155. The Real Story Behind Trump’s ICE “Retreat”

0:06Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me Katty Kay back in Washington DC finally I feel I've been gone for a long time. I'm digging out from under the ice, the big freeze of Washington. How are you, Anthony? Well, welcome back to your home. It's so nice to be home. I always like getting home. I'm here in New York. We also have weather that is more frozen than Alaska. But you know what's not frozen, Katty, are these Epstein files, okay? It's like molten lava. It's like a volcanic explosion. Yeah. Which is having a big impact on the UK and the potential UK government. I don't know if it's going to have a big impact on the US government, but I will predict, like Ed Luce said on your show yesterday, it's going to have an impact on our culture.

0:50I think people are really fed up. Yeah, I think they don't like seeing powerful people get away with things. No question. And that's what this is increasingly looking like. There's so much going on. We want to give you as much as we can, guys, but there is a common theme to some of this. I want to talk about the Washington Post. I have lots of friends who work there and I've been getting texts from them overnight. We also want to talk about what is happening in Minneapolis. Is this a climb down? I have a theory about both of those stories, which are these are both cases of leadership not reading their constituents properly.

1:22And we've got some new polling on on Minneapolis and ICE, which suggests that. And then in the second half, we're going to talk about I can't believe we have to do this again. But we're going to talk about the 2020 election and the president's new playbook, which is to sow discord and dissent about whether American elections are free and fair, which is exactly what he did in 2020. at this stage in the election, early in the year of 2020, he was telling people the elections were going to be rigged because he saw the tea leaves and he realized he was going to do badly. And guess what? Here we are six years later and the same thing is happening.

1:57So we're going to talk about that. Should we start with the Washington Post? I've been getting texts from friends of mine. I know you have friends that work at the Post too. I have several friends that work at the Post. And what's really interesting about this story, the Washington Post laid off a third of its journalists, particularly its foreign international coverage, has been decimated. Sports section has been decimated. There's barely a section of the paper, once storied paper. This is the paper, of course, that brought us Watergate, that brought down President Nixon, and is now really on its last legs.

2:28And the things that I'm hearing from friends of mine who work at the Washington Post is that this was a failure of management. Jeff Bezos bought the Post and for 10 years. He invested in the newspaper. This is when he changed the headline during the first Trump administration to Democracy Dies in Darkness. That was the kind of banner on the top front page. And then Jeff Bezos took a hard right turn, became much more Trumpy, and the Washington Post became disconnected from its readership. There was a failure of kind of Will Lewis who came in as the publisher. He failed to actually implement some of the reforms that were needed in the paper in order to expand its readership.

3:07When they pulled their endorsement of Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, they lost 250 ,000 subscribers and they never got them back again. What I'm hearing from friends of mine at the Post is that even very good management would not have been able to withstand Jeff Bezos's decision to get in bed with Donald Trump and suck up to Donald Trump and not do things that upset Donald Trump and that alienated what is effectively a fairly democratic readership in the Washington area and around the country. So I think it's ownership and leadership getting out of touch with their populations and their readers and their subscribers.

3:51I think it's very sad. I think the Washington Post has a great history and we need more newspapers. We need more news coverage. There is so much going on in the world that we need good independent reporting. And to see it go like this is very sad. Your analysis, I think, is spot on, but you have to remember what's going on in our society. We've fragmented the media. We've weakened the newspapers. The Pittsburgh Gazette has closed down. You and I could list probably 50 news publications in local markets that have closed. The New York Times, I was in Davos and one of the journalists from the New York Times said that we're a Wordle cooking company with news attached to it.

4:34Well, that was Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, did that to the New York Times and did it brilliantly. So he made the right decisions there because he figured out what the audience actually wanted, and then they were able to pay for the news. William Paley, he had CBS. He wanted the Tiffany Network to have a world-class objective news organization, but it always lost money. If you go to David Habelstam's book, The Powers That Be, it was really a totem of dignity to have the news. It wasn't really a moneymaker. Okay, so now fast forward to 2013 Sun Valley Conference. The Graham family is hemorrhaging money from the Washington Post.

