165. Why Trump Fired Noem and the Forever War Presidency

15:09Anthony Scaramucci:I think it's because the case hasn't been made. The president has put out various ideas. We're doing this because we were about to be attacked and attack was imminent. Marco Rubio has says we're doing this because Israel was about to attack. And so then we would have been counter attacked and we have to do it. We're doing that because they were two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. That's the latest explanation. Meanwhile, Americans are thinking this has nothing to do with my cost of living. In fact, cost of living has got worse because of this operation. So why are we out there thousands of miles away trying to take down the Iranian regime when it doesn't feel to Americans like there was an imminent threat?

15:51Anthony Scaramucci:I think one thing that is worth saying is that the traditional, the old Republican position that you would have remembered, Anthony, would have been hawkish on Iran. There's not a lot of love lost for the fact that the Ayatollah has been taken out or that Iran is getting punched on the nose. So, you've got this kind of discrepancy between Donald Trump, who is saying, I came in to stop the forever wars, but now has become the commander-in-chief who goes for Venezuela, who threatens Greenland, who actually goes for Iran not once but twice in the course of the last year and puts himself seemingly at odds with his MAGA America first base, which voted for him because they said they didn't want the forever wars.

16:41Anthony Scaramucci:And yet, scratch into Congress, I think, where you're seeing this support for Donald Trump at the moment. And there is still in the Republican Party a desire for America to lead and a desire for America to hit America's enemies, particularly Iran, which has been an enemy for so long. So I think it's a more complicated picture than perhaps the polling is suggesting. And I think there is this rump of traditional Republicanism on foreign policy, on this foreign policy issue that is helping Donald Trump at the moment. So there are MAGA voices. You're right. There are the Tucker Carlson's, the Marjorie Taylor Greene's.

17:26Anthony Scaramucci:There are a bunch of MAGA voices that have come out against this operation, but they tend to be MAGA influencers on the sort of one extreme of the MAGA base. I don't know that he's going to lose MAGA over this.

17:42Katty Kay:No, I don't think he loses MAGA over this, but I don't think he's got all of MAGA. I think he's fractured MAGA and I think he's leaked a little bit of MAGA. But I did a seance last night in preparation for this. Did you?

17:56Anthony Scaramucci:How are the ghosts doing? I know. God, you do believe all this. Yeah, I know.

17:59Katty Kay:Well, yeah, I channeled the spirit of Dick Cheney. So it took a while because I'm here in Dublin and had the sorcerer thing and yeah and dick tamed down he is thrilled dick cheney let me just tell you how happy dick cheney is very happy dick cheney is like this is a neocons wet dream vindication yes he cannot believe this he's like whoa we got the reality television star yeah in the white house uh liz didn't want him i didn't want him you know before he moved on because you know cheney's in purgatory right he's not quite in heaven because of all the bad deeds and he's like you know i'm here waiting to see if i can say that about the dead you can't say that

18:36Anthony Scaramucci:anthony about the dead this is the period of lent we're heading into easter you're a good catholic

18:41Katty Kay:i'm just letting you know what's going on and so he's sitting there waiting for saint peter to let him in the pearly gates but he's very happy right now because he's like this is like even better than i thought and so let me give the unitary executive power pitch uh dick cheney on steroids That would be Donald Trump. And remember, just to remind everybody, this is the peace president, Donald Trump. This is the president that was campaigning for the end of forever wars. He has taken the Dick Cheney playbook to the max. And so, as I said last week, what is the Dick Cheney playbook? We're going to behead Iran.

19:18Katty Kay:We're going to install somebody that we can corrupt, and that's secular. And we're going to see if we can do to Iran what we did to Venezuela. Now, Kati, I am sure of this, and this is not based on reporting. This is based on my gut. And so I'm going to tell you my gut, and then I want you to respond to it. I am sure that Trump is pissed off at the Israelis. And let me explain why. The Israelis have a diverging objective to Donald Trump. The Israelis want to kill everybody. The Israelis have been terrorized by the Iranians. They funded Hamas. They created this fiasco in Gaza and they've hurt tons and tons of Israelis over the 47 years.

