113. How Far Will Trump Go to Control the Narrative?

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1:20Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kaye in Washington. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci back in New York, Katty, struggling with the United Nations traffic in this beautiful island of Manhattan. Oh, I feel bad for you. I always try and avoid that week because it's a nightmare to get around. There has obviously been an awful lot in the news just over the last few days over the weekend, which is why I'm so glad we're doing this extra episode now on the Mondays. We're going to talk about Trump's kind of broad crackdown on political rhetoric and how he's using various bits of the government to reshape the country in an image that he thinks is more favorable to himself.

2:00He's promising vengeance, targeting his political opponents, going after the media with a crackdown that's already pulled a comedian from the air. At the Pentagon, reporters are being told that they have to get sort of approval on what they report, even if it's not classified information, which is a new one for journalists. And TikTok, of course, is future as being rewritten in kind of backroom deals that favor Trump's allies. So across business, across the public sector, across the media, across the government, a lot is happening at the moment in America that is sort of this tightening of executive power and Trump's own power and grip on the country.

2:40But we're going to start with the memorial service to Charlie Kirk that was held down in Arizona on Sunday. It was an extraordinary display of sort of mix of government and Christianity, kind of part worship and part government. One cabinet member after another, you and I both listened to it, Anthony, but you had this kind of strange juxtaposition of these cabinet members coming up on stage one after another, eulogizing Charlie Kirk, talking about his Christianity, talking about his influence. And then you have what I thought was the most powerful moment of the service, which was Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow speaking.

3:22And it was just I was so impressed with her and with the eulogy that she gave her husband and also the way she addressed America. She was holding back tears. She had a tissue in one hand. She was trying to smile at moments as she remembered her husband. It was brave. It was sad. And most of all, I think it was generous. She forgave the shooter because she said that's what Christ would have done and what Charlie would have done. She spoke to America and said, listen, I'm so glad there hasn't been violence in the wake of my husband's killing and that there was not revolution and there was not rioting on the streets.

4:00And her whole tone was, we spoke about this last week, her tone was one of reconciliation. Her tone was one of reaching out and dialogue and empathy for the country in this difficult moment. And she did it all. I don't know how she got through it. I don't know how you get through a speech like that 10 days after your spouse has been killed, who she clearly loved very much. And she had these sweet moments of talking about their family and the love notes he used to write to her and how she built a home for him and his role as a Christian father and husband. But what really struck me was when she said at one moment that the answer to hate is not more hate, it's love and always love.

4:43And then Donald Trump took the stage. And it was not quite that message, was it, Anthony? Well, I mean, just a couple of things, Katty. You know, if something happens to me, please don't let Trump eulogize me. Okay, you just intervene. I'm not sure. Can I just say that I don't think he's going to be offering. But if he calls me up and says, if he says, hey, get me in touch with Deirdre. I want to I want to kiss this punk off. Could you do that? But I thought his speech. And again, this is the problem because we try to be fair and you want to be generous. I thought her speech was an A plus. I listened to the whole thing.

5:19and while I didn't agree with everything that Charlie Kirk said, I liked what Van Jones said about him in terms of the comedy. As I said on a prior podcast, I spent a lot of time with Charlie campaigning in 2016, genuinely liked him as a person and I admired the fact that he had an open door policy where he was willing to speak without the rancor. Having said all that, okay, And his wife did a great job having said all that with the president basically got up there and gave was a campaign stump speech. Yeah. And he said that he wanted to excoriate his enemies and go after them. The other thing, Caddy, if you ever cross me on the show, you should follow social media because I'm going to put out a memo.

6:04Okay. And the memo is going to tell you what you need to do to get your stuff together. Can you imagine Richard Nixon putting out a memo to the attorney general 53 years ago and saying the stuff that Trump said over the weekend to Pam Bondi? I mean, we wouldn't have needed the tapes, right? Yeah. I mean, obviously. But we're going to get into that. We're going to get into the Pam Bondi stuff and the crackdown. But it's all connected. OK, so we have people in our society that actually want to heal the divisions on the left and the right. We have people burnt out and we have people like, whoa, we don't want to cross over to political violence.

6:43We now have two young children that are going to grow up without their dad as a result of political violence. And it's connected, Caddy, because the president is a blast furnace for the continuation of this. And so Bondi, the Charlie Kirk speech, his actions at the Pentagon, they're all connected to him wanting to keep the fire burning and to be president of the dis-United States of America. And it's sad. I thought it was very sad. I mean, look, you have had voices over the last week. And actually, I do think most Democratic elected officials who I've spoken to have not been fueling those flames.

