's still limited.
14:59And so, there's hard dollar donations and soft dollar donations now. Is there a problem sometimes coordinating with these super PACs? It's illegal to do so. Aha. So, that must be a challenge for the candidate because maybe the super PAC will be putting out messaging or doing targeting on your behalf, but you're not completely comfortable with what they're saying and you could end up with a standoff? No, no. I mean, you hire your best friend. So, Rory hires Alistair, who knows him like the back of his hand. Then he says, okay, no email traffic, have at it. And then Alistair runs all of this apparatus for you outside of your campaign.
15:36And so, no. I mean, you could get into a situation where someone's doing it in a rogue way, but that rarely happens because this is coordinated and money's about money and you want to get a return for your money. But I think this broke the American system, by the way, because there's another famous case in the United States about racial segregation and it was called Plessy versus Ferguson. And the very famous phrase in that case was, you could have separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. It caused tumult and raised racial tension in the United States wildly. It took about 80 years to reverse that with Brown versus Board of Education.
16:14But we now have a Plessy versus Ferguson decision on our democracy known as Citizens United because we've created this separate but equal democracy for the very, very rich where they have more than their vote. They have this unlimited amount of money. And guys, this has woefully damaged the system because just look at the legislative agenda for Democrats and Republicans over the last 12 years since the case was decided. It's skewed to corporate welfare. It's skewed towards the very, very wealthy. You're getting tax breaks and entitlements. There is a reason why Boeing moved its office to Virginia to sit outside of Washington and why the doors are blowing off of the Boeing planes because they're more focused on lobbying those people in the Congress than they are on making the stuff anymore.
17:08And, you know, look, I mean, it's a problem for the country, by the way, Rory. Well, let's come on in a second. But there's this moment, you're appointed, and it's a chaotic moment. So, the White House Chief of Staff is furious. Spicer, who was then Sean Spicer, who was the press secretary, kind of resigns. But Trump wants you in. He pushes to get you in. Yeah. Well, he wanted them out, Rory. Remember that, okay? He used me as an ejection device because he knew those guys hated me. I mean, those are two babies, by the way. I mean, these are like real babies, right? Remember, I'm a business guy.
17:41I'm not a politician, right? These guys are like, they talk to you very nicely to your face. Probably they do this on Downing Street. And then they stab you in the back or like they're trying to be all howdy-doodie nice to you, like a Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. That was Reince Priebus. Okay. But he was a consummate like backstabber. I'm a front stabber. You know, if I don't like you, I tell you, all rights had to do was say, look, you know, I hate your guts. I don't want you anywhere near the White House. Probably wouldn't have gone to the White House, you know. But go ahead, Roar. Anthony, so I guess part of what Trump was buying into before he got annoyed with you is he quite liked, presumably, your quite colorful presentation style.
18:21He liked the way you speak. He liked the way he thought it would be great to have somebody like you as his front man. Let's think a little bit about what it tells us about Trump that he thought about having you as his comps director? What did you learn about him through the fact that he chose you? Okay. So, remember, everything he liked about me on the campaign, he disliked about me in the White House. Okay. So, as an example, on the campaign, he's taken a flyer to see if he can become president. I'm volunteering on the campaign and raising him money. Okay. And I'm a self-made guy. Okay. So, I was talking to him in a way that these sycophants were not talking to.
18:58Okay. One day on the campaign plane, Kushner came over to me, Jared Kushner. He said, Trump really likes you because you remind him of Fred Trump. You're a no-nonsense guy. You tell him exactly what you think right there to the point. And he likes that. You remind him of his dad. Yeah. His dad was a self-made guy. And so, he would say to Jared, Anthony's self-made. He built this thing on his own. Okay. And I respect that in him. So I'm looking to Anthony's opinion and, you know, you can get my vibe. I'm obviously not a sycophant, right? I mean, I couldn't work at a Goldman or a Lehman for very long because I wasn't going to be able to play the corporate politics.
19:40I didn't understand how to do it. I mean, I had one boss who said, what's our problem? I said, I don't know. Look, I mean, you want me to tell you that you have a double chin, but you obviously have a triple trend. So, I can't tell you that you have a double chin. That did not go over well with my ex-boss. You know what I'm saying? So, I'm not the right guy in the political world if you're looking for a sycophant. But if you're looking for somebody that can provide analysis and can provide some directness to a situation, Trump enjoyed that on the campaign. He absolutely hated that in the White House.
20:13That was antithetical. What changed? And what did we learn about him that he changed so much? Insecurity. So, he was in over his head. He knew he was in over his head. And so, he had to bully up more. He's a remarkably small and very insecure individual. And he's so small and insecure that you can't explain anything to him. And so, as an example, if you're on the campaign plane with him and we're discussing the Middle East and you want to explain to him what happened in the First World War and the Sykes-Picot Treaty and how these lines were drawn up that caused these permanent tribal disputes, okay?
