171. Trump Is Trapped in the Iran War

14:47Anthony Scaramucci:We've not seen the Iranians respond, thank God, with acts of terrorism around the world. It is kind of has been their MO in the past. And one intelligence operative official in the UK actually said to me, look, just wait, that's the long term play. We haven't got there yet. It doesn't mean it's not going to happen. But I think there is another side to that threat assessment, which is the immediate threat, which is the gas prices. There's the longer term concern about sleeper cells. But companies are going to start focusing on what capabilities the Iranians still have in the cyber realm, because, of course, that would be hugely disruptive to them as well.

15:23Anthony Scaramucci:Can I just say we're going to talk about this polymarkets trade, which I think is super interesting. And I wanted to get your sense of that. I spoke to an economist last night in the field who said something very fishy is going on. But can I just channel Anthony Scaramucci and give you a quick list? Donald Trump has had a bad week. Five things have gone badly wrong for him just in the last couple of days. The prosecutor in the case against Jerome Powell has admitted that they don't have any evidence of misconduct. He's done this taco on the streets. And even if he likes to say it's not a taco, everybody is seeing it as a taco, that he gave a deadline.

15:57Anthony Scaramucci:People in the White House said, please, Mr. President, don't give ultimatums. And then he's forced to row back again because the markets go crazy. Joe Kent, the former intelligence official who resigned very publicly, who has a whole load of dubious background of his own and is a full on 2020 election denial guy, but is saying very publicly to everybody who will listen that there was no justification for the war in Iran because Iran didn't pose imminent threat. The White House doesn't like that. Last night in Florida, Donald Trump has a new member of his state Senate, a Democrat, Emily Gregory.

16:33Anthony Scaramucci:There was a 13-point swing. We spoke about that special statehouse election in Texas a few weeks ago. The same thing happened in Florida last night. You had a 13-point swing away from Republicans to a Democrat right on Donald Trump's doorstep. And a Reuters poll came out that was completed on Monday showing that he has the lowest approval rating that Reuters recorded of 36 percent and that approval for his handling of the economy amongst all Americans, not just Democrats, is down to 29%. And approval for the war is falling. So I think if you put that together, I think Donald Trump's brain must be feeling a little frazzled.

17:11Anthony Scaramucci:He must be out there saying, guys, give me the good news. Because there's a lot of little bits of bad news coming in around the country that tie what's happening in Iran to what's happening in the White House to what's happening in the polls. And on the judicial front, he's not having good success either. Does that sound fair?

17:29Katty Kay:It's a brilliant rendition of what's going on. But I, again, have said on this show, he sort of doesn't care. I've got 36 months to go. I got to make$100 billion. I got to figure that out. We're going to trade the oil markets. We'll trade crypto. We'll see what gifts we can get from the Gulf states or other countries. And we're going to work super hard on that because I actually don't care. And if the Republicans lose coming up, it doesn't matter to me. I'm going to probably pardon myself on the way out and all my family members.

17:59Anthony Scaramucci:I get impeached. I get convicted. Yeah, no problem. I just got to pardon myself.

18:03Katty Kay:And by the way, Corey Lewandowski said, hey, if something goes wrong here for me, the big boss is going to pardon me. So I think the Republicans are wake up Republicans. He doesn't care about you guys. He's laughing at the fact that he lost the election next door in Mar-a-Lago in that district. He doesn't really care. But Trump, in my opinion, because Trump knows I'm 80, on my way to 83 on the way out of here. And let's see how much money I can rake in. This will be a lot of fun. I'm going to put up a lot of gold statues of myself in Washington before I leave and hopefully a big, beautiful ballroom.

