14. DONALD TRUMP SHOT

0:06Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci is with me too We have both rushed to our microphones to do an emergency recording because of the news that came in last night from Pennsylvania where Donald Trump was shot at while he was giving a speech in Butler, Pennsylvania at a campaign rally. Gunshots were fired from a rooftop. One person attending the rally was killed along with the gunman. Two other people have been critically injured. Donald Trump was hit with something. Initially, the reports were that it was shattered glass. That is all still being confirmed.

0:40It may have been a bullet that nicked his ear, but either way, you can see the images online of him with blood on his face. And he's pushed to the ground by the Secret Service. And then they whisk him off the stage. But before they get him off the stage, Donald Trump pumps his fist to the crowd. And there are roars of USA, USA that go out around the crowd. President Biden has put out a statement saying there is no place for this violence in American politics. But Anthony, I think this is a very defining moment. I mean, my immediate thoughts were Bobby Kennedy, when he was shot as a presidential candidate in 1968, and the kind of impact that this event could have on this campaign.

1:17I don't know that we know definitely what the impact is, but it's certainly thrown everything up in the air. Well, I mean, a couple things. I think on behalf of Cady and I, we firmly believe there is no room for this type of violence, period. There's no room for this type of political violence. And so we condemn it in every shape and form. As people that are students of democracy, lovers of democracy, who thankfully have been blessed to live in democracies our whole lives, you certainly want whatever political battles and the rhetoric of the politics and the policies to be debated and then give the opportunity for the voters to vote.

1:54And whoever wins the other side has to accept that. That's just the nature of these things. But, Cady, I just want to say before we go into the analysis, unfortunately, in the United States, this type of political violence is part of our history, unfortunately. We can talk about Abraham Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley. I could list the different people. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt was shot at after he was elected. He was president elect. It was a few weeks prior to his inauguration. Obviously, in our lifetimes, Ronald Reagan was shot, thankfully survived it. Gerald Ford was shot at twice, as hard as that is to believe.

2:32And so, unfortunately, you're mentioning Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, obviously slain while president. This is a terrible, terrible thing. And I speak about this with great sadness as an American, because you certainly don't want one person or a cabal of people to interrupt the democratic process. But I guess I want to throw it to you for a second and ask you this question. There were some defining pictures that were taken last night. But before I say that, I just want one more comment. My hearts go out to the family members that are now dealing with two critically wounded people. And of course, there's been one man slain at this event as a result of this unspeakable tragedy.

3:15So our hearts go out to them as well. But I'm just wondering from your perspective, your years as a journalist, seeing a bloodstained Donald Trump get up with the Secret Service's help, screaming fight, blood in his ear, an American flag over his head, the symbolism of all this. What are your thoughts there? Like you, Anthony, the first reaction is sadness and shock, and obviously for the families there. And I think sadness from my point of view, because this historical violence is not historical in American politics. There has been an uptick in political violence, even during the course of the last year or two on both sides.

3:53And I think the circumstances that led to this incident in Pennsylvania have been ripe for a while. I don't think any of us are totally surprised. Maybe we're surprised about the details of why the Secret Service didn't see this guy up on the roof, even though there were bystanders trying to point him out. But the amount of violence in America, I think from an outside perspective, and Americans sometimes don't appreciate the degree to which foreigners see the country through the prism of guns in the country. And we know there are so many guns in the country and we know there is so much tension in the country.

4:25And we've seen an uptick in violent language and we've seen an uptick in violent incidents. I'm thinking of even the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband in her home. It feels like the backdrop is ripe for this kind of an event at the moment. People have compared this election campaign to 1968 before. I've resisted that. I've said that there was nothing like the violence in America at the moment. There wasn't 68. You don't have the military out on the street. You don't have the military out in campuses and kids getting shot on campuses. But when this kind of thing happens, you realize how febrile America is at the moment.

4:56And in a country that has a lot of guns, shootings like this can happen and we'll have to have the investigation as to why it happened. That image is extraordinary. Just from a journalist perspective, there are two images that I'm thinking of this morning. One is of Donald Trump with blood on his face and the American flag behind him and the Pennsylvania sun shining. And it's bright and vivid and bold and violent, but also defiant. And the other image that I'm thinking of is of that is taken almost through the legs of a secret service agent or the arm of a secret servant agent. And there is Donald Trump being held down with his face on the stage.