5:17They go to one of the richest people in the world and they say, do you want this thing? And I'm going to give you some quotes from Jeff Bezos married to Mackenzie Bezos at the time. He says this is a irreplaceable civic asset, Katty K. And he says that he's going to be working alongside of the journalists to maintain the public impact of this institution. Okay, that's what he says. He puts$250 million of cash in. Amazon itself doesn't buy it. Can I say one other thing that he says? He said at the time, if you shrink a newspaper too much, it's no longer valid anymore. it's no longer viable or words to that effect that you can't shrink it and still have a viable newspaper which is exactly what he's just done this week right right so but it's on brand to be a left of center news organization fabled for the watergate investigation so it's on brand right yeah but he then goes to turkey to have a memorial ceremony related to khashoggi he gives a speech there that is in the spirit of all of this.

6:26And guess what starts to happen? The subscription surge during the Trump era, Trump won. Everybody gets the Trump bump. It becomes the top global English language news site, Trump won. He expands the newsroom aggressively 2014 to 2019. Now, I don't know when he started dating his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, but I think it's right around that time. Okay. He gets a divorce and, you know, Trump's coming for him by the way. So let me just say that to everybody and, uh, I will take you back to the 20th of July. Okay. And I'm going to tell you that that was a Thursday in 2017, because obviously I remember it.

7:11And I was sitting in the study off of the oval and Trump is going to hire me to be the comms director. I'm going to start the next day. And the first thing he says to me, Caddy, is what do you think of Jess Bezos? I hate that blankety blank, blankety blank SOB. And what do you think of him? And can we break up Amazon? Now, I took antitrust in law school. I said, there are certain tests that you have to go through. Amazon does not meet the threshold that's in the Sermon Antitrust Act. And he looks at me, he said, well, I hate that guy. I would like to see that broken up and I hate the Washington Post.

7:50So gets back to Bezos, of course, that Trump hates him. And now he's made a decision that he's going to buy a$500 million yacht. He's going to get himself remarried. He's having some glorified middle age crisis road trip and he's disconnected to the moral anchor of what he had. Okay. So let me just finish this last thought. He then pulls the op-ed endorsement. Well, he could have endorsed Trump or he could have endorsed Kamala Harris, but he doesn't want to endorse anybody. Even though the op-ed was written, it was all written, the editorial crew had signed off on it of Kamala Harris. Yeah. Yeah.

8:29I feel saddened by this. I canceled my subscription, by the way, because this is BS. this paper's going nowhere. But by canceling that description in hindsight and the multitudes of people that did, we created this vicious circle. So he lost 22 % of his revenues. And now you're looking at the paper, he's worth several hundred billion dollars. He could support the paper and keep it as a civic asset. He wouldn't even notice. But he's not doing that catty-cake. Okay? He's not doing that. And here's the sad part of it for me, is that we're going in a direction now where you're going to see boycotts.

9:07We're going in a direction now where our fellow podcaster and personal friend of mine, Scott Galloway, is asking people to remove themselves from MAG7 subscriptions, and people are doing it in droves because they're needing to send a message to these sycophants that this is not tolerable what you're doing. And by the way, these CEOs better wake up because Donald Trump has a 61 % disapproval rating. Yeah. Okay. In order to curry favor with Donald Trump, they're going to be on the wrong side of America. And Trump's power is fading, Katty. And Trump's political stature is going to jump the shark, which is an American expression for fading out, okay, after the midterms.

9:53It took me a long time to understand that one. So this was Arthur Fonzarelli, 1978. He was water skiing in Hawaii. You knew the origin of that one. He was water skiing in Hawaii in a leather jacket, no less. And they had him jumping a shark. And it was at that moment that everybody looked around and said, this is a completely stupid sitcom. We've run out of ideas. And they canceled the sitcom. So when people say you've jumped the shark in the United States, it's Henry Winkler, who I adore, friend of mine, jumping the shark in 1978 and it's over, okay? Trump is jumping the shark, ladies and gentlemen.

10:31And by the way, look at me. That's why I got to do this. Hey, Jeff, what are you doing there? Okay? Do you have no advisors? I get the fact that you want to hang out with Mrs. Bezos and float around in the yacht. God bless you. You're entitled to that. You've made a great amount of money and provided a lot of economic rent to the society. I get it. But this is what you're doing? I mean, come on, wake up, man, because let me tell you something, Trump is on the way out. Yeah, I know people who worked very closely with him in Amazon in the early years and don't understand what's happened to him now and just say he's a different person.

