146. Trump vs Iran: Will He Strike?

0:06Hello and welcome to the rest is politics US I'm Anthony Scaramucci today I'm joined by Rick Wilson a dear friend a political strategist pundit former republican party member and co-founder of the lincoln project but a little obscure rick but we both worked for rudolph giuliani yes we did back in the day back in the heyday rick before rudy to use an italian expression went guguts yeah you know if you're italian you know what guguts means but it means crazy all right but the show menu today rick just so you know we're going to talk a little bit about this don row doctrine right i want to get your opinions there i'll talk a little bit about what's going on in the iranian situation then of course we're gonna uh we're gonna spin back in the second half of the show to talk a little bit about ice and what happened in minneapolis but but uh before we get started rick just for some of our young viewers the the monroe doctrine essentially james monroe said hey european power stay out of the western hemisphere uh we want to control the western hemisphere at that time we probably didn't have the naval capacity to pull that off right but he was signaling directionally where america wanted to go uh once america got a little bit stronger most of trump's predecessors have let that lapse more or less okay basically i've had a a carte blanche for the us in latin america but we really haven't been super focused on that so So tell us your interpretation of the Don Rowe Doctrine and what Trump seems to be doing in Latin America.

1:44Yeah, look, I think a lot of this comes down to Trump has this weird fixation about oil. And more, I mean, look, all American presidents worry about our energy supply, but Trump has a weird fixation on taking the oil, as he always says. He got one person who's very persuasive to him in this whole thing for the last couple years has been Marco Rubio, who really, really, really wants to run for president as the guy who took out communism in Cuba. And that's Marco's obsession. He's got Trump sold on this idea that if you knock down Venezuela, the domino of Cuba falls next. And then the domino of any nation in South America or Central America that wants its own independent destiny goes next.

2:29As for energy security, I think that it fit with Trump's obsession about that. But right now, what it's done is continue to damage America's reputation in the world because they didn't make Venezuela safer for America. They left all the bad guys in charge of Venezuela. They may have snatched Maduro, but all of Maduro's deputies and the entire government system and all of those chavistas are still running Venezuela. and so you know i think like most things with trump it's got terrible consequences it's been sloppily handled and and you know we're going to be cleaning up this mess for a long time the old power rule of if you break it you bought it uh well we broke it so we're gonna have to buy it i want to give some context here uh we we said i ran in 1953 they had the long leader we took out most a day yeah we installed the shop uh 26 years later we had a revolution uh we wanted regime change in afghanistan we went from the taliban to the taliban rick in 20 years worked out great for us it worked out great for us okay i i iraq probably has a democracy now but it's a sloppy democracy and it's not ish and it's not necessarily allied with the united states we're going to call that one a mistake.

3:47Libya, we took out the Libyan leader, okay, in cohorts with the European leadership. You said, oh, we're going to have regime change. That's going to really work for us. That one hasn't worked. And so I'm going to give you the Trump theory here from inside the Trump State Department, and I want you to respond to this. This is different. We're leaving the baths in charge right the baths being the leadership in iraq we're going to have a transitional government over a 24 to 30 month period of time uh we're going to have them help us with law enforcement we're going to have them help us with oil curation and then as this works out for us which of course is going to work beautifully to use the trump word uh we're then going to have democratic elections 30 months from now i want you to respond to that look i think they they underestimate a couple of things there's a reason we did denazification after world war ii because the nazis would have if you would let the vast majority of them stay in power they would have found ways to stay in power longer and to once i took our eye off the ball come back and do more bad things i think the chavistas are going to be exactly in that position and i i I think there's an element here that they have underestimated that both China and Russia want a vote on this.

5:10China has taken advantage of the tariff situation by expanding wildly throughout South America in terms of their influence, their diplomacy, their ability to shape the narrative of those countries. I think that is going to be a factor where China looks at this and says well This is a way for us to bleed out further American power in the world We're the people that are going to do good trade deals with them Trump's going to be the asshole who both invades and doesn't trade and I think Russia and Venezuela have a long relationship as well And they're also looking to for valences to put pressure on us, but The idea that you're going to let the the the chavistas who are a relatively technically sophisticated, oppressive modern state with all the bullying tactics of Central American and South American authoritarianism matched up, I think this is a recipe for disaster.

