173. What Trump's Unhinged War Speech Means for Iran

17:43Anthony Scaramucci:The Chinese would put troops into Iran?

17:45Katty Kay:No, I'm not suggesting troops. I'm suggesting a crowbar of economic leverage.

17:51Anthony Scaramucci:On the Iranian regime.

17:52Katty Kay:Yes, to get more secularization. Hey guys, the oil, we need the oil.

17:56Anthony Scaramucci:They don't really care about the secularized. I mean more secularization But they care about the oil regime change exactly all they care about is the oil they could have a Islamic Republic still and the IRGC in power so long as they are compliant towards the Chinese

18:12Katty Kay:Let me think like Trump for a sec. Let me reframe the question. I'm gonna go in there. I'm gonna hit Carg Island I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna fully degrade these guys. I'm gonna stop all ALL, ALL the oil from leaving the Strait of Hormuz. And then I'm going to call Xi and say, you helped me figure this out. No oil is leaving the Strait until that regime secularizes. So how do you make sure that when you take Karg Island or you attack Iranian energy or

18:43Anthony Scaramucci:you attack Iranian desalination plants, which is also a possibility, that the Iranians don't then attack the processing and stabilizing spheres in Abqaiq, all of those ones in eastern Saudi Arabia that are vulnerable. We've seen them attacked before a couple of years ago. How do you know that the Iranians don't do that? So, that's the risk. And we've already seen that this thing can produce results that America did not anticipate.

19:10Katty Kay:Okay, which is why I'm interrupting Survivor reality TV programming to announce to everybody that I need a few more weeks to bomb these guys into the quote-unquote stone age, which by the way is a rogue state leader, disgusting comment, non-humanitarian comment, and I find it absolutely reprehensible and repulsive. And as an American citizen, I denounce the comment fiercely. But let me just explain the imbecile's thinking to everybody listening in. I'm going to take three more weeks to quote unquote bomb them into the stone age. Then I'm taking the 82nd Airborne and the Marines and I'm dropping them into the region and I'm shutting off the oil.

19:55Katty Kay:Then I'm calling Xi. I'm going to say, hey, you got a problem now. You got no oil. You got no oil coming in from Venezuela. You got no oil coming in from here. And this is the last gasp of American hegemony. And I need you to get involved now. And I need you to break up this radical institution which I haven't liked since 1980. And I've been giving interviews to Barbara Walters and Larry King since 1980. And I call for Americans having the courage and the strength to do this. And you say what? Because that's what he's doing, by the way. Guys, I'm just letting you know because I know the guy. That's what he's doing.

20:34Katty Kay:But go ahead.

20:34Anthony Scaramucci:Well, and the Chinese then have retaliatory efforts of their own, as we saw the only people that stood up to America after Liberation Day were the Chinese because they've been wargaming this. They've been accounting for all of these possibilities the last four years. They've been looking at all of the stuff that Donald Trump might do. And it's hard to believe they're not wargaming this at the same time. Now, they need the oil. They've got, what, 100 to 200 days of reserve supplies that they have. So we've already got through a month of that. But they can also turn around, as they did after Liberation Day, and said, OK, you want to play that game?

21:06Anthony Scaramucci:You want to be the tough guy? then we have rare earth minerals that you need. And he, he's, he, she has found America's weak point. America may, Trump may think he has leverage over China's weak point, which is the oil, but China has some control over this as well. So I think this is, if that is the game that they're playing, thinking that this is all going to fall neatly into place for them, there's a lot of things along that route that have to go very right for the White House. And this is a White House that is still, I would say, a month in, floundering for explanations and floundering for an exit route.

21:42Anthony Scaramucci:We've had regime change. We haven't. I don't care about the remaining uranium. We have to end their nuclear capacity. The Straits can stay closed. It's not our problem. The Iranians can control and toll the Straits. That's the world's issue. I mean, they're literally saying things from one day to the next that contradict each other. If this was a game of sophisticated chess that you have just laid out, where the start point of February the 28th was leading to the Chinese becoming more involved in the Middle East and changing the Iranian regime, and these were all the thought out steps that were going to get us to that end point, and I had confidence in the clarity of the vision and the strategy and the intelligence and the use of the intelligence, not just the intelligence, but the White House's ability to listen to the intelligence.