11:02He's taken a different turn, a different kind of compass is guiding him. Okay, but listen, this is where I think this ties in. And I think you're right that there's a lot of jumping the shark going on and people going too far in one direction and actually losing their base. And it was very interesting. Ross Douthat at The New York Times did an interesting essay this week, basically saying Donald Trump is losing America, that the White House has gone so far that they've got out of touch with the American population. I think you don't see that anywhere more clearly than on these new poll numbers that have come out on Minneapolis and ICE.

11:40Let me just run through a couple of them. This is a poll by Quinnipiac that was taken over the course of this weekend. 51 % of Americans now say that Donald Trump's immigration policies are making them feel less safe. Remember, the whole premise of this was to make America safe. You safeguard the border. You make Americans feel safe. Okay, 51 % say they feel less safe because of Donald Trump's immigration policies. 63 % of Americans disapprove of ISIS tactics. And only 22 % of Americans say that the killing of Alex Peretti was justified. If we think that MAGA is at about 25 to 30 percent, that means that even some MAGA people don't think that the killing of Alex Pretti was justified.

12:26I think here's what I think. And hear me out here, Anthony. I want to get your take on this because I know you're hot on gerrymandering. But I think this is a prime example of the way and we've spoken about gerrymandering in the podcast before. This is a prime example of the way that gerrymandering is failing American democracy, because you've got all of these members of Congress who are in now gerrymandered conservative seats. And what do they do? They go back home. They're in a feedback loop with their conservative districts and their conservative voters. And they're listening to MAGA media and they're hearing MAGA arguments and they think that everything is going well.

13:06and what they're not hearing because they don't have those people in their districts because they've designed their districts specifically this way they don't have centrist swing voters in their districts who are telling them guys you're going too far and so they go too far as they have done and they've got out of step with the american population they do it on things like gun control they've done it on things like abortion rights but here right now in front of our eyes, the administration is losing the population on the one thing that it was elected to do, which was securing the border, because they're going too far.

13:40Because actually Americans don't like the scenes of an American citizen with autism this week being dragged from her car as she's on her way to a medical appointment because she has a brain tumor. And they're dragging her and cuffing her. And she's saying to them, I have a brain tumor. I'm disabled. I'm on the way to the hospital. And what are they doing? They're throwing her against her car and putting cuffs on her. So all the talk about we're going softly, softly on the ground, it's still happening. And Americans are seeing that and they don't like it. And I think it's the leadership getting out of step.

14:15And part of this, I think, is because of this gerrymandered situation that you've got members of Congress who are just living in a different world from where the center of the American population is. And I think it's going to come back and hurt them. And this poll is, if this poll is not a wake up call to the White House on that you can't just say you want to change the optics of what's happening in Minneapolis, you actually have to change the tactics, then I don't know what is. 51 % of Americans say that Trump's immigration policies are making them feel less safe. So what do you think? Do you think that there's something there?

14:47Yeah, once again, I think your analysis is correct. But I think that The thing that I'm seeing, and again, I could be wrong, but I know Trump pretty well, is that he's panicked. He's not going to tell you he's panicked, but he's panicked. He's looking at the situation and he's saying, I'm only going to go into the states that asked me now. He's pulling back. They pulled 700 ICE agents out of Minnesota. They still have 2 ,000 there in a small city, but anyway, yeah. They do, but they're dialing back the violence and they're dialing back the abductions. OK. And so, yes, I mean, they do have that.

15:23But the temperature is going way down, Caddy, because it is so wildly unpopular. But I don't know that. I mean, let's see. We're recording this on Thursday. There have been several instances this week of that kind of violence against American citizens like this woman who testified. I don't know that the temperature is yet going down. I think it's going to come down. I think it has to come down. But it didn't come down automatically over the course of the weekend. I accept that. But they signaled it's coming down. And he's trying to get the heat off himself by disclaiming things because he knows he's in trouble.

