15. The Week Trump Won?

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1:24Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, I was going to ask you how you are, but if you're anything like me, you're kind of hidden under the bed because of the deluge of news that is coming on our heads at the moment. I like news. I'm a news person. I've been a news junkie my whole life, but Jesus, the last few days have been mad. I'm in an undisclosed location again, Caddy. As the news continues, it gets worse on the side of the reformation of the Republicans. Okay, so this is not the Republican Party I grew up in. I registered as a Republican in 1982 at the age of 18.

2:01Ronald Reagan was president. And I don't think Ronald Reagan actually would be welcomed at the convention that we're witnessing. Certainly none of the acolytes of his like George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. This is a totally new party. So, yeah, I am as far from Milwaukee as I can be and still have a great Wi-Fi connection. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I think we're looking at the kind of funeral of Reaganism, potentially the funeral of the post-war era of American leadership around the world. We'll get into all of that. So what we want to talk about today is everything that's been going on in this crazy week.

2:34It's been a whirlwind. We recorded that emergency episode on Sunday after Trump's attempted assassination. We're going to talk more about the aftermath of that in this podcast, what it means for the campaign, and of course, what's happening at the Milwaukee Republican National Convention where Donald Trump has entered like some kind of messiah and has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. He is leading now in all of the key swing states, and that was before he was shot. The Democrats, they're still in disarray as we're recording this. And in the second half, we are going to look a little bit at what the Democrats can do as they try and hedge their bets, not just on this election, on the 2028 election as well, and whether really they have any options.

3:16And we'll talk about the documents case quickly, right? I think it's also important to talk Talk about that. The documents case, which was thrown out in Florida, which was the strongest of all the cases against Donald Trump, but which has now been thrown out. I mean, maybe we just start there. How lucky is this guy, Anthony? Donald Trump was born under 58 million lucky stars. Yeah, no, I mean, there's no question. I asked Aleister Campbell on a scale of one to 10, how lucky is Donald Trump? And, you know, he's at a 200. Of course, on the internet, you can see how close it was. his slight turn of his head saved his life, thank God.

3:49And obviously the bullet grazed him. And there was a lot of mishaps. If you looked at the rerun of what happened, there were several minutes where people knew that there was a shooter. The Secret Service didn't handle it well. The local police didn't handle it well. All one of the local policemen had to do is shoot his gun in the air a few times, Gaddy, and they would have pulled President Trump off the stage. And it would have been less dramatic and less harmful. And perhaps the life of that retired firemen would have been saved. And so there's a real tragedy all around there. But luck plus guile, and let's just give Trump the credit that he deserves.

4:27He is an incredible physical animal. If we invited David Attenborough, sir, David Attenborough on the show this morning, he would have to describe Trump as a alpha male squared. His physicality, pressure that he can put on other people, the nonstop relentlessness. I mean, Caddy, this is a man that's almost 80 years old and he is hustling around the country or the way a 40 year old would hustle around the country. And frankly, he picked a person to be his vice president under 40. And there's stuff about that I'd like to grade, in terms of the positives of that for Donald Trump and also potentially the negatives for the country and the new world order.

5:10But yes, he's the luckiest SOB that we've ever seen. And he's ahead now as a result of all of this. In some ways, I think Donald Trump makes his own luck. He appointed a whole slew of conservative judges during his own administration. And that has now come back to help him reap the benefits of some of the cases that we've seen go through the Supreme Court that have helped him. The fact that the Mar-a-Lago case got thrown out, it was being handled by a Trump-appointed judge. So to some extent, he makes his luck, but he is also somebody who things seem to have, at least in the last couple of weeks, they seem to have fallen very firmly his way.

5:43Let's talk about J.D. Vance. Both of us have met J.D. Vance before. He came to fame writing a book called Hillbilly Elegy, which was a short biography, which was a portrait of downtrodden Appalachia in Ohio. His mother was an addict. He was brought up by his grandparents. They lived on food stamps. And it was really a portrait of forgotten America and a plea for help. And when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, that book, Hillbilly Elegy, became the kind of guide for liberals across America who wanted to understand what the hell has happened and how did we miss Donald Trump. And Hillbilly Elegy came to kind of describe that world.

