206. How Trump Is Using China to Sabotage the Midterms

0:08Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me Katty Kay in Washington DC.

0:12Katty Kay:And me Anthony Scaramucci.

0:14Anthony Scaramucci:Today we are going to be asking is China Trump's enemy of the week? Was Beijing behind the great meddling of the stolen 2020 election? Just kidding, wasn't stolen. Or is Trump trying to engineer a hate election for the midterms to energize his base ahead of November, just three short months away? Then we're going to get into reports in the second half that the FBI has been told to stop investigating alleged assaults by ICE agents. And the Trump administration's first ever use of a secret immigration court created nearly 30 years ago. What is Stephen Miller trying to do? Okay, Anthony, let's run through that speech last week.

0:55Anthony Scaramucci:On Thursday night, Donald Trump delivered a speech of about half an hour in the White House broadcast to the nation in which he made several unsubstantiated claims. But one of them was about China interfering in the 2020 election. He talked about shocking vulnerabilities in the US voting system. He said that our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen. He said the Chinese government wanted him to lose the next election, which I guess is the midterm election because of his tariff strategy. And he said that some of the documents that were released revealed that members of a deep state had been working actively to suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling.

1:39Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, the irony to me, Anthony, of the whole speech was that basically Trump released this huge tranche of documents that had been classified up until now. But the documents that he released actually rebut the claims he made during the course of that speech. And one of the claims was that China had interfered by somehow stealing these data rolls, but actually it turns out that those voter rolls were available on commercial websites. Another of the claims that he made was that foreign interference had been working against Trump as opposed to for Trump, which is what we know in the case of Russia.

2:29Anthony Scaramucci:And then the irony I felt of the whole speech was that in one of the documents that he released, it says that adversaries could make wholly fabricated claims that they have compromised all US voting machines. And those claims could introduce public doubts about the validity of the election and undercut public confidence in the election. That comes from one of the documents Trump released. What was he doing for half an hour from the East Room of the White House? He was doing the work of the people that America's own intelligence community in one of the documents that he declassified calls America's adversaries.

3:11Anthony Scaramucci:So I don't know that you should really believe anything that he says in that speech.

3:15Katty Kay:There's a couple of things going on, but the most interesting thing for me was the response from China. And I don't know if you had a chance to read that communique, but it came from their foreign ministry spokesperson. person and he basically said not only is it baseless but guess what the americans are the ones that are stealing data not us but there was no evidence there was no motive and so it's sort of one of these things with donald trump where he's saying something that's nonsensical he's saying something that's crazy and yet he has a lot of people believing him still and if i were on Putin's team, and Putin's under the gun, as you and I both know, because of the fight with Ukraine.

4:01Katty Kay:But if I was on Putin's team, I'd be like, wow, this guy is doing all of our bidding, so fantastic, crapped all over NATO when he went over there, crapped all, praised Putin while he was over there. Now he's trying to do exactly what we've been trying to do for 50 years, is undermining the integrity of the electoral process in America. And we would like the American people to think that their elections are fraudulent and that they're no better than our elections here in Russia. Yeah.

4:31Anthony Scaramucci:And you can go through and lots of fact checkers have point after point the things that he claimed and the things that actually turn out to be the case. And he didn't just fail to prove the election was stolen. He actually released all the paperwork proving that it wasn't stolen. I think the question, Anthony, is why? Why is he doing this? And is this as Mark Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intel community said over the weekend, because he is paving the way for the midterm elections? Or is this because simply he is obsessed in a kind of sort of Cohen type way with not losing? and that one of the things we found when we did our series on Trump was one of the rules that he learned from Cohen was you never admit defeat.

5:20Anthony Scaramucci:You never say that you lost. And it's still so painful for him psychologically to say that he lost, to admit that he lost, that he has to keep revisiting it. This is like the toothache that he has to keep coming back to that can never get fixed. Or is it as strategic as it was, I think, in 2016 when he discredited the media so that he could say if he lost, it was the media who was lying. Is it strategic? And is he trying to say, I'm laying the groundwork? Is that what he's doing, laying the groundwork to disrupt the midterm elections? What do you think?

5:54Katty Kay:Well, I think it's going to be hard for him to disrupt the midterm elections because people are onto him and these things are very decentralized. But I think he's going to try to get a very large group of the American people to believe that these elections are compromised and that there's no integrity in the election. And, you know, when he wins, it's accurate and voracious. 2024, remarkably, it was fine.

