104. Trump’s Meeting with Putin and the Plot to Rig the Next Election

0:06Welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Caddy, did you get the ass kissing red alert on your phone related to Tim Cook? I don't know if you saw that, but the beep, beep, beep. When the 24 karat gold iPad went over to Trump, I got the ass kissing alert. I don't know. Did you get it? I got it. It was like an amber alert. OK, I just want to make sure you got it. That was like the I'm Tim Cook and I know how to suck up to Donald Trump, give him a lot of money and announce that I'm going to spend a lot of money, which actually I'd already announced back in February.

0:40But, hey, that doesn't matter. Let's not worry about the details. You mean that alert? Yeah. And the 24 karat gold. Oh, that was good. It was brutal. Brutal. Anyway, what are we talking about today? I just wanted to make sure your phone was working like mine. Beep, beep, beep. It was the ass kissing alert. And I said, oh, OK, another another CEO groveling in the Oval Office. Hey, it's working for Tim Cook because what's 100 billion between friends? Right. Nothing. Hey, look, God bless him. You know, he's he will always be Tim Apple to me, but it's OK. We can sometimes call him Tim Cook. OK, today we are going to talk about the showdown in Texas, the flight in the night of the dozens of Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state of Texas in order to block a plan.

1:25by the Republican Party in Texas to redraw the congressional map so that they can win more seats. The FBI has now been asked to hunt down the rogue Democratic lawmakers who have hot-footed it up to Chicago, Illinois, a nice, safe Democratic safe haven. So we're going to talk about that. It's a little in the weeds. Bear with us of gerrymandering. But actually, this is kind of fundamental to America and to American democracy and to why this country is so dysfunctional and doesn't work and is so hard to govern and is becoming more politically extreme. If you want to know why, listen to this podcast because we'll get into it.

2:05Then we will talk about the announcement that has just come in. We're recording this on Thursday morning that came in that Donald Trump says that he is going to meet Vladimir Putin. Obviously, a huge coup for Vladimir Putin if it happens, because he's been kind of isolated on the world stage. So we'll get into that and what it means potentially for Ukraine as well. But let's start, Anthony, I think we should start by explaining what is happening because America draws up its congressional districts in a way that is different from every other major democracy. I just kind of went through the list.

2:38No one else does this. In America, congressional districts or what in the UK are called constituencies are drawn up by politicians. So if you're living in a state that is controlled by Republicans, it will be Republicans who are in charge of drawing up the congressional map. If you are living in a state that is controlled by Democrats, it will be Democrats who are in charge of drawing up the congressional map. And of course, once you give politicians the big red pen to draw up their congressional maps, they're going to guess what, draw it in their own favour. Normally, the congressional maps are only redrawn in America every 10 years, because that's when the census comes out.

3:18So the census comes out in 2000, it comes out in 2010, it comes out in 2020, it comes out in 2030. And it's when the census comes out, that the state legislatures can look at these maps and say, Oh, my goodness, we've got, you know, more of these people and less of those people and more people in this city and less people in that district. And then they redraw their maps. And that is when they do it. But we are, guess what, 2025. And Texas has decided to have what's called a mid-census redrawing of its maps, basically because it can. It's not illegal to do this. But Donald Trump wants to use every political tool he can to have as much power as he can.

3:58And ahead of next year's midterm elections, he wants to make it as likely as possible that Republicans hold on to the House of Representatives. So what he's trying to do is put pressure on the governor of Texas and the legislature in Texas and say, OK, I want you to find me five more congressional seats in Texas, which will help Republicans hold on to the House of Representatives. And that is the way congressional maps are drawn in America. And it is a system that has become intensely politicized. Democrats and I sorry, I'm taking a bit of time, Anthony, because I just think this is worth explaining to listeners who might not know.

