121. Inside Trump’s Explosive Shouting Match with Zelenskyy

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2:30Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kaye in Washington. And me, Anthony Scaramucci in lovely New York. New York City. We're going to have a socialist mayor here. What do you think? I think you are going to have a democratic socialist mayor who tells everybody that he's actually now running as a Democrat. But yes, I saw the debate between Andrew Cuomo, who's now running as an independent, the former governor, and Zoran Mamdani. And I don't think that Andrew Cuomo did what was needed to shake Mamdani's lead. He really would have had to land a punch or two, and he didn't manage to do that.

3:07Metaphysical punch, of course, we're now nice and peaceful in America. Governor Cuomo was on your show Morning Joe this morning. How do you feel he did there? I don't think he's doing enough. I think he comes across as a little old school. What do you think? I know you're a fan of his. I'm probably too biased, you know, because obviously I'm a supporter of his. But, yeah, I mean, I think that we're in a different era. People like podcasts, people like soundbites on Instagram, people like TikTok. And Mondami understands that better than anybody. And Mondami, remember something, Caddy, Mondami has a great smile.

3:42Trump can get away with a grimace because of this longstanding relationship he's had with the media and the name recognition. But Obama, Mandami, they have great political smiles. And don't kid yourself, they go a long way with people. We were texting earlier this week, you and I, after the New York debate for mayor. And I also thought Mamdani made a smart choice by going on Fox News. And he had a civilized, smiley, to your point, interview on Fox News. He was pressed on quite a lot of issues and he didn't lose his cool. He kept getting back to the issue of affordability, which is, I think, why he's ahead in the polls.

4:20But if he'd been, as I said to you at the time, if he had been a really stellar politician, he would have answered the questions and had a civilized and smiley conversation. And he slightly ducked quite a lot of the hard questions I felt. I think there's still a lot that he hasn't answered. But let's see how he does, because he's going to be New York City's mayor, it looks like. OK, so before we go to our topics, I'll just point this out. Mayor Koch was ahead of Andrew Cuomo's father, Mario Cuomo, for the governorship. This is going way back into 1982. He had a nine point lead going into Election Day.

4:55There was no Governor Ed Koch. So you'll have to see what happens. It'll all it'll all depend on turnout. But if the older people turn out, which they did not do in the primary, but if they turn out, it'll be a much closer election than people think. We'll see. Can you give us a little scoop on how Cuomo is feeling? I think he's recognizing now that Slewa is not coming out. That's the Republican who's polling at 18. So if you added Sliwa's numbers to Cuomo's numbers, they beat Mondami. And so people have asked Sliwa to drop out, but Sliwa's not dropping out, Caddy. And it's a good segue for what we're going to talk about today, because I think the Republicans want Mondami.

5:33Trump has told them that he would be the gift that keeps giving. The further to the left that the Democratic Party goes, the better for the Republicans. And so Trump is telling people, let him win. And so Sleewa has been told by Trump, stay in that race. You'll block Cuomo from winning and they won't get their moderate voice back. They'll lurch even further to the left. And Trump will then take it out on New York City and he will use whatever power he has to make life difficult for New Yorkers. He killed the cross tunnel. He got on the news and said Schumer's worked on this for 20 years. It's now terminated.

6:08And so, and by the way, that hurts the entire infrastructure and the entire rail system. And again, I guess I'm a little bit New York centric. We put a lot more money into the federal government from our tax levies than we get back. And so New York sort of felt like they were owed that. But, you know, Schumer's passed his sell by date. He doesn't have the effectiveness that he once had. Right around the country, there's a new generation of Democrats saying it's our turn now. Okay. Well, that was your little update on the New York mayor's race, everybody. And of course, we'll do more on that because I think Mamdani is such an interesting character and what he represents for the Democrats is such an interesting moment.