22:31Anthony Scaramucci:then I would say to you, okay, well, maybe that's where we're going to end up. But a month into this, I'm seeing confusion and disarray. I'm not seeing clarity. And I'm not seeing evidence that they're listening to the intelligence documents that I know are being presented to the president.

22:47Katty Kay:I know we're going to talk about another topic, but let me ask you another question. De-dollarization. Would you be worried about that? If you were an American business person or the Federal Reserve chairman, or you were somebody that cared about the deficit in the United States and how we financed the deficit. How is this working out now? Do you like this? Do you like what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz?

23:12Anthony Scaramucci:This must have upped the risk of it, right? Because the Chinese people who are paying these tolls to the Iranians are not paying in dollars. And you're now, you know, if you're talking about petro yuan rather than petrodollars, that I would have thought increases the risk of pressure on the dollar. as the reserve currency of the world. But you're the financier. How much is this actually changing the state of play?

23:37Katty Kay:Again, you have to tell me directionally where the country's going. Because if I'm a European leader, you made an excellent point a few minutes ago where you elect Donald Trump once, okay, but now you're doing it twice to something wrong, something going wrong in the country. But I really think that we're headed for…

23:58Anthony Scaramucci:Realignment.

24:00Katty Kay:And we're headed for some superpower brinksmanship here. And I think this is a very dangerous territory. And one thing Trump is right about is that we let manufacturing go in the United States and we didn't take control of the rare earth minerals that we need for a lot of our technology and a lot of our technology-based missile defense, et cetera. and the Chinese have 90 % of the production capability of that. And I think it's a really, really tough move here. To me, I mean, the negligence of the Republicans in the Senate to not check this man, okay? And we'll flip over to the birthright citizenship in a second because it's the same thing there.

24:50Katty Kay:This is the thing I would be worried about as a European leader. I'd say, oh my God, these guys have allowed a country, a great country to get down to a decision making of one.

25:00Anthony Scaramucci:We're going to talk about this in the second half and we'll take a break and talk about the birthright citizenship case because in some ways, the bit of the system that is holding in America, the bit that might give hope to people looking at the country are America's courts.

25:21Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome back to the program. we're going to talk about the Supreme Court and the birthright citizenship case that is currently before the Supreme Court and the extraordinary sight yesterday of Donald Trump turning up, the first ever president to turn up to the Supreme Court while they were hearing a case that he is bringing. So, Anthony, the case is around, centers around the 14th Amendment of the United States, which allows for anyone in the country to become an American citizen, with the exception of the children of diplomats or invading armies. I think they're not allowed to become American citizens.

25:55Anthony Scaramucci:But basically it says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. This applies to children of immigrants in the country. So my children, for example, I am not an American citizen, but my children who were born in Washington, D.C. automatically became American citizens just by virtue of the fact that they were born here. But the Trump administration wants to deny citizenship to children of people who are either in the US illegally or here on temporary visas, arguing that that encourages the practice of what is known as birth tourism, whereby people come to the US when they are heavily pregnant in order to give birth, in order to get an American passport.

26:42Anthony Scaramucci:So the 14th Amendment has been around since 1868. It's been looked at several times. Sometimes why does the Trump administration think that it has a case to overturn it? If you are the Trump administration's solicitor general and you're going before the Supreme Court, what is the case that you are making? Put on your hat of being John Sauer, but ideally not the voice, which is a kind of weirdly grating, scratchy voice. I don't know if it's just me that thinks that, but anyone else who's listened to it might feel the same. So what's the case that you're making?

27:14Katty Kay:Well, I'm going to make the case. By the way, I'm going to say that it's a ridiculous case and just remind people that Marco Rubio will have to turn in his passport because he wouldn't fit the description.

27:26Anthony Scaramucci:Along apparently with lots of Native Americans, according to the White House.