5:32And there is something about that image too, that we're going to see a lot of these images over the course of the next four months during this campaign. It seems a little heartless and perhaps trite to delve into the longer term ramifications of this incident. But I think we're going to have to do this during this podcast, Anthony, because I think this could potentially change the race. In Trump's favor? I think in Trump's favor. Okay. All right. So let me give a historical reference, give you to react to it because obviously times have changed. Teddy Roosevelt was shot at. He was running against Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft.

6:08He had a shot fired at him, hit him in the chest. He had a steel glasses case in his breastplate there and it protected him. He finished his speech. He said that he was as strong as a bull moose. And a shot like that wouldn't stop him. The party's name became bull moose. Everyone said he would go on and win the election. He lost the election. But I think you and I would agree that times have changed. And so I'm actually in your camp analytically, I believe that this is a big moment for Donald Trump because you're now juxtapositioning one candidate who is vigorous, presents at age 78 a much younger version of somebody that is age 78.

6:50You have another candidate, the sitting president that's 81. He waits over an hour and a half to start speaking. He's flubbing lines again from the teleprompter as he is speaking. He does say the right things. God bless him, Joe Biden. I think we would both agree that he's a good person. There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It's sick. And I believe that he is being sincere when he says that. Yeah. He purposely calls him Donald, by the way. I know that that was, he didn't call him President Trump. He didn't call him former President Trump. He didn't say Mr. Trump. He says, I'm trying to get a hold of Donald.

7:22And so somebody told him to say Donald, as opposed to using the two words, President Trump. We can debate whether or not that was a good idea to do or not. But it's a candidate that's presenting himself slightly enfeebled. It's a candidate that's presenting himself malapropping. The New York Times this morning has an op-ed on him basically saying that his paths to the presidency now are narrowing. If you look at the polling spreads, many of the swing states are now outside of the margin of error. For Joe Biden, you mean the Joe Biden's paths to the presidency are narrowing? Yes, I saw that. Yes, and so now President Biden would have to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

8:04The Democrats call that the blue wall, but those races are mathematically tied and all he has to do is lose one of those and he has no path to the presidency. So what do you think happens here? I believe the Biden family is resisting the changes that the Democrats want to make. Insiders have told me as recently as last night that they're extremely frustrated about the situation. There's many people on the Democratic side, the Democrat Party, basically say, hey, if we had a different candidate, given the track record that they had this four years and given the nature of Donald Trump, they'd be 15 points ahead.

8:42This probably would have never even happened. But it looks like he's going to lose unless you tell me differently. So what are your thoughts there? I think these images help Donald Trump and I can see them appearing cynical that that might sound in campaign ads going forward. And I think more than just the images themselves, it reinforces two things. One, that Donald Trump's narrative that he is the victim and the people who support him are the victim of liberal opponents. We don't know much about the shooter at this point, the 20 year old, but I'm sure we will hear more about that. look, you see the left is out of control.

9:18The country is violent. It needs a strong man to restore order. And we are the victims of that violence. I think all of that narrative gets reinforced by what happened in Pennsylvania. I think the second thing is the way Donald Trump responded himself. And there's no way he could have planned for this, but Donald Trump has an extraordinary instinct for the moment and for the big moment when the cameras are on him and how to respond. And the way he got up off that stage and before being hustled into the van made the Secret Service agents pause a moment so that he could pump his fist into the air and get a rallying cry of USA, USA.

9:56As some of his supporters have said, he is a fighter. He came out of that moment strong and defiant and fighting, and he rallied the crowd with him. It was their struggle as well as his. And I think it plays into Donald Trump's incredible political acumen and strengths, and his sharp political instincts. As you know, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said, Trump is unstoppable. And it feels today, Anthony, while the Democrats are in disarray, the party is incredibly divided. You're going to have a big rallying around, even more so around Donald Trump because of this incident. You've already had a couple of big donors, Elon Musk, come out and say they're supporting him.

10:37And I think it's the Democrats have got to think very hard about how they take this on. Do you think that Joe Biden will leave the race or this will further dig him in to his candidacy? I think in the short term, this takes some pressure off Joe Biden, ironically, because he did come out with that statement. Yes, he mongled a few things, but he said the right thing. He did what presidents do. The attention now switches to Milwaukee. Milwaukee had been a little bit of a sideshow, frankly, over the last couple of weeks because of the Democrats are in troubles, there will be full on attention on President Trump in Milwaukee.

11:10And the press will be preoccupied with that for the next three or four days. But I think in the longer term, and I'm talking about end of this week, the following week, the pressure still builds on Joe Biden to get out of the race. And it's the discussion we've seen since you and I recorded the last podcast, he made those fluffs in the NATO press conference where he called Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump, and where he called Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin. So he got names mixed up. Now, he also said in the course of that press conference, quite a lot of detailed foreign policy things that were perfectly reasonable.