20:00Katty Kay:And so now that the Israelis have opened fire like this, they're killing everybody. I mean, they went through the top 40 in like five minutes of the senior leadership.

20:10Anthony Scaramucci:And Trump is very pissed off about this, including, by the way, the senior leadership that he was hoping to put back in there after they'd taken out the very top.

20:17Katty Kay:That's my point, because I'm watching the interviews of Trump. He's sitting there in front of the gilded fireplace now. There's like so much gold coming off the fireplace from Home Depot. It's like that's another revolting thing. But Trump is saying he's saying, who am I going to bribe? Trump is basically looking at the media and saying, Bibi killed so many people. I can't figure out which secularist I'm going to bribe. OK, so that is an opinion by me. And I'd like you to react to that. Go ahead. That was everything from Dick Cheney, by the way. And then I let his spirit go back. He went back up.

20:50Katty Kay:Yes, he went back up. Yes. Or down wherever he may have gone. Actually, I'm not sure. Go ahead. Go ahead. What is your opinion of that?

20:57Anthony Scaramucci:Next time we need to know what's happening, we're going to call up, you know, your seance situation. Look, I think that one of the most honest things that was said this week was when Marco Rubio came down and in this very kind of mangled way, said the quiet part out loud and said, the Israelis were going to go for it. And so we had to jump in there in case we got hit. We didn't want to get hit inadvertently. So we thought, well, we better join the Israelis and make sure that we were protecting ourselves. I think that Bibi has been, I understand, in the White House nonstop pushing Donald Trump to do this, obviously.

21:36Anthony Scaramucci:But Donald Trump could have said no. Now, I had reporting this morning of somebody who'd had lunch with Donald Trump a month ago in Mar-a-Lago who said he was gagging to strike Iran. You know, Bibi was clearly pushing. They could have said no to Bibi. They chose not to say no to Bibi, but maybe Rubio wanted to use that as the excuse Israel was pushing. Maybe Rubio has his own reasons for saying that. And they could have definitely said no to Bibi and not let him do it. But I think Donald Trump came out of Venezuela feeling, as many presidents do when they see the awesome power of the American military, high on the power of American power.

22:15Anthony Scaramucci:He loves power anyway. He loves to prove his predecessors were weak and stupid and wrong. That's a constant theme with his presidency. They didn't do this because they were too weak to do this. You and I have been doing this series on Donald Trump. He loves to show that he is the only person that can fix things. Only Donald Trump had the balls to go after Iran and punch them where it hurt and actually kind of obliterate their military machine. Only I have done this thing that's impossible. And you know what? However, this turns out, at this point, he declares a win. Short of massive American casualties, which looking at what you and I are hearing from the region, looking at the military situation at the moment, they seem to have avoided that so far, fingers crossed.

23:01Anthony Scaramucci:But short of massive American casualties, Donald Trump can go to the American public and say, anything is better than what was there. I don't really care about what regime comes next, what their ideology is, so long as this is a regime. But look, American public, they don't have access now to their nuclear weaponry. They don't have access to their ballistic missiles that were pointed at our US bases in the region. And he doesn't care about whether the Iranian population rises up and takes over, which is probably going to lead to a blood bath for the Iranian population. But the problem is it doesn't get America out of a cold war that it's been with in Iran since 1979.

23:40Anthony Scaramucci:It's still going to be in a cold war. It just won't have the weapons. And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's enough for him to be able to sell this reasonably plausibly as a win to the American public.

23:49Katty Kay:Okay. So before we go to another topic, I just want to throw a few more things at you because But I'm looking for Delce Rodriguez.

23:57Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, you probably killed her, by the way.

23:59Katty Kay:Yeah. So that's what Trump said. OK, and this is the beauty of Trump. He literally said, well, the attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they're all dead. Second and third place is dead. Those are literally Trump's words. But I'm going to throw out two people to you. OK, one is Hassan Khomeini. This is the grandson of the ruler, obviously, that was taken out earlier in the week. And he seems to be more secularized and he seems to be more pragmatic. Now, I'm not saying that's the direction he's going to go in or not.