7:25They have been expressing dismay and sadness at the killing of Charlie Kirk and the assassination of him. Obviously, the memorial service was mostly a MAGA crowd and mostly a kind of White House crowd. But Democrats, yes, there have been some crazies online on the fringe of the political left who have been celebrating his death. And I'm incredibly sad that some of the comments following our show and the release of our show on some platforms, you've got people celebrating his death. I don't know how people lose their humanity enough to celebrate somebody's death who was advocating free speech and who was talking on campuses.

8:04Whatever you think of their point of view, they should be allowed to do that. That's the whole point of the free speech principle. But that's why there was such a stark juxtaposition between Erica Kirk, who stood up with, you know, in full grief and still in the middle of her pain and sadness, found the generosity and the empathy. And maybe it's the Christian spirit to reach out to the other side and to forgive the person who killed her husband. I mean, that takes an enormous amount of of reconciliatory tendencies. We saw it from Governor Cox of Utah as well. He wasn't pouring fuel on the flames.

8:45He was trying to tamp it down. There are those figures in America. But I spoke to a Trump ally last week, a Republican, elected Republican, who said to me, you know, in times like this, we have leaders who can reach for the middle and reach for reconciliation and take the high ground. And we have leaders who take the bait. And unfortunately, we have a president who every time takes the bait. And that was from an ally of President Trump told me that. And we saw it, you know, there he was. It was so disappointing to hear him stand up at that memorial service and say, Charlie didn't hate his opponents.

9:22He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them. And he said it just after Erica had said what she said. And you know what was really disappointing why it was so sad? The crowd laughed. It was like they were there for the Trump show. They didn't want Donald Trump to go for the middle and to be reconciliatory. These kind of giggles around the auditorium was what actually was the sort of saddest bit of that moment. It's a DNA thing. He doesn't have it in him to channel any type of healing or any type of transcendence. He just doesn't have it in him.

9:58And that's part of it. But it's percolating now and it's fraying people. So I had the opportunity even this morning to meet with a senator, a U.S. senator, met with him this morning and said to me. Republican or Democrat? A Democrat. I'm going to leave him off the list because I think it's fair to him. It's a fairly straightforward conversation, but I want him to be anonymous. He literally said to me that there are people dropping like flies in the Republican Party to get out. He referenced, I don't know if you remember Jeff Flake. But Jeff Flake was the senator from Arizona. In the same mold as Ben Sasse, that kind of centrist Republican senator.

10:40Jeff got out. He also took flack in his home state from the MAGA people, some of the MAGA people in his family. Jeff actually ended up moving to Utah so that he would be out of the persecution zone of some of these people. And there's a crisis going on. There's a real crisis going on where smart, normal people are capitulating to this nonsense. And so to me, you know, I so so many weird things happened this week, Caddy. So I have to bring these up because they're just weird. Number one, these text messages that were released as evidence by the assassin. Bannon looked at that and said, how is that even possible with complete sentences and grammar and all this forethought causing question?

11:31Something happened this week and I said, OK, this has to be fake. This has to be AI generated. So I spent a lot of time looking at it. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, came out to deny that Israel had any involvement in the Charlie Kirk assassination. I thought that was bizarre to me. First of all, I don't think they had any involvement in the assassination, but you and I always go to the Shakespeare line, Douth does protest to us. Why would you be even offering any dignity to that assertion as the prime minister. Again, it's all connected to me because the world has gone mad with this sort of craziness that's part conspiracy theory, part drama around Trump, part algorithmic screed, where the algorithms are working on trying to create foam and fervor against each other.

12:28And there was Erica Kirk saying messages that you would have expected a leader, a political leader to say at an event like that. America's adversaries seize on moments like this to drive those wedges further between us to make the divisions more stark. And they capitalize on it. I read somewhere, was it? I'm just checking up the numbers, but it was so interesting. The official state media in Iran, Russia, and China mentioned the killing of Charlie Kirk in the days after he was killed 6 ,200 times, framing it as exactly as you just said, framing it as a conspiracy. So they love this. They love seeing these kinds of divisions amongst us.

13:26They love this conspiracy world that Americans fall into because they see where it leads. It leads to a weaker country. And until Americans start listening more to the voices of the answer to hate is not hate, it's love and always love, or to Spencer Cox up in Utah saying, go and touch some grass and get off your screens, I think we get weaker, not stronger. I think something will happen, I hope, to pull Americans out of this spiral of hatred and and divisiveness and violence, but I think it's going to take a while. And it has to get worse before Americans decide to elect leaders who are saying things like Erica Kirk and Spencer Cox of Utah and not saying things like, I hate my political enemies and I want retribution against them.

