147. Trump's Crash Out: Losing America's Workers?

0:07Welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. I am joined today by Stuart Stevens, a dear friend of mine, a veteran Republican strategist and was the chief strategist on the Romney campaign in 2012, among so many other things that he's done. He's also a best-selling author, and he's a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. And so we made this Stuart Lincoln Project week. I had Rick Wilson on earlier. Caddy's away. God bless her on vacation. It's always great to talk to you. Great to see you. Before we get started, I just, you know, we often say that character, you can really tell character what people do when no one's watching.

0:49And going back to the Romney campaign, when Anthony was involved in it, trying to help out. We had a long slogs of the nomination. And whenever we had some bad defeats, and Anthony was always the guy who would take out the younger kids in the campaign, would try to buck them up, order in pizza, encourage people. It was all very quiet, all behind the scenes. And it just meant so much to them. And I think it just speaks volume about you, Anthony. So, Alain Velady, thank you for that. You're kind to bring it up. I've learned a lot from you over the years, also from Governor Romney, Senator Romney.

1:26It's kind of you to bring that up. I mean, he would have been a different country, frankly, a different world had MIT become president. But I want to also tell a story because we were together in Boston on the evening of the election. And you may or may not remember this, but Donald Trump sauntered in. He always wore the top coat inside. He had Michael Cohen with him. He had flown up to Boston to participate in the potential celebration or the donor party that we were hosting at the Weston, which was attached to the convention center there. You remember all that. And when Fox News reported that Romney was not going to win, Trump said, ah, I knew I should have never backed him.

2:10And he left abruptly. And he said on the way out, because Paul Ryan heard him, other people heard him, I'm going to do this myself. I'm going to do this myself. Wow. I never heard that story before. Yeah, well, that's a true story. You could ask Michael Cohen or anybody that was around him. But also, I didn't take him seriously at that time. I don't think most people did. I want to start the episode. We're going to do two halves. I'm going to start the episode. We have something called the Don Rowe Doctrine or the Trump Doctrine, but I also have a doctrine where it's Trump needs a doctor doctrine.

2:45Okay, just hear me out for a second, okay? He's giving the middle finger to an assembly worker at a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. He now wants to do a Mondani or Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders approach to the credit card and banks, where he's going to cap interest rates at 10%. We talk about the ramifications of that. And he's threatening countries, but also territories like Greenland who are controlled by Denmark. So I want to start there, Stuart, and I want you to manifest your best psychiatry, if you can, and tell us what you think is actually really going on, is there just madness to the madness or is there method to the madness?

3:31Well, you know, I think if you kind of step back, there is no conservative party in America today. You know, I mean, so normally a party, any president will represent a party that has some ideological, philosophical approach to government that, you know, and they have differences. But I mean, you ask Elizabeth Warren, her theory of government, she can articulate one. And you might think she's crazy. You can argue with her. She's very good at it. No one can do that on the conservative side now. And I think that what this is, is a series of, you know, Donald Trump is going increasingly weaker, which gets into your doctor stuff in all sense.

4:07He's weaker. If he was, you know, 45 years old and, you know, winning the Masters Olympics, he still would be getting weaker politically because he's a lame duck president. And all lame duck presidents are weaker than they were. I mean, it's just a fact of life. But when you combine it with his physical decline and his mental decline, and when you combine it with this image that is so important to Magoff, sort of masculinity, the guy on these absurd memes of him out there as Superman or whatever, it's particularly damaging to him. So what does somebody like that do? I mean, you know better than anybody, Anthony.

4:46You know, he tries to reassert, no, this isn't happening. So why not take out a head of state of a foreign country? You know, Greenland. We can invade Greenland. We can win that war a bit. And it's just sort of a floundering around. And, you know, what struck me most about the whole Venezuela thing, Anthony, is they couldn't come up with a consistent answer as to why they did it. So when Vance went out there, he said, you know, it's all about we have an indicted drug dealer in a palace in Caracas and we can't allow it to happen. Like it was some episode of The Wire. OK, right. That's you can argue that.

