161. Trump’s Plan to Defy the Supreme Court

0:00Katty Kay:Rated T for Teen.

0:30Katty Kay:One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar, and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say, and she replies with a low, shh, listen. So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full.

0:57Anthony Scaramucci:Hershey's, it's your happy place.

1:00Katty Kay:This episode is brought to you by Venmo. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back. Do more stash, get more cash. Visit Venmo.com to learn more. Venmo Stash Bundle Terms and Exclusion Supply. See terms at Venmo.me slash stash terms. Max$100 cash back per month.

1:37Katty Kay:Hello and welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S. Caddy. We of course are going to be talking about Trump's tariffs, its ongoing tariff war today, but there's been a lot of movement since the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs as illegal last week. We're also going to talk about what's going on in Mexico this week and some of the violence there and the drug cartels. But before we dive into all of this, there is something bigger going on here, Katty, because Donald Trump's position on tariffs has been the same for the last 40 years. This is exactly why we made this brand new series, Becoming Trump.

2:15Katty Kay:We are rewinding the clock, Katty Kay, to dig into the people, the events and the scandals that built him.

2:23Anthony Scaramucci:We made this series because the whole world is obsessed with Donald Trump, the president of the United States. But we felt it was worth giving you some of his backstory, trying to understand everything that he had gone through in his childhood, when he was a young man, when he was in real estate, when he was a TV producer. We've gone into the seedy side of his love lives, his divorces, his marriages. And it's not really just to tell the biography of Donald Trump. I felt and I was kind of reminded of this, Anthony, while we were researching and doing this series that in order to understand this guy, you have to go back to the origin story of him because so much of what he felt and said and did and believed right back when he was a young man is what the world is living through today.

3:10Anthony Scaramucci:Right. I mean, you even see it in the tariff story that we are going through this crazy roller coaster of a news cycle and an economic cycle because of something he believed way back in the 1980s. For me, that's why it was important to do this series.

3:25Katty Kay:All of his philosophies are coming out now. Right. So we we know about his family's secrets. We know about the heritage of lies in his family's history. We know that his father was tied to the Ku Klux Klan. And Trump acted like a bully, got sent to a military school. But it's also a story about how a bully can win because he's won a lot, Gaddy. And so this is going to be a four-part series where we delve into it. But we're going to take the perspective not only of history, but of what really happened during our lifetimes, especially me as a New Yorker observing Donald Trump literally over the last four decades.

4:05Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, and how big and how famous he became. I mean, he'd always wanted, I hadn't realized that until we started doing the series. That was a fun thing to find out that he had always wanted to be a TV guy, that he'd thought of going to university to study television and film and then went into the family business. But actually, of course, his big success was as the star of The Apprentice. It was very edited. It made people believe around the country that he was this fantastic businessman, which he wasn't necessarily. And we get into all the close shaves that he had as a businessman. Anyway, I think you're going to enjoy it.

4:37Anthony Scaramucci:I think there's really never been a more urgent time to understand the world that Donald Trump has made for all of us, the world that we are all living in. It's really worth understanding how we got to where we are and how he got to where we are. So you can listen to episode one from Wednesday. Sign up at the rest is politics US dot com to become a founding member. It is all there for our members or click on the link in this episode description box and you'll find it there as well. Did you have fun making it, Anthony? Did you have fun or did it make you like relive your PTSD moments?

5:10Katty Kay:No, I it was somewhat traumatic because, again, doesn't reflect well on me. I was remarkably naive about the sinister nature of Donald Trump. And I frankly wish I had had this four part miniseries delivered to me on my doorstep in 2016. And I probably would have handled things differently. But we're here now. But let's go back to what happened on Friday. Trump is petulant. He's upset, exactly as we predicted. He's wildly swinging and overreacting. His approval rating, I think we should just point this out, he has a negative 27-point approval rating. His approval rating is below where it was on January 7th, 2021, Caddy K.

5:59Katty Kay:That would be the day after the insurrection. McConnell and McCarthy said Trump was finished when he got to an approval rating this low. Yeah. But here we are. OK, but he's flailing now. So he's going to use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. And he was going to put on 10 percent tariffs, Caddy. But, you know, he didn't like some of the news reports. It was hurting his feelings. So he's upping it to 15.

