118. Trump is Destroying American Democracy

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1:23Welcome to the Res is Politics US. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And I'm Katty Kay. Somewhere in the middle of New England. I'm not quite sure why. I'm on a long road trip. Did you strategically place the fern behind you or did you get that from the guy from Hangover? I don't think it's real, the fern. I think it's plastic. I'm driving my son anyway from D.C. to Maine, which is kind of fun. We're having a nice road trip. Just remember, Tony Soprano did that. He ended up killing a few people while he was doing that. Remember, he went on a college tour, right? I was tempted to kill the person who told me the Wi-Fi in my room was going to be good enough to do this podcast before I had to move down to the fern-infested business center.

2:03However, let's move on. All right. Well, you look great, Caddy. But I'll tell you who does not look great. That would be James Comey. James Comey's first court appearance. I'll tell you who also doesn't look great, somebody like me, Pam Bondi. What a tense Senate hearing. What a show. And of course, our U.S. government also not looking great. It's still shut down. But I am surprised by this. The Democrats have gained some ground. So, Katty, take us into what we're going to be talking about. So, we're going to talk about those two things. Of course, there is news that there is a peace deal between Hamas and the Israelis in Gaza.

2:40I would urge you to go and listen to Alistair Rory on The Rest is Politics. They've been doing an amazing job following this story. We're going to talk about that on Monday, which is the day that the hostages may be actually released and when we will have more details from the talks. And also Donald Trump has said he may be going to the region, possibly to Egypt, to the talks or even to Israel to speak to the Knesset. So I think there'll be more to talk about on Monday. So we're going to save that for Monday and talk about it then. We are going to talk about both those things, James Comey's arraignment, Pam Bondi's extraordinary appearance and the politics of retribution.

3:12Then in the second half of the show, we're going to talk about the government shutdowns. But before we dive into today's episode, and since we have been talking a lot about ICE recently, and there's been a lot more activity on the immigration front in Chicago and in Portland this week, all of those massive raids with the National Guard, We thought it was worth taking some time to tell you about the man who is really behind all of that and behind much of this politics of retribution as well. Lurking in the background, of course, and whispering in Trump's ear at the moment is Stephen Miller. He's been with Trump since the very first term, since the beginning.

3:48He's the architect of the so-called Muslim ban back in 2017. He is one of the few who stuck right by Trump after January the 6th, which earned him a lot of credibility with his boss. And he is now a huge figure in the White House. He's driving a lot of domestic policy and he's really driving a lot of what we're seeing around immigration and retribution. So we thought it was worth talking about him. So, Kat, I've known Stephen Miller since 2016. People won't remember this, but he was actually Jeff Sessions, legislative aide, the senator from Alabama that would ought to be Donald Trump's attorney general.

4:25His extreme views on immigration started young. He disowned a friend in middle school because of his Latino heritage. He railed against a diverse high school on right wing radio shows. Now he's Trump's most trusted advisor. I had unbelievable amounts of access to him and Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. And I'm going to tell some of those stories. But he was suppressing this while working for Sessions. He's in full bloom now, Katty, for his ideological equal, Donald J. Trump. Yeah. So if you want to listen to that episode, it is for our members only. You can sign up, of course, at the rest is politics us dot com.

5:04But Stephen Miller really is at the heart of everything that is happening in the White House at the moment. He has an enormous amount of power and he has a lot of credibility with Donald Trump. So we think that's going to be an interesting listen for everybody. OK, on to this week. And wow, so much has happened that we have a ton of things we could talk about, but we're going to home in on these Bondi hearings for a start. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, was summoned up to the Senate. Part of the Senate's oversight role is to have members of the administration. And she followed on a pattern that we've seen from Kash Patel, from Robert Kennedy Jr., of being combative with senators in a way that I have never seen in a previous administration, having covered American politics for the last 25 years.

5:52She was personally rude about them. She came in very hot. And I mean, hot in the sense of not in the Donald Trump sense of hot when he says people are hot. She came in very hot as in kind of high temperature. She did not answer the questions. She had lists in front of her. She looked down at her notes and she had all these prepared attacks against the senators. And I thought it was a sort of depressing moment, really, Anthony, for the prospect of the state of the country, because she wasn't really answering the questions that they would have answered either on the Republican or the Democratic side, perhaps.

6:27But she was doing something that in its tone and manner degrades, I think, the democratic process and sets up a new norm of how future administrations will view the oversight role of Congress. I mean, no president, no White House likes the oversight role of Congress, but they don't usually show it in this incredibly combative way. What did you think of what she was doing and why she was doing it? I just want you to imagine that there is a fire alarm in the Senate, but it's not really a fire alarm. It's the democracy is ending alarm and you've got to break the glass and you've got to pull the switch and the democracy is ending.

