137. Who Owns the News? Trump's War on the Media

0:00With Christmas coming up, why not give someone a membership to the show? They'll get exclusive access to bonus episodes every week, ad-free listening, and early access to our live show tickets, too. Just head to TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com and click on gifts. Big question for you. What kind of a Christmas shopper are you? Are you the kind of person that leaves it to the last minute, or have you already got it done? What do you think, Kat? Obviously, you haven't even thought about anybody's Christmas present yet. I'm a very busy man, and I believe in delegation, Kat. Really not that busy, but I thought I would say that to make myself feel self-important.

0:35If you are like Anthony and have left it to the last minute again this year, we have the perfect gift idea for you. Make someone that you love a founding member caddy. Exactly. It is the perfect present for the less organized among us, Mr. Scaramucci. You can schedule it now and it will land in their inbox on Christmas Day. Listen, the political obsessives, and you know you have them around your dinner table, you know they're going to love this, okay? It's ad-free listening, members-only miniseries, bonus episodes, Q &As, and exclusive weekly newsletters for me and Katty Kay. It's so good, I'll probably be giving it to my whole family.

1:17Your poor wife. Listen, she loves The Rest is Politics US. Your friends and family will love The Rest is Politics US too. Just go to TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com and click on GIFs.

1:36Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Caddy, I just want you to know I'm making calls, Caddy. Trillions of dollars of ad revenues are coming in. Trillions. You know, a call here and a call there and just trillions are coming in. You know, it's just so easy for me. There's so many low IQ people out there, Caddy. And you're solving wars too, I hear. It's great. You're off in the Middle East. You're fixing a war here. You're fixing a war there. Yes. Yes. Millions of lives have been saved. And I took a cognitive test and I just want you to know I I knew the difference between the dog and the cat.

2:15I aced the cognitive test. I mean, I mean, you you can't even make this. By the way, by the way, I mean, are we being serious now? I mean, is anybody in Washington going to say what is going on with this man? No, it's OK. There's a slight sort of, you know, reality fantasy disconnect going on. But I'm just a female reporter, so I'm probably obnoxious, ugly inside and outside, cruel and incompetent. So, you know, what do I know, Anthony? What do I know? Everybody has a low IQ. And, you know, green turns to brown when it soils. Did you not know that? Like when it wilts. So it's Marjorie Trader Brown, some would say.

3:00So let me take out the Trump, like, you know, those little circle decoder things you got in school. Okay, so it's low IQ. Some would say, a lot of people say, a lot of people say. Okay, and then he likes saying things that don't make any sense. Like, you know, Marjorie said I was working too much on the foreign. What does that even mean? I mean, working too much on foreign policy? What are you talking about? Foreign policy, I suppose. So, Katty, I know you want to go through the show rundown and you know I have a tension deficit, but I just have to tell you this, okay? Who's going to open the window and scream, I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore?

3:40That's what I want to know. Anybody know, right? They're just going to let them continue to rant and rave. This Pocono Mountains thing, I'm sure you want to go into that. I mean, it was ridiculous last night, but all right, go ahead. What are we going to talk about today? I'm sorry. I just letting you know that I brought in trillions of dollars of ad revenues while you were sleeping, Caddy. I was bringing in trillions, trillions. This is Anthony Scaramucci on jet lag, and I take no responsibility. OK, guys, today on the show, we are going to talk about this sense of disconnect between reality and Trump's view of the world.

4:15He was out last night giving a long speech in Pennsylvania all about the state of the economy. His team had said, we're going to get out there and we're going to talk about this thing that is such a political liability to us. And we are going to address affordability. Well, we'll get into how that actually went down in a second. Maybe the team not as happy today as they might have been beforehand. And then in the second half, we're going to talk about Trump getting into business. This is now, again, kind of Oval Office economy at the moment, with Trump getting involved in business and particularly in the media business and the Netflix Warner Brothers Discovery deal, Paramount deal, and a lot of that about how he wants to control media and particularly control journalists.