27:30Katty Kay:We'd have to talk a little bit about Barron Trump. I think they would have to figure that one out as well. But let me make the political argument first, then I'll make the policy argument, and then we'll talk about the power and the culture. So the political argument is that the base believes that illegal immigration is the country's biggest problem. And so birthright citizenship is the most powerful symbol of that. You're coming into the country and creating an anchor baby so that you can pull your illegal family into the country. So this is that xenophobia. This is that racism that Trump likes pulling on.

28:03Katty Kay:Okay. So this is something to Trump's voters. This feels wrong to them. and Trump is a brilliant culture warrior. Again, people can like me for saying it or dislike me, but he understands how to identify emotional pressure points on people. The policy argument is a little bit interesting about the magnet effect. What Trump's people like at the Heritage Foundation that are a little deeper intellectually than Trump, what they would say about this is that the data is mixed, meaning that some people come for jobs and safety, but some people also come to live off of the welfare system, right? So that's the thing the heritage guys are like, hey, man, you're coming over here, you have your kid, your kid's a citizen, he's already entitled to this.

28:51Katty Kay:And so this is that we hate poor black and brown people argument.

28:56Anthony Scaramucci:Forget the argument that they're also going to pay taxes and have jobs and keep the American economy going.

29:01Katty Kay:No, no, we don't like that because remember they're all welfare queens. Remember, we're right-leaning lunatics and they're all welfare queens, okay? And then the power argument, and this is something that nobody actually says out loud, so I'll say it. If you redefine who counts as a citizen by executive order, you've claimed so much power, so much enormous presidential power, okay? And so Trump's theory and the gloony tunes around him is a maximalist position for the president. And therefore, Article 2 blows out Article 1 and Article 3. And I now have the maximalist power where if I win this, I'm winning everything after this, Katya.

29:46Katty Kay:So this is the touchdown throw. It's the domino effect. This is the touchdown throw, okay? So people have to understand what they're going for here. They're not just going for the black and brown person that had a baby here in the country. We're throwing them out. Probably got to throw Marco out too, but that's okay. Marco's expendable. We're going for the maximalist power here. I just want to say one last thing very quickly. Trump is going to lose this, but he's going to win this in the culture war. So he's sitting there saying, I'm going to go to the court. I'm going to lose. I'm going to go to my base and say, look at me.

30:26Katty Kay:I went to the court. I nominated those stupid people, those stupid people on the court. And I lost. And you got to come out. Why are you laughing?

30:35Anthony Scaramucci:Because that's exactly what he says. Yeah. I mean, literally, he's calling the Supreme Court justices stupid, which I don't know about you, but if I was walking into a courtroom trying to win a case, I wouldn't start with, your honor, I think you're stupid.

30:52Katty Kay:He 95 % knows he's going to lose the case. Yes, I agree with that. He 95 % knows this, Caddy. And Caddy, you have to understand what would happen here, okay? You would blow the entire country up, okay?

31:10Anthony Scaramucci:Well, you'd have to go back into, I mean, as one of the Supreme Court justices was saying, it was Amy Coney Barrett was saying, okay, what's the practical nature of this? Do you go back to people who were born here in the last year? Are you going into hospital rooms? Are you checking people's birth certificates as they're in the delivery room? I mean, the implications of this are unmanageable anyway. It's a very hard thing to institute.

31:35Katty Kay:Let me pick up the phone here. You're going to be Justice Roberts. Okay, you're the chief, Chaz, let me go to the phone.

31:40Anthony Scaramucci:Who had one of the best lines, by the way, which we'll come to. If you want a slogan for this administration.

31:45Katty Kay:No, no. What was his line? Go ahead. Tell us the line.

31:47Anthony Scaramucci:You've got the Attorney General, the Solicitor General from the White House saying, well, we're in a new world compared to late 1800s, where people can fly to this country when they're pregnant and give birth there. And Justice Roberts turns around and says, well, it's a new world. It's the same constitution. Same old constitution, which I think is how the court is going to feel about very many of the cases that they're bringing. It was a good line.