24:39Katty Kay:And then the other one I would say is Ali Larajani. Am I saying his name right? He's probably the most powerful transitional figure that's left alive right now.

24:51Anthony Scaramucci:He's been running the country for the last year, by the way.

24:53Katty Kay:Yeah, and he's probably running the country. And maybe he's not dead because the Israelis don't want to kill him, if we're just being brutally honest with everybody. And he's more or less, I think, run the country, national security, Supreme National Security Council. He's the one that's worked with the Europeans and the Chinese. And he has some technocratic credibility. So my question to you is, is this somebody that could work with Donald Trump? And now, as I'm saying that to you, remember the Israelis, they don't mind failed states. They like the failed state of Lebanon. They don't mind the failed state of Syria.

25:33Katty Kay:And they ideally would like this to be a partitioned failed state. Trump does not want that. We both know that. So the question is, which direction is it going in? And do either of those two people sound like to you as potentially people that Donald Trump and the Americans could deal with?

25:51Anthony Scaramucci:I think it's potentially, you know, one of those two, assuming they stay alive for a while, because these bombardments are continuing and the Israelis are going after the security forces and the Americans, Hegseth has said, we're going to step up the bombardments over the next day or two. What Trump seems to be looking for is kind of, you know, Iran's Deng Xiaoping, right, the post-Mao leader who America can deal with. I have a question about the Iranian society, though, because I've reached out to a couple of Iranian friends over the last few days and people who are Iranian but live abroad. And they say Iranian society is so fed up with the model that they've had that will they accept anything that is adjacent to that model?

26:37Anthony Scaramucci:Will they be satisfied with the Laronjani? Will they be satisfied with Khamenei's offspring? They are seriously unhappy with the status quo. And will that be something that they can tolerate? How many was very opposed, my understanding is, to reform of any kind because he saw the Soviet model. He thought once you open the door to any kind of reform Gorbachev style, then all hell breaks loose and you lose the regime. So, there aren't very many people around him who were real reformers. I don't think Delce Rodriguez was a real reformer, but Venezuela is a very different case. Venezuela has been democratic and pro-American much more recently than Iran has.

27:19Anthony Scaramucci:They've kind of gutted a lot of the leadership anyway, is now still staunchly radicalized. So, I think all of those are good questions and I think we don't know. I mean, there's also these reports that are coming out that the CIA is trying to help the Kurds in the north. Well, the poor Kurds have been through this before. So I hope if the Americans really are saying they're going to support the Kurds, they're going to do a better job of this than they did in the first Gulf War when they kind of abandoned them. So there are a lot of moving parts in this. Is Trump really trying to foment civil war in the country?

27:52Anthony Scaramucci:Will the Iranian public accept somebody who wears a turban? I mean, let's put it bluntly, who comes from the clerical side, will they accept somebody who has anything to do with the regime like Laron Jani does? I mean, it's going to be up to, I guess, having decimated Iran's defenses, it will be up to Israel and America because they're not going to tolerate somebody who they feel they can't do business with. I think all of this is why Karl Rove is writing this article today in The Wall Street Journal, which is saying, look, we just need a more coherent theory of the case rather than the prospect of Donald Trump one day clicking his fingers and saying, OK, let's call it quits.

28:31Anthony Scaramucci:We've had a victory. We're done. Because if you leave so many of these questions unanswered, your victory could evaporate.

28:38Katty Kay:I think it's a really insightful analysis, and I'll just add a few things to it. So you have everything you just said, and now you have the big supreme question, Caddy, and that is, will whatever's left standing in that government play ball with the Americans? And I think it's hard to know because they've got a couple of different factions in there, right? Faction one are the pragmatists. They've been severely damaged. These are the ones that were very close in Geneva. You know, they were reporting to reporters that they thought or they were almost there with a deal. Okay. And there will be a backstory about that.