11:47I mean, there was some word salad, but he held that press conference. It was good enough for the press conference. And I spoke to a couple of Republicans and Democrats after that press conference, and they said this was the worst of all possible world for the Democrats, because it gave Joe Biden the ability to say, look, I can handle a NATO press conference. I should keep going. But I think that I see absolutely no signs of the panic amongst Democrats abating. And the question is still the question we posed when we recorded our last podcast on Thursday. Who gets to him? How do they get to him?

12:18When do they get to him? And who has the ability to persuade him to drop out? Because at the moment, he's not saying he's going anywhere. We're going to take a quick break.

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14:26so i just will say something uh that i want to be as objective and speak with as greatest clarity as i can number one i agree with you mr trump president trump is an unbelievable showman great political instinct showman instincts to get up and do that i think some people were like why is the secret service actually letting him do that because there could have been other shooters and so on and so forth i mean i'd have been a wreck on a in a puddle of you know mess on the floor of the stage, right? My instincts would have been completely gone to hell and back. Yeah, listen, enormous credit and credit and courage on his part.

15:01I will say that his family members have to be shocked and upset because he's in harm's way. And we'll have to have some type of investigation related to how someone is 450 feet away from him with a gun. Now, thankfully, it was an inexperienced sniper with an AR-15 because an experienced sniper with the right long range rifle, unfortunately, we had a tragic ending. People did die, but they would have killed a leading political figure. And this would have been another unbelievable tragedy for America. And so I just think that the narrative is now Trump's. This is Donald Trump's election to lose.

15:42He's captured the narrative. People like that or dislike it. It's too bad. Just have to frame it for what it is. He's going into the Republican convention as a wounded, almost martyred candidate for the right. And so he's there now to say, I have literally taken bullets for you people. You have to get out and you have to vote for me. Now, counter opposed that to Joe Biden. He's going to go to his convention, I guess a month later, malapropping, misspeaking, misspeaking at the teleprompter. Maybe he'll call Kamala Harris, Vice President Trump again. He also said Vice President Trump was not qualified to take over for me.

16:23He did say that. I mean, that's in the transcript of his remarks. You could see his aides wincing. You want to talk about blinking. Anthony Blinken, appropriately named, was literally shuddering and blinking when Joe Biden was doing that. So you have to be, if you're a Democratic strategist, you have to be sitting here saying, wow, some of this is luck. Some of this is surfing. You know, Mitt Romney once said to me after the 2012 election, Caddy, he said, you know, politics like surfing. There's waves that are coming in. You have your surfboard, which is your platform. Are you a good surfer on your platform?

17:01But different waves come in. You know, if there's a conservative movement and a conservative wave and Ronald Reagan is doing a good job surfing, he gets his surfboard to the beach. I was up against Barack Obama. the wave was this sort of progressive movement away from conservatism. I flubbed and fell off my surfboard. What wave is hitting the beach right now? And whether people like this or not, Donald Trump is making the waves. Okay. He's creating the narrative. He's framing the narrative. And whether you like it or not, coincidences, universe, whatever, he goes into the Republican convention next week with his right ear bloodied, literally grazed by a bullet.

17:41It doesn't even matter, Caddy. If it's grazed by the teleprompter glass or the bullet, it doesn't matter. He was hurt. There was blood. Yes. And I took a bullet for you guys. And so, are you going to come out and vote for me? Yes or no? And now, how has Joe Biden countermand that? It's a good question. I have to think about it more. I honestly don't know. I would have thought he would have said, okay, I got to come out of this race. I'm not at age 81, given my infirmity, given my cognition, I got to give it, either to my vice president or open up the convention. But we'll see. If he stays in the race, he will go down in history as a guy that really cared more about himself than the country because he squandered a good presidency, a good agenda, and he squandered it as a result of his Shakespearean ego.

18:27So for the last year, this campaign has been kind of in neutral, right? The two candidates were in the same position pretty much in every single poll. Neither of them was particularly liked. It was clear the American people was not excited about this race. And I would say that in your wave analogy, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were on a very flat pond that had no waves. Nothing was propelling them. Nothing was giving them motive. There was no impetus, no excitement really on either side, apart from amongst perhaps Donald Trump's small base of supporters. I think in the last couple of weeks since that debate, now perhaps because of this incident, we can see a very clear red wave coming towards the shore, and it's being ridden by Donald Trump.