6:07These are not fans of Donald Trump. They're not going to give up power without a fight. They're going to figure out ways to flatter him in the short and medium term. And so, So I don't think there's a really serious intent to do democracy or liberty or freedom or whatever you want to call it for the Venezuelan people. As long as they're giving Trump the oil he wants and a cut of the vig off of whatever's happening down there, I don't think he gives a damn about democracy. And leaving those people in power is a recipe for them to remain in power forever. Okay, I want to test something on you, Rick, and then I want you to respond to it because I'm now an opposition leader.

6:50Okay, so opposition leaders in Iran said, oh, the imperialist Americans took out most of the day our democratically elected person. We need more of a cleric situation. And then same thing in Iraq. And what's going to happen here, the Venezuelans, the Chavistas, if you will, are going to lie and lurk, wait for the Americans to get tired and then use the American Yankeeism, the Yankee imperialism as a rallying cry again. Am I wrong about that? And if I am, push back. No, no, no. This is absolutely what's going to happen. They're going to go to that whole Bolivarian perspective. It's actually got a lot of popularity culturally in South America, particularly in those northern tier states of South America.

7:35I'm going to interrupt you, sir. Give us the Bolivarian perspective for those that may not know what that means. Simone Bolivar was a South American leader in the 1800s who was one of the first people to say, we're going to be independent nations, free of Spain, free of Portugal, free of America. We're going to have a third way, if you will. and it has become a populist sort of calling card, which Hugo Chavez and other Latin American, South American leaders have adopted it over time because it fuses the Spanish culture, indigenous culture, all these sort of things. And I mean, not to go too deeply into this whole thing.

8:12I'm not an expert expert on it, but it's a powerful, appealing narrative for folks in South America where they say, we would be great except for the Yankees. We would be great except for And, you know, in older times, Spain and Portugal still keeping their fingers in the pie of what we do. They view us as an extractive nation. And that is one thing that that shaped a lot of South American history was Spain and Portugal extracting gold, silver and resources from South America. And that gave them the sense of we're slave colonies. That still has this resonance with folks in South America. and and if trump's storyline is we're here just for your oil shut up pump oil give it to us i i think it plays right into that theme okay i want to i want to now go i'm channeling full trumpism and full mega ism and i want you to respond so i'm a i'm a genius i'm i'm playing 19 dimensional chess right you once said to me no anthony trump is eating the chess pieces of course i of course i stole that from you i've been saying that for the last five years but i'm playing 19 dimensional chess right and so i'm taking the oil from china where they are selling it to china remember it's only one percent of the production right now 17 of the world's known oil reserves and i'm going to go after the shadow russian fleet in the north atlantic and in the arctic sea uh uh and take those tankers as well you know uh delcie rodriguez has been very helpful to me to find those tankers and i'm now going to control not only the western hemisphere but i'm going to be the geo strategist at the poker table of oil and i'll be able to assert myself more vigorously in the middle east and potentially put downward pressure on oil prices which will really hurt the russian economy uh respond to all that i don't think donald trump is able to think that abstractly at scale.

10:18I also think that solving the Venezuelan oil problem for China is de minimis compared to solving the Iranian dark fleet oil problem for China, where I think they get a larger percentage of the take of what they need energy-wise. The idea, though, that Trump is going to put pressure on Russia, he has consistently shown he's not willing to put any real pressure on Russia. We already saw that they're freeing the people off these tankers and returning them to Russia, the ones that are involved in managing this operation. If Trump wanted to put pressure on Russia, he'd be helping Ukraine. That's the simplest possible answer on that front.