18:40Katty Kay:And I'm going to shove myself up the yin yang, because I like the word yin yang now. I got a lot of good feedback on yin yang. I'm going to shove myself up the yin yang of the establishment, the Washington, D.C. establishment. But, Katty, just quickly on the 15 points, we don't know exactly what all 15 points are, but it's been reported what some of them are. They want the nuclear capabilities gone, the missiles gone, et cetera. They basically want to dismantle the clerical power inside of Iran. So those points are going to be unacceptable to the regime. Remember to stay around. You don't give up your weapons of mass destruction.

19:19Katty Kay:When When Bill Clinton had the chance to stop the North Koreans from getting weapons of mass destruction, they continued. And now the guy's still in power. So to me, I think accepting these 15 points extremely low, fight on and survive the war, I think that's much higher. And I just want to say to people that are really thinking this through, and again, I want to be fair to everybody. The Wall Street Journal had a great article. looks like this is a way more dangerous, thuggish regime. The journal said it better than me. The journal basically said, this is a harder war for us, but guess what? It may be a little bit more necessary than all of us want to believe in terms of the absolute threats.

20:03Katty Kay:I'll finish by saying this, Gatti. United States, the Gulf states, the European allies, you got to clear the strait, And you've got to make sure that there's international cooperation on the street to prevent the attack on those oil tankers. Otherwise, we're heading for a global recession.

20:22Anthony Scaramucci:Okay, let's take a break and come back and talk about somebody who seems to have been making a lot of money out of this already.

20:33Katty Kay:before we dive back in we want to let you know the general sales for our show with roy stewart and alistair campbell at london south bank center opens thursday the 26th of march so we're super excited about that so guys head to southbankcenter.co.uk to get your tickets Listen, guys, it's going to be great fun. And I'll be going live with the rest is classified, David McCloskey. So don't wait. Head to southbankcenter.co.uk to get your tickets. Can't wait to see you there. Okay, Caddy, let's get back to the show.

21:10Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome back, everybody. Anthony, it's clear that something is happening on the betting markets. Somebody is making a lot of money. The poly markets are anonymous. We don't know who it is. We don't know if it's just somebody who is watching tanker movements, troop movements, and putting two and two together and realizing things are changing. But somebody placed a bet just before Donald Trump announced that he was pausing his 48-hour deadline to attack Iranian energy facilities. And they made a ton of money, close to a billion dollars. What's going on? I spoke to one economist who said there's no way that this was just somebody working from open sources.

21:55Anthony Scaramucci:This is somebody who had to tip off.

21:57Katty Kay:Okay, so go back to Liberation Day on April 2nd. The guys are getting short the market. They know it's going to be very disruptive. He's coming down from Mount Evil with the orange tablets, and we know it's going to be – he's Orange Moses infecting evil on the global economy. They make money. A week later, he says, oh, we're going to have a pause on the tariffs. They get long, they make money. October the 10th, he puts out a tweet related to rare earth minerals. He says he's going to be in a big fight with China over rare earth minerals. The market gets crushed. Crypto gets crushed. Guess what?

22:32Katty Kay:Unusual activity. And there's a whole tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars are being made. And now, five minutes, Caddy. Because here's the problem with the markets now because of all the technology, we can track the stuff. Five minutes, Caddy. They put$1.5 billion of futures contracts on the market and oil. They get short oil contemporaneously. And then five minutes later, he puts out the all-cap tweets with the WITCH. And these guys are raking in the money. And it's so bad that the SEC, the woman that was set up to investigate all this stuff from the SEC, she complained about it.

23:22Katty Kay:Nobody listened to her. And she just left. Her name is Margaret Ryan. You can look her up. She was the enforcement director at the Securities Exchange Commission. And she left last week. She was clashing with agency leadership over wanting direct investigations into the administration. And again, not just the Trump family. We're talking about family members of the people that are in the know.