6:23Anthony Scaramucci:2016, it was fine.

6:26Katty Kay:So when Obama was running things and he won the Obama people, that was voracious. When he was running things and his people were in charge, that was fraudulent. And now, and when Joe Biden's people were in charge and he won again, that was also accurate. So this is sort of absolutely Trump mania and this is Trump world. And so what you see before you is not true. Please pay attention to me. What I am saying to you is true. The sky is green, the grass is blue, and don't believe your lying eyes. And so that's his mode. He's always been in that mode. But Cady, it's so bad that he's destroyed Jay Clayton, right?

7:11Katty Kay:It's so bad that anybody that comes up for Senate confirmation that's asked who won the 2020 election, a litmus test. You said something to me last week, and I was like, caddy is so right jay clayton's nomination would have been withdrawn by donald trump if all he did was lean into the microphone and say fair and square joe biden won that election and with evidence of scant electoral fraud if he had said that bye bye jay clayton and so So this is the situation that we're living in. And I will say this about the Democrats. They are meek, Caddy, in terms of their rebuttal and their response to this.

7:59Katty Kay:Even our friend Senator Coons, you know, he said, oh, it's not about Beijing. It's about voter boxes in Bucks County. Hey, Senator, you got to get out there and you got to speak in a totally different way. And you got to speak in a much more aggressive way about what this guy is doing. Same thing with Mark Warner. but they're not and trump is going to have a very large group of americans and you put the number on a caddy i'm going to say 20 could be 25 and if i'm wrong please push back that belief that there's something wrong with our election electoral process i mean i i think that's the real key here

8:38Anthony Scaramucci:is that that quote i read from the national intelligence council reporting that this is at the heart of everything America's adversaries are trying to do, whether it was Russia in 2016, and Russia in 2016 did try to meddle with American society and the electoral process in order to get Donald Trump into office, or Iran, which we also know has meddled, North Korea, which we also know has tried. There's actually less evidence that China has tried. We know that they've got the ability to do so, but they haven't done it as much as Russia has done it. But the thing that they would all like to do is get Americans to believe that the elections are not free and fair.

9:20Anthony Scaramucci:And that's how you cause the real damage. And I think you're right. It's probably the diehard MAGA crowd, somewhere around 20 to 25%, like you point out, who does believe in the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And I know that people close to Trump, the kind of supporters of this strategy, And there are lots of Republicans in the Senate. I mean, you've had Cornyn saying, I don't see how we win the midterms by talking about 2020. You've had Tillis talking about this. You've got people in the White House who have gone to the president before he gave this speech and said, listen, Mr. President, these claims are insubstantiated that you're going to put out there and we should be focusing on affordability and what's going to make people's lives better.

10:06Anthony Scaramucci:But he can't give it up and he goes out and talks about it. his defenders would say, ah, but this rallies the base. This is what gets people riled up. There are enough people who believe in the big lie, who believe that the deep state is trying to screw us over, who will go to the polls. My reply to them is, those people would have voted anyway, because they are the diehards. This does nothing to expand the pie, right? I mean, that's the problem is that this doesn't help you get the people who might not show up because they're disillusioned with Trump, even though they voted for him last time around.

10:46Anthony Scaramucci:It doesn't get the people who are still wavering. I don't know how come. There are very many people who swing voters in America, but let's say the 3 % of people who are still wavering and could go either way, it doesn't get them to come over to your side. Talking about this, I think this is something deep in Trump that he feels mortified at the idea that people think he lost and he doesn't believe he lost because Roy Cohn always trained him never to think he was a loser. And being a loser or being weak is the worst thing you can be in Donald Trump's view. And so he keeps going back to this because he, I don't know, he wants to replay the record and replay the record and replay the record until people actually start believing him.

11:29Anthony Scaramucci:But I don't know that anyone came out of that speech believing what they didn't believe beforehand.

11:33Katty Kay:It's the Hotel California of American politics, Katty. Trump has checked in. He's checked in six years ago and he's never leaving, Katty. But let me ask you about Xi for a second. Are we going to have a summit, Katty? Did this derail it?

11:48Anthony Scaramucci:I don't know that this derailed it because the Chinese hear a lot from Trump. I mean, there's a lot of speculation in Washington this week that Trump is going to come up with a fresh tariff strategy and impose more tariffs on including on China. That would probably derail it. But I suspect the Chinese are just going to, I would think that they would let this fly if they want the summit, if they want the summit.