4:56He has not been particularly nice journalist and in particular to female journalists over the last few weeks, it has to be said. But first, we have some very exciting news. General Sale is now on for our live show in London next September, on the 6th of September. We do hope we're going to see you there. Go to southbankcentre.co.uk and look for Rest is Fest. Tickets are selling fast. If you want to get one for your loved ones for Christmas, we recommend doing it soon. Otherwise, poor old Father Christmas might be rooting around up in northern Finland, And trying to find a ticket to the South Bank show and trying to find a ticket to the rest of his politics, the U.S., and all he comes up with is a doll, which Donald Trump says you don't need anyway.

5:39So go. Go buy those tickets right now. Anyway, on with the show. I have to make a confession. I have to make a confession. Confessional projection. I know it's a confession. I haven't brought in trillions of dollars of ads. I haven't. I just thought I would let you know that. But you are selling tickets. I do admire this amazing, passionate ticket sale. I mean, it should have been your vocation. Can I just say, ticket sales should have been your vocation. It's not necessarily the most flattering thing you could say to a person. You could have written a lot of tickets on Wall Street. I'm talking about Wall Street tickets.

6:19Those are sales. Those kind of multi-million dollar tickets. Yeah, a million shares here, a million shares there. 20 phones. I could see you doing all that. We're going to get on with the show. Okay, the news. All right, let's get on with the show. So go ahead. What do you want to talk about? So Donald Trump has gone out on this fixing affordability tour, which the White House staff have come up with because they realized from recent elections in New Jersey and New York and Virginia that they have a problem on this messaging around affordability. Americans think the prices are too high and why isn't the White House doing more about it?

6:53And so they come up with this idea. We're going to do a tour. We're going to get Donald Trump out there around the country. He's going to be seen in the heartland in all of these battleground states. And that is going to help us fix this messaging problem. But the problem is there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between the reality of the economy and how Donald Trump sees the American economy, or as he would perhaps put it, how he sees his economy. And the two came clashing into each other in a rather spectacular fashion at this speech that I'm not sure the White House staff will be incredibly happy with.

7:23They've now got a real problem on their hands. Do they get him out more or do they get him on the sidelines? Because I'm not sure he fixed anything. But let's just give a little bit of the context to people. Here is a Politico poll that came out, was held in mid-November. It just came out yesterday. It's great timing. And I'm going to give you a few numbers on it, Anthony, because I think it's worth people understanding what the state of the American economy is or how people see the state of the American economy before we get into what Donald Trump says it is. And then we can see if there's a bit of an Alice in Wonderland situation going on.

7:55So almost half of Americans are saying at the moment that groceries, utilities, health care, housing and transport are hard to afford. Let's run through a couple of them. Half of Americans say that it's hard to pay for food. And a majority of those people are blaming Donald Trump. Quarter of Americans say that they have skipped a medical checkup recently because of the cost of them. A quarter of Americans say they've also skipped taking a prescription drug for the same reason, too expensive. A third are saying they can't afford to attend a sports game with their family or friends this holiday season.

8:29And a half say they can't afford to go on any kind of a holiday that involves a flight. So that's that's some pretty I think that's quite good data, isn't it? I think it's quite useful in the context of this conversation that we have that political poll saying what people are feeling, because that doesn't seem to me what Donald Trump thinks the economy is looking like. Well, listen, you know, when I read the data, it breaks my heart because there's stress in that data and there's economic unhappiness in that data. There's no question. When you're missing a medical checkup and you're missing your pills because you can't afford them, that is hard work.

9:02Or you're not going to the dentist. That's tough. And, you know, your teeth are related to your heart and all the different things that are going on. And so, you know, my heart goes out to those people and it's got to be high anxiety. But listen, I'm not the president's communications director anymore, and I was only there for 11 days. But this was an abomination last night because if you're there to talk about affordability and you're there to reframe the issue, you bring Basent out there. I watched that part of the speech. I thought he did reasonably well. He came with some facts, Scott. You know, some areas are doing better.

9:37The bond market is actually U.S. We're down a tick or two with the idea that the rates are going to get cut today. I mean, there's an 80%, 85 % expectation that rates get cut this afternoon in the United States. We're recording this at 8 a.m., but I don't think we're going to have to re-record it because they're going to cut rates 25 basis points. And they've more or less signaled that to the market. And there's enough dissension among the governors where they're not going to zero, where they're not going to 50. So I'll eat my hat, but I don't have a hat, but I would eat my hat if I'm wrong about that.