6:48But we are today, we are going to talk about all of these no kings protests and what we think they meant. Close to 7 million people marched right across the country in big cities and small towns to push back against the executive power grabs from the Trump administration and his crackdowns on dissent. They were running on a kind of anti-oligarchy type banner. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump shared an AI video of himself, literally as a king, quite a few of them actually, with a crown on it. We can get into that later. We will look at whether Donald Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act as part of this discussion.

7:25And then in the second half after the break, we are going to talk about the latest round of not very good talks in the Oval Office from Ukraine's point of view and the shouting match that erupted between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday and what that means for Ukraine. But first of all, Anthony, I hear that you're a communist and that must be a pretty weird position for you to be in. So do you want to explain what's going on, please? I took the MSNBC picture. Some are disputing it now. They're saying it was a 2017 picture. But it was a very large protest in the city of Boston related to the president, sort of the things that he's doing from an authoritarian perspective.

8:09And I said, and I do believe this, they're going to run up against something. He's going to get himself in trouble. There's a reverse Tea Party movement forming. So the No Kings movement is sort of a populist movement, in my opinion, believe it or not. Because if you look at the people that are going to the rallies, it's, again, populism, but it's left-leaning populism. And it's sort of a counter to what Trump is doing. And I said, if they're not careful, the Trump coalition is very fragile. He's polling at 37 percent, despite all their rhetoric and all the stuff that he's doing. And so they get another leader in there that can galvanize people.

8:50They'll crush the Trump movement. Yeah. So what happened with your run in with Laura Loomer? Laura ends up tweeting me and says, well, why do you support communism? Did it look like communism? It looked like a whole load of grannies carrying sort of NPR bags and, you know, families. It really did not look like a bunch of Antifa communists to me. So 100 percent. OK, you and I would have been the youngest people in a lot of those protests. OK, except for the kind of little families. I saw quite a few kids in there, too. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. There was zero arrests. You couldn't have been more peaceful or sort of, you know, just did not look like a threatening crowd.

9:28Our international listeners, when I was a kid, they used to have on the soap operas when I was home with a sore throat or at least faking. a sore throat. You said have a vitamin called Geritol. This was for geriatrics. I felt like that. I felt like that was sponsored by the No Kings rally was sponsored by Geritol. You know, I mean, guys, you got to get some younger people out there. But this also speaks to where Trump's got it wrong. It's not Soro sponsored people. He would have had younger people in the mix. It's just an older group of people that are very frustrated by Trump's actions. But it was we should definitely say it was super peaceful.

10:04I mean, I think in New York, they literally had no arrests, which is remarkable when you've got crowds of 100 ,000 odd. And this is the mistake that Trump is making, because if you're going to shoot artillery over the I-5 to try to scare people under the supposed 250th anniversary of the Marine birthday. I mean, guys, what are you doing? Let them have their peaceful protest. You see, but they don't want that. There's an impunity. There's a cruelty. There's a meanness. There's an un-American approach to this. Now, since Laura Loomer's in the mix, let's just address her like her or not. She is well-researched.

10:41She's a tough investigative journalist now. She ran unsuccessfully for the House. I don't know that I would actually call her a journalist. I'm going to push back on that. OK, I don't think. Well, let me put it this way. Influencer with opinions, but I don't know that she's a journalist. OK, well, let me put it this way. she digs up dirt on people. Yes. In my industry, we would call that an investigative journalist. In your industry, you're going to be defensive about that, which is fine. But, you know, she's tough. And I know her a long time because she was a younger person. She's 31, 32 years old.

11:13There's 20 year old volunteer back in the day when I worked for Donald Trump. So, you know, listen, here's the other thing. A lot of people, this is a very polarized country. Trump wants that polarization. He wants the binary stuff. He's got Caroline Levitt saying that the base of the Democratic Party is Hamas and they're anti-American and they're terrorists. But Laura Loomer is on Trump's side. But I like the engagement with Laura Loomer. I bet you do. I know you love it. Yeah, because I'm an engagement sort of a person. I want to engage the left and the right. And I I want to see if we can guile down some of the tribalism, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.