6:23And J.D. Vance was the author of that. And he was kind of darling of the left, really. And he hated Donald Trump. He was very rude about Donald Trump. He called himself a never-Trumper. But then he flipped and went down to Mar-a-Lago and told Donald Trump that he'd been duped by the media. And actually now he loved Donald Trump and was looking for Donald Trump's endorsement when he ran for the Senate and seems to have worked. This is somebody who has an ability to put a kind of ideological framework, I think, around Donald Trump's MAGA instincts. Yes, I think the only thing I would like to add for non-Americans, the The Appalachians, they're called Appalachian for people that don't live there.

7:02They're called Appalachian for people that do live there. An important distinction. I'm going to tell you why that's an important distinction. If you say Appalachian, chances are you've been there and you know how abject the poverty actually is. About 20 years ago, my old boss from Goldman Sachs was a trustee at a college called Berea College, which is right on the Appalachian mountain trail. And it's a college that's dedicated to giving these very poor indigent people free college tuition. And so I've been down there many times. I was a donor of that school for quite some time until he came off the board there.

7:41And why am I bringing this up? It's important because this is as abject of poverty as you're going to see in the United States. Many of these coal miners were out of work now. They're living in shacks or huts. It's very, very, very downtrodden. Homer Hickam in the book Rocket Boys describes how he grew up. He was a rocket scientist and an engineer for NASA. And so the Hillbilly Elegy is about this area. And so when I read the book, I was blown away about how honest J.D. Vance was in the book. He is a brilliant writer. It's a beautifully written book. For anyone who hasn't read it, pick it up. It's worth reading.

8:17It is worth reading. You know, the left is trying to cancel him now. I think that's a huge mistake. I think these cancel culture wars are only fueling the far right. What upsets me about J.D. Vance and one of my political mentors, one of my political heroes is Governor Mitt Romney, now senator from Utah, about to retire, elder statesman in the Republican Party, obviously lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. He was the Republican nominee 12 years ago, how far we've come. But Governor Romney took to J.D. Vance and invited him to the Park City, Utah Republican Symposium that MIT does every single year.

8:58And I've got to tell you, I was blown away by the intellect that J.D. Vance has. He's a very, very smart human being. Yale Law School, editor of the Yale Law Journal. These are things you can't get to unless you have incredible energy, IQ, et cetera. him. He's a U.S. Marine. He served in the Gulf for the United States. And what Governor Romney said is that the person that he has the least amount of respect for in American politics is J.D. Vance. Now, why is he saying that? He's saying that because J.D. Vance is now wedded to his political ambition and the personal power and the trappings that come with that, as opposed to the principles that he started with.

9:44And people that are on the hard right that are listening to me, they'd be mad at me for saying that, but that's fine. What J.D. Vance stood for was something totally different than the policies that he and Donald Trump are espousing. And I'll just be brief on this. He wants to devalue the dollar. He believes that we allowed the Chinese to trounce us by allowing them to link their currency to our currency. And Richard Nixon actually allowed this to happen in the early 1970s. Why was this bad for America? There was an industrial rise in China that usually means that their value of their currency is going to go up.

10:23We are a deficit spending country. We have to devalue our currency in order to stay in deficit spending. We pay our our debts back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that we borrowed. And so we allowed the Chinese to devalue their currency at a time when they had major manufacturing. It enabled them to boost their economy, not in the 3%, 4 % GDP growth, but the 10%, 12 % for many years. And they've now become the second largest economy in the world. People like J.D. Vance, many others now in the United States, bipartisan, frankly, I think all of this was a mistake. We saw the Chinese as an ally and potential global partner.