4:36So Democrats in Texas, Democrats elected to the House of Representatives and the Senate in Texas are furious. And so they said, we don't like this. This is pure political warfare. And the way we are going to try and protest this, we don't have many tools at our disposal, but we're going to leave the state because then there won't be enough members to vote on this new map in the state legislature. and we're going to leave the state until the end of this congressional session, which is August the 19th, and we're going to hot foot it to Illinois. And we're not going to come back until August the 20th.

5:12And that way you can't pass this new map. Meanwhile, the FBI has said potentially that it's going to hunt down and arrest these lawmakers who are holed up in a hotel where, believe it or not, there was a fire alarm in the morning and they all had to get out of the hotel. But anyway, that was an aside. They're all holed up in a hotel, and now the FBI might go and actually try and arrest them. So, it's massive political brinkmanship, which doesn't serve the voters of Texas necessarily, doesn't serve the voters of the United States. And we're going to explain why. So, Anthony, why is this a story in your mind that our listeners should care about?

5:51Something about is technical about drawing up maps. Katie, when I talk about the dysfunction of the American government and how ungovernable it is and the lack of civility in the House of Representatives where they don't even talk to each other anymore, very rarely are seen together socializing. Some of it is directly related to gerrymandering. And I want to explain to viewers outside the United States the origins of it because I think it's important. There was a gentleman by the name of Elbridge Gerry, G-E-R-R-Y. He was the governor of Massachusetts. A couple of the state senators went to him and said, listen, we're going to lose an election in this area by Swampscott in Andover, Massachusetts.

6:32And so we want to, quote unquote, redistrict the area. And Elbert's jury looked at them and said, what do you mean? Well, we know these people on this side of the block are for our opponents. And these people on the other side of the block are with us. And so we want to recarve the district. And here's the paperwork. So they wanted to get rid of all the people who weren't for them, basically. We want to screen out our enemies and we want to screen in our allies. And Elbridge Gerry said, no problem, let's do it. Now, I'm holding up a map and I'll make sure that this gets to our producers. But I'm showing that for your benefit there.

7:09So that is a political cartoon from 1812. And what the political cartoonist said, that looks like a salamander. And so therefore, this is a gerrymander or now known as a gerrymander. And that's the origin story of it. And the courts, actually, the opposing party sued them and they won in the court because the procedural aspects in the state were such that the governor, Elbridge Gerry, had the right to do this. Both sides started doing this immediately, but it didn't intensify, Caddy, until after the 1992 election, when Ross Perot was competing as a third party, Democrats and Republicans said, whoa, no third parties in this country.

7:54We got to tighten our duopoly. And they started letting each other gerrymander. And then one more point was a very important one. And you guys could Google this. It's called Operation Red Map. And what was that? The Koch family, the Republicans said, man, we have less and less registrants. Republicans have the smallest level of voter registration in the country. Independents, number one, Democrats, number two. Yet the Republicans, ladies and gentlemen, they control the House, they control the Senate, and they control the Supreme Court. How did they do that? Go back to Operation Red Map. They flooded the zone of all the state legislators, and they got a lot of state legislators to win seats as Republicans.

8:39And they started this process. Trump wants to take it to the ninth level. Trump is looking at the map and saying, oh, my God, I've just grifted$3 billion. Probably not a great thing. That's obviously an emoluments clause violation. If I lose the House in 2026, they're coming for me again. And they're going to try to impeach me. They're going to totally slow me down. So he's on the phone with Greg Abbott saying. The governor of Texas. Yeah, this is back to Georgia. Remember what he called the Secretary of State of Georgia? Yeah. Find me enough votes to win the state. He's now calling Greg Abbott saying, hey, Greg, find me enough congressional districts.

9:19And Abbott, who's another lapdog jellyfish like all these other guys. Woof. OK. Anything you want, President Trump. So, Anthony, hold on a second. So what happens with this gerrymandering is that the states become more extreme and it becomes harder to find Republicans who can get elected in Democratic states and Democrats who can get elected in Republican states. So basically, moderation through this process is getting squeezed out of American government, which makes the country more polarized, harder to govern, harder to get things done. So here's just an example on Texas. The Republicans won 56 percent of the popular vote in Texas in 2024, but they won 25 of the 38 congressional seats.