7:13And what I don't understand is that alarm should be being pulled right now, but it's not. But let's go over a couple of things and then you tell me what the hell is going on with the United States Congress. So, number one, I've got the Epstein files right here on my desk. I've got the client lists. And then, remember, they brought those people into the West Wing, those right-wing journalists, and they handed them loose-leaf binders of nothing. Oh, by the way, I've got the X-Beam files on my desk. Now she's saying, where's my desk? I must have misplaced my desk. Number two, senior people in the Department of Justice, objective, independent arbiters of justice, said no to the Comey prosecution.

7:57Donald Trump, we learned from the Wall Street Journal, is using direct messaging. So he's stupider than Peter Hegseth. He's going to use direct messaging, Katty Kay. Just to fill people in on that, you're referring to the Truth Social post that Donald Trump put out last month saying, Pam, you've got to go after Comey. This is destroying our reputation. You've got to go after him faster. Get on with the case. And what he actually meant to do, according to the Wall Street Journal, is send that to her in private. Yeah. So now we have this type of dependent, no longer independent DOJ, and we're going to prosecute Comey.

8:34And we know there's flimsy evidence there. Number three, we got a bag man. We got a bag man. Tom Homan, bag man. caddy let me tell you something i get you whatever you want from ice just i need 50 000 and unmarked bills but i wanted a louis vuitton bag by the way because i'm a stylish guy they don't prosecute him no problem she's asked the question what did he do with the bribe money and then the follow-up question did he file for the taxes on the bribe money i mean he's getting paid is he paying some of it to the irs enough question nothing caddy k nothing last piece this is the one that really gets me.

9:13Okay. She's firing DOJ staff over not having the right priorities to Donald J. Trump and Pam Bondi. And she's wholly and totally politicized to the Department of Justice. Attorney General Mitchell, who went to jail for Richard Nixon, is literally coming out of the grave on Halloween night. And he's going to say, Pam, how are you doing this 50 years later after the Watergate. This is actually phenomenal. And so, Cady, my question to you, why isn't the fire alarm, the democracy is over fire alarm? Because while you and I are talking about this, the president and his team wants to pull the Insurrection Act lever.

10:00And I don't know, is Steve Miller showing him fake videos of people marching in the streets? Is Trump really this delusional or is Trump just making up his own set of facts so that he can declare martial law and end elections in the United States? Okay, what say you about all of these things? But I've got the fire alarm pulled and I'm like, dudes, you better get it together here or we're going to lose a democracy to these morons. And there may be some of those generals in that 800 group of generals that like these bozos. Okay, go ahead, Caddy. I'm sorry. I'm slightly under-caffeinated this morning.

10:34Let me just take out my candy corn cup here. Are you under caffeinated or over caffeinated? Look, I think that what Pan Bondi did, perhaps because she's on a little bit of thin ice in the White House or has been over the Epstein files. And clearly, as we know from Donald Trump having publicized what he was really thinking to her, not following through on this campaign of retribution fast enough with some of Donald Trump's allies, she had to go up there and give on a show and she gave a show and that show was for one person. And it's not the Pam Bondi that people I know and have spoken to who have worked with Pam Bondi in Florida, as prosecutors say, they recognize.

11:16You and I were texting earlier this week. You say that is not the Pam Bondi that you recognize, but she is fully on board with the Donald Trump program. She knows that she's been on a bit of thin ice. And so she had to do what increasingly members of the cabinet have to do go full blast against the senators in order to prove that she is an absolute MAGA stalwart in Donald Trump's camp. I agree with you. It was a depressing display. And there was one little bit of it that I wanted, two little bits of it that I thought were worth picking up on with you. On the Epstein files, it was nothing that Pam Bondi said, she said she was not going to talk about it.

11:55But there was a question from Senator Whitehouse about reports that there are photographs of Donald Trump with semi-naked underage girls, young girls. And she didn't answer that at all. She just turned the attack back on Senator White House and said, how dare you say this about Donald Trump? But I thought it was interesting that a US senator raised that issue and made me wonder, what do these senators know? What have they seen that we have not yet seen. And the other thing that I thought was interesting was when Senator Durbin of Illinois, who also she attacked, said, listen, you're not going to answer for this today, but one day you will be held accountable for that kind of behavior.

12:41And I guess I don't know if he's hinting at the idea that one day Pam Bondi would be impeached or something, you know, they would take some kind of retribution. But it got to the idea of when you talk about the fire alarm and democracy, you have to think what are the checks and balances and one of the checks has to be elections. I mean, the only way that Senator Durbin can deliver on that promise of holding Pam Bondi accountable, of holding the White House accountable, of holding anyone else in the administration accountable right now is by winning the midterm elections and winning the 2028 election, but particularly by winning the midterm elections.