20:53You couldn't say that to him because he didn't want you to know that he didn't know that, okay? And so, the only way you could get information to him is through storytelling. So, you'd have to say to him like, oh, you know, do you remember Lawrence of Arabia? He'd be like, oh, Peter O'Toole? Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, that was a great movie. That was like in the early 60s. I said, sir, do you remember the story behind the movie? No, not really. I said, give me 30 seconds to tell you the story. And then I would take him through Sykes and Picos, and I would take him through elements of the Ottoman Empire and the British and the French evacuating the Middle East, but leaving these great border disputes among the tribes.
21:37And all of a sudden, he would be, oh, what a great story. And then he would invect that in some of his speeches. Or I took him through a trade narration of what happened at the general agreements of trade and tariffs or what happened at Bretton Woods that led to the economic arrangements that we had in post-World War II history, but why the American leaders made the tariff system uneven. Remember, we had 2 % of the world's population in 1945. And our elders, these new Victorians, these great new Victorians that ran the country, whether it was Eisenhower, Truman, Marshall, Atkinson, they made the system uneven because they were trying to create rising living standards globally, Mr.
22:20Trump. They didn't make the system uneven to hurt America. They made the system uneven because they knew that global prosperity would reduce the likelihood of a third world war. So how were decisions actually made? I have a vision in government of, you know, a leader there surrounded by people submitting papers, giving advice, having discussions, and then the leader says, okay, well, this is what we're going to do. But this sounds to me rather not like that. No, that didn't happen. And so if you read Richard Neustadt's book about presidential power, there's a cabinet model where the cabinet directs the roles of the executive branch, or there's a White House model.
23:00Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan used the White House model where the White House was like the conductor and the cabinets and the sub-agencies were the symphony and they send out messaging every day and they tried to get everybody coordinated. Mr. Trump didn't do that. He was more like a billiard model where he shot a cue ball into the billiard table and the balls were going everywhere and he was paralyzing people. One of the cabinet members I'm very close to, he wouldn't want me to name him, so I won't, He came to see me in 2019. I had broken from Trump. And just so you know, after I got fired, I remained a loyal advocate for Mr.
23:36Trump for two years. It wasn't until I said something he didn't like on the Bill Maher show, and then he went to attack me on Twitter. And of course, I'm a New Yorker. I'm not Ted Cruz. I think I called him the fattest president since William Howard Taft, which he hates being so fat, right? And so then the fight started. But to just understand this, a cabinet member came to me and said he has no executive management skills. So there's no symphony, there's no coordination. How do the decisions literally get made? So the way it got made was through ignorance. And what I mean by that is don't bring it to the president, make the decision at treasury, make the decision at justice, do not even get it in his field of vision.
24:18If it gets in his field of vision and he says something berserk, ignore it, and let's hope that he goes on to something less berserk in the next three hours or the next three days. And so in the beginning, it was really rough because people were trying to please him. So Mr. Trump would say, do A, 25 people would run around and try to do A. And then Mr. Trump would say, well, I hate A. Why are you guys doing A? Do B. Okay. He got in a huge fight with Nikki Haley over that. He told her to do something at the UN. She went to do it. And then he put out on Twitter, what a dope, why did she do that?
24:53And then she went back at him, I did that because you told me to do that. So, people realize that they couldn't bring him things. They realize that he really wasn't good at decision-making. He's also got this perverse love affair with Vladimir Putin. And you guys are smart enough to know this because you're in government. He's a systemic threat to Western liberalism and he's a systemic threat to the world order. And he has political motivation to reattach former republics to the Soviet Union. I'll just point out when he took Crimea, Obama was like, no problem. Give him Crimea. He wants that warm water port.
25:31He had control of that for 300 years. He thinks he's Peter the Great. Give him the warm water port. He won't go any further. Okay. But he went further. So, when somebody tells you, oh, well, he just wants the Ukraine. He doesn't really want Poland or Latvia, he wants those places. Okay, but Trump doesn't care about that stuff. You see what I mean? So, you left him out of the decision-making when that stuff came up. And tell us a little bit about what that tells us about him as a person. I mean, that's a very weird management style. And this is a guy that used to run a business, right? So, what is it about his mindset that makes him say, do A, do A, do A, and then the next minute say, wait a second, why are you doing A?
26:08You should be doing B. Well, but I think it's important to talk about what his skills are, okay? Because I think that's important. Okay. There are two things that drive Mr. Trump. Okay. So you think about it as Pavlov's response. Two things drive Mr. Trump, money and attention. Okay. Not prestige per se. He doesn't, he's not interested in prestige. He's interested in attention. It could be negative attention or positive intention and it's money. And those things go back and forth in his mind. Okay. There was a very famous, I was on the campaign plane waiting for him. He comes up onto the campaign, the flight attendant had all of the papers.
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26:44And like in the United Kingdom, you have broadsheet papers and tabloid papers. And Mr. Trump was very keen to get on the top half of the broadsheet. He came onto the plane. He said, Anthony, look at this. He took the New York Times. The word Trump was at the top. He took the Wall Street Journal. The word Trump was on the top of the fold of the broadsheet. And he said, you know, I've only been on the top of the fold twice on these papers. And these were for lawsuits and bankruptcies. But look at me now, I'm running for president and I'm on the top of the fold every day. So you have to understand the motivations.