15:58Mike Lawler, who you know, and I've seen you interview Mike Lawler, got destroyed over the weekend. I saw that. I texted him, actually. He didn't text me back, which he usually does. No, he got destroyed. Okay, he's a MAGA guy, Rockland County, blue collar area. Actually, my wife Deirdre is from that area in Rockland County. And he went up there and they were destroying him. And you had veterans that were up there screaming at him and he asked the cops to remove the veterans and then the other people were chanting, let them stay. This is our First Amendment right to tell you that your MAGA policies are in Basilica.

16:35So he stepped down on the polls. You have a 95 % incumbent election rate. This is, again, the thing I hate about the gerrymandering because these guys don't compete anymore. But he's under in the polls now. He's got it. They got a shot to take that back, the Democrats. Yeah, which actually would be a shame because it then makes Congress even more divided. I mean, you actually need people like Mike Lawler, who are a centrist Republican, who, you know, is in Congress. But I think you're going to you're going to lose more of those. I do believe that he's actually an interesting swing voter. And he's actually someone that has worked with the Democrats in the past.

17:09So I do agree with that. But the problem remains the fear of Trump. And I know we're going to get into Epstein in the second half, but I just want to explain to people that the people are pissed. The American people, as mad as you are, if you're listening from the UK at Starmer and Mandelson, trust me, the average person on the street is pissed because I live in the area where the people voted for Trump and they're all mad at Trump. And Trump is not stupid, Katty. No, he sees that. He had a pro wrestling crowd in Las Vegas. This is not like a bunch of hippie dippies. This is not a big Hispanic audience.

17:48This is a pro wrestling crowd in Las Vegas with people in the crowd chanting, fuck. Am I allowed to say, yes, I am. This podcast. Fuck ice. It's really worth watching the clip. This is a traditionally more MAGA friendly crowd. And they're pissed too. You're right. Abolish ice on their t-shirts. Once again, Katty K cursing on the rest of the show. politics us and anthony scaramucci no cursing the virtuous anthony scaramucci it's okay you can go to church on sunday i had the under on that when the podcast started no i had the under on that when the podcast started but what can i say what can i am winning this i just want everybody to know that i'm winning this okay so but i mean it's pretty remarkable right you've got a pro wrestling crowd anti-ice i'm gonna be trump's pollster for a second okay because i know this is what they're saying to him, your aggregate numbers are negative.

18:42Okay. Your approval rating was low to the mid forties, but your disapproval rating is at 61%. You still have strong support among the Republicans, but guess what? The registration of Republicans is shrinking. Okay. It's down to 26%. Okay, so if you've got 91 % of the Republicans, that's great, but it's roughly 22 % of the population. Your policies like immigration, enforcement, tariffs, and foreign affairs are drawing more criticism than support. Okay, and the independent voters are losing confidence in you. So he's sitting there pretending la-di-da, everything is fine. I don't know if you saw that NBC interview the other night with the new NBC anchor.

19:32Bizarre. But I mean, he looked out of it. I think one of his quotes was, what we do with water. As a response to what's happening in ice in Minneapolis. Yeah, it was weird. Worth watching, guys. Right. He goes, well, look at what we do with water. And it was like, what do you mean, what do we do with water? And he goes, oh, well, we bombing the water. I mean, I guess he was trying to get the heat off of ice. And because it is popular, the drug interdiction is popular. Yeah. And so Trump was getting hit. See, because I know how Trump thinks. He's getting hit with the thing that people don't like.

20:03And so he's trying to come up with the thing that they do like. And he says, look at what we do with water. I mean, come on. The guy is fading, Caddy. If you're on this podcast listening and you're saying, oh, Trump is going to take over. He's going to be a dictator. He's going to run the US. not going to happen. Take a listen of what Ross Douthat was saying this week. I think it is that thing that you said at the beginning of jumping the shark. They came in. Stephen Miller and Donald Trump felt they had a massive mandate to do these things that the American population is not happy with, that they see as cruel.

20:39And all they needed to do is look at Newton's law of politics and realize that nothing is there forever. I think they felt they had a permanent majority. 2004, what did Karl Rove say? there's going to be a permanent Republican majority. Two years later, Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat, is Speaker of the House. 2008, Barack Obama gets elected, expands government. 2010, he gets shellacked by the Tea Party in an anti-government expansion midterm elections. It is swings and roundabouts. And I think they came in and they thought it was going to be different. And they came in, they went too far on the right.