10:55But Anthony, I don't think that there is a long abstract thing with Trump in his brain about a strategic realignment of the world, except for he seems to have accepted this sort of thing from Alexander Dugan, this Russian. He doesn't know who Dugan is, but he likes the idea of a world divided into three chunks where America runs the Western Hemisphere, China runs Asia and Australia, and Putin runs Europe. Africa's a jump ball. And Alexander Dugan, of course, is the Russian philosopher that's very close to Putin that believes that russia should be able to successfully reattach all of these republics right now that they're a little bit stronger and a little bit more stable and that should be their province geopolitically and trump doesn't mind that of course as long as he gets his province geopolitically which of course is very unsettling so so i want you now to make the case rick of the european statesman of somebody that's followed the rules-based order uh farid zikari was saying this over the weekend i felt found interesting america alone uh it's one of the great superpowers that's managed to keep friendly alliances for almost a century most of the time that doesn't happen and so i want you to make the case you're a uh you're a european statesman and you're meeting with marco rubio uh because he's probably a little smarter than donald trump and what's the case that you'd be making to him about why this is so mistaken well europe's economy is larger by a long degree than than russia's longer larger than china's still as an aggregate and they have been a vital trading partner they have been a vital role in keeping peace in in europe it is the economic engine that that america benefits from vastly if we abandon that we abandon both the stability of europe and an economic model that that has been very very good for both parties uh it alters the world financial system because while the bricks can't quite ever get off the ground this alternate currency basket folks and again we're getting in the weeds here bit um if europe and american finances become disentangled or disentangled that's not great for america it is it is it is a much more less stable global market for this country um and and as for the alliances you know donald trump may not share all the values that that that were the glue of NATO for now nearly 80 years in terms of deterrence and peace strength and all those things.

13:49But those things have kept America safe in the world. They've ensured that the war rarely comes to America's shores, that there's a buffer in Europe between Russian expansionism, which is you know always an underpinning thing as you just discussed dugan and it doesn't become hey give us alaska back it doesn't become an oppressive uh state in russia taking over europe or or launching a war in europe you know we have a war in europe right now but it's the pre-game warm-up it's it's the off season and and as horrible as that is to say the idea of of a vastly expanded Russian sphere of influence should scare the hell out of America.

14:35All well said, but for some reason, not registering 100 % in terms of the current influences at the State Department. I want to flip over before we go to the break. I want to talk a little bit about the Iranian situation. So the reports are now we've got over 2 million protesters in that country. They're being shot at by the regime. And they keep coming out. Richard Branson said over the weekend, could you imagine a government that hates its people so much that rather than seeking reform, they would prefer massacre? What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on its linkage to Russia, which you mentioned a little bit previously, and then the Trump administration's response to all of this?

15:17Let me start with the Trump administration's response of we're going to bomb Iran if they shoot protesters. I think that's exactly what the regime wants right now. Going back, as you said, to Mossadegh when we overturned him in the 50s, that was a long cultural drumbeat among the Iranian leadership. It's what allowed the Ayatollahs over the last 47 years to keep a part of their elite population on side. What you're seeing right now is transformative. We are seeing a revolution in Iran. It is moving faster than the regime ever believed. Iran is a younger country and the people in the streets who are in their 30s and even in their 40s, they don't remember the Mossadegh story as clearly.

15:57They don't remember a time where Iran was more free and more educated and more Western. I mean, I love Iranians. That is a highly educated country. they have an entrepreneurship and a drive that if they were not a religious theocracy, they would be an economic powerhouse in the world in a matter of years. And I think people see that. I think they see that a free Iran is a prosperous Iran. A prosperous Iran is a free Iran. There are people in Iran who will fight this to the death. The moas will fight this to the very last, till the last dog dies. And I don't even think this is necessarily going to be like Iran becomes America's greatest ally in the Middle East.

16:38There's still a lot of anxiety and a lot of tensions between our countries. It will upset the Middle East in ways. You will see Netanyahu lose his version of the great Satan. You will see the Saudis unclench on a lot of the cultural things that the Wahhabi strain in Saudi Arabia made them fear it would be the next Iran for generations now. You hopefully will see them, if we do our job right and don't bomb them, hopefully you will see them say to the Russians, hey, you know what? We need a stable Persian Gulf and we're not going to keep shipping you drones to kill people in Ukraine. there's a lot of upside for the people of iran um there's a lot of upside for the world there are some downsides there are some chaos to come you know regime change is never clean and easy i hope the iranian people for their sake um manage this revolution and and can can expel these people this is a incredibly intolerant horrible religious theocracy and it has been a stone loser for the people of iran so you know it's interesting i and obviously i'm in i'm in violent agreement with you, but I think the problem historically is when a group of people want to overthrow their government and seek reform, if they do it more or less by themselves, it's generally more successful.

18:01Now, somebody will push back and say, well, you had Lafayette intervening, but Lafayette did not intervene in the formation of the government. Lafayette didn't say, I'm now running the American colonies, right? The way Trump is saying Venezuela, right? The other big issue here, which I think is relevant and important, is that if it does happen in Iran, I believe it will scare the daylights out of the Chinese. Do you think I'm wrong about that or not? Why would it scare the daylights out of the Chinese, Rick? The theocratic regime in Iran and the IGRC, which is basically, I'm going to draw a very broad analogy here.

