194. Trump Vs Netanyahu: Who’s Calling The Shots?

14:51Anthony Scaramucci:Well, first of all, I wouldn't have him speaking to journalists. I mean, I really wouldn't. I don't think that.

14:55Katty Kay:He's going to do that anyway. He's going to do that anyway. Mr. President, I'd like you to stop speaking to journalists. You're hurting our ability to get the peace. F you and you're fired after 11 days, I'm going to continue to speak to journalists. Okay. So, but then what would you do? Recognizing that you have Trump in power and you're recognizing that this is the disaster that is Donald Trump. So what would you do?

15:17Anthony Scaramucci:I think you need to get to two things, right? You need to create space for the negotiations to succeed. And that's going to mean a couple of things. One is that the Iranians are going to have to have some kind of upfront payment. Like you say, they're running out of money. They need money now. Sanctions relief won't cut it. The return on that is going to take too long. They need some assets unfrozen. So you need Trump to get to a position where he can describe unfrozen assets as being the very opposite of what Barack Obama did when he gave Iran unfrozen assets. You're going to have to trick him into thinking there is a way to sell unfrozen assets, Iranian assets, back to Iran as a win.

16:11Anthony Scaramucci:Because without that, I don't see how he gets a deal. And he really wants a deal. The trouble is he's gone around telling everyone who will listen in Washington, including members of Congress I've spoken to, that the one thing he doesn't want is money going to the Iranians up front. He's going to have to swallow that. That has to be on the table if you want to get some kind of a deal. Otherwise, diplomacy is not going to work. So he's going to have to be able to present himself, and you're going to have to give him the language to present himself as the master negotiator who managed to get the Iranians to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for very little money that was theirs anyway, while we got access to the nuclear dust that they had already agreed to water down.

16:54Katty Kay:Well, I mean, for me, okay, I'm going to put myself in the Israeli position here for a second, recognize everything I know about Trump. I would go to Trump and say, listen, I'll trade the Lebanon front. You want the deal. I get that. you're telling everybody no nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapons, nuclear dust, blah, blah. I would say, hey, I'll trade the front, the Hezbollah strikes for more definition and more delineation on getting the nuclear material out of that country, which ironically we had under Obama. But let me just explain, because if I can get it out of the country, my position inside of Israel is I'm eliminating the nuclear threat.

17:39Katty Kay:We're always going to be at war here. Our neighbors and us, for whatever reason, since 1948 are fighting each other, but I don't want to get wiped off the map. And so for me, that would be the move. There's 440 kilograms of uranium, and I would definitely push for that.

17:59Anthony Scaramucci:And you'd find a way to make Trump accept that he's going to have to pay some money up front. I mean, he's going to have to pay to get the straight open. That's just what it is. And he's going to have to accept that.

18:08Katty Kay:Yeah. He hates that because he watched Fox News 10, 12 years ago. And when Obama was doing that, they were all aghast at that. But that's the real politic, Caddy. They all would tell you this, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Roosevelt. Churchill would tell you this. There's only so much power that we have. And there's only so much influence that we have on the rest of the world. And whether you're von Metternich or Henry Kissinger, you pick it, you have to balance the powers and you have to put everybody in a position where they have a slight political win, even your adversary. Okay. And there's been a few unconditional surrenders, the Nazis in 1945, the Confederate army in 1865, but that's not this.

19:02Katty Kay:Okay. There's not going to be Trump called for an unconditional surrender of Iran, but good luck, unless you're going to put 1 million ground troops on the ground and you're going to bomb them into the stone age, which nobody has the will for, that's also not going to happen. So to me, if I'm Trump, I'm trying to get the deal done, I'm going to pay the money, Kat, even if it's something I don't like or don't want to do.