10:08That's 66 percent. So even though, just as you were saying, right, the share of the Republican vote is shrinking, but they've managed to draw the maps in such a way that they actually have more power. Doesn't that just disenfranchise? Well, the Democrats are doing it, too. And Democrats have done exactly the same thing in New York and in Illinois and in the states that they control. It's just that Democrats control fewer states. That's the problem because it is the state legislatures that draw up these maps and Democrats don't control as many states. If this becomes an arms race, then it is Republicans who have the advantage just because they have more maps that they control.

10:49Right. I'm fighting with my maps and you're fighting with your maps. I've got more maps. Yeah, for now. And they were more clever. You know, listen, I mean, again, a newsflash to my Democratic friends. The Republicans are more sinister and they fight more ruthlessly. And so they did this surreptitiously 30 years ago. So they had an agreement with each other. Basically, it wasn't like a written agreement, but it was like, OK, you gerrymander a little bit in your state. I'll gerrymander a little bit of my state and we'll protect these others' interests, tighten the duopoly. And then the Republicans said, ha ha, they think we're lightly gerrymandering.

11:27Let's do this Operation Red Map and we're going to flood the zone when these small little elections caddy. A state senators race is a couple hundred thousand dollars. It's not the hundred million dollars or the two billion dollar presidential election. So very rich people on the Republican side flooded these states. They got state senators propped up. They tripled their campaign budgets. They started winning in these states. And then they corrupted the map. The other things that Republicans have done brilliantly is what I call the tyranny of the minority. And if you remember the Federalist Papers, what they wrote about in the Federalist Papers is we want to protect the country from the tyranny of the majority, meaning we're going to have a Republican setup where there's two senators in every state.

12:17And this way, even though you may have less population in your state, you're protected. The Electoral College is an example of that. It's to protect the minority voter against the mob. The Republicans subverted that. They flipped the table and they've now created something called the tyranny of the minority. Let me give two quick examples. North and South Dakota, four senators, combined population one and a half million, slightly more than the island of Manhattan. And quite a lot of buffalo. A lot of buffalo, a lot of buffalo represented by those four senators. But think of the power of North and South Dakota, Republican enclaves flooded the zone with Republicans.

13:00And that cancels out the great state of California and the great state of New York, which are two of our more populous states, but they're underrepresented as a proportion of population. The Republicans are masters at this. That is a little different, though, from the gerrymandering, because the gerrymandering is to do with the congressional districts, right? But remember, they cut those states. Remember, those states were one state. They cut North and South Dakota so they could get two senators in each state. So it is different, but it's in the same genre of the gainsmanship is that what they're doing.

13:34And you're right that the Democrats do it too. You look at Illinois, Republicans won 45 % of the popular vote in 2024, but they only won three of the 17 congressional seats in Illinois. That's 18%. So they won 45 % of the popular vote, but they only won 18 % of the congressional seats. And why? That's because the Democrats have done exactly the same thing. I reached out actually this morning before we recorded to Mike Lawler, who's close to you. He's a Republican congressman in New York, one of the few, I think there are only 10 Republican congressmen in New York, one of the few actually Republican congresspeople around the country elected in Democratic states, because there just aren't very many of them because of this gerrymandering.

14:19And he's furious about this. I mean, he said, you know, it's idiotic what they're doing and that it basically makes the country more ungovernable. I asked him whether he thought it was because of what you just suggested, that this is all about Donald Trump being afraid that if the Democrats win the midterms, then he could be impeached for a third time, which he really doesn't want to be impeached for a third time. Two was bad enough. And he says those were unfair. And he agreed with that. He said, yeah, basically. But he did also point out that Democrats have done the same thing. And he also says that even though Gavin Newsom is trying to now retaliate against what Texas is doing, he thinks, Congressman Lawler thinks that Democrats will run out of ammunition, that they can match Texas's five seats with five seats in California that they can swing to Democrats by redistricting.

