18. Trump’s Next Move

24:52On the waiting stuff, though, by the way, they're clearly not listening to you because AP had this great breakdown of the numbers. Since Monday, when it was pretty clear she is going to be the nominee, I'm reading this so I don't get it wrong, Trump and his allies are outspending Harris's team 25 to 1 on television and radio advertising. And there is an argument that actually they need to get out and start spending fast because they don't have long. They need to define her and they need to define her before the Trump team defines her. I'm not sure how effective all of that$68 million that they've spent since Monday on ads has been, if it's been the kind of stuff that is defining her personality.

25:32But I know that some of it has been defining her as too liberal on the issues. And there's been one out of Pennsylvania using a quote from the guy running for the Senate there saying, listen, you can't exactly what you said, that she was opposed to fracking and that's not going to fly in Pennsylvania. But nobody is waiting when it comes to spending money. Okay, just a couple of reactions. So I would tell her dust off the 2008 Barack Obama playbook. You've got to get out there. You got to talk a little bit about your heritage like Barack Obama did. You got to talk about your family. I think people will be very interested in that.

26:02and you've got to speak pro-business because you already have liberal chops. You have liberal bona fides. You got to talk pro-business and you will be able to get independents on board. They'll be like, okay, she's for reproductive freedom. She's not going to hurt my business. And by the way, did Joe Biden hurt my business? The answer is no. Economy's at the all-time high. Economy's improving, doing better. Did Barack Obama hurt my business? Well, he came in during the financial crisis, things got a lot better over the eight years that Barack Obama was running the economy. I am a descendant of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

26:37I am not as liberal as Donald Trump wants you to believe. I grew up and represented the state of California, and I'm here to make sure you're doing well in business, but you have your personal reproductive freedom. And by the way, there are fewer people crossing the American border in the South today than there were on the last day of Donald Trump's presidency. I think you're right. She has to keep saying Inflation is down, unemployment is low. They're going to step away from that border czar stuff. They will step away from that because of what you just said. Yeah. They don't want to put fire on what you just said.

27:10And by the way, yeah, and I heard from somebody in Mexico City after our last podcast where we were talking about Claudia Scheinbaum, the new president of Mexico, who was saying exactly what we were saying, which is watch that relationship. If I was Kamala Harris, I would have President Scheinbaum's number on speed dial and just make sure the Mexicans keep those people away from the border until November, until the election. The producer is asking us how much attention do voters actually pay to all of these$68 million worth of ads that Republicans have spent till Monday. Look, the ads get seen by people.

27:40You'd think perhaps that traditional TV ads have less weight, but a lot of this money is now going into digital ads. They're popping up on TikTok. They're popping up on Instagram. People are seeing them, particularly older voters are seeing the ones that still run on television. They still help to define a candidate. Spoken like a true TV journalist. Look at that. Oh my God, I'm very proud of you. See, if I was your agent, I'd be like, oh, that was a brilliant analytical statement. And with that, I think we'll wrap up this half. Nobody gives a shit about these TV ads. Nobody. I mean, they like glaze over.

28:11They look, the clips come up. You think you spend$68 million for nothing. You spend it because it has some kind of an impact. It pops up on people's lives. I know TikTok is probably more important. And by the way, she is killing it on TikTok. My next life, I'm going to be Katty K's agent, signing her media contract because she's such a good advocate for TV. Yeah, that's my job. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more.

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29:47Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And we are going to talk in this half, Anthony, about what's changed from the last time a woman ran for president in 2016 and what it was like in that campaign that you were part of, kind of the framing of how to deal with her as a woman candidate. Because there was kind of a lot of talk about sexism in that campaign. And I'm just wondering how much the landscape has changed And look, taking a leaf out of your playbook from the last episode we did, I went and looked at some numbers too, because there can't just be one professor on this show.