19:30Anthony Scaramucci:So I think the other thing that I would do on our situation room, our little rest is politics situation room, there would be a big sign on the door, Anthony saying, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, you are not welcome here. Because the Hawks, whilst there is no deal, the hawks are finding space, whether it's hawks in Tehran or hawks in Washington or hawks in Jerusalem, the hawks are finding space to push for escalation. And that's why we need a deal done soon, because they are circling and they are the ones that are trying to ramp this up again, because they don't want the deal. So we need to get the deal done, which means Trump swallowing a bit of humble pie and realizing what he has to do.

20:16Anthony Scaramucci:But I don't think, Anthony, I think you and I both agree it sounds like this morning, I don't think we are anywhere near a deal. Even though President Trump has done his usual, let's juice the Monday morning markets thing of posting on Truth Social that a deal is very close. By my reckoning, that is like the fifth iteration of this thing of America, of Trump saying that the deal is close and then the deal is nowhere near close and it all falls apart and the Iranians walk away.

20:45Katty Kay:I agree, but he doesn't need, he's going to say that because that's Donald Trump, but he doesn't need the deal, Caddy. What he needs is the freeze. What he needs is the stalemate. And what he needs is to let them sell some oil and get some of our Goff ally tankers through the strait.

21:02Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, he needs some opening up of the strait. That's what he needs. But that is, at this point, Anthony, that's the deal. I mean, nobody's thinking that there's going to be some big nuclear deal announced. All we want, the priority at the moment is to get the strait open. Okay, here's my question for you before we go to break. At what point does the smart investor money start realizing that when Donald Trump says that there is a deal near, he's probably hiding something and we are not near a deal? Okay.

21:34Katty Kay:So it's a great question, but you have to understand how the markets work. The markets are working off of the notion that Trump is going to pump the market on Monday.

21:43Anthony Scaramucci:Exactly what he did this morning.

21:45Katty Kay:So traders are getting up on Sunday. I've got buddies of mine. They sit at these huge trading turrets and they have literally screens dedicated to Trump's truth social. They have bling, bling, bling notifications the minute Trump says something on his truth social. The fever and the circuit that you're seeing right now is not going to break anytime soon because they're trading off of Trump's information the same way he is. You see what I mean? And that's just people saying, okay, and that's unbelievable amounts of cynicism, but that's just the way it works, the way it works in the markets. And so people getting up on Monday and it's too late.

22:28Katty Kay:They got to get up on Sunday and they've got to look at what the hell's going on and get ready for the Tokyo market to open, Hong Kong market to open and trade the Trump tweets. And that's what they've been doing.

22:39Anthony Scaramucci:But oil was up, right? In the Asian markets because they've seen what's happening.

22:43Katty Kay:Yeah, but I don't think we have any resolution to this for several months, but I do think you're going to get the straight open or partially open, and you're going to get the oil prices into an equipoise. And I think you're going to have a cold peace on this situation, but you're not going to have a resolution because Trump doesn't want to pay the money because of the tarring that he'll get that he's Obama-lite. Netanyahu doesn't really want it to 100 % stop either because of the political coalition that's fracturing before him. And the Iranians don't care. They just want to be able to sell oil so they can try to get their economy revived.

23:30Katty Kay:And so if you take those three points of the triangle, that's a 60-day freeze, let some oil through the strait, and will be in this sort of weird equipoise.

23:41Anthony Scaramucci:I had a conversation over the weekend with an international economist who had been studying the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. And he was saying that he doesn't think the Strait of Hormuz is ever going to go back to the kind of transport flows that it was before the war. Because if you look at what happened in the Red Sea, when the Houthis started bombing tankers, hitting tankers in the Red Sea, actually the traffic has never picked up fully even when they stopped doing so. And I think that the legacy that Trump has given the world of this war, it's not going to be a peace deal or necessarily even a successful nuclear resolution.

24:24Anthony Scaramucci:It's going to be a permanent inflation tax on the global economy that the Iranians have just put in their back pocket because they know they can shut the strait at any time once they've had a chance to rebuild themselves and rebuild their own economy and rebuild their own military supplies.