14:13Before we go to a break, what was your impression of the Musk-Trump handshake? Weird, right? What was that? Weird? I thought it was a little weird and a little contrived. I mean, I know that Musk has been a big supporter of Charlie Kirk's, obviously, and they have amplified each other. But I thought the two of them sitting behind the bulletproof glass, kind of yakking it up, suddenly looking like friends again. I don't know. Well, Musk put out on his Twitter feed for Charlie and he showed the video of him and President Trump shaking hands. But remember, Trump is in the Epstein file. And then the second subtweet, the truth will eventually come out.

14:59That's from Elon Musk. And by the way, there's no going back from that. Okay, there's no going back from that. So yes, cordiality at a funeral. Trump obviously saying that he's not going to go after Musk in this sort of witch hunt that he wants to go after other corporations or adversaries, political adversaries of his, because he knows Musk is very, very powerful and has control of a very large social media mechanism. So he's probably going to leave Musk alone. But there's no love lost there. There's no question about that. No, it looked a little awkward. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about all of the ways, as we were just talking about, and we can kind of run through the list of them that Trump is using the organizations of government to clamp down on his political opponents.

15:46So we'll be right back with that.

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17:00So, Katie, I want to talk about a couple of things again. I think all connected. We want to talk about TikTok in the evolution of a deal there. Jimmy Kimmel and what happened to Jimmy Kimmel this past week as a result of comments he made on the air related to the Charlie Kirk assassination and the Pentagon. Oh, and let's have the DOJ, too, and the firing of the Virginia. I mean, there's so much going on. Throw it all in there because it's all. It's all connected because if you read in your scouting report, let's say you were prospecting a future president. And in the scouting report of Donald Trump, it said, has fascist tendencies.

17:40Didn't say that he's a fascist, just has fascist tendencies. You could then cite some evidence now. And so my question to you, do you think the government should be involved in opining on whether or not Jimmy Kimmel should be fired from his job? So this is a really interesting case where I spoke to a lawyer who suggested to me that Jimmy Kimmel actually has a very good argument for suing the government over his firing. Just kind of a little bit of background, particularly for our listeners around the world. America is almost an exception in terms of Western democracies in that free speech is protected very broadly in this country.

18:25there isn't really such a thing as hate speech in other countries in the West, in different countries for different reasons, you can be prosecuted for some of the things you say. In Germany, it's around the Second World War. In Britain, we have hate speech that is prosecutable. In France, also hate speech that is prosecutable. But in America, as Charlie Kirk liked to remind his listeners. You can have gross speech, offensive speech, speech you disagree with vehemently, but you can't prosecute somebody for what they say. You can prosecute them for inciting violence against somebody, but you can't prosecute somebody for what they say.

19:05And in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian who was fired, and it was clear that he was fired because Trump and the MAGA right and Brendan Carr, who is the head of the Communications Commission, didn't like what he said. He was fired by or pulled from the air by ABC News. And now I've spoken to a couple of lawyers who said, actually, he could sue the government because the government was coercing ABC News to get rid of him because of what he said. Now, Trump then went on and said, oh, well, it's because of his ratings. It wasn't because of his ratings, because by then, Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, had already gone on a podcast and said that he should be pulled.

19:48It's my way or the highway. We could do this easily or we could do this hard. We can put pressure on his organization because of what he said. And that is the chilling effect of clamping down on free speech, which you're not allowed to do in America. And which, by the way, a couple of Republicans have already come back and said, to their credit, this is inappropriate. I mean, you've got Ted Cruz saying you can't behave like a mafia boss, Brendan Carr, just because you didn't like what he said, because guess what? One day they'll be in power and they'll do the same to us. Maybe I don't recollect this properly, but didn't J.D.

20:21Vance go to the Munich Security Conference earlier this year and give this very big speech? And he was very pedantic related to Europe and the UK and the way they handle free speech. And now he and Donald Trump are free speech absolutists. Did he not give that speech? You're right. I mean, the whole MAGA movement is built on the basis of running against the weaponization of free speech by the left. And now they're just doing the same thing, right? Yeah. Well, again, when we remember Animal Farm, the pigs obviously felt that they were abused by the farmers. They revolted and they didn't like animals that stood on two legs.

21:01But by the end of the allegory, they themselves, the pigs, were standing on two legs. And it just talks about how human nature being what it is, you're accusing one side of doing something, but then you're doing it. Right. So so tick tock, they're going to pick winners, Katty. So they've decided that even though the Congress and the Supreme Court said TikTok should not be allowed in the country, Trump is saying, no problem. It's not only going to be allowed in the country, but I'm going to pick my friends to run TikTok. Right. And now the left is decrying that. But the flip side of it is about eight years ago, nine years ago, Solyndra, you may remember this.