29:16Katty Kay:You know, Jared and Steve Woodcoff, because you guys were very close to the deal. But, you know, BB didn't want that deal. BB wanted to bomb everybody. Right. So the pagmatists are there and they are damaged. The second group are the IRGC. These are the hardliners. Okay, these guys are also militarily weakened, but they're the ideological maximalists. And the question is, what are we doing with them? And how many of them are left in power? These are the ones that are shooting the rockets at the Gulf states. You know, the foreign minister, you probably heard this, called the foreign minister of Qatar to offer some level of apology.

29:54Katty Kay:That's not an IRGC thing. That's the pragmatist faction. Right. Right. And the Qatari foreign minister says, hey, you're not just shooting at American bases here. You're blowing up apartment buildings and hotels. Cut it out. So you've got a couple different factions. And this is the one that I want to ask you about. And that is the people, Katty Kay. Because I think Trump is misreading the people. And hear me out for a second, okay?

30:16Anthony Scaramucci:The Iranian people?

30:17Katty Kay:He is. I think he's misreading them. He's like, you know, go overthrow the government, go overthrow the government. But then he's also telling the press, where's Delcey Rodriguez too? Where's Delcey Rodriguez too? And I think Trump's going to put himself in a weird position because I don't think the general population wants a deal with the regime.

30:37Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, I think you're right. That's what I was saying. Yeah.

30:39Katty Kay:I think they want fundamental change. I agree. Which is, frankly, fundamentally different from Venezuela. So you could be in a situation where, let's say, Trump finds Delce Rodriguez, too, but you have lots of tumult in the place of the people. Where they're like, no, that's not what we want. We want a full, renewed Iranian revolution. And I think Trump is misreading that. That's just me personally, because he likes and he enjoys this. He does it to everybody. He talks out of both sides of his mouth. I'm not for forever wars. Let's bomb the living daylights out of these guys like Dick Cheney. I want you guys to overthrow the government.

31:16Katty Kay:Hey, is there someone in the government I can bribe that I can do business with? And so he gets the guy or the person that he can bribe to do business with. I think the people are going to generally be unhappy. Am I wrong in that?

31:28Anthony Scaramucci:No, I think you're exactly right. It's what I was saying, that they won't tolerate somebody who is regime adjacent. Now, that doesn't mean that we're about to see a huge uprising from the Iranian people. they've been traumatized and brutalized for years. And they're not at the moment, my understanding is they are absolutely terrified and will not be going out onto the streets because there are regime remnants and security services and IRGDC who are walking around with guns who are going to shoot anyone who so much as puts their head above the parapet. And I think you're not likely to see within the next six months to a year, a huge big rising up of the Iranian population, short of massive American support, which I don't think Donald Trump is going to do.

32:07Anthony Scaramucci:He's just kind of vaguely hoping that they'll do this by themselves because they've been hurt really hard. I mean, I think they're much more likely, the Iranian people right now, to hunker down and try to repair themselves. They're under bombardment right now as we speak. But that doesn't mean that they are happy about the idea of this bombing campaign starting and then being abandoned and this not leading to wholesale regime change. Speaking to people who know the country much better than I do, where we know there's something like only 15 % support for the regime. But people are very, very wary there at the moment and they don't like the idea of America not finishing this job and giving them full.

32:44Anthony Scaramucci:That would be massively disappointing to the Iranian people if we end up with an enfeebled but still Islamic Republic type of regime in the country. That is exactly the last thing that they want. Okay, talking of factions, where is Mr. J.D. Vance these days? Mr. No More Forever Wars. I voted for Donald Trump because he is the only one who understands how awful it was that America started all of these wars and we must never start any more wars. Have you seen him recently? Is he there with you in Ireland? Because he's not here in Washington.

33:20Katty Kay:He's not here with me.

33:22Anthony Scaramucci:Have we had a seance for him?