13:17If they can't win those elections next November, they have three more years of the process that you were talking about, right? And I guess we get to that, you know, in the second half when we talk about the shutdown and whether it'll have any impact on Democrats' favorability or Republicans' favorability. But until they win an election, Senator Durbin's kind of whistling in the wind. And the administration is going to carry on doing the things that it is doing around the country and in Washington, D.C. I think it's a brilliant analysis. I just want to add to it. She does not have presidential immunity.

13:50So Donald Trump can probably get away with a lot of this stuff, But she actually is over the line now and lots of different laws and lots of different procedures. And again, we like being objective on this show. And so let me tell you a couple of things she's doing that is working. OK, she is doing a good job through ambiguity. OK, her testimony was staged ambiguity. So she was, you know, limiting her direct exposure to these direct contradictions. She was sort of deflecting questions. You said she had that rhetorical device where she had a few puns or phrases that she was using on the Congress.

14:31That was a signal caddy to her base. Try to, you know, this loyal base signaling. Look at how we're owning the libs here in the Congress. And I'm telling you, it worked for her with the president. I guarantee the president called her afterwards. He got some highlights on his iPad from his buddies. and he called her afterwards a great job, Pam. You're terrific, Pam. But listen, ladies and gentlemen, a democracy can die on a number of different ways. But one of the ways a democracy can die is mis-underestimating because we're going to use the George Bush word here because even now liberals think George Bush was a good guy.

15:11He's got a 72 % approval rating now. But we're mis-underestimating Trump's weakness, Katty K. I'm telling you, he's only got a 37 % approval rating. His health is bad. The economy is about to hit the shitter. I'm telling you that. We'll be talking about this in March, and hopefully Fiona will pull the tape where I said in November or October that the economy is going to crap out because the tariffs are out of control, right? Ro Khanna is running ads of a 22 % increase in coffee. Well, guess what? The biggest coffee supplier in the United States is Brazil. we have a 50 % tariff on them and our coffee makers are eating half of it, but they're still passing through a 22 % increase.

15:53And those things are rippling now through the economy. One other thing quickly, the Chinese are not buying a single soybean from American farmers, which is causing problems with American farmers. Devastation. It's not just causing a problem. No, it's devastating for soybean growers. Yeah. And the Iowa Senator. Senator Ernst. Yes, no mas for me because I'm not doing a good job representing my constituents. Trump promised them XYZ and they're getting goose eggs, he's getting zeros, and we're really suffering out here in Iowa. But just these three points, please listen, everybody. And if you're an American, call your congressman and say, hey, WTF, he's not as strong as he appears, number one.

16:36The economy is weakening. Number two, what is everybody fearful of with this man? A couple of ICE videos? Okay, we've got to push back on this guy if you want to save your democracy. And they're uncertain, Caddy. Trust me, I watched that testimony. It was staged. She did a good job. But you can see she's uncertain. You can see she's like, wow, they're pointing out all these inconsistencies with our system and our democracy. And this is a lesson from the great fiction writer, Robert Harris, the great nonfiction writer, Bill Shire, who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. You start out normal, Caddy, and then you start to morph into something that you do not recognize in yourself.

17:26That's where Pam Bondi is right now. and the frog is getting boiled in a direction that Trump wants it to go. So last point, Robert Harris said in the book, Munich, it was a historical fiction. He said when he went through the research, the bureaucrats in Germany hated Hitler. These were the permanent employees in the government and they were expecting Chamberlain to come from the British Empire to knock Hitler on his ass over the Sudenland. And he didn't do that. He appeased him and they were all confused. They thought, okay, this is our opportunity. Churchill's going to knock him on his ass and we're going to get him from the inside and topple him.

18:09And Churchill did the exact opposite due to, due to what, Caddy? You know your history. Due to what? Well, to thinking that if he went and he appeased him, then they could get some kind of deal with him. We're doing that with Donald Trump right now, guys. That's exactly what we're doing right now with Donald Trump. So wake up, open the window like in Network, the 1976 movie. I'm mad as hell. Not going to take it anymore. And these guys are a systemic threat to this system. And Pam Bondi showed some ambiguity, Caddy. Go look at the tape. Go look at her body language. She was like, oh, wait, whoa, everything they're saying is true from what I learned in law school.

18:49Oh, wait, whoa, everything they're saying is true when I was working for Jeb Bush. Oh, let me look at my notes and come up with a turn of a phrase here to signal to my base. Let's talk about the arraignment of Jim Comey, because I thought that was interesting, too. Jim Comey arrived in a Virginia courthouse Wednesday morning, and he went in through a side door, at which point Steve Bannon on his podcast railed against this and said that this was an expletive. He said Jim Comey was getting special treatment. My understanding is the Comey family were in quite extensive negotiations with the DOJ around how he was going to present himself.