18:41It's not one-to-one. The IGRC, the Iranian Guards Revolutionary Council, and the Chinese Communist Party are kind of the same thing. Ignore what their titles say. They are the power elite. They are the structural underpinnings of the culture and the society and the political power structure that's in charge. Iran's power structure has been more stable in some ways than China's in the last 50 years. If the people in China see that the people in Iran in a theocratic regime, absolutely brutal and repressing dissent in a way that rivals or excels China, I think that's a message to the hardliners in China that they better keep looking over their shoulder.

19:21And China is a much less stable system than it looks like from the outside. And I think that the Iranian system, if it collapses, does put China in a state where maybe they get a little less ambitious about outward expansion and a little more ambitious about inward reform. Knock wood. Okay. Amen. Before we go to the break, we're going to go round robin on five countries or five territories. And you're going to tell me what's going to happen. Okay. The Rick Wilson view. You ready? Yep. Cuba. Collapse soon. Massive, massive, massive refugee flood into South Florida that will make the Mariel boat lift look like a picnic.

20:04Okay. And the Mario Boliv was in 1980. Folks, I mean, Marielle brought over, I think, I can't remember the exact number now, but it's like 100 ,000 people. And it absolutely crushed the American immigration system and was a transformative thing. When Cuba goes, Anthony, it is going, and remember, folks, it's 89 miles across the water to the Keys. Anything that will float is going to leave that country. The collapse is going to be ugly. They're already in the dark right now. We will try to send a Viceroy, Marco Rubio. Trump said yesterday Marco Rubio will be the supreme leader of Cuba going forward.

20:40If it collapses, great for Marco. He's loving that. Well, they hate him there. I mean, so, you know, because I've been to Cuba many times, and Cubans want relief. They want economic relief, and obviously they hate their own regime, but they hate the repression that Rubio offers them. They would want something that would be way more collaborative. So we'll see. Let's keep going. Colombia. You know, I think Trump is bluffing on Colombia a little bit. I don't think he's got as much intentionality to go and snatch the Colombian leadership. The drug stuff is always a cover for these guys. You know, this isn't about fentanyl or cocaine.

21:17It's about oil and resources. Now, Colombia has some energy resources, but not at the scale of Venezuela, obviously. Mexico. That is a country that I suspect the shine bomb is a very smart operator. She's played Trump pretty, pretty effectively so far. I think they have a great veto power. And the simple answer is to say that if Trump threatens to invade Mexico or start land operations in Mexico, they're going to invite 5 ,000, 20 ,000 Chinese advisors into the country, and that's going to end this thing. Okay. Last but not least, Greenland. I suspect that if the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if the members of the JCS don't resign in mass that we're going to attack Greenland and we're going to blow up NATO.

22:01It's going to destroy NATO. It will be the greatest win for Putin he could ever have imagined and it will say to the Chinese, hey, take Taiwan. No problem, dude. So attack Greenland, you have it at 75%, 50 %? 75%. It's a trivial operation to attack and seize Greenland. 57 ,000 people. I think that would be the most colossal foreign policy disaster ever of all time but it wouldn't be america first by the way it would be america alone uh i think we would have to that would be rick wilson and anthony scaramucci form a dissident community inside the united states we have to become dissidents and have a form of grassroots effort to try to see if we could put an end to this uh total insanity if you go in that direction but uh cuba i think you're right about cuba uh i think i think it is failing colombia i think is noise trump is already suggesting that he may actually meet with the colombian president in the oval office uh mexico i do think he's going to drop some bombs on mexico probably in the quote-unquote drug areas uh just to let people know that his repressed anger that he's felt his whole life he can put a little bit of hurt on people in mexico He'll hit some Sinaloa processing facilities or whatever.

23:24So I'm in general agreement with you, but I really hope and pray that there's enough of an establishment left in our society that would stop him from invading Greenland because you could more or less get whatever you wanted from Greenland in terms of security. We already do. Right. This is like when you and I were playing risk back in the 1980s. I'm taking Kamshatka. Yeah, exactly. This is exactly what that's like. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

23:56Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US. I'm joined by a very dear friend, Rick Wilson, who was a Republican, is now part of the, I guess, centrist resistance. Is that okay to say? Yeah, I'd say that's about right. Centrist resistance. You just think this is absolutely crazy what's going on. But I want to go to the Homeland Security situation and I want to go to what's going on with ICE and the differing views in the country, Rick. And I just want you to react to the following statement. One side of the country sees this violent death last week of this woman in her minivan as a act of self-defense by an ICE agent.