24:43Katty Kay:But I think he's changed the right-wing propaganda on this. Because when you listen to Fox News or these other people and they just want you to go hard at the Iranians and beat them up like it's a sports team, I think he's now changed the narrative, which is this is a way more complex situation. And so even the Fox News pundits, they can't seem to get around the fact that the realities are there's just only so much that the Americans can do. And I'll just take you back to the tanker wars in 1984 to 1988, very similar situation, very tight parallels where we had to reluctantly escort commercial shipping out of there.

25:29Katty Kay:and I think that's where we're going to be. The next president, Cady, will be sitting here saying, okay, well, Trump left me a mess. How do I quietly resolve this with the Iranians so that I can have free flowing oil and goods and services coming through the strait? That will be done without talking to journalists. That's my prediction. That'll be done in a subterranean sort of a way.

25:55Anthony Scaramucci:Okay. I'm going to take a break and come back and talk about that extraordinary interview with Meet the Press.

26:04Anthony Scaramucci:Anthony, you have a few kids. I imagine you're looking forward to Father's Day.

26:08Katty Kay:It's a special day in the UK, also here in the US. And look, as a dad myself, I wanted to give our listeners a quick tip. This year, why not give your dad a membership to the Restless Politics US?

26:22Anthony Scaramucci:And because we love all the dads out there, those who send us questions who are in our founding members club, those who come to our shows and come up and speak to us afterwards. We are offering a 25 % discount on an annual gift membership.

26:34Katty Kay:I mean, come on, Caddy. What dad wouldn't want our exclusive founding members Q &A, our members only mini series, ad free listening, early access to our live shows, ticketing and much, much more.

26:48Anthony Scaramucci:Just head to the rest is politics, us.com. You can click on gifts and the gift will land straight in your dad's inbox right on Father's Day.

26:56Katty Kay:It's an excellent Father's Day present. I would know. Go to the rest is politics us dot com and click on something to make your dad a founding member. Happy Father's Day, everybody.

27:09Anthony Scaramucci:Happy Father's Day.

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28:08Katty Kay:via, including important safety information.

28:16Katty Kay:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Anthony Scaramucci and Caddy Kay. Caddy, NBC. Crooked, crooked NBC. Yes, they spent a lot of money to fly out to Wisconsin. It was an event with farmers out there and they were trying to get that one-on-one interview with the president and Kristen Welker was asking him normal questions. I didn't think they were crazy questions. I watched the interview, but he didn't like it. Two things about that interview that I think people should be aware of. Trump threw down the microphone. You could hear him crunching the microphone as he stepped on it. But when he got up, he's not doing squats, Caddy Kay.

28:56Katty Kay:When Trump got up, he was wobbling out of the seat and he was in an awkward stoop as he walked away.

29:03Anthony Scaramucci:Because they had the boom mics ahead of above them. You can't see that in the shot, but they did.

29:08Katty Kay:I didn't like his mobility. I'll just tell you that. Yeah. That was not a springy guy there.

29:13Anthony Scaramucci:So look, so here's what happens. They do this interview. It's interrupted by the rain. They keep referring to the rain. Trump is clearly getting irritated with the rain. Even Trump can't stop the rain, but he wants to do the interview. So he does the interview. They cover a whole load of things. And then at the end of the interview, they get to the weaponization fund And Donald Trump gets into January the 6th and how he would like to help those people because they were ushered in by the FBI. I think anyone who watched the images of January the 6th knows that what we saw actually was not FBI agents.

29:47Anthony Scaramucci:And anyway, this was the Trump presidency, not the Biden presidency at this point. So it was his FBI. But I did not see FBI agents calmly ushering rioters in. And what I saw instead was police, you know, having their literally having their heads squeezed between doorways and being attacked by these rioters. And from then on, for the next 10 minutes, the whole interview disintegrates and it becomes Kristen Welker doing a good job, I thought, of trying to push the president to produce the evidence for his favorite bugbear that the 2020 election was stolen. And there's a back and forth. And she says, but show me the evidence.