32:12Katty Kay:That's indicating that Trump's going to lose. But let me get on the phone with you. Yeah. Justice Roberts, are you there? I'm here. So I just want to give you the heads up, okay? If you rule with Trump, you are going to create a whole class of people born in America who aren't Americans. But guess what, Justice Roberts? Those kids will have no citizenship anywhere because their parents' home countries, Justice Roberts, they don't automatically grant citizenship to the kids born abroad. So you're going to create a group of stateless children growing up here in the United States, unable to work legally, vote, or access basic services.

32:53Katty Kay:And you say what, Justice Roberts? Hold on, hold on.

32:57Anthony Scaramucci:Justice Roberts is saying this is all a little tricky. And by the way, Mr. Solicitor General, what are you thinking about all of those Native Americans? Are they birthright citizens too? At which point the White House turned around yesterday and said, oh, yeah, maybe I guess they are.

33:14Katty Kay:I hadn't thought of that before is what the guy said in the court.

33:18Anthony Scaramucci:I was texting last night, Anthony, with one of the lawyers who brought this case, Norm Eisen, who was sitting in court two rows behind Donald Trump, who's one of the lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who's brought this.

33:30Katty Kay:Did he pick up the smell coming off of Trump?

33:32Anthony Scaramucci:He said that, like you, he says they're not going to win this. He thinks it's going to be a six to three or even a seven to two ruling, judging by yesterday's hearings. He says the White House was not prepared, partly, he says, because it's very hard to defend, as you've just said, but also because the DOJ has been so hollowed out with lawyers because a whole bunch of lawyers, hundreds of lawyers have left the DOJ because they wanted to institute the rule of law, not the misrule of law, that there's actually been a noticeable, he was saying, deterioration in the quality of the White House's lawyering recently and that the White House could present better cases.

34:10Anthony Scaramucci:But, for example, they hadn't even got an answer to something as basic as what does this mean about Native Americans who were in the country hundreds of years before white people arrived in the country. but according to the White House, may themselves be here only through birthright citizenship. But he said something interesting. He said, I'll read his text to me, the bubble of power and fear around Trump has been popped. So everybody from the Supreme Court on down is emboldened. Trump is on the run. Yes, that might be what he's going to say. He's taking on the White House. But if Donald Trump thought that by going to the court, he could intimidate the snowflakes who sit on the bench into doing his bidding.

34:51Anthony Scaramucci:I think he has another thing coming.

34:53Katty Kay:But he didn't do that for that reason.

34:56Anthony Scaramucci:No, he did it to show his base. But it is one thing for him. He thinks he can do it with the Republican senators in the Senate. He thinks he can do it with the Republican House members, and he probably has some sway. But I don't think he's going to manage to do this with the courts because you're right, this was performative. He wants to show the base that he's fighting. He wants to show the base that he tried to stop mail-in voting, which he also signed an executive order for this week. So after the midterms, if he loses, he can go and say, well, look, it's all the fault of the judges. They ruled against me.

35:26Anthony Scaramucci:They ruled against me on birthright citizenship. They ruled against me on mail-in voting. It's not my fault. We would have won otherwise. Blame the judges. Don't blame me. But I think it proves again that if you're looking for an indication that the system in America is holding, Norm Eisen said this to me again yesterday, what we heard from Senator Coons. They have bought something like 600 cases against the White House in the course of the past year, and they've had a success rate even at the Supreme Court of about 80%. The American system holds, but the last line of defense seems to be the courts.

36:03Anthony Scaramucci:And as everybody says, it shouldn't just be the courts. Where's Congress? That's the good news for the day, by the way, guys.

36:08Katty Kay:Yeah, it's good news, but I want to say something contrarian, which importantly isn't good news. And I want people to really pay attention to this, okay? He's going to lose the case. That's my prediction. Okay, but this was not the war. Okay, this is a small battle that he's losing. The war is about establishing that everything is negotiable, even the Constitution. And Article 2, for me, makes me the supreme ruler of the United States. And so therefore, everything in that Constitution, I'm going to push and shove at over the next three years. But none of this really helps the Attorney General, does it, Katty?