27:21The second thing about him, he's a very colorful speaker. He's a very effective communicator. You guys are in politics. So you know when he's communicating, it's like you rubberneck him. It's like when you see a car crash on the road, you slow down and watch the car crash, you do that with Mr. Trump because you know he's going to say something crazy. So you slow down the television remote and you listen to him. The other thing he does incredibly well because he's very intuitive. Okay. Richard Branson, who I think you both know, once said to me something about Mr. Trump, which I thought was insightful.
27:54He probably can't read well and he probably has attention deficit. And so when people have those things, and Richard has written about this in his own books, you compensate. You find an Alistair Campbell to run your comms, or you find a strategist to run your campaign. And Mr. Trump is very, very good at that. And he's got very good instincts. He understood the dilemma for about 20 % of the United States population that feels left out of the current social contract, a result of which they use Trump as an avatar for their anger. Those are his skills. He is not an executive. You say he ran a business.
28:33He inherited that business from his dad. He had some good people left over from his dad, like Alan Weisselberg, et cetera. They were helping him with that business. He ran a television show that was produced by Mark Burnett, okay? But he was the wrong contour on that show. So, in Trump's skillset, it's communication, attention grabbing, and decent to very good political instincts. It's not executive management. But one of the most interesting things you said there is you implied that he might be quite good at hiring people. But on the other hand, actually, an incredible time. No, no, I didn't say that.
29:08I said you have to trust people. If you don't have the skills to read or you have to trust people. Richard Branson is good at hiring people. Fred Trump hired most of the people that ran the Trump organization after his demise. Donald Trump is very poor at hiring people. okay but the republican national committee was decent at hiring people okay so you know we had a fiasco going on on november the 9th wednesday november 9th 2016 we were looking at each other we can't believe the sob won we have no transition team he fired chris christie how are we going to build the government well i went back to the romney readiness project i went back to all of those binders.
29:54And I gave them to Mnuchin and others. And we built his team for him. He didn't build his team. Remember, Rex Tillerson, he couldn't decide on a secretary of state, which is arguably the most important position in the cabinet. And he went with Rex Tillerson at the suggestion of Robert Gates. Okay. And Rex is an unbelievable guy, a phenomenal American, an American patriot, an Eagle Scout. And Rex Tillerson did so many things in the first part of that administration to stop crises. But Trump didn't hire these people. And by the way, you're going to have a total full-on fiasco in a Trump II administration because these people are going to be way more right-leaning.
30:38They're going to be way more objectionable to the institutions of the democracy. And they are going to do things to disrupt the world order. And they have a view of the world, which is Trump's view of the world. They can articulate it better than him, but they will try to implement that. And it'll be very bad for the world. It'll be isolating for America and it'll be very, very bad for the global community. You said there, Anthony, that Rex Tillerson is an American patriot. Is Trump an American patriot? No, Trump is an American heretic. Trump is a traitor to America. To really understand Trump, He's cloaked himself in the flag and he's cloaked himself in the totems of the early America First movement.
31:21And so just take your viewers and listeners back. We had an America First movement in the late 30s, which was put down by FDR and Wendell Wilkie. But the acolytes there were Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, Father Coughlin, Huey Long. These were American nativists. They didn't want Italians on the shore of America or Irish. These were Americans that believed in the Nazis. They were trying to form a Nazi party in the United States. The descendants of Trumpism, or the predecessors, I should say, the predecessors of Trumpism is the first America First movement that we saw after the Great Depression.
31:59This guy is a heretic. He's a full-on traitor. He doesn't understand the Constitution. Despite taking an oath to the Constitution, he disavowed it many times, including on the 6th of January 2001, we're at an insurrection at the nation's capital, but he cloaks himself as a false prophet of patriotism. Anthony, you mentioned Steve Bannon and you said maybe one of the ways through to understanding Trumpism was through Steve Bannon. Tell us a little bit about what the Bannon vision of the world for Trump would have been. Yeah. So, to fully understand it, you got to take America back to the 1890s.
32:37See, Trump couldn't articulate this, but Trump, when it gets in his field of vision, he goes, oh, that's what it is. I want to do that. Okay. But Bannon can articulate it. That's the danger of Steve. And so the articulation is isolationism. The articulation is unplugging America from the global order and the global system. It's walling America literally and figuratively from the rest of the world. The Trump-Bannon idea is that we have enough natural resources on the North American continent. The oceans are still fairly protective militarily. Let's manufacture and produce all goods and services here in this country, apropos to the 1890s, where 97 % of the goods and services consumed in America were produced in America.
33:26Okay. And so he wants to wall us off. He wants to cut our military ties and our military alliances. And again, wall us off figuratively through isolationism, but then also absolutely through actually literally building a wall on our southern border. Why is this appealing to Donald Trump, to somebody whose primary interests are attention to money? Why is he suddenly interested in isolationism? Well, because he believes it. He believes that America first is America alone. America can fend for itself and produce for itself. And it doesn't need to be tethered to the international system. It doesn't need to be the global police officer.