11:55It won't happen during the Trump ring. Look, I think you're right. Seven million people don't turn out for nothing. When you look back at 2003, there were really very small anti-war protests in Iraq when there were huge protests on the streets of Europe. Look at 2008. You had some Occupy Wall Street protests, but not very much. There were huge protests in Europe. And so to get 7 million Americans out protesting, there is something going on. There is a certain level of dissatisfaction, and you can see that in the poll numbers. And I do think that Trump would be wrong to just dismiss this as a Soros-funded group of communists, because in 2009, when you had all of those Tea Party protests, Barack Obama did just that, right?

12:43The Obama White House and the Democrats dismissed those Tea Party protests as Koch brothers funded. These are big Republican donors saying these were just funded by the Koch brothers. And they kind of poo-pooed them. Now, guess what happened in the midterm elections? They got what Obama then called a shellacking, which I love that word. I had to find an excuse to use it. But anyway, the Democrats got hit hard because actually those protests were a sign that a lot of Americans didn't like Obama's expansion of government, the way he was expanding the American government. And I think if Trump ignores these protests, then let's see what happens to them.

13:18But that's not an insignificant number of people, right, that came out. And just saying all of those protesters, they hate America because they don't agree with me. And I thought what the speaker, Mike Johnson, said, Anthony, I don't know what you made of that. But this idea that if you are with us, you love America. But if you are against us, you hate America. I mean, that's sort of where we've got to in the country. There's something else going on. So I want I want you to imagine King Charles having an A.I. video of himself flying around in an F-16 dropping excrement on people. OK, so or Keir Stormer doing that or what if Albanese did this as an example?

13:59Just I want you to imagine somebody other than Donald Trump on the world stage. So so this is a complete mockery of the institution of the presidency. And so, listen, you travel around the world. You know, I travel around the world. It's hard for people to understand. Rational people, it's very hard for them to understand. And yet, there's 35, 40 percent of the people in the U.S. that love this behavior. They think it's great. we're owning the libs we're dropping excrement out of a plane where donald trump is wearing a crown or we're showing various memes of trump there's a kind of coarseness that people like we want to we want to trigger people like the young republicans text actually in a way that we spoke about last week but it's all part of the same thing so really so so i actually went back to that uh and i went through some of the texts okay it is way worse than you and i reported Okay, it's way, way worse.

15:04I mean, this is misogynistic. It's racist. Anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitic. Hey, come on, guys. Come on, guys. You're not joking. When you're saying that you're joking, you're not joking. Ask any comedian about the fine line between comedy and truth. you know it's like when you're telling me that you're going to bring michael lewis on as an example if i god forbid get sick one day i mean ever do that to you i mean that's not a joke i mean fiona our producer she knows it's not a joke i mean so as an example so when you're when you when you're right there between the truth and humor people know the difference caddy just pointing that out to you and jd vance by the way has become the number one person in the administration who is saying, we're just, you know, having a joke, we're just having a joke, have more of a sense of humor.

15:56You know, I looked back to see what former presidents have said against protesters. Bill Clinton in 1996, after the contract with America, he didn't go out and say that protesters hated America. George W. Bush, when there were some protests in this country and in other countries, even though this protest was small, you know what he said about the protests about the Iraq war. Democracy is a beautiful thing that gives people a right to express themselves. Right. That was George W. Bush. That was his view. Barack Obama didn't go out and say that the people who were protesting in 2009 were hateful people or that they hated America.

16:34The closest that we came to that was Hillary Clinton saying that supporters of Donald Trump in 2016 were a basket of deplorables and the right, understandably, went crazy over that. So now Mike Johnson is just doing the same thing, calling these hate America marches. I mean, it's like, if you're George Santos, you can get away, former Congressman George Santos, you can get away with wire fraud because Donald Trump will put out a truth social post. He will pardon you and get you out of prison. Why? Because Donald Trump says he votes Republican every time. OK, but, Katie, Hillary Clinton calls people a basket of deplorables.