12:16Katty Kay:I think the Chinese need the summit for trade purposes.

12:21Anthony Scaramucci:The tariffs matter much more to them than whatever Trump says in a speech from the East Room.

12:26Katty Kay:No question. So they're going to ignore this. And, you know, Trump wants to be seen as a dealmaker. And I think Xi wants the combination of tariffs stability, to your point. But I also think he wants the prestige of a state visit. It helps him at home. And so I think that those things will happen. And just for those people that are focused on Save America, Save America is not going to pass. Remember, they need the magic number of 60 to make the vote filibuster proof.

12:56Anthony Scaramucci:This is the bill that Donald Trump wants to pass that would do things like having voter ID, for example, for people going to vote.

13:04Katty Kay:It won't pass.

13:05Anthony Scaramucci:It'll make it harder for some groups to vote.

13:08Katty Kay:But again, but just to explain the sausage making that happens in America, the Republicans are trying to embed in this latest$95 billion spending bill. They're trying to embed and infuse some of the tenants of Save America. And so that could happen in reconciliation. And so what ends up happening is the bill itself doesn't pass, but there's some DNA remnants of the virus of the bill that ends up in a spending bill. And so that's the machinations of the American Congress. But that to me is something I don't like.

13:42Anthony Scaramucci:Just before we go to a break, and you mentioned Jay Clayton, who we spoke about last week, who has been having Senate hearings, waiting to see if he will be confirmed as the next head director of national intelligence. I think that Trump's speech on Thursday night and the declassification of these documents and the claims that Trump made actually helps Jay Clayton because the person who is behind that is this guy Bill Pulte, who was in head of the housing agency, but then Trump brought in as acting director of national intelligence with the specific task of mining and releasing this 2020 election material.

14:24Anthony Scaramucci:and it's Bill Pulte who has been whispering conspiracy theories into Donald Trump's ear. It's Bill Pulte who was pushing for the release of this material, pushing for this speech, when other people in the White House were saying, we don't need to be focusing on this right now. This is not helpful. Bill Pulte is the one. And Trump got wind of what Bill Pulte was working on. Bill Pulte had been briefing him over the last few weeks on what he had found in these documents that piqued Trump's interest and Trump insisted on doing this speech. Well, I think you're now going to have any senators who had had reservations about Jay Clayton during those hearings because Jay Clayton wouldn't say that Biden won the 2020 election.

15:05Anthony Scaramucci:Those senators will now say, you know what, we've got a choice between Jay Clayton, you know, being a loyalist flunky, but relatively sane and competent, and Bill Pulte, who is an outright conspiracy theorist, who is trying to persuade us that the Chinese got the election, the 2020 election stolen somehow. So I suspect that was a good day for Jay Clayton.

15:26Katty Kay:So, but Katty, Nicole Wallace, who's a friend of mine, I worked with her on the Bush campaigns. I did her show last week. And she said that the Jay Claytons are more dangerous because they know better. Do you believe that?

15:41Anthony Scaramucci:We touched on that last week, right? Whether it's better to have somebody who is competent or whether it's better to have somebody who is kind of an outright conspiracy theory. In other words, do you want somebody who says the quiet part out loud or do you want somebody who stays silent but is loyal? The argument in favor of somebody like Jay Clayton is, listen, okay, he will get in there. And you made this argument last week, Anthony, that he will be some form of a moderating influence. I guess the counter argument is that if you have Bill Pulte in that position, somebody like Bill Pulte, who is a conspiracy theorist, somebody like Kash Patel, for example, it exposes this administration's lack of competence and conspiratorial bent to voters who can then make a decision about what is really going on.

16:32Anthony Scaramucci:And the things may be bad behind the scenes, but if you have somebody who comes across as kind of normal and competent and loyal, then voters may kind of think, okay, well, this is all okay. I can argue that one either way.

16:45Katty Kay:Yeah, it's a disaster either way. It's a disaster. I just, you know.

16:49Anthony Scaramucci:We didn't need Russia or China to attack American elections. Trump did it himself for us last week on television.

16:56Katty Kay:Well, what we also know is that Russia and China are aiding Iran in terms of their logistics during the war. You know, and so we also know that too. So, look, I mean, he's put us in a really tough spot and he's got the ICE agents are beating the drum again, Caddy. The ICE agents are coming into a town, a neighborhood near you.

17:22Anthony Scaramucci:Oh my God, that sounds like an awful, awful movie line. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about that.