34:06It doesn't need to be the global aid provider to help the rest of the world. And it's very popular with a certain amount of his base. It's not just that he believes it. He can see a huge, huge constituency for this. But you see, I understand that because I grew up with those people, right? So you have a group of people that were once aspirational blue-collar people. I grew up in an aspirational working-class family. Those people believed that one of their children was going to go on and live the American dream. There's 20 to 25 % of the country, Rory, that now is in economic desperation. So in 35 years, we took economically aspirational people and we turned them into economically desperational people, a result of which they're very angry.
34:48Okay. And so they believe Trump. They say, well, let's cut ties. Why do we need to send$93 billion to Israel or the Ukraine? Let's cut ties with everybody. We'll build it here. oh, by the way, no more immigrants, you know, unless their IQs are over 200, and let's leave them at 10 ,000, not teeming immigration like we've had for several hundred years. That's the ethos of it. And they believe if they do that, they'll get higher wage paying jobs, there'll be more manufacturing. But Anthony, if you go back, you know, they lived through the Trump first term and the chaos of that. And the fact is that his economic strategy was all about making rich people richer.
35:29And frankly, the poor got pretty much nothing out of it. So why are those still the people that say we want him to beat Joe Biden, who's actually done a pretty good job on the economy? Okay. Because Joe Biden is terrible messaging. Okay. Let's assume we're having an honest podcast here. It's like weekend at Joe Biden's. He's got one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in a casket. And so when you see him, it's absolutely terrible messaging. You don't have a strong, vigorous, charismatic delivering that message to those people. like or dislike Trump at 78. He still has a lot more energy than an 81-year-old Joe Biden.
36:05Now, Biden will beat him, which is the great irony. It'll destroy Trump's ego further, that he'll get beaten for a second time by Sleepy Joe. But you have to understand what's going on. Biden has great legislative successes. He's got great policy successes. The UAW is supporting and endorsing him for a reason. Wages are up. Inflation is on the way down. He's generally done a very good job with his team, okay, in terms of running America, but he's not an avatar for their anger. Why are you so confident that Biden's going to win? Oh, there's many, many reasons why, but I'll give you the top three.
36:42And if you want more, you tell me. Number one, Trump is hated by a good 65 % of the independents, particularly suburban housewives that are going to drive the election in the four swing states that matter in a country like ours. Number two, Joe Biden has generally done a good job and the economic data will likely improve towards the end of November. And the proclivity historically for Americans is to go with the hand that's been on the tiller. Okay. And number three, they're going to run a highlight film of the insanity of Donald Trump. They're not going to run it today in February, but they will run that highlight film in October and November.
37:29Those are three, so I'll give you one more. Trump has fully alienated natural allies, which would include people like myself, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kissinger. And these people have pledged to be way more vocal and way more aggressive this time than they were in 2020. So those are four reasons. I have many, many more. But let me just say this, the demographics of this country, this beautiful country I live in, have changed from 2016 and even 2020. This beautiful, colorful mosaic of the country has changed. And there's just not enough rich, older, white, angry people to vote Donald Trump into office in 2024.
38:14Well, Alistair, Anthony, let's take a break.
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38:52Tell me a little bit about the way that Republican congresspeople and senators are behaving. So Alistair and I had a meeting, in fact, we had a number of meetings with congressmen and senators. And one of the striking things is the way that Republicans who seem pretty impressive, upstanding people will say to you privately, I've got to endorse Trump. I don't really have any alternative. And it's a very, very strange thing because one imagines that just out of a sense of pride or their wives bullying them or their husbands bullying them, that they might just be like, forget this, I'm not going to endorse this person.
39:24And presumably if they'd all stood against him, they would have been able to do a lot of damage to him. Why do they get behind him? cowardice is the answer. Remember Jack Kennedy wrote a book in the 1950s called Profiles in Courage. And they said, well, Mr. Kennedy, it's a very short book. Why is it so short? He says, I couldn't find any courage out there. I only found 12 or 14 people that broke from their party in the House or Senate and did the right thing. And so, these are cowards. These are people that want to stay in power more than they want to serve the country or have any principles. with great irony.
39:57I met with one of those people last night. He's a Republican. He's in the House leadership. Hates Donald Trump, but he's endorsed him for president. Kevin McCarthy. Okay. He's a little mad at me, Kevin. You don't like him, do you? Well, look, I mean, I do. I gave him a lot of money over a 20-year period of time and he's attended my conferences, but Kevin McCarthy sold his soul to Donald Trump. He's mad at me because I think I said on a podcast, him and I are the exact same age, but he looks like a 500-year-old fossil at this point in his life. But that's less Botox, right? Well, we'll get into my health and beauty secrets in a second.
40:32I know you have a lot of women listeners and they'll be very interested in how I preserve this 105-year-old body that I'm living in. Okay. But let's just talk about McCarthy for a second. The guy looks 500 because he sold his soul to Donald Trump. And you guys know this. He could have put lights out on the 7th of January. Okay. He knows that Trump fomented that insurrection. Remember, it's not a Soros-sponsored DA going after Mr. Trump. It's Mark Meadows. Okay. It's a white Christian Southerner that led the Freedom Caucus in the House and was the chief of staff for Mr. Trump, is the chief witness for the prosecution.