6:26Anthony Scaramucci:Listen, when when Donald Trump's feelings are hurt, the rest of the world suffers. That is what we have learned.

6:32Katty Kay:What is the economic rationale? No economic rationale. We're just going to do this. Neil Katyal, who you know well, the attorney who helped win the Supreme Court challenge, says, yeah, he probably can't do this. He probably doesn't have the right to do this. Moreover, even his attorneys said that Section 122 wouldn't work to put on these characters. So where do you think we are now, Kat?

6:55Anthony Scaramucci:I think Donald Trump, in his reaction to what happened on Friday, has made it pretty clear that he is a president who wants total power. He wants to be able to implement tariffs as he sees fit, as he wants to. He said over the weekend, which oddly Republicans haven't responded to very much, I can do anything I want. I can do anything I want. Constitution obviously doesn't say that, but that's what he believes. He wants to be able to tell Americans, you know, they're going to have National Guard troops in their cities. He wants to be able to tell American companies who can sit on their boards. We had him over the course of the weekend telling Netflix that they had to take an Obama administration official off their board.

7:36Anthony Scaramucci:So he wants to be able to run everything. And when he has stopped from running everything by the courts, because as we said last week in that emergency session we did on Friday, the system is holding and the courts are holding. He lashes out. I mean, he's lashed out in rather petulant ways saying that he's going to just put out a truth social post. We're recording this on Monday morning. He's just put out a truth social post saying he's going to lowercase Supreme Court because they're such a disgrace. Anthony, if you misbehave, I'm going to lowercase your name. It's Anthony small a from now on.

8:11This is what five and six year olds do, right?

8:15Anthony Scaramucci:I don't like you, so I'm going to spell your name with a lowercase. I mean, that's what he's doing. But he's also doing stuff that I think is genuinely dangerous. I mean, I think the way he called out the Supreme Court justices who disagreed with his theory of the case that he could use a state of emergency to declare these powers. The way he called out their families puts those people in greater danger. I mean, this isn't a joke. We've seen one of the justices he likes, Brett Kavanaugh, have somebody outside his house kind of stalking him, posing a threat to his life. There are images of Amy Coney Barrett going around the justice who also disagreed with him in this case.

8:57Anthony Scaramucci:There are images of Amy Coney Barrett going around on the kind of MAGA internet with a sign in front of her saying, I am a traitor. I mean, it reminds me of when I went down to Arizona to that Trump merchandise store. I told you about that. And they had t-shirts with Mike Pence and his face behind bars and the big word traitor. And they told me that was one of the biggest selling items they had in the store. Part of it is silly and petulant and these tariffs may not hold. So it's confusing. Other countries are having to deal with the chaos but part of this is also dangerous when he gets like this it puts people's lives in this environment that we're in i i can't imagine that amy coney barrett hasn't had to step up her security over the course of this weekend right yes i want to make a statement i

9:44Katty Kay:would like you to react to it i feel like because i've read through carefully all the opinions now including the neil gorsuch brilliant concurrence which i would recommend to anybody that has any love of the U.S. Constitution to read it.

9:58Anthony Scaramucci:He doesn't spare anybody.

9:59Katty Kay:Yeah, and it basically is he's being very honest about where we are culturally. But I feel like we have three political hacks. Okay, Clarence Thomas, Kavanaugh and Alito. Now, some would say that there are political hacks on the other side, that the three liberal justices always vote the same way. But I feel like Gorsuch is not that way. Gorsuch actually looked at the case cleanly and made the assessment. But Cady, what does it say about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court today?

10:34Anthony Scaramucci:Look, we know that the Supreme Court's approval ratings are at record lows. We know that they are seen as partisan. There's a very good editorial in the Wall Street Journal that is worth everybody reading, saying that this is arguably the worst moment of Donald Trump's presidency, and that he owes the three justices who he maligns, and he owes the court as an institution an apology. I agree with you that this partisanship on the court predates this ruling, and that those three liberal justices gave Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt in cases that were not entirely dissimilar to this in terms of executive power.