30:28Anthony Scaramucci:There is no evidence. Show us the evidence. There have been 64 court cases. There was no evidence. He's not buying any of it. And eventually he pulls off his microphone and says, okay, I'm done and walks out. He has a history, by the way, of walking out of interviews. He's the only person, fun fact here, did you know he was the only person, as far as I know, to walk out of an Ali G interview with Sasha Byron Cohen. He kind of got the joke and after a few minutes said, okay, I'm done with this. But anyway, he did that. There's a couple of things here that I think are worth talking about. One is how do journalists handle Donald Trump?

31:01Anthony Scaramucci:When you have the president of the United States on television saying that the 2020 election was stolen, saying that the California election count, which is currently being counted, is corrupt and crooked. Do you stop the interview? Do you focus on one of the lies and just make sure your audience knows It is a lie that the FBI ushered in rioters. It is a lie that the California election process is crooked and rigged. It still surprises me. And it's one of the reasons why I'm just never sure if I would like to interview Donald Trump. because unless you spend your whole time playing fact checker, you're doing your audience a disservice.

31:50Anthony Scaramucci:Because he does. He lies. He is clearly in that Meet the Press interview. What's he actually doing in that interview that matters? It's not so much the re-litigation of 2020 or even of January the 6th. He is laying the groundwork for being able to say that the California election that's taking place at the moment was stolen. And he's laying the groundwork for being able to say the midterm election is stolen if it doesn't go the way I want it.

32:18Katty Kay:Give more context. So what's going on in California and tell us how the president is breeding and feeding that sort of uncertainty.

32:28Anthony Scaramucci:So California has, as their officials would say, a slow count process. You are allowed to have your ballot counted in California if you've mailed it in and it is postmarked the day of the election. So any ballot that arrives into the election houses, counting rooms that is postmarked from the day of the election, on the day of the election, that can be counted, even if it arrives four days later. California mail can be slow. The postal service has been pretty degraded over the last few years, so it's even slower. So they are literally still counting. It can take six, seven days. That's the nature of California elections.

33:12Anthony Scaramucci:It will take six, seven days in November because of this system that they have. And Kristen Welkin was saying that to the president, that is the California system. It's rigged. It's crooked. That is the California system. They count the ballots. They count everything that arrives that has been postmarked on the day of the election itself. It takes time, But he doesn't buy it. What he's wanting to say, and he says it with such certainty, it's rigged, it's being stolen, is what he's saying. He's setting up a process whereby he can say, if I don't win, and he sees his candidates as proxies for himself, if I don't win, then the election was stolen.

33:51Anthony Scaramucci:But actually, maybe it's a dumb system. Maybe you don't like the system. Maybe they shouldn't accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day and you have to just get your act together and post them two weeks beforehand. But that's not the system. So given that we have the system we have, you want to try and do all you can, I think, to make peace or people believe in the integrity of the system because what Donald Trump is doing is undermining public belief in democracy. and that's his goal.

34:21Katty Kay:He's winning at that. He's been very successful at that because a lot of people have grown very cynical. And I've said this, it would have almost been better off for America and the world if he had won in 2020 because if he won in 2020, he'd already be out to pasture and we wouldn't have had this insurrection and we wouldn't have had this electoral stress where he's challenging the integrity of all of our elections and he's making people feel that the, you know, there's a quote unquote rig system. But I want to flip back to the journalist for a second, Caddy. Do you remember Bernard Goldberg? Does the name sound familiar?

34:59Katty Kay:Uh-uh. Okay. So Bernard Goldberg worked at a place called CBS News, which is considered the Tiffany Network. And he worked for Dan Rather, who was the anchor at CBS News and many others. And he wrote a book about 15 years ago called Bias, B-I-A-S. And it was his interpretation that CBS News had a liberal bias to it. And he articulated all the things that he saw at CBS News. It became a nonfiction bestseller in the United States. He went on and did many interviews about this topic. And obviously, CBS News refuted it, et cetera. But my question to you as a journalist, someone who has been around for three decades, mainstream news, is it biased, Katty?

35:46Katty Kay:Is it tilted to the left?