23:48Anthony Scaramucci:So you've been in the White House, Anthony. How close? You say it's not just Trump family members. How close would you have to be? I mean, how does this work? Talk me through how it works. Because these decisions are made, as we know with Donald Trump, pretty last minute. The national security structure has been really flattened since he's been in the White House. We understand that it is him making the decisions with one or two people around him. It really is a pretty tight circle because he's done away with so much of the expertise because he doesn't trust them. So how does it get out from him thinking, and he changes his mind so quickly that you don't necessarily know when he's going to put that tweet out with a lot of warning and a lot of distribution and a lot of input from White House functionaries.

24:36Anthony Scaramucci:So somehow somebody has to get that information from Donald Trump's brain in order to make that trade five minutes beforehand. How do they get the information and how many people would have access to that information?

24:47Katty Kay:So it's such a good question. Trump has had around him a coderay of people for the last 40 years that get a tiny piece of everything he's doing. You want to have a Trump board game? Great. You guys do it. Take a tiny piece of it. You want to have Trump vodka, Trump water, Trump steaks? You take a piece of it. These very same guys got involved with the Trump meme coin. They took a piece of it. And so he has a group of people around him.

25:16Anthony Scaramucci:And he's happy to let them make money so long as they don't make too much money.

25:19Katty Kay:They've got to make money alongside of him because remember, he doesn't have the attention span to do it himself and he's a little busy being president. But you do it and then I get my cut, you get your cut. If you remember, Politico had a story where he's down at Mar-a-Lago, he's super pissed off at Lutnick. He's saying, your two boys are running Cantor Fitzgerald, where's my cut? Okay, if you remember that story, I mean, that was there, right? So he has a small group of people he's working with. And he says, okay, you ready? You got the trade on? Yeah, go. Yeah, okay, great. Let's put the tweet out.

25:54Katty Kay:Now, Caddy, here's the problem with everything that I just said, because there's lots of layers to this. The Congress is making money off of defense stocks. So the Congress gets a look at the appropriations. And before the appropriations come public, they go long or short defense stocks. the Congress.

26:14Anthony Scaramucci:And you actually have some people in the Democratic field who are running for president, people like Rahm Emanuel, who's saying, we really need to tighten this up. We shouldn't have government employees being able to trade the poly markets. We shouldn't have members of Congress being able to make stock trades. There is talk about, I mean, it's become a story now here.

26:31Katty Kay:I don't want to get the gun off the bird of Donald Trump, but just hear me for a second. Okay. Democratic Representative Kelly Morrison, she bought stock in Saronic Technologies. It's an autonomous warship company. Do I know what it is? No. I'm on Wall Street for 40 years. Nine days after the beginning of the war with Iran, right as the Navy was awarding Saronic contracts, her office said her portfolio is managed by an investment advisor, and she had no prior knowledge. Okay. Government watchdog groups called it a pretty clear conflict of interest. Caddy, the problem is they're all doing it, Caddy.

27:14Katty Kay:Now, what Trump is doing with his buddies is exponential. Okay, so now maybe the exponential crazy of Donald Trump, which has got Senator Chris Murphy alarmed and all these other guys, maybe they'll say, okay, well, wait a minute, guys, pay these guys more, Caddy. They're making$180 ,000 a year. They can't afford to live in Washington. So they're day trading their personal accounts using insider information, and they're legally allowed to do it. You know it, and I know it.

27:43Anthony Scaramucci:And you wonder why Congress has such low approval ratings, and people think of pox on both their houses. They never fix anything for us. They just make money for themselves.

27:52Katty Kay:But, Cady, here is the big problem, okay? It has to do with the way people think about their government and the way they think about their society, okay? the eight-year-old version of me in 1972, I'm looking up thinking, hey, man, I'm going to make it here. I just got to do the work, go to college, get a great white collar job. I'm not going to be a blue collar guy like my dad. I'm going to make it in this country. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption in the 1970s and corruption in the 19th. Of course there was. But this is so crazy and it's so out there. Caddy, look at me. Now you're looking up and you're like, okay, wait a minute, this is rigged.