19:11And it seems that the country is shifting to looking more like a right-leaning political movement that is where the country wants to be at the moment. Now, there has also been about Donald Trump over the course of this campaign that I feel is different from 2020 and 2016, and I don't know what you think about this, growing kind of messianic language. He is saving us. He is some kind of savior. Marco Rubio said that God protected the former president last night. And that adulation, which his base has had for a very long time, is fueling this wave as well. So you've got a very potent combination of people really looking at the Democrats.

19:57And I think that this will, again, turn back against Democrats because people will say, listen, it's Democrats who are responsible for the disorder in the country. It's Democrats who are behind this kind of event. Democrats who are making the country lawless. We need a strong president to take that back again. So I think you're going to see a shift away from the kind of left and democratic movements towards Donald Trump because of this incident. This plays into that force field that seems to be shifting. I'll add another log to the flyer. and perhaps more lighter fluid. While you're saying that, as you pointed out, Elon Musk has endorsed the president, dropped money into his pack.

20:36He obviously controls Twitter. You have 200 plus million followers that Elon has, and you can like him or dislike him, but he supported him. Bill Ackman, someone in my industry, the hedge fund industry, just went out and endorsed him. And so the assassination attempt will trigger sympathy and support for Donald Trump. And it will also create more Trump amnesia, Katty K. It'll force people to have sympathy and they'll forget some of the hysteria and the mayhem that he created while president. In a way, it'll whitewash or wash over some of his deficits, if you will. And by the way, you have nobody on the other side that can make the litigation, that can make the case against him.

21:20You just don't. He's not able to, at a debate, he couldn't rebut them, at a debate, he couldn't call out his lies, at a debate, he couldn't say, well, no, you were talking about this, but I reshored manufacturing in the United States. I'm building microprocessor foundries. I put trillions of dollars into infrastructure in the US. My legislative agenda in modern history is only second to Lyndon Johnson's first term as president. And we didn't hear any of that. You've articulated his agenda and his accomplishments faster in the last 30 seconds than he did in a 90-minute debate, Anthony. And there's no way for now him to rebut that.

21:56And so the fact that he has people around him, whether it's his wife, his son, his aides, or say, no, you're the guy. You're the only guy that can beat Donald Trump. And you're the guy. And he can't determine if it's President Zelensky or President Putin or Vice President Harris or Vice President Trump. It's a big problem for him. And for us not to say that would be… Malpractice. Would be malpractice as podcasters, analysts, pundits, whatever it is. So he's got a severe problem and he better wake up, basically. I think it's not just that support for Joe Biden is declining. I think because of this, we're actually going to see support for Donald Trump increase.

22:35And those are two slightly different things. So you're going to see those people in the middle, perhaps suburban housewives, whoever, these mythical non-decided voters, whoever they are. I think they are because of this kind of incident, they may just decide, you know what, there's too much chaos on the other side. Who is the real leader? Is the Democratic candidate Gaga? Is he actually even there? Is he functioning? Well, Donald Trump stood up, got up off the stage and pumped his fist and looked strong. And I think that's very powerful for them. I had a very interesting conversation. I'm at an event, a family event in Shropshire in England.

23:08And there are a lot of Americans here and a lot of American political types here. And I legal scholar yesterday. And I asked him, he's not a fan of Donald Trump's, but he's definitely a conservative and he worked in the Bush administration. And I asked him what he thought the biggest downside was of a Trump presidency from his point of view. And this was before the shooting. And he said, listen, I think Donald Trump gets elected and the left goes crazy. And Donald Trump uses that to pull out the military onto the streets of the United States. And we have a huge escalation of political violence in the country.

23:42And I think I'm thinking of those words. He said it before the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, but I'm thinking how much truer those words sound to me today. Yeah. Listen, it's a dangerous and perilous time and it's not the cooler heads that are prevailing, but just a quick question. If you had to get three sentences, three points into Joe Biden right now, what would it be? That with him at the top of the ticket, Democrats will lose the House and the Senate. They won't take back the House, but there'll be terrible impact on down-ballot races. That his political legacy, if he loses, which looks likely, will be shot out of the water.

24:24And he will be defined as the Democrat who refused to step away. And that he will be known in the history books as somebody who let his ego get in the way of the good of the party. And if you had three bullet points for Donald Trump's campaign right now, what would they be? Keep him out there looking strong. Try and restrain his worst instincts if you can to be mean about people because that doesn't play well. And spread the map. Play in Minnesota, play in Virginia, play in North Carolina, play in New York. He's inside the margin of error now inside of New York. So I think what you're saying is spot on, but I appreciate you joining this emergency podcast.