35:48Anthony Scaramucci:So I would say it's less that it's tilted to the left, Anthony. But I do think, and I've heard this from conservatives for years around America, that they've lost the big institutions of democracy like universities and the press to liberals and that it's skewed against them. And I think in one respect, they're right. And that is that the major newspapers and broadcasters of the United States have their headquarters in New York and Washington and Los Angeles. They do not have them in Kansas or Oklahoma or even Texas. And that produces a consensus in the editorial rooms of those media organizations that is generally pro-globalization, pro-elites, pro-education, And just all of those people in those editorial boardrooms tend to come from elite universities, have more of a global flavor.

36:51Anthony Scaramucci:They probably are more likely to lean democratic because we know that 90 % of people with university degrees end up in cities and they tend to vote more democratic. But I think it's as much the coast of America being out of touch with the heartland of America as it is a deliberate bias. Because I do think having worked in news organizations for a long time, that journalists of reputable organizations by and large don't always get it right, but they really try to be fair. I think they have a real commitment to that. Donald Trump does not try to be fair. In 2016, his rallies were a kind of playbook.

37:34Anthony Scaramucci:It was like the greatest hits. The first 30 minutes would be how wonderful he is. The next 30 minutes would be the press can't be believed, they're all rigged. And the last 30 minutes would be an attack on Hillary Clinton. And it was a deliberate strategy. If you undermine the public's belief in the press, even if the press is doing a good job, then you can say that the election was rigged. And you can say to people, don't believe it just because you read it in the press, because the press after all is rigged. So I think it's very cynical what he's doing when he attacks the press. And yes, he's playing on some prejudices and beliefs that people have that the press had become skewed against them and didn't represent their values.

38:18Anthony Scaramucci:But I think it's also his he is being far more cynical and that he is just deciding that if I make people distrust the press, then when the press tells them I've lost the election, they won't believe the press. They'll believe me.

38:31Katty Kay:Scott Pelley, was he liberal? And just for those who may not know who Scott Pelley is, he was just recently fired by CBS News. He was one of the lead correspondents on probably their most successful news program, 60 Minutes, which had a banner year last year, over$200 million of advertising revenues flowed into 60 Minutes. But he got fired because he wasn't telling the line for Barry Weiss and some of the other people at 60 Minutes.

38:59Anthony Scaramucci:Well, and he confronted his boss in a way in a public meeting that, I don't know. I think most people would probably think you're going to have some kind of retribution, some kind of comeuppance for doing that.

39:08Katty Kay:Is he liberal?

39:10Anthony Scaramucci:Probably.

39:10Katty Kay:Okay.

39:11Anthony Scaramucci:With a small L.

39:12Katty Kay:So to me, this is the genius of Donald Trump. And people, please pay close attention. If I'm looking at it as objectively as possible, and Cady gave you a great answer, but I'm not a news person. If I just, on the outside, I would say lowercase L, the mainstream media at the big networks does have a lowercase L liberal bias. It's just not as far to the left as Fox News would tell you or Donald Trump, but it's a lowercase L. But you see that fact, Cady, allows a lot of space for Donald Trump to maneuver it. And so that's where he gives out this big chant.

39:54Anthony Scaramucci:But it's not just that. I don't think it's just that, Anthony, because Trump rails against, And we've said this before. Trump wants 150 % loyalty. 95 % loyalty is not enough. He wants the MyPillow network everywhere, right? So he will trash Fox News if Fox News has one item that doesn't agree with him. This is not about whether Americans have a legitimate grievance about being excluded from liberal institutions. Conservative Americans have a legitimate grievance. This is about loyalty to Donald Trump and nothing else. Otherwise, why does he go after those networks that generally support him, which he does?

40:39Katty Kay:I agree with you because his attitude is anybody that's against me, I'm going to obliterate. And he's been doing that successfully for five decades, so I give him credit. Right. Katty, do you remember the incident between Dan Rather and George Herbert Walker Bush? It happened 38 short years ago. Vaguely remember?