24:38The other side of the country sees it as a cold-blooded murder. I've stipulated on this show, irrespective of those two views, this is an unspeakable tragedy that we're actually in a situation like this, in a vortex like this. But I want you to talk a little bit about what you're seeing and what you think the administration's objective is with this level of intensity. I think the message and the shaping factors of ICE are coming out of Stephen Miller's brain. And Stephen Miller is a very dark person. He has convinced Trump that the base wants strong military forces in our streets, not just to deport aliens, illegals, or otherwise, but he's convinced Trump that it makes Trump powerful if there are armed, masked men in the streets who can kill people for whatever reason and not face any accountability or consequences.

25:35This appeals to something very dark in Trump's personality, and you know it very well. You know Trump's personality very well. There's a punitive, dark nature in his brain. And I think that this is one of the things that has put this country on a very dangerous path right now. because you know i talked to a bunch of republicans over the weekend i was making some calls on saturday to elected officials that i know uh who are still around not as many as i used to know but you know still a few uh and uh you know uh influencer types that i you know i keep my door open to talk to people and a lot of them were like well yeah i can't say anything but obviously this is fucking crazy we we can't kill uh yeah that woman wasn't it wasn't didn't deserve to be killed and they know it.

26:23There is a play acting part of this, a performative part of this, where they know to keep Trump happy and that they're going to have to go out and take the troll position, to take the position of evil, to say, ha ha, she deserved it. F-A-F-O. Ha ha ha. And if it happened to their daughter or their friend or their wife or their sister, they would they would not feel that way and the excesses that ice has been able to engage in in our streets it's interesting because remember they deployed ice to minneapolis not for to round up illegals but they said to do to go up against the fraud in minneapolis and the fraud in in minnesota i'm sorry i don't understand what the border patrol has to do with fraud investigations They can't bring the National Guard in anymore because of the court system.

27:19Yeah. And Trump is going to wait to really press the court until we get closer to the midterm. So he doesn't want to press the court right now. He wants to show people, look, I'm in abeyance of these court orders right now, but I've got this other junta known as ICE. So let me throw those guys up there. You're mentioning Steve Miller. And I know you saw the interview with Steve Miller and Jake Tapper, at least the excerpts of it, where he's - Oh, yeah, I saw it. It's a mean and brutish world. And the only thing that matters in the world is power. And we know that that's not it. We know that that has never worked.

27:53Okay. Von Metternich said it never works. Kissinger said it never worked. Even Thomas Hobbes. He obviously didn't read the entire book, Rick. It doesn't work. Machiavelli says it doesn't work. He got the nasty, brutish and short part, but he missed the rest of it. Right. And I think one of the things that we're watching here, it's what I call the 80s movie version of the world. They want to be the rogue cop in the 80s movies. They want to be the guy who kills everybody and lets God sort it out. They have this fantasy that the world can be purely mediated by violence alone. And no society that tries to mediate its governance with state violence in the end will succeed.

28:36and they will inevitably collapse. And we were talking about China earlier. Yes, the state is very, very tough on people. It is very authoritarian, but they also calibrate how much they do. They run in cycles. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm saying that they understand that if you start killing women in their minivans in the streets, there will be a public backlash. There will be a response to this. And just saying, well, we'll send more ICE agents and then we'll send more and more and more is not the answer. There aren't enough ICE agents in this country to suppress an entire nation of 350 million people.

29:16Talk about the rule of law for a second because you're a Reagan guy. I'm a Reagan guy. And we grew up in federalism where the states basically had the power, right? The 10th Amendment. If it's not in the purview of the federal government, it reverts to the states. That's the 10th Amendment. And yet you have a situation here where the state investigators are being blocked from case materials and they're being blocked from seen evidence in the case. uh so tell me about trump's base okay because it's not conservative uh no no conservative would accept that so what is trump's base and and get in the mind rick and this is a scary thought so you may need a vomit bag but get in the get in the mind of a fox news producer and someone that's writing the script for jesse waters okay so square the circle for me tell me about the base what is the base and how does a Fox News producer justify this cold-blooded killing?