5:26Marco Rubio said we can't have foreign influences on a hemisphere like it was a game of risk. And Trump went out and talked about it like it was a hostile board takeover. You know, we've gotten rid of those those board members. And now we're on Venezuela. And, you know, it just seems like on a base level, removing a head of state is not an unserious thing that they would have gone to the trouble to come up with a consistent reason for it. I see the lame duck stuff and I see the overreaction to the lame duck stuff because there are still some honest brokers in the room. They won't be publicly honest brokers, but I could imagine somebody like Susie Wiles.

6:05You and I know her a long time. you know they're talking about the midterms and the concern that if they lose the house he could be under investigation also someone could say to him and he could overreact to this well this is your last real election where you're going to be a force of nature in the election you know after this year you know i mean you're going to be politically irrelevant in the united states And I would imagine something like that to Donald Trump would drive him crazy. But this thing in the Ford factory, Stuart, I want you to react to it for a second, because this to me is like he's for the worker, but he's flipping the bird to the workers.

6:48And I reported on this program prior to Christmas at the invitation of the Ford Motor Company. Ironically, I went to that factory. That's the Rouge plant out in Dearborn, Michigan, the famous Henry Ford plant, now making Ford F-150s. And as I've said on the program, they're producing one truck, the best-selling truck in America, one truck every 53 seconds. And I stood on that ledge where the president was with the manager of the Ford plant. and the notion, even if they were, whatever they were saying to him, I think they called him a pedophile protector or something like that. Obviously, there's people down there that don't like him.

7:29But the President of the United States to flip the middle finger to a group of workers. Okay. And forget about it. I get it. We don't see him as the President of the United States as much as we see him as Donald Trump. But I just want you to react to the political symbolism of that. And is there any political symbolism of that? Or can Donald Trump more or less do whatever he wants and even that middle finger is on brand? I don't think there's anything that is attractive about President United States flipping the bird to workers of any kind. And there's such symbolism in that plant, you know, that that really, you know, right at the heart of the arsenal of democracy in World War Two.

8:12And, you know, doesn't it just speak to this lack of self-restraint he has, this inability to control his impulses? Being president, you should get a lot of criticism. You should get booed. You should get, you know, jeered. I mean, that just goes with the territory. I mean, it would be like a sports figure going into the stands after a heckling fan. And when that happens, we don't think that's a good thing for the sports figure. You know, it's like, dude, you're going to get fined. Settle down. This isn't a good look. And it just speaks to weakness. You let it get to you. And probably, I haven't seen any reporting on the person who did it.

9:00But, you know, that's a reference to the Epstein stuff, obviously. And that is a huge deal with his own base. so you know that could have been from some you know progressive left-wing type more likely it's not uh more likely somebody who listens it could have been a MAGA person exactly right it could have been a MAGA person like a Marjorie Taylor Greene is like you said you were giving us the Epstein files and now you're not doing that uh but also you know again if it's madness madness I accept that but there's also a distraction at play here as well that I want you to react to The method to the madness could be, hey, I got to get this Epstein file as far off of the canvas of all mainstream media, non-mainstream media, social media.

9:47And so if I snatch Maduro, I saber rattle at Greenland, I threaten Iran during a protest movement in Iran, this will take the noise out of the direction of Epstein. What do you say about that? Yeah, look, I mean, it's a classic historical trend of presidents who are at home having trouble domestically for whatever reasons. Try to focus on foreign policy because foreign policy, they can control more. And when you send in Delta Force to Venezuela, you don't have to deal with any other Americans who think this may not be a good idea. You can just do it. I mean, this is a classic tactic of Nixon's.

10:28And George Bush, to a certain degree, did the first George Bush this. So, you know, I think that when I step back here and, you know, here we are in January before midterms. In politics, as you know better than anybody, Anthony, you need a good messenger or you need a good message. And if you can have both, you're probably going to have a really good day on Election Day. For the life of me, as somebody who worked in the party 30 years or so, I don't know what the message is of the party that is attracting voters that they don't already have. And ultimately, as our friend Haley Barber used to always say, politics is about addition, not subtraction.