28:32Katty Kay:I'm not going to be able to make it. That's how they feel in Russia. That's how they feel in these other countries where the elites are at the top funneling and grifting off the top of the system. You got to break the stronghold of this. Okay. And I'm going after Trump on this, certainly, but it's not just Trump, Caddy. It's a bipartisan situation. And it's absolutely disgusting. It's absolutely disgraceful. But the flip side is they don't make enough money. So be like Singapore, pay them more money, okay, so that they do the job without this sort of nonsense going on.

29:09Anthony Scaramucci:So your t-shirt, nobody cares, work harder. In the current environment, just scratch out the work harder, nobody cares. Because if you are an American, you're looking at this thinking, I'm going to work hard, I'm going to play by the rules, that is going to get me to where I want to go. And meanwhile, you see people in Congress, You see people in the White House, you see anonymous people on the poly markets making a huge amount of money out of inside information that they may or may not have had from the president or from the trades that they're doing in Congress or from the laws that they're doing in Congress.

29:41Anthony Scaramucci:but it's I think it is starting to get political traction you do start to hear people say this is not acceptable you have Rahm Emanuel saying you've got fellow Americans putting their lives on the line you've got somebody else sitting in his or her basement placing bets on it that kind of thing doesn't go down well with a lot of voters so I think you're going to start seeing a push to try and get this regulated in some way it comes from a system that is tolerating this. And when you have it from the top down, of course, you're going to allow more permissive structures for people, lower down their echelons in government or in Congress to try and do the same thing.

30:19Anthony Scaramucci:I don't think Rahm Emanuel is going to get elected, by the way, but he's saying some pretty good stuff on this.

30:23Katty Kay:Nice guy, Rahm. I don't think he gets elected, but let me play the congressman for a second. You know, Cady, I hear you, but I don't care, Cady. Let me tell you what happens to me. The big money comes in because of Citizen United from big business, big defense, Big Pharma. And I do their bidding here in the Congress. You know why? Because I get to go on these junkets and I get to do all this fun stuff for myself. And I trade my portfolio on this. And oh, by the way, you think I really care about the little people I don't, Caddy? Because I've gerrymandered my district in a way where I can stay in power.

30:55Katty Kay:The Congress has a 14 % approval rating, which is slightly above Kim El-jung, the North Korean dictator. But it doesn't matter to me, Caddy, because I have a 95 % incumbency reelection rate. So yeah, go ahead, poo-poo, you guys talk about the reform while I trade the markets. And that is how cynical it actually is. And so Trump is like, hey man, let me take this to the ninth level. I think Hunter, and I always call him Hunter Picasso Biden, I think he sold a painting for like$5 million or something like that. It was like, to use a Trumpian word, that's peanuts, Caddy Kay. We can make billions here.

31:35Katty Kay:If we organize my tweets properly, we can make billions. Peanuts, Caddy Kay.

31:43Anthony Scaramucci:He should have been asking Perisma for a hell of a lot more money to be able to play in this kind of league. We speak about this, by the way, everybody, if you would like to hear more about Trump and the money machine and the money machine around the Trump family and some of the things that Anthony and I have just kind of hair-raising things that we have both heard, You can sign up at the rest is politics us.com to become a founding member. We're talking about it on our bonus episode this week, looking at the Trump money machine. We are going to leave it there. There'll be lots more to talk about next week and we'll be back on Monday.

32:12Anthony Scaramucci:Hope you have all have a great weekend. Hope I make my flight and I'm not standing in the TSA queue for the next three hours. Anthony, I'll let you know how it goes.

32:21Katty Kay:Well, I wish you a safe flight. And, Katie, after telling you all this stuff about the insider trading, I want you to stay with me here at Goalhanger. Okay, I know it's very lucrative that you could move into the Trump administration, but don't do it, Katty. I know the temptation is there. Don't do it, Katty.

32:35Anthony Scaramucci:Don't sell your soul. Okay, guys. See you soon. Thanks for listening.

32:39Katty Kay:Thanks, guys.