10:10But man, you're talking about high levels of racism again, right? He's promoting, you saw the whole thing he said about the dirty Haitians and Afghanistan and Somalia are filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. Contrast those to the Scandinavian nations. Did you watch all that? I mean, it was 97 minutes long, which is long even by Trump standards. It was very rambling. He did address that he did go back to the teleprompter at some point and put in some of the lines about the economy. But he even boasted about the fact that he was barely reading the prompter in front of him. And when he wasn't reading the scripted lines, he goes back to his favorites, right?

10:55This was an election style Donald Trump rally where he goes for all of the hot button cultural issues. He talks about trans issues. He goes after Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Somalia who came here as a refugee. He's brutal about her. He's vitriolic against Somalia, filthy, dirty, disgusting. He confirms that he called African countries shithole countries. And there's a moment, Anthony, where there's a guy in the background who's kind of laughing because the whole premise of Trump is that he says things that, you know, are unpolitically correct. and that he says things that people are thinking, but they don't dare to say out loud and he doesn't care he's going to say it out loud.

11:33But it was really interesting watching this one guy as he says the line about Somalia and the people being filthy and the shithole countries. He's kind of grinning, but he's also shaking his head like it's too much. And you wonder what even his supporters make when he goes that far off the reservation. There's another point in the speechway. He says the Afghan guy who shot the National Guards woman just before Thanksgiving. And he says, and this is crazy, right? The doctors are fighting to save his life just so that we can put him to death. And then he kind of says, catches himself and says, oh no, I suppose that's the American system.

12:09They'll tell me that's the beauty of the American system. But you know, he thinks it's crazy that the doctors are actually doing their job. That was a lot of the speech was about that cultural things. Let me tell you what I heard. And let me tell you what I saw. And let me tell you why I think these speeches may have helped him in a campaign, but will likely not help him right now. So I heard three things. I heard that my tariffs are burying the economy. I heard that inflation is a sticky 3%. Prices are rising in my administration over the last 10 or 11 months. They're not going down. I'll pretend to you and lie to you and say that they are, but they're really not.

12:54I heard, and he said this, that he's thinking about floating a 10 % universal tariff. And he went back to the 60, 100 % tariffs on the Chinese. And the Chinese have really done something interesting here. He approved the chips, caddy. And then the Chinese said, yeah, we probably don't want your chips because we have to decouple from you. So I don't know. If you're with the guy, you're going back to Air Force One and telling him, you did amazing. You're the best, Mr. President. We got to get you out there more. 97 minutes wasn't enough. But I think the data is telling you, Caddy, that it's not working, that he's maybe galvanizing elements of his base, particularly those that are racially charged.

13:41But he's not getting to the moderates. He's not getting to the independents. He's not getting to the people who have told journalists that they're missing dental appointments and missing prescription drugs. He's not getting to those people with these sorts of speeches. And so anybody in the White House telling him the data or they're just saying, hey, man, just go crazy. Have at it. Rip up the journalists when you want. The one woman, Caddy, I just you're a journalist. So the one woman repeats the exact words that he said five days earlier and he calls her fake news and low IQ and he starts demeaning her.

14:19I didn't mean that. I didn't say that. It was about the video. So that's this reality perception disconnect that we seem to be living in. And what's ironic about this speech is just before it, he gives an interview with Politico, a 45 minute on camera interview. And the reporter asks him, what do you think of the state of the economy, Mr. President? He says, it's an A plus. And she says, A plus. And he says, no, no, A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, five pluses. So he prefaces a whole speech about affordability in which he's meant to be expressing empathy for the problems of Americans who are facing affordability issues by saying, actually, guys, I don't buy any of this because my economy, the economy of Donald Trump, is a plus, plus, plus, plus, plus five pluses he is giving himself just to double down on that.