11:14Anthony Scaramucci:So the court has been drifting in that partisan direction. But I actually believe that you can take a kind of barometer of Donald Trump's anger over the weekend and kind of correlate it with actually the degree to which the court has held. And I think the Supreme Court has done what the Supreme Court needed to do. And I think historians may well look back and say that could have been a turning point for the court. Maybe not some of the individual members who you say are so partisan, but the court itself put down a marker that defended the American Constitution, defended Article 1. Am I being too Pollyanna-ish about the court?

11:54Katty Kay:No, I think there's a real problem, though, because you have one branch of the government that has no respect for the other two branches of the government. You have one branch of the government that's saying, hey, this is toilet paper, the Constitution, and therefore I'm going to be disrespectful and intimidating and threatening to the other two branches of the government. And so it's having an impact. It's hurting the society. There's no question about that. And I want to respond to some people that are from Wall Street who called me over the weekend and said to me, oh, you're being too glib.

12:32Katty Kay:You sound like an MS Now host where you're saying the age of Trump is over. The age of Trump is not over. And they're giving me all these different reasons why, but let me push back and tell you, the age of Trump is actually over. I want to explain to people why I'm adamant about saying that. It's not me being partisan, it's me looking at that court holding its ground and Neil Gorsuch's opinion. And I believe that more people will look at that opinion and they will say, hey, we've had enough of this. And that negative 27 % approval rating is not going up, Caddy, if he continues this. So why don't you tell us, if you don't mind, what he's doing now, what is a licensing fee, and what are these new tariffs that he's trying to impose using Section 122?

13:21Anthony Scaramucci:So I'm not a tariff lawyer, but as I understand it, he signed this proclamation. It's a 1974 Trade Act. It allows him to put 10 % temporary tariffs. And I think that's the key thing on goods from all countries. He's raised that to 15 % on Saturday. But the key thing here is they're only valid for what is it, 150 days. So these are short term tariffs. And there has to be an investigation into what he can't just fire off a bazooka and impose a tariff because he wants to. There actually has to be a formal investigation and they don't last for terribly long. Well, take that period of time. Where does it get us to?

14:05Anthony Scaramucci:And then Congress, after that period of time, would have to vote on whether to make these tariffs permanent. Well, that gets us to midterm territory. And the sigh of relief that you're hearing around Washington, D.C. is from Republican members of Congress who think they won't have to go to their electorates and say tariffs are in place. Now, they may have to go to their electorate and say, okay, there's been a lot of chaos. But actually, the good news for Republicans is hopefully that these tariffs come off. I don't see this Congress or any other Congress voting to make those tariffs permanent because they see the damage that it does to them.

14:41Anthony Scaramucci:I was getting texts from European officials who are saying, we don't think this is permanent. Like you saying, the Trump era is over. This tariff era is over. So if you're a business is trying to make a decision and you've committed to, you know, or you're a country who's committed billions of dollars under some deal that you've done with the administration already, you're now thinking to yourself, well, why on earth would I go and spend billions of dollars in order to get myself a better tariff deal? These tariffs may well not be there in six months.

15:10Katty Kay:Yeah. So Trump could have taken the win, right? So what he could have said is, okay, they've ruled against me with the tariffs uh let's refund some of the tariffs and let's move on and that would have actually created an economic stimulus for his team going into the midterms and then sometime in september as the economy's humming from this additional money flowing into the economy he and the republicans could have taken credit for that okay and that's basically what the republicans wanted him to do, but he's not doing that. And so he's now using this obscure thing called a licensing fee. And this comes from a 1976 case called Federal Energy Administration versus Algonquin.

15:56Katty Kay:I'm not going to bore everybody with it, but what the court basically said there is that the president does have a right to use some tools to adjust imports if he thinks it's going to protect the U.S. economy is sort of a different thing from IEPA. And so he's going to try to use that. But I've talked to three or four different trade lawyers and constitutional scholars over the weekend, and they say that this would function exactly like a tariff. He would try to structure it differently. But if it got back up to the courts, it would be disallowed. So he could do it. Which Neil Katyal has also suggested it would happen.