19:28He did go in a side door. They were expecting a whole ton of protesters out the front, which was part of the reason they gave for wanting him to go in through a side door. I don't know whether actually Jim Comey going in the front door and holding his head up high might not have been a better moment for him. But I thought what was interesting in a way, and it made me think of it just in relation to what you were just saying, is that there were not tons of protests outside the arraignment of Jim Comey, the FBI director who has been charged on charges that are so flimsy that there was not a single prosecutor from that court's district in Virginia who was there signing up to take part in this prosecution.

20:10They had to bring in two prosecutors from North Carolina. The only person who signed it was Donald Trump's personally appointed prosecutor in the case. But there were not big protests. And I wonder if what's happening around the country. We've had sporadic protests in Chicago that the president, that ICE members have slightly whipped up, it looks like, from the videos. A journalist had a pepper bullet shot through her window by an ICE officer. Remember, these ICE officers, the 10 ,000 ICE officers who have been recruited, given bonuses of$50 ,000, they've had very minimal training in weapons use.

20:47These are people who have been kind of picked up in sort of recruitment fairs and are now going out on the streets and are in this position of interacting with the public. These are likely January 6th insurrectionists. Who are now getting$50 ,000. Yeah, exactly. And so the chances of something going wrong and becoming an emergency, I think, are fairly high. But outside Jim Comey's arraignment, there wasn't. It was like the weirdest thing about that arraignment is how normal it was. And to your point, this is becoming sort of normalized. We've now had three cabinet members in a row go up and berate senators.

21:23I've never seen that in a previous administration. This kind of rude language from a cabinet member to senators. I haven't seen it. It chips away. are the kind of norms and sort of customs of democracy. It kind of takes away some of the oil that greases the wheels of democracy. It will then happen again in the next administration. If we now get used to people being arrested on charges that are very flimsy, but because we know the president wants a campaign of retribution, that starts to be normalized. What's to stop it happening in successive administrations. And I think that's what's worrying about all of this is that, to your point about pulling the emergency ripcord, how much of this now just gets baked into the kind of cake of American democracy, whether it's retribution against your political enemies, whether it's stretching executive power, whether it's sending federal troops into other cities, whether it's taking power away from Congress, all of these little things that are happening at the moment.

22:27I find it hard to believe that a Democrat will come into power and say, OK, fine, we'll just go back to the status quo ante, because they've seen what this president can do when he does maximize his power, when he shatters the norms. They've seen how much power he can amass in the White House. Why are they going to hand that over? But one thing that is interesting on the retribution stuff, there was a very, I don't know if you saw this, there was a YouGov Economist poll came out just this week that showed that Republicans like it. And I've spoken to lots of Republicans and Trump supporters who say to me, yeah, the Democrats were doing this.

22:58Look, they did this endlessly. Obama did it. He used the IRS against his conservative enemies. Joe Biden's White House indicted Donald Trump not once, but five times. And I think that, but this YouGov poll, the most interesting thing was that independent voters overwhelmingly don't like it. And who is it that swings elections in America? It's those independent voters. So the checks and balances have not all gone. And these polls showing that independent voters don't like it. And even actually some Trump voters who are better educated, who tend to be women, who tend to be older, they don't like what they're seeing.

23:36They don't like this politics of retribution and revenge. They don't think it's good for America. So I don't know. Maybe it ends with this. Maybe Jim Comey is the last one. I think there will be more. But my big question is what happens in the future with the tone that is being set now? Isn't it likely that this just continues? Well, I mean, it's very well said. We're going to take a break. When we come back from the break, we're going to go over the shutdown, which could last longer than a Scaramucci. And we'll explain why.

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25:32welcome back to the rest is politics u.s where the u.s government is still not open amazingly and may not be open for a little while but democrats feel like this has been a good week for them politically it has not been a good week if you are a federal worker because you're not getting paid at the moment but a couple of things have happened that have made democrats think that they might come out on the right side of this shutdown. So just let me run through two or three of them, Anthony, and get your reaction to them. First of all, there are polls. I spoke to a Democratic pollster, Molly Murphy, yesterday, who showed me numbers that show that disapproval of the Republicans around the shutdown is growing faster than disapproval of the Democrats.

26:22She made the point that shutdowns tend to be defined by something critical, something that is more than just the fact that the US government is shut down. And she said there is a coalescing of opinion that this is about healthcare and the Republicans trying to take away Americans' access to healthcare to make healthcare more expensive at a time when many middle class Americans are already suffering. And so healthcare has become also synonymous with affordability. So she thinks Democrats that kind of have the right messaging on this. And the polls tend to suggest that it's the Republicans that are hurting.