15:10And then he goes into the speech and says, anyway, affordability, it's a hoax. It's a phrase coined by Democrats. Now we're all meant to be talking about affordability. It's another hoax. He compares it to the Russia hoax. It's Russia, Russia, Russia. And then he says, actually, OK, the way to address the affordability crisis is the way I'm doing it with my China tariffs. You don't need$30 at Christmas, which I actually happen to agree with. You only need two or three dollars or you only need a couple of pencils. But he's not in this speech, he's not addressing the things that are worrying Americans.

15:42He's saying, you just have to buy less dolls. You just have to buy less pencils. So it's a kind of weird, Jimmy Carter-esque austerity speech from a guy who I don't think his own grandchildren are only going to be getting two dolls, as a Democratic senator pointed out this morning at Christmas. And as they left the stadium, the New York Times interviewed some of his supporters who were at that rally. And they're saying, a couple of ones that were quoted in the New York Times, I'm offended by the idea that it's a hoax. I could stop eating, I suppose, one of them says, because my groceries are so high.

16:19But he's not taking me seriously. And I think that is a problem for him. I mean, you've already got polling saying that his supporters don't buy, that tariffs are going to help the economy either in the short term or in the long term. But it's a president who seems to be mocking his own supporters concerns. I mean, maybe this is going to work for Republicans in the midterms. But if I'm a Republican member of Congress in a vaguely precarious seat listening to that last night, I'm not saying, please, Mr. President, will you come and give that speech in my district? No, you're not. But also, it doesn't square with the economic reality, right?

16:57So let's just go over this. Wages, since the beginning of the year, and again, I'm not picking on him, by the way. He's the one that's trying to take credit in personalizing the economy. I did this, I did that, I did this. But the wages since the beginning of the year are down. Real wages in the country are down adjusted for inflation, 0.7%. So the inflation's up. But, Caddy, if you are an economist and you take a basket of goods and you say for a family to have, quote, unquote, affordability, 30 % of their salary has to go towards housing. No more than that. Because if it's 50, Caddy, it starts to creep into the dental appointments and the prescription drugs.

17:43Okay. And so in order to do that now in the United States, the average family has to make$121 ,000 a year. Okay. And you know that that's way higher in Washington, D.C. and way higher in New York. I'm just talking about the average family in the 50 states. So, Caddy, the median income for the U.S. families now,$84 ,000. So that means half of the families in the United States are making less than that. And so this is a problem. And this is a, there's no income growth. Consumer sentiment is down. The index dropped from 53 at the beginning of the year to 51. And so, okay, well, let's go on a tour and tell people things are great, buy less dolls.

18:32But this is what's really going on in the economy. And I'll just say this to you. I know we have to take a break, but I'll just say this to you. Where is the opposition? where is the colorful, charismatic candidate from the left or the centrist Democrat that actually gets to a microphone and says, hey, here's the goods? You know, when I was a kid, Reagan had like props. He took out a U.S. dollar and he took out 36 cents and he said, you know, this dollar has got 36 cents worth of purchasing power 25 years from now. But there's nobody challenging Donald Trump. Okay, I think I'm going to push back on that a bit because actually I think the Democrats have had a pretty good few weeks.

19:19They're loving what they're hearing last night. They are making the juxtaposition every morning. They were doing it again on television between saying, you know, he can lie about a lot of things, how much money Saudi Arabia is going to invest in the US or whatever, or he's bought peace in 10 countries or however many war zones it is. But he can't lie about what people are feeling about the economy. And they had a couple of wins. I mean, they've had a win this week on Tuesday in the election in Miami. They elected a Democratic mayor of the city for the first time in three decades. They flipped a ruby red state house seat in Georgia.

19:58I spoke to a Republican this morning who said to me, look, there have been five dozen state house races. So the state legislatures have their own House and Senate and those have races every year. There have been five dozen of those races around the country this year. The average swing to Democrats is 13 points. And that's pretty much unprecedented and heralds this idea of a wave. So I think Democrats have found the issue. They can run on the issue of affordability. What they haven't found is the national charismatic leader. They found a leader in New York City who is very charismatic and ran on this issue successfully.