11:03We now see them as an adversary and a competitor. But what J.D. Vance wants to do is devalue our dollar further to boost our manufacturing. Caddy Kay, that would be an economic disaster for the United States and an economic disaster for the world. And so I can go line by line what they want to do and what the J.D. Vance strategy is. But he wants to disengage the United States from Europe. He wants to, like the Steve Bannons of the world, wall it off from the rest of the world and see if we can internally drive our consumption and manufacturing here in our country. Look, I think we're both agreed that J.D.

11:42Vance is the pick that Donald Trump made because he's feeling confident about winning this race. He didn't go for expanding with somebody like Marco Rubio, who perhaps could have helped him with Hispanic voters. He didn't go for somebody like Nikki Haley, who could have reached out to suburban women voters. He looked at his own internal poll numbers, and you and I have discussed those. And he sees the prospect of them doing extremely well. And so he can go for somebody who, like him, is a fighter. Donald Trump went into this Republican National Convention after that assassination attempt, saying this is going to be a moment of unity, and this is the time to pull together the country.

12:20and we may hear that from him at his speech at the convention on Thursday night. We're recording before that. But J.D. Vance, like Donald Trump, is a tough talking fighter. And I think that's this campaign. This is the extension of all of the things that Donald Trump himself has kind of failed to sort of articulate in a coherent intellectual framework, but feels in his gut. A sense that the rest of the world is out to get America, that America has had a raw deal, that America should pull back from foreign entanglements. And what J.D. Vance does is he takes all of those instincts of Donald Trump's and he puts them into a kind of policy framework.

12:56So were J.D. Vance controlling policy, and we don't know the degree to which Donald Trump is ever going to let any vice president or anyone else, you know, push him into doing anything. But it would suggest that this is the extension of economic populism. The party of Ronald Reagan is having its funeral in Milwaukee this week. A party that is engaged in the world, believes in globalism, is internationalist, believes in free markets, that is not the party of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. If Donald Trump had chosen Marco Rubio, somebody much more in line in many ways with Mitt Romney on foreign policy, it would have been a different signal.

13:36But the signal that Donald Trump is sending is very firmly that the MAGA movement has taken control of the Republican Party. And not just, I think, for this election, this is a signal for 2028. This is Donald Trump choosing his heir apparent and a signal to the rest of America that in 2028, the Republican Party is going to look the same. A couple of reactions. So the best meme I've seen, because the internet is undefeated, is a picture of J.D. Vance and Mike Pence and say, did you call the last guy that had the job just to see how it was going? And it's a big joke, obviously, because the former vice president will not endorse Donald Trump alongside of 40 people.

14:13Second thought on this is that I know Trump and I was part of the process when he was interviewing people like Chris Christie and Mike Pence back in 2016. And the one thing about Trump is the narcissism is so pure, he does not want anybody, Caddy, to take any credit or any potential add to his electoral outcome. I think there's going to be trouble in paradise here. I mean, I think the issue is going to be if they win when they're actually trying to work together, how does Donald Trump handle somebody? And J.D. Vance is smart. He knew how to flip from being anti-Trump and calling him cultural heroine or whatever it was to being pro-Trump.

14:52And he knows that if Donald Trump says you've got to back off, he's going to back off. But he's ambitious. He wants to be president. He's going to get annihilated by Donald Trump because he's smarter than Donald Trump. And he's younger than Donald Trump, so Donald Trump is comfortable with that. Donald Trump does not do well in his own peer group. He gets very insecure. He does better with the people that are younger than them because they're generally intimidated by him. But let me tell you something, Katty K, J.D. Vance is smarter than Donald Trump. Donald Trump did not go to Yale Law School or go on the Yale Law Review.

15:26And this will grate on Donald Trump over time. If Trump does win, I see an isolated J.D. Vance in the office of the presidency. Remember, the vice president has an office down the hall just past the chief of staff over by the national security advisor in the west wing of the White House. It's very close to the Oval Office. Many vice presidents, though, get isolated. Harry Truman was only vice president for four months. He said he had no idea what was going on in the government. But this last point, which I think is an important one to make to people about the J.D. Vance dynamic. He's tight with Donald Trump's older sons, Eric Trump and Don Trump Jr.