33:23Katty Kay:Maybe in the seance with Dick Cheney, but the thing with J.D. Vance, and again, I'm not patting myself on the back, but I sort of am patting myself on the back because I told you J.D. Vance, like in the movie Fargo, is going to go through the wood chipper. And so conspicuously. Oh, gross. No, conspicuously, not in the room during the Venezuelan thing. Conspicuously, not in Mar-a-Lago during the Iranian invasion. And, you know, he said, oh, my God, we got to set up some mock-up situation where he's sitting there looking like a bozo in some kind of photo op in another situation room that has nothing to do with the real situation room.

34:01Katty Kay:Power center. Yeah, exactly. It's this sort of nonsense. And he's doing things, right? He headlined that fundraiser. He went out to go with 50 people. You probably saw that in the paper with Donald Trump Jr. They had 50 people give him$100 ,000 each. It was a very lucrative fundraiser for them all. But I think Vance is in big trouble with Donald Trump. I think he has been completely and totally sidelined.

34:27Anthony Scaramucci:On this issue. On this issue.

34:29Katty Kay:On this issue. But generally, Trump wants nothing to do with him. Now, on the other thing, okay, the eagle that is soaring right now is little Marco. Okay, little Marco is almost like a clay pigeon caddy, you know, like, and it's up in the air right now. And he's soaring and Trump's telling you he's the greatest secretary of state in the world. And in six months, click, click, kaboom. Okay, the clay pigeon is going to burst in the sky and Donald Trump is going to eviscerate little Marco. OK, so that's going to happen as well, because Trump honestly cannot. And I repeat, he honestly cannot help himself.

35:09Katty Kay:And somebody said to me here in Dublin last night, I was at an event. Who does Trump want to be his successor? Nobody. OK, thank you, Katty Kay. So I answered with Gavin Newsom and they went, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, gee. I said, well, hear me out. You guys were nobody before I got here. Now you're somebody, but only because of me. And oh, by the way, when I leave, you're going to be nobody. OK, and that's what's going on here. So J.D. Vance, bye bye. OK, now what J.D. Vance did, which I found very interesting, Caddy, and I want you to react to it. He had his staffers leak to the press that he wasn't for the strike.

35:49Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah.

35:50Katty Kay:Didn't help him with Trump, but he's trying to get a poll position in place for the 2028. So react to that, please.

35:55Anthony Scaramucci:So he didn't even just leak it to the press. He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal back in 2024 in which he said his primary reason for supporting Trump had been that he started no wars. In October of 2024, he said, our interest, I think, very much is not going to war with Iran. He doesn't even need to leak it to the press. I mean, he's been quite blunt about this. And to the extent that he represents the anti-interventionist wing of the Republican Party, which he clearly does and is the champion of, that wing is losing at the moment. The Steve Bannon wing, the J.D. Vance wing, they're the ones that are not being able to restrain the president.

36:39Anthony Scaramucci:They couldn't stop him from Venezuela. They couldn't stop him from doing Iran. And now JD is in the position where he's having to go out and talk to some of these anti-interventionists. And he has had to come out in public, which he's done, and sell the administration's line. But as he does that, he's losing some of his political capital with that group. So he is having to spend his own political capital. He's in a you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. He's got to spend his political capital with that group to defend the administration's actions in Iran, knowing that if he's going to run in 2028, he's going to need their support and they are now a little bit disappointed with him.

37:18Anthony Scaramucci:A reminder to J.D. Vance, you can't win here. You can't be half pregnant. You can't be half MAGA. You have to be kind of full MAGA. It's a bit like John Cornyn. We spoke about him in Texas. You've got to be 100 % on board.

37:33Katty Kay:So in 1960, on the eve of the election at a press conference, one of Eisenhower's last press conferences, the press raised their hand and said, Mr. Dixon is running for president in the last eight years. Could you please tell me an achievement of his in your two administrations? And Eisenhower looked at the guy and said, if you give me a week, I'll think about it. OK, and it was like literally like a scud missile going into Nixon's campaign headquarters. Trump did a number. He did a number on J.D. Vance, said differently. He hit him with a karate chap into the Adams apple caddy. He said, and I quote, it didn't take much persuading of J.D.