16:36Katty Kay:Right, exactly. So he could do this, because he's a petulant guy, and he's arrogant and egocentric, and he wants to flex on everybody and prove to people that he's the boss. But this would be what your European friends are saying. Okay, we'll pay the tariffs now, and then it'll get disallowed, 6, 8, 12 months, and then it'll have to get reversed. Now, I want to explain to people how this works. So the big companies are always getting rebates and refunds at the ports. And so I just want to make it very, very clear to everybody. If you paid a duty at the port, there's a system in place to unwind that duty and to credit your account.

17:19Katty Kay:Now, if you're a small guy, if you're me buying wine or you buying wine, it's a different process. But somebody like Costco or Walmart is going to get the money back at it. And this is going to flow through to their earnings. It's going to be very positive for them in the economy. So I just want to point out, Trump is going to push this. The Republicans don't want it. The Democrats are like, this is great. Continue to push this because this is going to help us as we get towards the midterms. But I guess my question to you is, I haven't heard a coherent Democratic response to all of this. And if you have, tell me what it is, because this is what I'm always worried about.

18:02Katty Kay:And it's something Bill Maher said over the weekend when he was getting teased by Trump. He says, you know, I feel like the Democrats, I can't find a way to win. So I don't understand why they haven't responded effectively to this. But if they have, push back on me and tell me what their coherent response is to this Trump disaster.

18:20Anthony Scaramucci:I think you're right that over the last three days, we haven't seen a particularly strong Democratic response. When I've had a couple of Democrats texting me saying that they feel they have the momentum going into the midterms. There are also some who are suggesting that we could have kind of inflation creeping back into the economy if there's no new tariff revenue that comes into America. but that's a sort of you know pointing the finger at Donald Trump's strategy rather than them taking control of this but I also think the Democrats can look at the polls and see which way the American public is going and as you know you and I have had conversations with senior Democrats who have said actually they have had at a legal level quite a lot of wins over the last year and they would count this one as another win.

19:08Anthony Scaramucci:I separate two things. One is that you're going to have the Democrats at a small local level over the next six months running for their midterm re-elections in small local races. And the question is, do they go left or do they go center in those individual races? And then after the midterms, the Democrats are going to have to come up with some kind of coherent national figure and message that can carry their standard forwards. But I don't think you're going to hear that honestly until after the midterm. Maybe there should be a united message that comes out of this tariff fiasco, but I think what you're going to have is constant pointing out the chaos that comes from this administration.

19:49Anthony Scaramucci:Chaos, by the way, is what got Joe Biden elected in 2020 because the country was tired of the chaos. So in a way, there's the old political playbook, which is when your enemy is shooting themselves in the foot, sit back and let them carry on shooting themselves in the foot. And right now, over the course of the last three or four days, at least, the White House has done a very good job of shooting itself in the foot. So maybe that doesn't need to be. What I'm saying is, I think you're right. Obviously, that going into 28, they're going to need a very coherent strategy to run an election campaign effectively against whoever it is, J.D.

20:23Anthony Scaramucci:Vance, Marco Rubio. I'm just not sure that you're going to get that in the space of four days from a party that still hasn't gone through his primary season and doesn't have a leader yet. But they only need to, I mean, the polls, you mentioned one poll. Let me ask you about these polls. There's a CNN poll that came out this morning. Hispanic supporters dropped from 41 % to 22 % in the last year. Independent supporters dropped from 41 % to 26 % in the last year. 18 to 34-year-olds has dropped from 41 % to 25 % in the last year. And here's the worst number for the president. Only a third of the electorate thinks that Donald Trump has the right priorities.

20:59Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, I think those poll numbers are brutal for the administration. So here's a question for you, Anthony. Does he now try and turn them around? What does he do to now try and get everyone going into the State of the Union, Republicans, MAGA, and independents alike, and the overall electorate are saying, we just want him to talk about affordability. Is that what we hear at the State of the Union, And is that what we hear from the White House?