16:09I said on this podcast that Trump hates beards. I got a lot of different reactions from that. A lot of people that know Trump well say he absolutely hates beards. However, he accepts the fact that his two sons wear them. So it's seemingly okay for the next generation. That's what the pushback has been to me. But when you look at J.D. Vance, he looks like a totalitarian care bear, Caddy Kay. That's what he looks like to me. A little cuddly, but totalitarian underneath the care bear persona. Yeah, there's nothing that Europe is thinking is very cuddly about J.D. Vance at the moment. We should talk about his isolation.

16:42I had a conversation over the weekend when it was looking like it might be Vance with a conservative who said to me that he really likes Vance. Two things he likes about him is that he's tough on illegal immigration. And the second thing he liked about him was that he's going to push Trump to do that deal on Ukraine in one day. I mean, this is the guy, J.D. Vance is the guy who has said, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other. His priority is to get out of that entanglement, to get Europe out of that entanglement. The charitable interpretation of that from one conservative I spoke to was that, look, there's a lot of people dying in Ukraine.

17:18Why are we facilitating that? The Ukrainians are going to lose territory anyway. Let's just do the deal as soon as we can and stench the bleeding of more lies because Ukraine is never going to get all of its territory back. But the message to Europe, J.D. Vance, I don't think Donald Trump has much love lost for Europe. But J.D. Vance, some of the things that he said about Ukraine, he's been very rude about the Germans. He's talked about the Islamification of the United Kingdom. And he kind of seems to take pleasure almost. in insulting America's allies. So there's a little nervousness here in Europe about the pick of J.D.

17:57Vance, who kind of embodies the id of Donald Trump. And the feeling is, if Trump wants to fight and Vance wants a fight, is Europe in the target sites of America in the Trump administration? Out of the Capitol rioters, are they political prisoners and their captivity is an assault on democracy? Is that what they are? Because that's what J.D. Vance thinks. You didn't get the message. They're hostages. Obviously, they're all hostages who were taken prisoner illegally and thrown into jail without due process, who were just happening. And weren't they there for a day of tourism? I think that was what they were doing on January the 6th.

18:31Yes, they had their, you know, they bought those Kodak old-fashioned cameras to the Capitol riot. The incendiary rhetoric is coming from the left or the right, because when you poll it in the United States, the majority of people polled think it's coming from Donald Trump. You know, he's called for all types of violence. And so violence was brought upon him, and now somehow they have deflected that to say that it's the left. But J.D. Vance says that. He says that this claim that Trump is a potential authoritarian fascist has led to the violence against Donald Trump. Do you believe that, Katty K?

19:09Do you think that the left is the one that's fomenting the violence? I mean, there's data on this, Anthony. It's not a question of whether I believe it or not or whether I feel it or not. There is numerous reports have been done on this. I think one by Pew, which is probably the most comprehensive, which has looked at where the majority of the violent rhetoric has come from. And Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has actually spoken about this. It comes from the right, that there is more violent rhetoric that comes from the right. I'm not saying there is none that comes from the left. There certainly is.

19:38And I think, you know, Joe Biden gave an interview to NBC's Lester Holt this week in which he got as close, and I think he should have gone further, in apologizing for saying that it was time to put Donald Trump in the crosshairs. And I think that's the kind of language that clearly doesn't help. and Lester Holt called Joe Biden on it. But statistically, the majority of that kind of language has come from the right. Katie, do you think the media was against this pick, by the way? Rupert Murdoch didn't like it. I saw that. Several of the top donors. Well, anybody that was in the Reagan orthodoxy did not like the pick.