38:17Katty Kay:Vance because the press went to him and said, the vice president has expressed reservations of going to this war and trump just went right at

38:27Anthony Scaramucci:him and demeaned him and takes away the invitation to come down to mar-a-lago as the war is starting

38:33Katty Kay:exactly and so by the way jd that was a sign of disloyalty i agree with that and here's the thing okay because jd actually had some chops on this he's a former marine he was in the wars he had some chops on this and he had some gravitas on this.

38:51Anthony Scaramucci:And a long history. You know, there's video for everything, right? There's video and op-eds for everything. So interesting, Vance, and we're going to move on to the economy and what it's doing to the American economy, because I think that's also interesting. But Vance did do an interview with Fox News. Here's what he said. The president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish. There's just no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight no clear objective. That is J.D. Vance trying to talk out of both sides of his mouth. In the first part of that, he's trying to say, Donald Trump, you're right.

39:23Anthony Scaramucci:He's done exactly the right thing. Not that we think Donald Trump has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish because he clearly hasn't. And then in the second part of that, he's saying to his non-interventionist base, don't worry, this is not a forever war. And please forgive me for the position that I'm in.

39:38Katty Kay:How's that going to work out for him, Caddy?

39:39Anthony Scaramucci:That's going to work out really well.

39:41Katty Kay:Can you hear the wood chipper in the background? Can you hear the wood chipper? It's right outside my window by the seance studio. Can you hear it?

39:48Anthony Scaramucci:You know why it doesn't work out? Because we live in an era where there is no forgiveness for people not being authentic. There is no room for -

39:57Katty Kay:100%.

39:58Anthony Scaramucci:People in this communications world, in this age of populism, particularly, you have to be somebody that the people believe you are. That's why Donald Trump gets away with it.

40:09Katty Kay:100%.

40:09Anthony Scaramucci:Donald Trump can say 50 different things at once and have 50 different positions on something, but he is who he is.

40:17Katty Kay:Yeah, he's consistently mad.

40:19Anthony Scaramucci:He's consistently inconsistent. J.D. Vance is trying to make a coherent position, but revealing himself as trying to satisfy everybody. And in this world, you can't try and please everybody.

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42:53Anthony Scaramucci:Let's talk about the economy.

42:55Katty Kay:Okay.

42:55Anthony Scaramucci:I had an interesting conversation this morning with Congressman Jim Himes and asked him whether we're going to start seeing Democrats make more of a case linking the economy and the potential costs of the economy and this war. Because just in the last day or two, you've heard Democrats saying, hold on a second, gas prices are going up. The war cost a billion dollars in the first 24 hours. At the same time, the Republicans in the White House are trying to cut your health care subsidies. So is this somewhere where Democrats think they're going to go, that they're going to hammer this not on the grounds, because I think it's complicated for them, not on the grounds of this was a bad idea, because they realize Americans don't like Iran, and a lot of Democrats don't like Iran either.

43:41Anthony Scaramucci:But they're going to start linking this to the key issue that they know is the issue in the midterms, which is affordability. Do you think that's where they're going to go, and would they be smart to go there?

43:51Katty Kay:I do, and I think it's smart to go there if they frame it properly. Like if they got to the camera, looked straight into the camera and said, this is the war tax that nobody voted for because gas prices went from the low$2 to$3.20 in five days. Okay. And now you have a liquid natural gas crisis going on around the world where those prices are up substantially. You also have a forecast coming out by E &Y Parthenon that's saying that the growth in the U.S., the GDP, is likely going to be down 50 to 100 basis points as a result of this. So that slowdown is going to hurt everybody. And then the weird thing, Cady, and I'd like you to talk about this, you know, he's trapping the Fed.

44:34Katty Kay:OK, so the worst enemy of Donald Trump is Donald Trump because he wants the rates to go down. But you're setting up a situation now for inflation.