41:12Okay. So, we know he led an insurrection. McCarthy went after him on January 7th and then got scared again, okay, because he only wanted to be speaker. It was just so obviously transparent. But McCarthy could have knocked him right through the ropes with McConnell and Pelosi, impeached them on the spot. He would have gone out the window, but these guys are babies. Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the water gets thrown on the witch, she melts, and then the soldiers go, geez, I'm sorry, Dorothy. I didn't me to do that to you. All they had to do was hit the wicked witch of the West Wing with the water, the impeachment water, and he would be off the playing field right now, but they're afraid of him.
41:54And he's laughing because he's so insecure. He cannot believe he's gotten away with this stuff. But here's another one, right? So, you've got these 91 court cases, right? You've got these charges against him. You've got billion dollar fines for lying, for sexual offenses. You've got all this. So these people, I mean, our vision of the American working class, I think, is a people who've got some pretty basic, decent values. So is that wrong? Because I mean, how can they support this guy? Let me ask you a question. Did your middle and lower class reject the European Economic Union? When you look at the polling data in June of 2016, when you had the Brexit, Who voted the United Kingdom out of the Economic Union?
42:40Yeah, but they will now be saying, a lot of those people are now saying, do you know what? I think we got this wrong. The polls here show that actually, you know, most people now think Brexit's a disaster. With Trump, they're still saying he's the right guy. Okay, but listen, your people, maybe they're smarter, but I don't think it's that. I think they're looking at the situation. It's hurting their pocketbook. The people that we're talking about haven't had their pocketbook benefited or detrimented. But what they've seen is inertia as it relates to progress for them and their families. And what they see is an establishment that has a funnel, a kleptocratic funnel, an oligarchic funnel around the top,$20 billion spent on lobbying and PACs and Citizen United, billion I mean to say.
43:32And so the lower and middle class of the country are saying, hey, this system does not work for me. Let's get the orange wrecking ball into the system. Let them smash everything. I don't like the medical establishment. Don't want to take the vaccine. I don't like the political establishment, the media establishment, Wall Street. Mr. Trump is going to smash all of them. And I want that because it's not working for me. Okay, your people have said, wait a minute, the EU was working for me, we got this wrong. Our system in the country, there's a good 20 % of the people that have been disaffected from the social contract.
44:11Anthony, one of the things that keep coming back to is that everybody was very optimistic about the macroeconomic statistics. So the kind of big numbers in the US look great, growth, inflation coming down, wages going up. But there's also a sense that many ordinary Americans don't experience this. What's the gap between the stuff that really impresses Paul Krugman in the statistics and the way that people actually feel on the street? So it's a great question. And what you find is that they do feel it, but they don't feel it deep enough. And so if I'm a lower middle class person and I got the wage gain, you also had 8 % inflation over the last two years.
44:53And so I don't feel it at the gas pump. I don't feel it at the local grocer. Okay, so it's a very, very good question. But if you look at the distribution, Rory, it's tilted towards the upper class and it's tilted towards the very rich. Since the pandemic, the very rich have quintupled their aggregate net worth and the lower and middle class have not done that. Okay, and there's another thing that you can't ignore and that is something called social media. Okay, we stare at each other now through these filtered lenses. And it creates anxiety. And so if I'm seeing Kim Kardashian on her plane, okay, and I'm struggling with my Volkswagen or my, you know,$9 ,000 Chevrolet, I'm mad about it.
45:42Okay. You know that we have a lot more tension and more envy in the society as a result of filtered social media. And Anthony, one more from me. Look, I know you absolutely think Trump's going to lose and Biden's going to win. But I guess Biden's health is becoming more and more of an issue. People talking about it all the time. Is there any scenario at all in which Biden might be forced to step aside and another Democratic candidate could emerge? And if so, what kind of Democratic candidate would that be? And could they beat Trump? Well, listen, they locked themselves into this accordion knot.
46:17Okay, Joe Lieberman, a former senator, former vice presidential nominee, called for Mr. Biden to step down today, actually. He's not going to do it because he's looked at the calculus. They erroneously tied themselves to identity politics and not performance politics. I'm going to pick George Floyd was murdered. I'm going to pick an African-American woman to be my vice president. Is she the most qualified person to succeed me as president? No, I'm doing this for identity politics so I can check the boxes and virtue signal to my base. Remember, Mitt Romney didn't get to the presidency, but he picked Paul Ryan.
46:59He looked around, he said, this guy could succeed me. He's a policy wonk. He's a brilliant guy and he can build a coalition. Okay. So you have performance politics and you have identity politics. Okay. And so Kamala Harris is not popular. She's not popular with Biden. She's not popular in the administration and she's not popular with the American public and she's terrible public speaker. So what are you going to do? He's going to drop out of the race and have an open primary. She won't win the open primary. Then you have a huge voting block, the African-American community that will support Joe Biden that may pull out or not show up to vote and Donald Trump will win the election.