40:59Anthony Scaramucci:Well, I know I'm remembering the more recent Dan Rather incident that was the one that got him moved out of CBS News.

41:06Katty Kay:He told a story about George Walker Bush on the news that was not factually accurate and it wasn't sourced well and it damaged him. But this happened in January 25th, 1988. He's hitting him on the Iran-Contra affair. Okay. I'm bringing this up for a reason. Just stay with me. Bush retorts to him and says, well, you walked off the set for seven minutes, which rather was sometimes petulant. He goes, I wouldn't want your career defined by that seven minute walk off any more than I want my career defined by the mistakes that we made in that one-off thing called Iran-Contra. And this boosted Bush. This was like, oh my God, Bush isn't a wimp.

41:49Katty Kay:Look at the way he took on Dan Rather. And it helped him get to the nomination for the president. And the reason I'm bringing this up is Donald Trump understands this better than anybody. If you have a journalist that's asking pointed questions. And again, even if those questions are true, and even if they're moderate questions or lowercase L questions, if you press the nuclear bomb on the journalist, the possession bias is towards you, Caddy Kay. Am I right? Yeah.

42:26Anthony Scaramucci:Because nobody likes journalists.

42:28Katty Kay:Okay. So that is the motif that Trump is doing. Don't say that, Caddy. You're a journalist. I I like you. Okay. You're probably everybody's favorite journalist, by the way.

42:38Anthony Scaramucci:Can I give actually the cynical interpretation of what is happening with CBS News and 60 Minutes?

42:43Katty Kay:Please, I'm dying to hear it. I just try to explain the motif of Trump. But go ahead.

42:47Anthony Scaramucci:Yes. And I think you're right that this has been an easy stream for Donald Trump to mine. I just think we have to be careful to separate what have been legitimate grievances that some conservatives Americans have had in the heartland of America about not having their voices represented in the American press from what is a very cynical manipulation of the public to stop believing the press so that you can then say the 2020 election was stolen. January the 6th was a day of patriots walking on the Capitol and being ushered in by the FBI. Right. I mean, I think let's not conflate the two things because one of them is a disastrous, if we keep going down that road, it's going to undermine our democracy.

43:37Anthony Scaramucci:I think actually behind all of this is something very cynical and this is just a win for Larry Ellison. From his point of view, this is about trying to make sure that Paramount can buy the Warner Brothers, get that deal through, And so he needs, so Barry Weiss needs to make him happy and make sure that CBS News looks a little bit more Trump compliant so that there'll be less regulatory hurdles to that deal. I think this is just about business and making money.

44:12Katty Kay:So I have nothing to say there because I think that is the exact right narrative and I'm in 100 % agreement with you.

44:20Anthony Scaramucci:In the end, guys, follow the money.

44:23Katty Kay:Follow the money.

44:24Anthony Scaramucci:How many times we said that on this program?

44:27Katty Kay:Amen.

44:28Anthony Scaramucci:Before we go, everybody, I want to quickly remind you about our founding members miniseries, The Truth About Donald Trump's Health.

44:37Katty Kay:Katty, Trump turns 80 on Sunday. My God. Okay, which means we probably have 80 more years to go with Donald Trump. But with that in mind, we thought now would be the right time to discuss whether someone of Trump's old age with rumors flying around about his physical and cognitive health, is he fit to serve as president of the United States? Yeah.

44:58Anthony Scaramucci:So the second episode comes out this Wednesday. In the first episode, I spoke to physician Dr. Vin Gupta about the president's health, and I think you're going to be shocked by what he had to hear about the president. If you would like to become a founding member and listen, sign up at TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com or via the link in the episode description. And while you're there, do also sign up to our weekly newsletter, which this week features a special essay about why America elects old presidents and how that compares with other countries around the world. you might be interested to find out just how well the United States stacks up on the gerontocracy scale.

45:38Anthony Scaramucci:Okay, guys, we will be back later this week. Have a good couple of days. We'll see you then.