21:42This was a solar panel company. U.S. government put$500 million in it. went to zero. People said, well, what is Barack Obama and the administration doing trying to pick winners in the marketplace? So they're doing it to each other at times. And again, it's not about whataboutism, it's about making it stop. Intel, Lutnik got out there and said, we got a$10 billion grant of equity from Intel. People started crying about that. Well, number one, during the CHIPS Act, Joe Biden gave the company$10 billion, got nothing in exchange for it. However, Barack Obama gave billions of dollars to General Motors and got equity in General Motors during the global financial crisis.

22:29And of course, the government wants the company stabilized. The government sold those shares. And again, I can take you back to the 80s. Chrysler was bailed out by the Carter administration, Lee Iacocca got money from the Carter administration, they took equity. So again, you got both sides doing things, and then the side that does it, the other side decries. What is that all about, Katty Kay? Hypocrisy, clearly. I mean, it's just rank hypocrisy from both sides now. I mean, I think it is interesting that you had for years the MAGA movement railing against the censorship that they saw in the Biden administration and railing against the use of law fair against President Trump.

23:19And now you have a president who is going to use exactly those tools, as he's just asked Pam Bondi to do in this kind of bizarre personal truth social post to her, like a memo, like you said earlier, it's like, you know, who needs the Watergate tapes when you've got Trump actually putting it out there in a memo, right? Saying, okay, now you're being too slow. My reputation, I'm looking like a dummy, go after my political opponents. I mean, they went after me, now you go after them. It's an arms race of anti-free speechism and use of lawfare. Back to the company's thing. I mean, it's interesting that you've also got Pam Bondi going after Office Depot because one of their employees, who they've now fired, and that's perfectly fine, you can be fired by your employee for breaching terms of your employee contract.

24:13She's now going after Office Depot because one of their employees refused to print flyers memorializing Charlie Kirk. It's the same thing, right? What bit of the American apparatus of government and private life is this administration not prepared to capture or to use in order to create a society and a country that is flattering and favorable to Donald Trump. Because that's what it feels like we're in at the moment, whether it's the private sector and businesses, as you've just described in TikTok, and the way that the president can make money out of that, whether it's some areas of crypto and how the president's making money out of that, whether it's the DOJ going after prosecutors or in the case this week of suspending, which hasn't been done before, a US attorney for not going after one of Donald Trump's enemies, even though that attorney was appointed by Donald Trump.

25:13It seems that there is nothing that Donald Trump is not prepared to try and use to get a country that he feels is favorable to him. I think that's the commonality, right? Yeah. But I'm not going to go after Elon Musk. He's too powerful. And oh, by the way, I'm going to tweet on Monday morning that Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch are going to be involved in the TikTok deal. Oh, but I am suing them for$10 billion. Oh, but did I not mention to you last week they were invited by King Charles to the state dinner and they're going to get included in the TikTok deal. So let's take out the Trump decoder ring.

25:52I'm suing them speciously to support me with my base because they're putting out truthful things in their newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, related to my liaisons and relationship with Jeff Epstein. But they're so powerful, Caddy, that they're coming into TikTok alongside of my bud, Larry Ellison, and other buds of mine that have given me campaign donations. And by the way, Caddy, I watched Trump on Fox and Friends last week, and he was chummy, chummy, chummy about Rupert and Lackland. So this is a guy that literally can say two things out of his mouth, contemporary. I've never met anybody like this, and the world hasn't seen a political figure like this at a very long time.

26:40he can say two things simultaneously out of his mouth and people do not overreact or call him out on it they've been immunized by how he talks and immunized by these actions i just find it hard to believe that there's nobody checking him at the door of the doj nobody checking him at the pentagon nobody checking him as it relates to free speech and brendan carp nobody's checking any of this Well, nobody's checking in within the Republican Party because they're kind of terrified to do so. I mean, I have literally in the last week, I've spoken to senior Republicans who in private do tell me that they are worried about what Trump is doing, whether it comes to Ukraine, whether it comes to Charlie Kirk and the temperature in the country, whether it comes to free speech issues.

27:27But they won't stand up and say it in public, except you've had Tent Cruz and Rand Paul. I mean, they'll pick their moments. They'll very carefully pick their moments when they feel that they can say something in public. So we're reliant then on the courts and we see the courts trying to do their jobs, although the president is trying to interfere with the DOJ. And then we're reliant on the press. But that took another blow this week when the Pentagon demanded that defense correspondents of American media organizations sign a pledge not to gather certain information. So if you are a journalist now that covers the Pentagon, you have to basically get your stories approved by the Pentagon.