30:24So I thought, listen, Anthony can come up with numbers. I better go and dig out the data. You've raised my game, Anthony. So in 2016, 5 % of CEOs were women. In 2024, 10 % of CEOs were women. So the numbers doubled. In 2016, 87 women served in the House of Representatives. In 2024, it's 122. So we've gone from 87 Congresswomen to 122 Congresswomen. We've gone from 20 female senators to 25 female senators, and they're now a record 12 female governors. Look, those numbers are nowhere near where I would like them to be, obviously. But on every one of those metrics, we've seen more women in positions of power in the United States.

31:12And I think that every time a woman gets elected into the House of Representatives or gets elected into the Senate or gets elected as a governor, it kind of chips away at the barrier to entry for other women. So I do think that the landscape is different. I also think since 2016, when you were helping on Donald Trump's campaign, we've had the Me Too movement, which has kind of changed the way that the media talks about sexism generally. I think it's changed public awareness of sexism generally. And of course, we've had the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision, which has put women's rights, reproductive rights, at the heart and center of American politics.

31:50So I think you've had kind of three big shifts. You've had more women coming into power. You've had the Me Too movement, which has changed public perception about the kinds of barriers that women face. And then you've had Dobbs, which has made this, you know, an election that perhaps isn't going to be about the economy, but is going to be about women. So I think in that way, the landscape for Kamala Harris is very different from the landscape for Hillary Clinton. Am I being too Pollyanna-ish about this? No, I think it's a brilliant assessment of everything. I just think the, because I love asking you questions.

32:21So if you don't mind, I want to fire this question out at you. Hillary Clinton, to us, when we worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, we thought she was going to win. And we looked at everything, you know, Bannon thought she was going to win. And by the way, she did win the popular vote by three million votes. Yeah, she won the popular vote, but she did things that we could never understand. Okay. So she left the July Democratic Convention in 2016, did not travel to the state of Wisconsin. Not once. She went to Pennsylvania once. I think she went to Michigan twice. Donald Trump was in that state, double digits on every one of those.

32:56In fact, I remember the night, 48 hours before the campaign ended, I think he was in New New Hampshire, and he flew himself to Michigan for one more 1 a.m. rally before he came back to the New York headquarters. So he was leaving everything on the field. She wasn't. And so we're with Donald Trump because of that candidacy. Moreover, I would like to have you react to this. Joe Biden wanted to run against her, wanted to primary her. He was stopped by Barack Obama. Now I'm going to really give people some trivia here. What happened? Obama was a little shaky in 2011 into 2012. He went to the Clintons.

33:33He said, I need your full-throated endorsement. And they said, no problem, but you've got to endorse Hillary in 2016. He said, no problem. If you go back 12 years to the Democratic Convention, the speech that Bill Clinton gave was a phenomenal full-throated endorsement of Barack Obama. And that pushed Obama to stop Biden. So we're sitting here talking about all the demography and the uber, hyper-extended masculinity, overcompensating masculinity of Donald Trump. But all of this stuff is reaction and then formation to reaction, Katty, meaning if the Democrats had handled this differently, Donald Trump would have never been on that stage.

34:13They would be going against more garden variety Republicans. And I want your reaction to that. Am I wrong on that? Because that's something all of us thought eight years ago in that campaign. Yeah. I mean, look, I think you're clearly right on the Obama-Biden stuff and that kind of complicated relationship and Obama endorsing Hillary Clinton and framing it as kind of the time had come for a woman to be president of the United States, which a lot of women believed back in 2016. A lot of women voters hoped that was going to be the case. I don't know that what you're saying, though, gets to her gender.

34:48I mean, she ran a bad campaign by not going to Wisconsin and not focusing - that her gender actually didn't matter. Yeah, that's what I mean. Are you suggesting that her gender didn't matter? Because I think she has said, and she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week saying this, that there was definitely sexism. There was a lot of focus. She was called, as she said in the New York Times, all the kinds of things that she was called during the course of that campaign and the kind of ugly prejudice that she faced. Are you suggesting that that didn't play into the 2016 result? No, no, no.

35:20I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if she did the work in the campaign, despite the sexism, despite the attacks, despite the glass ceiling that she perhaps felt and women of her generation felt in the United States her whole life, she would have won. And she was that close to winning. He had to create an inside straight is what we were calling it. He had to win Pennsylvania and Michigan. He had to win Wisconsin. He had to break the blue wall. He did that. He won. He lost the popular vote by, I don't know, seven to eight million votes, but he still won. He's never won the popular vote.