11:09And who are the messengers? You know, Trump, the combined favorables of Trump and J.D. Vance at this moment are lower than the current favorability of Vice President Harris. like that's sort of funny if nothing else um you have jd vance who's uniquely unattractive who seems to take it to go out i'll defend when nobody else will defend in a way no one else will defend it and that's going to help me rise in this shadow primary stephen miller i mean is there a more unattractive sort of ghoulish figure in america christy noem i was there in south Dakota, working for the governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, when she was crowned Miss Snow Queen.

11:53And I don't think it's, you know, we all sat there and go, oh, there's a future Homeland Security director right there on stage. Jailhouse Barbie. I call her Jailhouse Barbie. So, I think the assembly line thing is a pivot moment for me. Just hear me out for a second. I think Trump has basically said, hey, I'm in full nihilism mode now. I'm going to do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. Give people a finger. They could be part of my base. We're not. Send Rubio and Vance to Greenland or to meet with the Danish officials. Talk about buying Greenland or whatever the hell they're talking about over there.

12:38He's coming to the World Economic Forum. I'm here in Switzerland right now. I'll be at the WEF next week. Cady will be joining me there. He'll be at the World Economic Forum with those European leaders who all he has done for the last 13 months is castigated them. And I imagine that there'll be more than sedentary stuff coming out of his mouth. So to me, I just think it's a pivot point of nihilism. I want to point out to people, though, this gentleman, TJ Sabula, 40 years old, Stuart, United Auto Worker, local 600 line worker. He's raised, and again, he didn't do this himself. A couple of guys got together.

13:22They went on GoFundMe, and they said, okay, he's been suspended by the Ford Motor Company. It's not clear when he'll be able to return back to work due to his actions. Two different GoFundMe pages, Stuart. They raised a combined total of$810 ,765. Okay. He has now asked, this is his request, could the donation stop? Okay. Now he's making probably$60 or$70 an hour. It's not a bad job. You know, it's north of$100 ,000 a year if you put in all of the benefits. But he just received probably seven or eight times his salary from the American people in support of this slur that he launched at the president.

14:08Of course, in my opinion, he is a pedophile protector. The president would deny that, of course. But I've given you my opinion. I share the same opinion as the Ford factory worker. So what do you say about that, the response from Americans sending$15,$20,$100,$1 ,000 donations to this young man? Yeah, you know, I think one of the great mysteries of Trump is there's no part of American life in which any teacher, coach, Boy Scout leader, Girl Scout leader, CEO, Midwest manager, would encourage or tolerate the behavior of Donald Trump. There's not a board in America, even before he was a convicted felon, that would have appointed him.

14:53And it's always baffled me, like, why is it that If you as a coach wouldn't think of doing what Donald Trump does, why is it that you support Donald Trump? Because, I mean, if you go back to when, you know, Bill Clinton and all the Monica Lewinsky stuff, so many people like Bill Bennett wrote beautifully about how the office of the White House is more than just an executive. It embodies something in America. And I can tell you, Anthony, I was working in a Bush campaign. We made a lot of commercials, spent a lot of money. But really, the only thing, well, certainly the thing that worked better than anything else was George Bush looking into the camera and promising to restore honor and dignity to the White House.

15:40and that I think won the election form. I think America's sort of sense of the unsavory if nothing else quality of that whole thing and you look back on that and it seems like some small time stuff and I think that America is still there and I think it's a real tragedy that Republicans aren't speaking up and defending it more. It shouldn't be a partisan issue. You know Stuart, to my theory And again, I just want to let you, I want to add a little bit of evidence, I think, to this theory. I'm going to put a 10 % cap. He can't even, he's not even allowed to do it, by the way. That's a congressional thing that would have to happen.

16:20It would have to go through all of the different regulatory bodies inside the Senate Banking Committee, et cetera. But, you know, this is a hard left populist thing to do. and I'm going to do this because, you know, I'm texting back and forth with Mayor Mondani and affordability is going to be a big thing coming in the next midterm election. And so, again, this is part of his nihilism. No problem. I'm just going to fire this in there. What say you about that? You know, I mean, I find it darkly hysterical that the Republican Party is losing its mind over Mayor of New York is talking about maybe five city run groceries.