20:15Because of the kinds of comments about Ukraine, for example. Yeah, 100%. And so my question, though, is the suits. Now, You're in an interesting business. I'm not in the media. I just play a media person on television or on podcasts, but you are actually in the media and we have something in the media called suits. These are the business executives, the men and women that are not in front of the camera, but they make decisions related to the people that are on camera. Do you think that these people are intimidated by Donald Trump? Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. Are they intimidated.

20:49I think they have Donald Trump wrong. I think they think that Donald Trump is going to be good for their business. I mean, I think they think, you're talking about media executives in particular. Yeah, but I'm also talking about the fear that they have of this man, where they may want to throttle back some of their media personalities, or they may want to rethink. I know what you're referring to. You're referring to whether Morning Joe, the show that I'm on quite often on Monday morning, was not aired. And there's speculation that that was because the report, and I have to say, I have, I was not due to be on that morning.

21:23I was up in a family event, but Morning Joe didn't air on Monday morning. And the speculation is that that was because MSNBC was afraid that somebody on the show might say something inappropriate about Donald Trump on the couple of days after he'd had an assassination attempt. There's also an argument that it was just a rolling news coverage and that it was better to do rolling news and that's what the network was in. So I don't have any insight. I know that Donald Trump has said in the past that he hates MSNBC and that he would like to take some kind of action, whether that would be by, we've spoken about this before, by making the Federal Communications Commission more politicized so that they could take some kind of action to shut down MSNBC.

22:04I don't quite see how you could do that. I think that would get tied up in courts. He doesn't like MSNBC and would like to see some kind of toning down of MSNBC. I don't know that that's why Morning Joe didn't run on Monday morning. I mean, listen, he's taken it a step further than that. He has said that people on the air that are against him, he will go after. I mean, he's been very clear about that. He's also said he would pull the FCC licenses of people. It's not clear he can do that, by the way. Well, it's not clear that he can do that now. But if you control the courts and you've got your acolytes on the judiciary and you've got your acolytes in the FCC.

22:41And there's something in this project 2025 that you and I have talked about called Schedule F, where they let go 50 ,000 career bureaucrats that work in the government. Okay. This would be for the British, your civil service, which is supposed to be agnostic politically. You let go of those 50 ,000 people, you hire 50 ,000 people that take a loyalty test to MAGA and all things Donald Trump, all of a sudden things start to change. Now, people say to me, when I say, well, Erdogan in Turkey was democratically elected, look at him today, 20 years later, people get very mad at me. My business partner who went to law school with me says, well, this isn't Turkey.

23:26And I said, well, no, it isn't Turkey. You don't get to Turkey day one. You get to Turkey day 10 ,000. And so what I'm worried about here is the gradualism that Donald Trump is capable of and his team of distorting the things that you're saying, which I agree with. Well, he's not capable of doing that right now. He won't have the control right now. But these guys are really plotting and preparing to figure out ways to gain that control by staffing where all the checks and balances are in our system. Well, let's just staff it in a way that tilts the scales towards us. And so before we go to the break though, if you don't mind, I have to talk to you about my billionaire boys, the billionaire boys.

24:11I'm not a billionaire, except in Zimbabwe. I just want to point that out. But I have a lot of friends that are billionaires, many of which have thrown their support in for Donald Trump. I'm not friends with Elon Musk, but he is also one of them. What is your reaction to all of that? I think Silicon Valley and the billionaire boys are seeing the same kind of polling that we're seeing. They're seeing that Joe Biden had a very bad debate night and the Democrats, and we'll talk about this after the break, the Democrats have failed to respond in a way to that debate night that gives them a better chance of winning in November.

24:45And they are putting money where power is going to be. If you think Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States, and you are purely thinking about your bottom line, then you decide that you're going to donate to Donald Trump so that you can have influence in the Trump campaign. And we can talk about the economics of this and the fact that on the first night of the RNC, you had the president of the Teamsters Union, Sean O 'Brien, lambasting corporate America. I mean, that sounded more like a Democratic National Convention speech than a Republican National Convention speech.