35:57What's interesting now, he may win the popular vote this time. It could be the first time that he could win it. But I'm saying something different. I'm saying if she had won, the sexism would not have been a big issue in 2024. I'm just giving some alternative history because this stuff goes, I think I want viewers and listeners to know you're on a knife's edge in a campaign. You're on a knife's edge in terms of your decision making. And certain things that you're doing, going left or right, are going to affect people's analysis later on. But perhaps it's more broad than that. It's less deeply analytical.

36:33It's very superficial. Go to Wisconsin. Do the work. If I'm Kamala Harris, do the work. You're an energetic person. Fly yourself everywhere to the point of exhaustion. But I think that's true. And look, Donald Trump, you know, repeatedly in 2016, questioned Hillary Clinton's strength, her stamina, he mocked her voice. I think those were things that were seen as kind of dog whistles about her gender, you know, that she wasn't up to being president, she couldn't because a woman wasn't strong enough or had the stamina enough. They made a bad call on going to Wisconsin. Clearly, that was a campaign decision.

37:12And maybe they were feeling cocky because they felt they had so many paths to 270 electoral college votes. But I think that's a criticism that could be made of any male candidate. I think the interesting question this time around, and I do think there's been a huge sea change in how Kamala Harris is going to be treated as a woman and as a woman of color. I mean, I think, sure, there's going to be sexism. We're already seeing it. The stuff about her laugh is sexist. The implication is somehow that she's too emotional. And women get told that all the time. Women in positions of power are always getting told that they're too emotional to run things.

37:43But I think there is a real change in the sense that there's a public awareness of that kind of stuff and a willingness to call that out, which is why you've got Republicans falling over themselves to distance themselves from the kind of stuff that J.D. Vance has been found to have said about Kamala Harris, about that stuff of being a childless cat lady. Let's have a little bit of fun. I like my cats. So there's an American thing that we do called rotisserie baseball. I don't know if they do rotisserie football in the UK. I have no idea what that means. Okay. So we pick players and we analyze the players and they go play.

38:16What if Trump had picked Nikki Haley? Where would the Trump campaign be right now? Where would he be in the pollings vis-a-vis Kamala Harris? Yeah, I think that would have been a much smarter play for him. I mean, it helps him, of course, with the center of the country, especially with Kamala Harris running, right? They couldn't foresee that Kamala Harris was going to run. Helps him with the sexism. Helps him hugely with people of color, with the center of the country and with suburban women voters, those mythical suburban women voters. So why didn't he pick her? Because I know the answer, but I'm curious as to what you think the answer is.

38:48Go ahead. Why didn't he pick her? First of all, I don't think he could have picked her because he could never have got over the things she said about him. It just was too hard for him to have a woman attack him in public like that and then forgive that woman. In a way that somehow he has been able to do with J.D. Vance, the stuff about him being cultural heroin or cultural opium? Maybe he liked being called Hitler by J.D. Vance. Listen, in 1980, George Herbert Walker Bush eviscerated Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail. He called him, every name in the book, vacuous, dangerous, conservative cowboy.

39:25He used the term voodoo economics when describing his economic plan. And the Reagan people were upset. Reagan himself was upset. When push came to sub, they picked George Herbert Walker Bush because they picked them for the win. And Reagan said, I'll deal with it personality wise. Donald Trump, two things. I don't want anybody getting credit for my win. I am such an uber narcissist. I am bringing everybody over the finish line by myself. So I don't want anybody on this campaign that could possibly say to a journalist, I helped Donald Trump win the election. Does it make any difference whether that person is a woman or a man or none in his mind?