36:50Anthony Scaramucci:No, if you've had poor lawyering, is this another reason why Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is on her way out, that the president has not been impressed by how she handled the Epstein files case that dragged on too long for his liking? He hasn't been impressed, of course, by some of the stuff around immigration and how that's been handled. And apparently that very combative hearing she had up on the Hill where she was deriding senators and members of the House, he didn't like that either. She may have felt that was the way to play it, but he felt like it was overkill. I suspect this makes no difference to the erosion of the firewall between the DOJ and the White House, which I think is still one of the biggest consequences of the last year here in Washington.

37:35Katty Kay:So we've established that we're acting like a rogue state. We've established that we have a ruler a man child that thinks he's a king and we've established that we've got a bunch of cowards in the Congress and so it's not a great situation caddy and And the market should actually be selling off more than it has sold off if you really think about everything that's going on. Because how do you fix this now without transformative leadership? Because the current bunch of jokers that are sitting in Washington are not capable. They don't have the courage to fix this.

38:12Anthony Scaramucci:I think you have to look to American elections. And actually, I thought you were going to say something else. The war is elections. The war is not just power. I mean, maybe elections are a route to power. It's another good point.

38:28Katty Kay:But I'm really just trying to explain to people what Trump is thinking. You know, I mean, this is me trying to blow out the other two articles.

38:34Anthony Scaramucci:Maybe the war is money. Actually, the war is money. And we can get into that some other time. We've spoken about that, by the way, for our founding members. We did a long episode talking about the finances of the Trump family. and Donald Trump Jr. is going around telling people that by the time Donald Trump leaves office in 2028, which he will do, the Trump family will be the richest family in the world. And sometimes you wonder whether actually this is about money.

39:01Katty Kay:But Katty, before we go, you read out a list, I read out a list, but what could bring Trump down are the gas prices. That's the irony of the whole thing. Okay, dude, you are losing the MAGA people. Oh, okay. You better pull out by 4th of July because they're going to be grilling hot dogs and they'd be driving around in the pickup trucks and they don't want$7,$8 gas here in the US.

39:26Anthony Scaramucci:With all of this going on in the States, one other thing that I keep being asked about when I'm in Europe particularly, and actually when I was down in Mexico, is the World Cup and whether this could end up being an embarrassing spectacle. We were asked in our members only episode this week, how Trump would react if fans boo the US national anthem. Take a listen.

39:48Katty Kay:Trump is going to be angry about it. I think most people would be generally upset about it. I mean, we're booing the Canadian national anthem and they're booing our anthem. This is all created by one megalomaniac asshole. So, I mean, yeah, this would be sad for me to see that happen. Listen, I was at the 94 Italy versus Ireland World Cup match. I've talked to Gary Lineker about it. It was one of the most exciting sporting events that I'd ever been to in my life. It was at the Meadowlands Stadium in the summer of 1994. And the spirit in there was the spirit that I would like to have at an American hosted World Cup, but we have an asshole running the country who's pissed off most of the world.

40:39Anthony Scaramucci:And people are worried about coming here and getting picked up. I mean, seriously, they're worried about what happens if I come there and I get picked up by ICE and then I'm thrown into a prison for five months.

40:48Katty Kay:There will be a lot of people that don't come here because of all that. Although I am going to say this, I do feel like that is toning down. I do feel like Holman and these guys have realized that the Minnesota situation, the Minneapolis situation was horrific.

41:07Anthony Scaramucci:I think we're not going to see more surges. You're right. We're still going to see the deportations though, but we're not going to see more surges. They're going to be more careful.

41:14Katty Kay:I think it's going to be more Obama and Biden like though. It'll be a little bit more quieter.

41:19Anthony Scaramucci:They're not going to film it. They're not going to try and get the whole publicity. But if you really want to change the policy, you need to change Stephen Miller. And Stephen Miller is still in the White House and the president still listens to him.

41:32Katty Kay:OK, that was great to sign up at the rest is politics. Us.com to hear the full episode. Happy Easter, everybody. Happy Passover. And we'll see you next week.

41:43Anthony Scaramucci:Have a great weekend, everybody.

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42:30Anthony Scaramucci:Listen to us to find out how investors are reacting and whether we're heading to a financial Armageddon. I'm talking to Karen Ward, a chief market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management. Listen to The Rest Is Money to get her take.