47:39Okay. So I don't see Biden, unless he has a severe dementia crisis or severe something happened to him. I don't see how he pulls out. Just in case that happened. I mean, you never know. I mean, life's difficult. So, just in case he had a serious health issue. Well, no, he could get very ill, God forbid. He could get very ill. I understand that, yeah. And then who could be a candidate to replace him? Oh, well, listen, they'll open up the primary. Gretchen Whitmer could replace him. Gavin Newsom could replace him. Kamala Harris could replace him. Terry McAuliffe could replace him. And could some of these people be Trump?
48:13Murphy, Phil Murphy from New Jersey. Any one of those people but Kamala Harris could beat Donald Trump in a general election. The comparative analysis would be such that they could beat him. Remember, 65 % of the independents dislike the man and he's lost a suburban housewife. They don't want him returning to the scene wreaking havoc the way he has done. Now, the best thing he's got going for him are the Democrats and the impressions now that Joe Biden is giving about his mental acuity. Now, Anthony, you've been very generous with your time, but if I can just one last one from me, I want to talk about Taylor Swift.
48:55Yeah. What the hell is going on with the vehemence with which the Republicans and the MAGA crowd appear to be turning on somebody who it seems to be kind of represents the American dream? She's one of the most famous, wealthiest, powerful women in the world. She's incredibly talented. She's just fallen in love with a guy who's just won the Super Bowl. And yet they're going around basically saying she's come kind of weird Pentagon psyops against Trump. What's going on? Well, I'm not going to be able to find the tweet. There's a tweet from October of 2020 from Taylor Swift denouncing Donald Trump and denouncing his apparent in her view racism and apparent in her view the white supremacy nonsense that he was spewing.
49:42And she said, you're not going to make it back to the presidency. And it was known as Twitter at that time. It's on X. You could find the tweet. And so this really drove people crazy, okay, on the Trump side. And of course, he then went on to lose the election. So now her fame has gone up exponentially since then. She is a white farm girl from southeastern-ish Pennsylvania, sort of the Redding, PA area. She's loved by everybody. They know that the election is going to be very, very close. Influencers like Taylor Swift, if she brought Swifties out there, okay, to join the Biden campaign, it would have a disastrous effect on Trump.
50:32But this is making it more likely. Okay. But what he's trying to do is disparage her to weaken her support, weaken her at the pocketbook. He tweeted something on Truth Social recently that he signed some music liberation act that made Taylor Swift more money. He's trying to send a message to Taylor Swift, stay out of politics. You're a rich, successful person. I made you richer and more successful. If you come after me, I'm going to turn my legions of MAGA people against you. This is the old thing when Michael Jordan, the American basketball player, was asked, are you Republican or Democrat? He goes, hey, man, I'm staying out of it.
51:13Republicans buy sneakers too. Okay, so Trump's trying to use that on Taylor Swift, which of course is not going to work because she's more famous and she's going to be, if she wants to be, she can be an effective foil in this race vis-a-vis Donald Trump. And so, final one for me, give us a sense, God forbid, that Donald Trump becomes president. What does that mean for the conflicts around the world, Russia, Ukraine, for China's threats against Taiwan? So it's very bad. It's very, very bad because Trump sees himself as a strong man leader. He praises Xi. He praises Putin. Go look at the words. Viktor Orban, he praises him.
51:56Okay. And so what happens is he wants those people to succeed because he would like to be that person in the United States. Okay, so remember, wall off the society literally and figuratively, break the constitution and let me reign until my death. Okay, and so this would be very, very bad because his attitude is, I want to get in cahoots with Putin and I want to get in cahoots with Xi. Okay, you cover and you handle your domain in Southeast Asia, you handle your domain on the Eurasian plain. I want the North American domain for myself and that's what he's signaling to these people. And this would destroy the peace and order that was framed after the Second World War because people have very, very short memories and we don't have a politician in our community that's actually explaining the virtues of these systems and explaining the virtues of these treaties and our general economic policies and why they're better.
53:00And the thing is, and this is a criticism of the Democrats, the people that are voting for Trump today, their grandparents and their great-grandparents voted for Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and FDR. They're now voting for Donald Trump because the Democrats left those people. They wanted to focus on transgender bathrooms and they wanted to focus on identity politics as opposed to aspirational economics for people that want to live the American dream, if not for themselves, for their children or grandchildren. And since no one's focused on that, and this, again, goes back to Citizens United, in my opinion, Trump is the guy doing it.
53:38And I think it's ridiculous. Now, Biden would respond and say, no, I am doing it. Here are my legislative achievements. and I would say yes but you look like a 500 year old fossil and you're not reaching those people with great communication and a result of which you should let Gavin Newsom take the job or Gretchen Whitmer because they could reach those people with your legislative achievements and you would go out as the guy that saved the civilization from Donald Trump but you're staying on the stage too long and remember what I said when we started why did I take the job I took it through pride and ego, which was ultimately my enemy and led to my downfall.
54:15Mr. Biden is now allowing his pride and ego to have him make this fallacious decision to stay in that position too long. And he's overstaying his welcome. And if he loses, people will point to that. They'll say, wow, that was a big miscalculation by the Bidens. But if it is Biden-Trump, I'm guessing you'll still vote Biden. I'll work for Biden. I'll campaign for Biden. Remember, I'm a patriot first and a partisan second. We have to preserve the institutions of this democracy and we have to preserve the separation of powers in the constitution. You know, there was a very fun meeting for me and it happened on a Wednesday, guys.