16:59and we're nationalizing intel. Like, really, guys? And we're going to put a cap on interest rates? Really? You know, Bernie Sanders, I'm not sure he would do that. Your socialism is not as good as our socialism, right, Stuart? Exactly. I mean, it's like, and we basically support Putin. You know, it's kind of a trifecta. And one way to look at the whole ICE thing, in many ways, what's happening now is what the far right predicted that the left wanted to do. This shadowy army of masked men who are going to land helicopters on apartment buildings and seize people with no accountability, a government out of control.

17:38These are the people who are going to come and take our guns. And now it's coming true, but it's coming true from the Republican Party, which I think just shows that the party, to me, never really believed in a lot of the stuff that we claim to believe, and they were just marketing slogans. Yeah, listen, I find it rough. We're going to get into the new Republican Party today and whether or not the Republican Party that you and I worked in could ever return right after the break.

18:12Welcome back to The Rest is Politics U.S. I'm Anthony Scaramucci, joined by Stuart Stevens, a dear friend, long-time, three-decade-plus Republican strategist, strategist, bestselling author, Romney, senior campaign official, senior strategist there. Stuart, I want to go to the Supreme Court for a second. Okay. So the Trump administration lost in the district court. They lost in the appellate court. Are you allowed to put this tax, aka a tariff, on the American people without representation? And the court said, no, this is a form of taxation, and therefore you cannot do that. The decision was supposed to come out yesterday.

18:50The court has delayed this decision. Trump is clearly worried about it. He's tweeting nonstop about it. He's also pulled back and paused some tariffs because I think he's worried that he's going to get embarrassed here by the court. The stakes are very high. It's two plus trillion dollars of potential income over the next three or four years. There's probably$400 billion that could potentially be rebated, or maybe the court will split the baby and say, we'll give him emergency powers for what he did, but he can't have emergency powers going forward. I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen.

19:24So two questions for you. Do you have an opinion? What do you think is going to happen? And then I want to talk about whether or not this is traditional Republican philosophy. And if it is, it will we ever get back to it? So question one. You know, it really comes down probably to Kavanaugh. And, you know, Kavanaugh is a creature of the Bush world. And I can't imagine that he's going to support this. I mean, I just go back, what if there was a far left president or a left president and he was doing this? What if Bernie Sanders was president or AOC and they were pro-tariffs? Republicans would lose their frigging minds.

20:02But this tariff thing, and you've known Donald Trump a long time. It's one of these ideas that he's had in his head since the 80s. And all evidence to the contrary, he hasn't budged. It's almost sort of the only philosophical consistency or ideological or economic consistency that he's had. And it's a terrible idea at a time when Scandinavian countries are backing away from trying to lower that and these sort of tariffs. The United States is going to rush to it. And why is it that Republicans allow this to happen? It's just baffling to me. You know, it's a lot of trouble to get elected to the Senate or the House.

20:42Let me give you my theory and let me get you to react to it. So you're a consultant. They go to their consultants and they say, listen, Trump's going to be off the stage in three years. You're going to be a permanent fixture in Washington. You love the job and the power. And of course, their fear is being primaried by the hard right. So it's better for you to be a shrinking violet now and roof roof do exactly what Donald Trump wants. I think that's a very sad way for any adult to live their life. You know, when I wrote It Was All a Lie, one of the most impactful books that I read, I stumbled across it, was a memoirs of Franz von Papen.

21:22Franz von Papern was the Prussian aristocrat who did probably more to usher in Hitler than any other German political figure. So he wrote his memoir in 1953. In it, you could say things had gone a little sideways. World War II, the Holocaust, it hadn't really worked out. He was still trying to justify why they supported Hitler. And his logic went, you know, we, the Prussian ruling class, had lost touch with the working class, which is what a lot of Republicans have said. And there's a lot of truth to that, particularly the white working class. The working class was trending Bolshevik, which was true.