17:16The right goes crazy. Everybody's hair gets on fire. Caroline Levitt from the White House. Yeah. Yeah. With a big smile on her face. Is saying what? Go ahead. Tell us what she's saying. Oh, she said she said the Democratic base is Hamas. I'd have to see the whole quote, but it's basically terrorists. You've got terrorists. They support Hamas. And they're anti-American and they hate America and they hate America. So so let me ask this question. Why not the outrage? OK, why not the outrage? That is a quote unquote deplorable moment for them. OK, right. She's more or less saying that. Right. They have a devil's ideology.

18:03They're a policy of hate. The Democrats main constituents are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals and nothing on the left. No. Well, hold on a second. Yes, there is something on the left. Seven million people turned out and protested and the wrong direction numbers. Is the country going the right direction or the wrong direction? Sixty nine percent of Americans say it's going the wrong direction. So you don't get democratic leadership capitalizing on this, I think, because I think if they were smart, they would probably just stay focused on the question of affordability, which is actually what Americans seem to be focused on.

18:45But you do get the American public telling pollsters they don't like the direction of the country, giving Donald Trump, you said it just now, a 37 percent approval rating and turning out on a Saturday in their millions to say we don't like this. So in a way, they are speaking. OK, OK. But I'm going to make the statement and you can agree or disagree when the right gets pissed off, they galvanize and they stick together. The Ted Cruz people line up with the Donald Trump people. When the left gets pissed off, you have sleeves of pissed off. Bernie Sanders sleeve, AOC sleeve, Andrew Cuomo sleeve, Gavin Newsom sleeve.

19:28They don't coalesce the way the Republicans do. And if I'm wrong, please push back. Am I right or wrong? I think you're right. And I think part of the reason, I don't know if you read Maureen Dowd's comment column this weekend about she's really referring to the Pentagon, but saying they're fraidy cats. I think you could use that expression for Republicans. You and I both hear on a regular basis from senior Republicans, Republican senators who tell us they really don't like what Donald Trump is doing. But do they say anything in public? No, they just fall into line. And so you get this sense of Republican cohesion dominated by the fact that they're afraid of Donald Trump.

20:08They're fraidy cats. And so it looks like they're all singing from the same hymn sheet. And until they break ranks and say enough, and the issue which they might break ranks over, I think is the issue we should talk about next before we go to a break. I wonder whether if Donald Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which he has spoken about now twice, and J.D. Vance has confirmed that it is something that he is thinking about, would that be something that would break the Republican Party? But first, tell us what the Insurrection Act is, Mr. Scaramucci, since you played a lawyer on television and actually studied law.

20:43Yeah, but it's interesting. So the Insurrection Act has been used before. You know, John Adams used the Insurrection Act. Woodrow Wilson. Eisenhower used the Insurrection Act. So what is the Insurrection Act? Basically, there's two things. There's two pieces of it. The Insurrection Act is the president says there's unrest or potential insurrection is going to happen that gives him or her, but for now just him, the right to deploy the National Guard to supersede anything that's going on at the state level. So conjoined to that is something called the Supremacy Clause. And we've talked about that a few podcasts ago.

21:22What is that? It's basically that the federal laws have supremacy over the state laws. And so he lost the case against Gavin Newsom because he couldn't prove that the deployment of the National Guard into Los Angeles met the criteria of the Insurrection Act. But it generally says that they are not allowed to carry out civilian law enforcement duties except in times of emergency. And so the court felt that that didn't apply in Los Angeles. So Trump is a little vexed by this. He can say, and you saw Governor Pritzker with his bulletproof vest on talking about the war-torn area of Milwaukee playing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, you know, with all that great sarcasm, which proves the point that you don't have a full-on insurrection going on that would meet the criteria of the Insurrection Act.