54:57You know, I know it was a Wednesday because I was only there for one Wednesday. Okay. So I know it was a Wednesday. And it was Paul Ryan in the Oval Office with Donald Trump and Trump had his finger in Ryan's face. Okay. They're both pretty tall guys. And he said, blankety blank, you work for me. You work for me. And Ryan looked at him like he was crazy. He said, I do not work for you. Okay. I'm in a totally separate article of the constitution. And these are separate and equal branches of the government. I do not work for you. Moreover, all of us work for the American people. And that was one of the reasons why he fired me.
55:32I said to him once, listen, man, this is not your house. And the presidency is the people's. It's the only job in our country where everybody gets to vote for it. Okay. The senators are local to the state. The reps are local to the district. This is the only federal national job where every eligible voter gets to vote for it we have to be president for everybody and we have to think that way he did not like that and he told me that i was a deep stater and he thought oh i thought you were one of my guys you're a deep stater and maybe five or six days later i got fired well anthony all power all power to your elbow keep fighting um and just make sure he doesn't come back oh well i'm doing my best alistair you know but it's the truth of the matter is he beat himself last time and i i predict he'll make a lot of unforced errors and beat himself again here.
56:23Well, I hope you're right. Well, let's hope so. Anthony, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. All right. Great to be on, guys. Thanks for having me.
56:35So, Rory, your first encounter with the Mooch. Well, my first encounter with him was virtual, which is that when I was in Davos, he sent out a tweet saying there are three reasons why Donald Trump's not going to be president. Number one, everybody in Davos thinks he's going to be president. You don't need to bother with the other two. So I thought he was going to produce that one again. Yeah. He's a much, much, much smarter guy than he gets credit for, I think. I mean, obviously, I thought that was really interesting. I mean, I guess a couple of things. I mean, first is he's very articulate and he's very convincing.
57:11It's a surprisingly mainstream analysis for Trump, isn't it? I mean, it's not very different from what well-informed democratic political commentators would say about Trump's strength and weaknesses. I didn't particularly get a sense there. I thought he was very articulate, very strong on it. But there wasn't anything there which made me think, gosh, that's fascinating. I never would have known that unless I'd talked to someone in the Trump White House. A lot of it seemed to me the kind of stuff that we know. But maybe that's just because Trump's been covered so much. Yeah. And also, I think also those people who have been in the Trump circle and have left all pretty much say the same thing.
57:45don't they? Narcissistic, chaotic, can't make decisions, can't lead. Everything has to be sort of told as a sort of, you know, bedtime story. I like the fact that he quoted the Robert Kennedy about courage. He does have guts, you know, because he went in there, he admits it was vanity. It almost cost him his marriage. He's gone back and rebuilt himself as, you know, pretty successful entrepreneur. But he's out there. You know, he is pretty much, he calls himself a patriot. He basically says the patriotic duty is to do whatever you can to stop Trump winning again. So, you know, I think he's got guts and he's got a bit of, you know, he's got real flair.
58:23He's very good with words. I do like some of his one-liners. I guess the other thing, I'm trying to sort of pick holes and what otherwise I thought was a very powerful articulate thing, that there is a question mark about him serving under Trump. I mean, that was a really weird thing to do. It's great that he says it's ego and vanity, but there's part of me that thinks you're letting yourself off too lightly. You've got this incredibly self-critical term. But the truth of the matter is you've been working with this guy for a year. You knew in absolute detail what a monster he was. You took his job to be his communications director.
58:59Presumably, again, I want to return to this with you. Your ability to be Tony Blair's communications director depended on the fact that you actually thought he was a good thing. You liked him. You admired him, right? What on earth is going on with someone agreeing to be the comms director, somebody who by then, presumably, he must have despised? Well, he pushed back at my suggestion that maybe he thought he could change him. I think he did think he could project him in a different way because he could take center stage. I think what he felt was, because I've talked to him a bit about this. I think he felt that, you know, whatever people thought of Trump, if you could kind of get in there and be the voice and be the spokesman, he does have that sort of pretty good, it's almost Trumpian.
59:42I mean, he won't thank me for saying that, but his style, you know, he comes out with great one-liners. He's very, very good at narrative. And I think he thought he probably could have done something a bit different. And presumably that's what, I mean, I suppose that's slightly what I was getting up when I was talking about why Trump appointed him. I mean, Trump must have seen in his communication style, something that resonated, maybe, as you say, even reminded him of his own communication style. Yeah, yeah. And he is a very, you know, Scaramucci is a very, very good communicator. He's punchy, he's funny, he's very good at explaining the kind of context of something in a way that Trump is not.