40:03We're going to get into the secondary thing. I am anti-DEI. I am anti-affirmative action. Read Project 2025. That's what it's about. I am white America. I want America to go back to 1947 where there were no blacks in baseball. That's me. I'm red meat, white America. You know what his favorite meal is? I want my steak well done, okay? And I want a ton of Heinz ketchup. As my mother would say, marona me, is this guy, you know, go goots, right? I mean, you got a chicken running in your head. Okay. But this is what he is. And so he boxed himself here, Caddy. He had so many opportunities to lock this up for him, but he didn't.

40:46And now he's up against the sexist charge. And it's a totally different America than the one he ran in. And it's a totally different in America than the one that he wants to live in. And so it'll be very interesting to see if her team can calibrate itself to handle that. And I believe that they will, because I think they're learning from the Clinton campaign what she did. And I give her credit, by the way. I give Secretary Clinton credit. She's open about it. She's writing op-eds about it. And I'm certain she wants Kamala Harris to win. And I'm sure she's advising. Yeah. I mean, there is sort of the disconnect between the way the world has changed.

41:22And I think what J.D. Vance and that comment about childless cat ladies and how she is one of those, and therefore she doesn't have a stake in America. And it's not just him, by the way. There's been this guy, Will Chamberlain. I'm going to look him up if you feel like it on Twitter. He's a kind of conservative MAGA exponent with a kind of pretty big following. And he has said on Twitter, look, she shouldn't be president because she doesn't have kids. There is a kind of view out there of America should be a sort of 1950s America. And as Kamala Harris said in Indianapolis this week, they want to pull you back to that.

41:57I mean, it's not just on terms of reproductive rights, but there's this sort of sense of, well, these guys who are white guys who feel that power is slipping from their fingers, women are earning more money, they're better educated, there are more women for the first time, college educated women in the workforce than men. And my God, we're about to lose our power. So can we just get women back into the kitchen and out of the office, right? I mean, I think there's this, there is that sort of sense out there. I just think that, yes, there's some of that. And there was some of that in 2016. But against that is a pretty strong realization that you can call that stuff out now in a way that perhaps you didn't before Me Too.

42:35And that a lot of women and a lot of men, as we saw in all of those referendums on abortion, don't particularly like to see their wives' rights being taken away on healthcare issues or on other issues. So I think the landscape has changed. And that's why you've got the Wall Street Journal this week saying, listen, Republicans, you've got to figure out how to attack Kamala Harris, because the way that you're doing it, and with Trump, for example, calling Harris dumb as a rock, no woman likes to see another woman being called dumb. No person of color likes to see a person of color being called dumb.

43:07It just great, right? It rubs them up the wrong way and drives them into the opposite camp. So I think that's what the Trump team is trying to figure out. And it's probably down to Trump psychology, like you say. We're contemporaries, you and I, although you look 15 years younger than me. I like to say that I'm younger, but we don't need to remind people about those 10 months difference between us. That's okay. It's not that I'm counting or anything. But let me ask you this question, okay? It's not a statistical question. It's just your gut. Are men of your age afraid of women being in charge?

43:37Yeah, I think they are. Okay. I think they still are. Your mom and dad, my mom and dad, were they afraid of women being in charge? No, because it didn't really happen very much. Okay. Why are they afraid of women being in charge? Because as a white man in many societies, in fact, all Western societies, the fact that you had a Y chromosome and the color of your skin gave you an automatic entry to certain positions of power that you now don't have anymore. Well said. So there's an institutionalization. You're getting the benefit of your anatomy and your skin color because it's more or less been institutionalized and that defines some levels of power.

44:20Right. And that's slipping away. Okay. So that's the next question. Your children, do they feel the same way? So I think that's the really interesting question. I think in many ways they don't, because I think my kids, for example, have grown up seeing me always working and they've grown up seeing their dad working, but also organizing playdates like you do, Anthony, going to PTA meetings, going to school conferences. And I think that's the difference. They've seen the role of men change as much as the role of women change? So there is the dynamic. This is a major change going on in the demography.

44:58And the question is, if the younger voters turn out, she's going to win. And if they don't turn out, if they decided, you know what, doesn't matter. I'm Mr. and Mrs. Cynical. I'm not going to turn out. It's going to be easier for Trump to beat her. So it'll have to see if she can energize those people. The United States has yet to have a woman president, but there are great women leaders around the world. Of course, your great country had Margaret Thatcher 35, 40 years ago. What do you think is going on culturally? I mean, it is interesting when you look at countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Israel, all of those countries that have had female leaders.