20:39He's not a national figure. But that process begins when you start, I think, having the primaries and you pay a lot more attention to it. And some of them are jockeying for that. But I think if Democrats can stay and the woman who ran in Miami, the new mayor elect, Eileen Higgins, what did she run on? She ran on guess what cost of living. She ran on affordability. won back a seat or a mayorship they haven't managed to have for three decades. So I think the Democrats have found a message. They haven't found a national figure yet, but I think they can find that during the primaries. I just think this is, I think the White House is in a, he was, the way he was talking about his own White House staff last night at the rally in the Pocono saying, my staff told me to give this speech.

21:21My chief of staff, even throws Susie Wiles on the brush, is writing this stuff and telling me to talk about affordability. They told me not to talk about the border. And then he goes on and talks about the border. His staff, they know have a problem. He called her Susie Trump. Did you catch that? He called her Susie Trump four times because he's passed his cognitive test. And then he realized he called her Susie Trump four times. And some would say and even call her Susie Wiles. I mean, he's really a piece of work. So I want to just talk 30 seconds on the Fed. Is that OK? Yeah, we've had a lot of movement around the Fed this week.

21:58It looks like there is a new Fed chair, although it's not been announced, but probably Donald Trump is going to lean on whoever is going to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve to bring those interest rates down as quickly as possible, isn't he? I'll just say that if you had asked me on Friday, I would have said Kevin Hassett has the job. But the way Washington works, one of the guys running for the job is actually running for the job. He's not sitting there trying to get selected. And so he's using lobbyists and he's using all different types of people to influence the administration. So we now have an interview sweepstakes that's going to happen this week that wasn't going to happen last week.

22:35Don't you love the way Trump announces all of this? Like it's it is The Apprentice. It's the Fed chair version of The Apprentice. Yeah, well, he likes it because it's exciting for him. But I think a couple of lobbyists got greased to keep this game afoot. But I think it'll be Hassett. And I'll just say to people, if you want to really learn about Kevin Hassett, he wrote a book 25 years ago with James Glassman, who was actually an economic advisor to the two Bushes, George W. and George H.W. And the title of the book, Caddy, was Dow 40 ,000. And at that time, the Dow was at 9 ,000, and people were aghast and said, this is a ridiculous book.

23:14But if you actually read the book, and Hassett wrote most of it, the book really gives you a really good rendition of how he thinks about monetary policy. And so I think he'll surprise people. I think, yes, he'll lower rates, and it'll make the president happy, but he won't overly lower rates to cause a crisis in the bond market. Waller would also be a good pick. Kevin is a good guy. Kevin Warsh, the other Kevin in the race. But if I were a betting man right here, right now, even though we're going to go through the sweepstakes, I do think Hassett is going to be the Fed chair. I would put my money on Hassett too.

23:50He knows the president the best. He knows the president the best and therefore Trump will trust them the most. Yes, he's working inside the White House and he was in the White House in the first term as well. He's one of the few hangovers from the first time. I remember going to a dinner with Kevin Hassett and it was one of those kind of Washington dinners. It was early on in the first term and Trump was up on the stage and he was being roasted. It was that kind of a black tie gala dinner where you roast the politicians and Hassett was grinning and laughing. And then he suddenly saw that Trump was looking at him and he leaned over to me and said, I better take this smile off my face.

24:23The boss is watching. So he knows which way to play Donald Trump. And I think The Economist is asking, you know, which Kevin Hassett will we see? The Kevin Hassett who wrote the book about the Dow or the Kevin Hassett who has become more of a sycophant to Donald Trump recently in support of his interest rate quest. So that is the sweepstakes this week on the Fed. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about the media, how Donald Trump is talking about the media and more importantly, what Donald Trump wants from the media and from big business deals.

24:57This is a paid advertisement by BetterHelp. The strange thing about December is how little of it we actually choose. The calendar fills itself up. Sometimes it can all feel like the month that is happening to you, not with you. You're chasing packages, managing family logistics like a G7 summit and pretending it's relaxing. Meanwhile, your own year, everything you've carried, put off or powered through gets swept to the side until January. So what if this year, one of your festive traditions is a little bit different, not inherited, not expected, but something that you choose a quiet hour a week to talk to someone who helps you process what the year really meant.