44:47Anthony Scaramucci:Right.

44:47Katty Kay:You see what's going on? Like Mohammed Al-Aryan, one of my buds, used to run the Howard Endowment. He was at Alliance. He's one of the top capital allocators, top macro thinkers in the world, is saying these types of situations could really hamstring the Fed. They'd be locked in a Gordian knot because they can't move. And Trump wants lower rates, but you've got the prices going up.

45:10Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, and Kevin Walsh is not going to want to come in and raise interest rates after all of the campaign he made to get that job. That is not the thing he's going to want to do. But if oil and gas prices keep going up, it's going to be certainly very difficult for him to cut rates. Apparently, you've got Susie Wiles is calling oil industry executives frantically on the phone saying, what can we do? Find me something. Find me some good news. I need you to do something to try and bring down oil and gas prices, particularly prices at the pump. I don't know why the administration didn't think going into this that gas prices would go up.

45:48Katty Kay:But why didn't they open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? The last war, we opened up the SPR.

45:53Anthony Scaramucci:Or suspend, as they're talking about now, you suspend the gas tax or something. They're throwing out all of these ideas. Let's suspend the gas tax for a year. The White House is acting in a panic over gas prices right now. All of the political sides realize what an incredible cost this can be. This is what helped get Joe Biden booted out of the presidency.

46:14Katty Kay:No question.

46:15Anthony Scaramucci:It was damaging to his campaign. It was the single thing, right? They care about gas prices more than they care about the price of eggs, voters.

46:21Katty Kay:See, the White House thought that they were going to have a triple intensity 12-day war, but the Iranians were going to respond to it like they did the 12-day war. Okay, they did not expect the Iranians to start bombing apartment buildings and hotels in Dubai. No way, because that's evidenced by the lack of planning with the embassy and getting people out of the country. They were thinking about it in a way that shows extreme arrogance, meaning never underestimate your adversary or your potential opponent. And the Iranians are saying, hey, I got the number here. I'm going to choke off the global economy.

46:58Katty Kay:And so I see the Strait of Hormuz as a mini COVID. And just hear me out for a second, because even if they slow down, they could mine the strait, they could slow down the tanker activity in the strait. Then what happens, Caddy, you get factory shutdowns in South Korea, factory shutdowns in China. You get a whole host of things that happen in Europe as a readjustment or reallocation of capital due to energy prices, as well as the United States. And it's like a mini COVID recession. And the administration, what are you doing? They weren't thinking about this. And so I just find it really weird that they thought that they were going to get a 12-day war response where the Iranians were like, hello, we're going to bomb this site and you get your people out of there so that we don't escalate this too far.

47:46Katty Kay:But the Iranians are not doing that. Now, look, the missile strikes are down. This is the stuff that General Cain said. And, you know, obviously the U.S. will have air superiority, but the Iranians have done something, which is they've choked off elements of the global economy, which is going to hurt the approach the Fed is going to take over the next six months. And it's going to generally hurt global GDP.

48:08Anthony Scaramucci:And by the way, if tankers, like we heard off the coast of Kuwait do start getting hit and oil starts leaking into the Gulf, how many oil companies and tanker companies are going to want to send their ships there? I mean, that's going to depress even the fear of Iranians blowing up your tankers full of oil is going to make people wary about trying to be in that region. So, I think that's going to hurt prices. I mean, the longer this goes on, the more destabilizing it is to the economy, the more destabilizing it is to the White House because they have to deal with the fallout of this and the more the American people risk turning against this.

48:48Anthony Scaramucci:If this is all done and dusted in the case of the next week, then we may not be having this discussion in a week's time. And I think we have to have the humility to recognize that that's a possibility.

48:57Katty Kay:I still think he heard the economy. We'll have a different discussion. But, Cady, we've been doing this Trump series, as we both know, for our founding members. And I listened back to the second episode. I really want to encourage people to listen to it because the whole foundation of Trump's decision making and the whole lack of caution and general recklessness combined with the luck, okay, has gotten us to where we are right now, which is why the president is incredibly overconfident in doubling and tripling down on the things that he's doing. And thus far, because he's won the presidency twice, Caddy, much of the security of many people, including myself.