45:37It tends to be in countries where there is a parliamentary system and that woman rises to the top of her party, and then the voters vote for the party. They're not voting for that woman as a head of state. Now, many of those countries may feel now fine about voting for that woman as a president. But up until now, and particularly early on, I think it was much easier for a woman to be elected in a parliamentary system as a prime minister, because they weren't having to raise the crazy sums of money that American presidential candidates have to raise. People weren't having to go into the ballot box and vote for Anne Smith, they could vote for the Labour Party or the Conservative Party.

46:19And I think that just made it that one step easier for women to rise to the top of politics. Once America has done it, I think they'll have broken that memory muscle, if you like, that people have of thinking, I always have to vote for a man as president. And that record will have been broken. And so it'll be easier a second time around. And it may even be easier this time around because Hillary Clinton was on the ballot in 2016. But I think that's why. I think that's the main difference. Before we go, if you don't mind, I know we're probably in a little bit of OT, I want to ask you about Barack Obama.

46:51No endorsement for Barack Obama. The right-wing media says that's because they think that Kamala Harris can't beat Donald Trump. Why no endorsement from a Barack Obama? Go. So I read less into this than a lot of the media is reading into this. I know that Kamala Harris has long had a close relationship with Barack Obama. She admires him enormously. I think Barack Obama has a complicated relationship with Joe Biden. He was orchestrating a lot of this departure of Joe Biden behind the scenes. But when it came to the actual moment of the transition, I buy the argument that he didn't want to step on Joe Biden's moment.

47:30Now, maybe I'm being too naive here and too kind of trusting of the things that I'm hearing from other Democrats, but he's going to come out and endorse her. But I think he needed to put a bit of distance between Joe Biden, who is the sitting president after all, and himself. Am I being like massively naive? No, I think that's the right read. So I have an Obama whisperer who you and I both know personally, who more or less plays golf with the President fairly regularly on Martha's Vineyard, who said to me, he needed to, in his mind, this was a Joe Biden, Kamala Harris situation. He needed to stay out of it.

48:07He'll be at the convention. He will be out on the campaign stump and he will do everything he can to help her. But he just wanted it to happen without him. If it was going to be a Mark Kelly or a Josh Shapiro that was going to challenge her, he wanted to be in a position as an elder statesman, still, one of the big leaders in the party to have some chops with whoever rose to the occasion. If it's Kamala Harris, I know he's fine with her. And I think he is going to be a big part of helping. If she does win, and I'm going to predict here on our show that she will win, he will be a big part of her win.

48:41Because he understands that electorate that's about 15 years younger than you or I, about as well as anybody. And he'll help her with that messaging. and he's got his campaign team in there right now working with her. There is no one in American politics who has ever excited black voters and young voters in the way that Barack Obama has. No question. He was a complete rock star and that was why he turned them out in such huge numbers in 2008. And my prediction is that he and Michelle Obama, who is equally popular, will be out on the campaign trail a lot, a lot more because it is Kamala Harris and a lot more enthusiastically than they would have been if it's Joe Biden and that that's going to be a massive asset for her.

49:26Particularly, watch Michelle Obama. If our podcast continues to do well, I promise an upgrade of my wardrobe. I notice that you're - No, I like the t-shirts. It's good. I notice that you're always well-dressed. The t-shirt I'm wearing, if you're listening, I am old enough to remember when we had a functioning democracy, okay? Because that means I'm very old. Okay. That's like I'm old as dirt, but I mean, maybe that was an attack by my wife to give me this shirt, but I'm wearing it proudly today, Katty. Yeah. Maybe functioning democracy can come back again. God knows we need it. Thanks for listening, everybody.

49:54We will be back next week, unless another crazy, crazy thing happens in US politics, in which case, of course, we'll be back with more episodes. That's it from The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. Thanks so much for listening. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. I hope to see you next week.