1:00:18Trump is a great communicator in his own way, but the one thing there isn't there is context. It's kind of, you know, just a sort of stream of consciousness. And I think he thought he could bring sense to that. Did you feel uncomfortable when Scaramucci was talking about woke stuff and suggesting that the only reason Biden had employed Kamala Harris was to appeal to a particular racial ethnic group and that George Floyd was about the whole thing and his attack on transgender bathrooms and all that kind of stuff? And what did you feel listening to all that? What I felt listening to that was, I felt a bit uncomfortable, but I'll tell you, I think that we underestimate those of us, well, you go to America because of your new job, but I think those of us who don't go to America that often, we underestimate how much further down the track this whole kind of woke debate is in the United States.
1:01:03Now, I don't think that's necessarily why he appointed her. I think he felt he had to appoint a woman. I think he thought it was an added advantage to be appointed a woman of color. But where I think Anthony does have a point is he didn't necessarily pick somebody that he or anybody else thought could be president if he fell under a bus. It's interesting, though, isn't it? I mean, when you think about the bedfellers, I mean, all the coalition that's forming now around Biden. So you've got Republicans like Scaramucci and Tukreski, although actually Scaramucci, Nancy Scaramucci is very interesting.
1:01:35I mean, he sort of put out a tweet supporting Hillary Clinton before he endorsed Trump. He backed Obama at one point. He backed Obama, and then he signed up with Jeb Bush. So there's something a little strange going on there. And maybe this is him just saying that he wanted to get behind these people because it was a way of making business contacts. um but but there will be a very odd coalition behind biden because you've got him you've got tucker rescue who we we just interviewed so republicans who are anti-trump but who will say things like attacking transgender bathrooms and by doing so really alienate and upset many many people in the democratic party for whom those things are very important issues and don't like to hear them trivialized and attacked in that kind of way no i think i think that's right but it but But I guess that just as I think there is a kind of bit of a movement within the UK that says, you know, it's got to be just get the Tories out.
1:02:25I think within the States, there is a pretty large movement that just says we have to stop Trump. And so you will have that broad coalition. How did you feel about his absolute confidence that Trump won't win? I mean, I can't pretend to be there myself. Well, I think he's probably onto something. I mean, this question about the way the independent voters will go is huge. I think that he is clearly more concerned about at least the appearance of Biden's health than maybe he was emphasizing there because he did imply that if Biden lost, he felt it would be because of that, unfairly or otherwise.
1:03:06I was interested that he wasn't talking more about turnout. I mean, one of the challenges for Biden is going to be the turnout of African American voters who feel the cost of living and crime is not working for them in the way that they want. There's going to be issues around turnout of voters who are very angry about Gaza in key swing states. And a lot of the polls are showing it as very, very close. So, I'm not sure that you can, in February, make a clear prediction and just say 60 % of independents hate him and say it's never going to happen. And Rory, do you finally, after my third attempt, do you finally understand why Taylor Swift has become this thing in the election?
1:03:49Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you've turned me into a Swifty. Oh, no context rests his politics. Love that one. You Rory Stewart has been turned into a Swifty. Very good. Very good. Well, I thought he was very entertaining, very insightful, very interesting. And we didn't get onto the Botox, but he actually does. He's very open about it. He takes a lot of Botox and he dyes his hair. He doesn't care. Who knows? Well, he was very funny before. I mean, it was such a serious interview in a way. I don't want to get onto this, but he was very funny before we came on air and was very happy to talk about it on air if we got onto it.
1:04:26He said that he'd had Botox yesterday and that he'd made a big change in his hair color. He'd gone from what he called Fidel Castro Black, which he thought didn't work well in television studios, to what he calls Latin American dictator Brown. Yeah, yeah. And no, he doesn't have any qualms about telling people. And he said that I looked like George Washington's granddad, which was really lovely of him. Well, he's trying to get you to sign up for Botox. And then he had to see at the end, luckily after we turned up, telling us that we needed to get our teeth whitened and he could recommend a good dentist.
1:04:59Well, he's not wrong about it. I mean, he did say, he says, look, you Brits have got terrible teeth, which is absolutely true. I mean, we have to take them out with pliers now. He doesn't even know that. No, but do you know what? As we were talking, I kept noticing that I am losing my hair up here. Well, he can help with that. Well, he said he's got teeth whitening and hair transplanting and dying. Yeah, absolutely, the whole lot. Yeah, it's amazing. It's great looking, as he says, as a result. He looks 28. Yeah. I first got to know him because he reached out to me, as they say, because he decided he was going to go full throttle, full frontal against Trump.
1:05:35And he just wanted to chat about sort of strategizing and campaigning and how you land messages and stuff like that. And he ended up doing quite a lot in the UK as well. He just became for a period. And I hope he does it again, because I think he's a very effective voice against Trump. Because the other thing he does quite well, I think, is he mocks Trump very, very well. And he's clearly seen in his 11 days and in his year on the plane raising funds, he's clearly seen that Trump really, really, really finds that difficult. And don't you think that was funny as well, that the thing that really got to Trump was Scaramucci saying that he was the fattest president America's ever had?
1:06:15that was when the war was declared all power to the mooch good thank you Alistair thank you see you soon
From the publisher
Would a second Trump presidency be far more right wing? What drives the former US president? Is he trying to do a deal with Taylor Swift?
In this week's episode of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's former spin doctor, where he answers all these questions and more.
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