49:38Katty Kay:He's won it twice. I think we do a very good job in this episode. We should play a clip. We do a very good job in this episode of explaining the sentiment and the foundation of the Trump decision-making. I said everybody liked Mayor Koch because Mayor Koch was bringing back the police officers. Mayor Koch was trying to bring back the businesses. And Mayor Koch needed Trump and Trump needed Koch. And you know what they both disliked about that? What I just said, because neither one of them liked needing each other. You see what I mean? And so bam, bam, bam, they were constantly going at it with each other.

50:17Katty Kay:Of course, Koch being a politician always used a cutout and he'd always throw different commissioners in front of Trump and to try to block Trump. And Trump was a steamroller. But the most famous thing that happens in the 80s that Trump writes about in The Art of the Deal is the Walman Rink. But you have to think about this, and these numbers aren't staggering to us today, but these numbers were staggering to the 1980s. So the rink closes in 1980. $13 million is spent by the city to try to get the rink reopened 1980 to 1986. $13 million, Caddy. Bureaucratic infighting, contractors fired, multiple design changes.

51:04Anthony Scaramucci:This is an ice skating rink, guys. I mean, he has a point. It's an ice skating rink.

51:08Katty Kay:So Trump goes on the air. Okay. He goes on the radio. He goes on TV, like local news. This is before the real advent of cable. And he says, I'm a private citizen. I'll take this over. I'll get private contractors. I'll fix this thing in six months. And so now you can hear the drumbeat from the city. Let him fix it. Let him fix it. Signs go up. Let him fix it. And so Caddy, he completes the rink in about four months.

51:35Anthony Scaramucci:What does he want to call it? Trump Ice Inc.

51:37Katty Kay:Of course, he wants to do that. Koch blocks that, right? So that's like the first blocking of the Trump Kennedy Center. Trump can't do that, but it doesn't matter. they have this big ribbon cutting ceremony. And there he is. And there's a great picture of him standing on the rink. It's 1987 and the rink is open. He's in that famous top coat of his. And this is great branding and great messaging for a private citizen, private entrepreneur coming into government-like services. And I'll show you, right? Because that's ultimately his message in 2016, but it goes back to the Woolman rink. And I think people have to understand how important this rink is to him.

52:28Katty Kay:While he's doing this, he's flying high. He's in the process of building his casinos, which we'll talk about, but he does something batshit crazy.

52:39Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, you really hear in that clip, Anthony, how he believed this Mr. Fix-It persona. It was born out of his years of business in New York, where he was working there on the ice rink. I mean, we've gone from an ice rink to a war in the Persian Gulf. And the thinking behind it from Donald Trump's own point of view of himself, how he sees himself is basically the same. I am the only person that can fix this. The problem with that is that now he is in the Oval Office. The stakes are so much higher. This is potentially a much bigger regional war. And if he thinks he can do it alone, it means he's not listening to the smartest people in the room.

53:22Anthony Scaramucci:He's the smartest person in the room. There's nobody smarter. He's not listening to people that will say no to him. And in foreign policy, you need a good president has people around them who will say to them, no, you're wrong. Try this approach. Have you thought of this? This is the nuance of the Iranian population. They may not be what you think. And he doesn't have those people around him because he's surrounded himself in this presidency with yes people. And I think you can see this is why I love doing this series and why it's so timely right now. If you want to understand Donald Trump's world that we are all living in, listen to this series and you'll understand where it came from.

54:00Anthony Scaramucci:So if you'd like to sign up and get this series, you can become a founding member by going to the rest is politics US dot com and clicking on the link.

54:11Katty Kay:Well said.

54:12Anthony Scaramucci:Thank you so much for listening. Clearly a lot going on. We'll be back next week with more.

54:17Katty Kay:Thanks, guys. We'll see you next week.

54:47Anthony Scaramucci:Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.