22:19So the question, though, really is, do they care? OK, and if they don't care, are they going to invoke the Insurrection Act anyway and then disavow the court orders? Because every one of these governors is going to sue them. And since the facts are the facts, Caddy, they'll lose in court. But what difference does it make? Will they still press the Insurrection Act? So what say you? Do you think they actually have the gumption to do that and to now cross over into full authoritarianism? I mean, I think if he it was interesting reading some kind of fairly conservative lawyers over the weekend who were raising the very real possibility that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act, which, as I understand it, is much broader than the laws that he is invoking up until now to use the National Guard around the country.

23:16I think there's a phrase in it that says that the president can use armed forces as he considers necessary, which basically kind of means anything, right, to enforce laws against obstructions or assemblages. So he could use it under almost any circumstances. And you could see him, if he wanted to use it, using it to monitor polling stations to say that the country was unstable. And I think that is a way in which I have always been fairly optimistic that you have a midterm election, you have a 2028 election. But I think if we have an Insurrection Act invoked, the 2026 midterm elections would no longer be free and fair elections because you would have this intimidate, if for no other reason, you would have this intimidating force of the military around polling stations, which they're otherwise not allowed to do.

24:08I don't know if he's going to do it. I mean, I think he is. He has said he's considering it. J.D. Vance says he is considering it. Are they saying that to troll the liberals and to get everybody's, you know, in a froth and to own the libs yet again? Or are they saying it because they're genuinely considering it? I think we can't ignore the possibility. And then, you know, what do you think? Is that the point at which Republicans say, hold on a second, there is no insurrection? It's such a good question. And obviously, I don't know the answer, but I want to provoke people to think about the following.

24:44If I'm J.D. Vance, do I want him to implement the Insurrection Act or not? So I'm going to say no to that, Kat. Hear me out for a second and then I'm going to say no. I'm going to say I calm down Elon Musk. He's not starting the America Party. I've got Elon Musk and deep pocketed Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and others on my side. I'm going to be the presumptive nominee in three years time, and I'm going to run the card table and own the libs because it lives are in complete and total disarray. And then we can take another cut at the authoritarian authoritarian apple in the next term where I'm a younger, fresher MAGA type of a person.

25:26So I'm going to say Vance does not want it. That it's just a step too far, you reckon? Step too far for Vance. Too politically risky. So now my question to you then is, what about Trump? I don't think Trump cares about J.D. Vance and what happens to J.D. Vance. Well, we know that, but what about him wanting to implement? I think he is more likely to want it. He doesn't really care. Après moi le déluge, he doesn't care what comes after him. He might even prefer a Democrat over J.D. Vance. I agree with that too. Let me jump on that for a second. Here's the narrative. Caddy, they were nothing before I arrived on the scene, these Republicans.

26:01And there will be nothing after I've gone. After I'm gone. There is there is no Trumpism. There is only Trump. OK, right. OK, so you see that, right. Go back to Trump's thinking about the insurrection act. Go ahead. Well, I can see from his point of view, he felt he was really pissed off that he missed an opportunity in 2020 to crack down on the Black Lives Matter protests. He doesn't want to be impeached. So actually, the election he cares about is not the 2028 election. It's the 2026 election. And if he has to find a way and he is doing everything he can and we spoke about this last week, Republicans are doing everything they can around the country to limit access to voting beyond the case that's in the Supreme Court and redistricting.

26:45Then I think that the insurrection act would be one more way he can put his finger on the scales of the midterms. I do think that that would be a bridge too far. I do think that if I was watching the No Kings rallies, I do think that, wow, if I really go pull the grenade pin on the Insurrection Act, this could blow up in my face. It could it could blow up in my face. It's like the good news about the country is that it's not Turkey or Hungary where there's enough people in the country that actually get the Constitution enough where they would like to continue with the Constitution. And that was my point to Laura Lohr.