21:53And the only way we could stop that is by someone like Hitler who could speak to him. And there are sentences in that book that are almost verbatim repeated by Mr. McConnell in 2016. The problem is, it's just, what is the upside of that? You know, you're going to be recorded by not long-term history, but up-close history. And, you know, the reality is being a member of Congress and even the US Senate, it's not that great of a gig. And, you know, these are the layers to the legacy of the greatest generation. And nobody's asking them to go charge a machine gun nest. You know, all they have to do is be consistent with what they ran on, what they said was a fundamental economic belief of theirs.

22:40And they can't do that. And it's just so weak and disappointing. So, Stuart, go back one degree, because you mentioned something about Bernie Sanders being president, putting this forth. What if Barack Obama had given the bird to an assembly line worker? How do you think Fox News would have reacted to that? And how many times during that day where they have played it and in the ensuing weeks? That's always a very interesting question to happen. I go back to in 2004, it was a very close election. People forget Bush didn't declare victory on election night. We had to wait until we got all the ballots in from Ohio.

23:20But what if John Kerry had said, no, I won Ohio. I am the president-elect United States. What would the New York Times or NBC have done? They would have taken his head off. They would have said, you've lost your mind. Shut up. You're a disgrace. What did Fox and all these people do when Trump did it? Even though we now know that they didn't believe it, they said, oh, no, that's okay. That's good. And it's just, you know, you can't equate these two parties in that sense. And as somebody that's spent far too much of my life pointing out flaws in the great party, you still have to give them credit for this.

23:53I think it's self-defeating. And I think it's such a tragedy to see someone like Barry Weiss chasing this at CBS. And it just sort of completely dumbs down the national dialogue. There's$120 billion of potential rebates. It's interesting. You know, this is the year where the consumer would probably have to absorb this. About 80 % of the tariffs in the first year were absorbed by the companies. Many companies like Rolex said, not going to raise prices. 39 % tariff on Switzerland, no problem. Not going to pass it through to the end user. It's cut the deficit. It has slowed down the trade deficit.

24:41If you look at the mixture of trade deficit in the United States and around the world, What's your general opinion of tariffs as someone that's observed presidential politics, economics over the last three or four decades? It's a tax. And I think you should call it a tax and then have people vote on it. I don't remember Donald Trump running on a tax increase. And it's a backdoor tax increase. I think the long-term economics of it, increasingly short-term now, are completely against the growth of America. This is something that the left used to do that now the right is used to doing, which is sort of like things are terrible in America.

25:27I don't know, man. You know, I mean, the Dow seems to be doing okay. The S &P 500 seems to be doing okay. What other country has done better economically, Western democracy, than the United States? The United States is a beast economically. And why is it that we're trying to fix something that isn't broken in these sort of big sweeping gestures that are, I think, completely counterproductive? This feeds into the question that I've always been dying to ask you, which is about traditional Republicanism and the cult of personality around Trump. I want to test the theory on you and your colleague, Rick Wilson, pushed back hard on this theory, but let me try again with his cohort at the Lincoln Project.

26:15I sort of feel like there's a quiet Republicanism out there. I think that these people still have some natural Republican tendencies. They're just afraid of Donald Trump. This is a full-on personality cult. When he leaves the stage, is it possible for some of these Republican philosophies and principles to rise again. And I'll give some evidence of this. When the terrorists were relaxed on the Argentinian beef because of his love affair with Millay, the Senate went after Vance. They never go after Trump. They'll go after Stephen Miller. They'll go after Vance. They never criticize Trump. But Vance is not Trump.

26:55And so he became a punching bag on that day. Could there be a civil war in that party and a reclamation by the old guard or is that long gone, Stuart? It's long gone. Long gone. Here's a fundamental question to ask. When will the Republican Party nominate a candidate who will unequivocally assert that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in a free and fair election? I mean, every fifth grader knows that's true. And it's unimaginable that anyone's going to be nominated by the party who will go out and say that in 28? So think about it. If that's the threshold of admittance to the party to have a future, who are you going to attract?