15:15But around the country, he thinks that Republicans will be able to offset anything Democrats can do by seven to 16 seats. And that would mean that the chances of the Republicans winning the House of Representatives next year go up substantially, right? I mean, if they can really net seven to 16 seats in red states by gerrymandering, then Democrats' chances of winning back the House go down unless it's a big wave election and there's a huge repudiation of the Trump administration. Are we still a democracy? Yes. Yes. America is still a democracy, but this is one of the weakest points. The politicians are picking the voters.

15:58The politicians are picking the voters. The voters are no longer picking the politicians. So go ahead. Ever since the founding of the republic, as you just pointed out with Mr. Jerry, that's been the case, right? This is not new that politicians have tried to pick their voters. What's changed since the 90s is that the parties became more polarized and technology allowed for much better data collection of voters. So the whole process of gerrymandering has just become so much more efficient because of technology. And let's assume that technology and the data collection is going to become even more efficient with AI that they can basically totally eliminate the chances of having an opponent from the other side run against them and win.

16:45and so all they have to worry about is their primary race and whether they can win their primary race. So it's not new, Anthony. This is a flaw in the American democratic experiment because other countries don't do this. They leave it to civil servants and they leave it to nonpartisan commissions. It's not new, but they put it on steroids. But let me ask you this, Gatti. Would they ever change it? Would it ever go to a system of automation where you said, hey, guys, let's make it fair. Let's make it nonpartisan. Let's give it to nonpartisan commissions. When I was a kid growing up, these districts look like geometric shapes that you could recognize from ninth grade geometry.

17:23Triangles, squares, rectangles, trapzoids. Except for that salamander. Well, yeah, a few of those were in there, but mostly they were fairly even. Now they look like jagged edged jigsaw puzzles. They're sort of completely ridiculous. And I will say this to American listeners. The cookies on your laptop, the cookies on your hardtop computer in your office, tell the political pundits whether you're a Democrat, Republican or independent. God forbid if you're independent, by the way, because then they flood you with both flyers. OK, but then immediately, oh, that's a Republican. We're going to cut him into the red district.

18:02Oh, that's a Democrat. Let's see if we can move that house into the blue district. I think this is the most damaging thing that we do in our society. And I submit to everybody listening, the United States has had 27 constitutional amendments since the founding of the Constitution. So that's approximately one amendment every eight years. Yet we have not had a constitutional amendment since 1993. That was a procedural one. The big amendment was the Voting Rights Act. That's already 59 years ago. So, Cady, this was supposed to be a living document, and this was supposed to be something that we reset like software, a version 2.0, a version 27, 28.0.

18:44And unfortunately, we're not doing that anymore. But if we were going to do it and I was in charge of it, I would submit to the people of the United States that we need to end gerrymandering and we need to have a nonpolitical process to set up these districts. And you would be in tune with the American public because poll after poll shows that the American public wants it. There was a YouGov poll just recently. 60 % of Americans support it. When Florida had an initiative in 2018 to ban partisan gerrymandering, it passed with 62 % of the vote. In Ohio, three quarters of voters embraced similar reforms.

19:23They did the same things in Missouri, in Michigan. But you know what happens when those states have done that? In 2018, there was quite a big push around five different states around the country moved to try to make this process nonpartisan. The politicians just got around the legislatures. I mean, the politicians just got around the courts. They got around the commissions. They submitted maps that were sneakily submitted in Florida that were meant to be nonpartisan, but were actually drawn up by partisan operatives. I mean, it's the so the voters are saying exactly what you say. They're saying, Mr.

19:56Scaramucci, we agree with you. We want your constitutional amendment. But the politicians are saying, screw that. We want to get elected. So I don't know how you would get around this because politicians are damn sneaky. That is the challenge. And I submit to the people listening. There's a very powerful voting bloc in this country. They vote the exact same way in every single election. 100 million plus people, they vote the exact same way in every single election, Caddy Kay. That's the non-voter. The non-voter, the eligible voter that could vote, that doesn't show up. If you're an entrepreneurial politician listening, that's the zero one idea.