30:20Base is a 57-year-old white guy from a Southern or Rust Belt state. The great job he once had with a pension and healthcare and all that stuff is gone. He's doing something he hates now. If that, his father probably had a really, really much better job and his grandfather had a much, much better job and he's seen his economic life as deindustrialization has hit this country for all the reasons i'm not that's too complicated to go into he views himself as the victim of that and he believes that hostile liberal elites are the cause of it and that they targeted him personally so that fox news producer every day is writing something to punch that guy right in the nuts and say they're going after you this is this is against you that that woman who got shot She was a lesbian and they're trying to convert your kids.

31:12And those people are all communist agitators and they're trying to turn you into a communist. And all this scare stuff that works for that 57-year-old white guy, it's a fantasy world. It's a bubble world. It doesn't exist in the real universe that we live in, but they're very good at convincing people of it. And that producer knows, even if the people that are watching it get the joke, the people that are higher educational attainment, higher news engagement, all that stuff, those people know that Antifa isn't real. Those people know that the Democratic Party are not radical communists. They may be incompetent, but they're not radical communists.

31:52But the people that get the joke like the power that that vast MAGA media enterprise gives them. So that producer is always going to find the way to poke the amygdala of that insecure white dude. He's always going to find a way to say, they are coming for us. They don't want you to succeed. They hate you. The old projection of, oh, the liberal media is so all-powerful. There is no liberal media. Fox News is bigger than every other cable network added up and combined. They have more power in the media to shape the public narrative than anything else. And social media, you've got the same sort of gameplay being played with Twitter and now with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Meta and Insta.

32:35You know, I find it hard for me at this stage of my life because I had this predictability about America and I said to myself, okay, you know, I went to law school, there's a rule of law in America and there's a general predictability. And then also there's a noblesse oblige from certain people in leadership positions. And so even Bush, if you want to disagree with the Iraqi war, he went to the UN. He tried to build a coalition of the willing. He asked for help related to NATO and Article 5. And you could say it was a disaster to do all of that, but at least he framed it from a coalitional perspective.

33:14Has this forever changed America, Rick, that we're now have a unilateral rogue at the top of the food chain? And by the way, I just want to point out to you, my buddies in immigration, because I went to law school, I got a lot of immigration lawyers. They've been told by ICE people and they've been told by DHS. we've been told by no man trump we got to get rough and if we don't get rough we're going to get demoted and i don't want to lose my pension and i don't want to lose my uh ranking here i've been working at 15 years i've got five years to go to my 20th year to get my pension and they're telling me to get rough and so i'm putting a mask on my face i'm going to get rough but my question though is related to america and how do we go back rick because there's a group of seething people that have floated trump's whale shit up to the surface well i mean look part of this anthony i think in the end we have to almost have like a truth and reconciliation commission when this is done the corruption of this administration is off the charts as you and i both know um the The abuse of American citizens' rights by ICE and these organizations is an escalating feature of this.

34:31It's not just rounding up illegal criminals. It's now in the face of American people who protest for whatever reason. All those things are going to require this country to get a survival instinct to kick in. And that survival instinct has been asleep for a decade. There are a few of us, you and I have been banging the drum for 10 years almost now. saying you've got to watch out for this. This is not going to end well. And a lot of people were like, yeah, don't worry about it. Supreme Court will be fine. They'll take care of it. They'll stop it. Congress will stop it. The press will report on it.

35:07The military won't do illegal or won't follow illegal orders. People are going to uphold their oaths to office. And that has been a mistake to believe that every single time. And so I think we're going to have to have something. It's that drowning man reflex. We've got to kick back to the surface and pull some air into our lungs that reflects the real nature of America, the propositional nature of this country, and have a desire not to live in a populist fantasy land, but to get back to something where the rule of law, which is what folks, the rule of law is what the thing that made this country.

35:47country prosperous. It's made us the envy of the world. If you're in a lot of these nations that people want to come here from, there's no rule of law. It's arbitrary. It's who's got power, not what are the rules. And we've got to reform how Congress does its work. We've got to reform how the presidency operates. And it's going to be very hard, Anthony. It's going to be the work of people that you and I will both be long gone while this project is still trying to turn the back in the right direction. I'm shocked that we let it go this far, though. And I'm shocked about the fecklessness of the congressional leadership on both sides.