21:13And now the public is saying, we don't like it. As Churchill would say, it's not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. And this guy's going down and we'll have to watch how this unfolds. But if he doesn't make a major political course correction going into the midterms, it's going to be a very nasty situation for him. And this is why guys like Gabe Sherman and others, oh, he's going to call off the midterms because looking down the barrel of the midterms is a democratic controlled house and lots of investigations. We're going to talk about that in the second half. One other thing I would advise you to look at is just watch the little clip of J.D.

21:53Vance being interviewed by the Daily Mail, being asked about Alex Pretty. Did you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Pretty? For what? For, you know, labeling him in a sash and with ill intent. Well, again, I just described to you what I said about Alex Pretty, which is that he's a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest. I think if J.D. Vance can't find another tone and present himself differently and seem a little less condescending when he's asked a question about somebody who has killed that only 22 percent of Americans think should be killed, then he's going to struggle in the 2028 election campaign.

22:28So just worth watching that clip. OK, we'll be right back and we will talk about the 2020 elections and why Donald Trump is suddenly talking about 2020 quite so much again. And also about Epstein and the fallout, not just in the UK, of course, but here as well and what it means. We'll be right back.

22:55Welcome back to The Rest is Politics, US. Yes. Donald Trump has been talking about the 2020 elections an awful lot in the last month. I've noticed, Anthony, he was less vociferous about it last year. But just in the last two or three weeks, I tried to do a kind of search on this just to see how many times. And I'm getting anywhere between the range of 30 and 50 where he's talking about elections being rigged. And I think what's interesting about this pickup in the number of times that he talked about the elections being rigged. I spoke to your friend Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, yesterday morning, and he pointed something out, which is that in early 2020, when Donald Trump could see that the 2020 election was getting away from him, he started saying deliberately that the election was going to be rigged in order to sow confusion and to undermine people's confidence in the election.

23:48And ultimately, if he lost the election to be able to say, you see, I always said it was going to be rigged. And Chris Christie was pointing out that the pickup in the number of times that Donald Trump is talking about the election being rigged this time around is that he thinks he might be losing the 2026 midterm elections. And he wants to sow the same kind of feeling that it's been rigged. And what he's specifically saying and has said on Don Bongino's podcast is that state officials should take over and nationalize elections in 15 different states where he says there is corruption in order to protect the process and to protect the Republican Party.

24:29Of course, the American Constitution says that the elections are run by the states. They are not run by the federal government. And so this would be anti-constitutional. and you even got leader John Soon, who's the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, coming out and saying, no, these have to be run by states. They can't be nationalized. But I think this is Trump doing the same thing. This is Trump saying that he's worried, effectively, about the midterm elections, causing, sowing the same kind of confusion about the elections in order to be able to claim that the elections were rigged and potentially try to do something to stop the elections being held in a way that would be free and fair.

25:07um what do you think he's doing well he's got the kgb playbook is what he's doing i mean let's go over the kgb playbook so seeds of doubt in the western alliance attack nato suggest that you're going to invade a nato nation uh so seeds of doubt about elections this is something that the kgb has wanted to do in the uk and france and other democratic countries uh dump tremendous amounts of personality profiles into the united states's social media from your internet server farms outside of moscow to try to get people to hate each other uh see if you can play off of the algorithm to create rage uh mr trump is doing all that and so uh this fits his narrative if governor christie would have also told you that trump was planning broad-based national protests of the evening of the election.

26:02He had people in place, money spent, ready to go to have a national protest movement all over the country about how he lost the election to Kamala Harris, and it was rigged. And so let's go over the math, because the math is the most important part of this. What he's doing is working, Cady. And so 37 % of the American people right now, as surveyed, believe that these elections are rigged uh 43 percent of the americans express serious doubts about whether recent elections are honest and open to all voters and so he has done a number on us uh and that wasn't the polling numbers it was less than 15 percent during the obama era so let me get vlad on the phone vlad my brother how am i doing am i helping am i helping you guys out Yes, I know you're a tiny country with a dilapidated military, but you own me.