20:39Go after the non-voter. Increase the market size. Don't go after the same MAGA people or the same hard left people. Go after the people in the middle that are moderates. Ring their bell and tell them, look at the nonsense that these dopes are doing to the country. You and I, we have a chance to change this. Come into the voting swimming pool. Register to vote. If you're not registered, if you're registered to vote, show up and vote. Yeah. Let's kick the asses of these dopes that are hurting the country and are overly gaming the system. and in making the system basically ungovernable. Yeah. And if you think about the way, the many ways that I always call it the scaffolding of American government, basically American government institutions, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court are out of step with the American public on major issues that voters around the world and people around the world listening, watching America do care about.

21:45I mean, things like abortion, things like gun control, all of these issues that people who watch America think, how on earth does America do that? And why do they do these things that are so different? And why do they do these things that their populations don't actually want? The population of America doesn't actually want. If you ended partisan gerrymandering, if you ended what is happening right now in Texas and what is likely then to happen in California and will probably happen as a result in New York in 2028, actually, you would have a political body that was much more in tune with the population on major issues like abortion, like gun control.

22:24and it would be a more moderate political system. The country would be more moderate on some of the issues on which it's become extreme because it would elect moderate politicians, right? I mean, you would elect more people who were in the center. You'd elect more Mike Lawlers, who is probably going to lose his seat, by the way, in 2028 if there is gerrymandering in New York. So you'd just have a government that was more in tune with the population on a whole host of issues. Right. Is that is that fair? I am so with you on this, but I think this is the challenge. Like this is somebody could look at this and maybe it'll be the Elon Musk of the world.

23:03Somebody has to look at this and say, wow, this is so broken. This is such a great country. The country is pliable. It's one of the most adaptive countries in the world as it relates to the economy. But it's very rigid as it relates to the political system. If we can smash this, Caddy, and we could recalibrate. Remember, these campaigns are marketing competitions. And so if you're only singing to your choir, you're going to get further to the left. You're going to get further to the right. But if you make the politician in their marketing competition known as a campaign, if you make them sing to the middle, guess what they're going to do, Caddy?

23:42They're going to sing to the middle, and we're going to have more consensus management of the government, and the government's going to work better. But this is a disaster. And if Gavin Newsom does the same thing in California, he will and New York does the same thing and all these other people do the same thing. This is a disaster. And they will do it because they feel their argument will be, this is existential. We can't just let the other side do it because then we will never be elected into the majority again. And that's the situation you have yourself in right now, which is why a whole load of Democratic members from Texas are holed up in hotels in Illinois.

24:21We're going to take a break and come back and talk about things happening abroad or maybe not happening abroad. Will this Trump-Putin meeting actually happen? stay with us for that.

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25:43Welcome back to The Rest is Politics. And we have the prospect, Anthony, of Vladimir Putin meeting Donald Trump in an undisclosed location, although apparently it's been decided, at an undisclosed time, although apparently it might be next week, to discuss the war in Ukraine. It's not clear whether this meeting is actually going to happen. It's not clear why the Kremlin and the White House are announcing that their presidents are going to have a meeting before before the details of that meeting have been sorted out, because usually you only get the principals meeting once a deal has been struck, and then they meet just to kind of put their signatures on the paperwork.

26:31But this would be something, if it happens, that is a huge coup for Vladimir Putin, who's been increasingly ostracized since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. It would be the first time that he's met an American president in four years. And it's not clear either what Vladimir Putin is prepared to give up. One of the things that the White House has said is that this bilateral meeting would then be dependent on there being a trilateral meeting with Putin, Trump and Vladimir Zelensky. The latest kind of sounds coming out of the Kremlin are that they are kind of dismissing that idea, which makes me wonder whether this actually is as firm as both sides seem to be saying it is.