216. The CIA’s Secret Meeting in Moscow - What’s Trump Hiding?

15:22Katty Kay:This is different. He doesn't need to tell people that he met with them if he actually did meet with them. We're not getting the whole story, but I'm sure there's a trade that the Americans want between what's going on with Putin and Ukraine and what's going on with the Americans and Iran. And I think that was on the table. And I bet you that Putin met with him. That would be my bet. If someone put it, say, hey, you think Putin met with him? I say, yeah, I think Putin met with him. Because I think there was a message that they were trying to deliver from Trump that they didn't want in a communique that was encrypted that could be uncrypted.

16:01Katty Kay:So again, that's me. But I mean, listen, we won't know that. But this is not semi-routine. And of course, Trump lying about it, big deal at this point, because he's lying about everything. So when Trump talks now, people are like, okay, whatever. We don't know what he's saying could be true or not true. It's ridiculous.

16:21Anthony Scaramucci:My tendency is to believe Ratcliffe and what the CIA is putting out more than it is at this point to believe what Donald Trump tells Fox News. Okay.

16:29Katty Kay:So you think it was just, hey, you're encouraging on NATO nations?

16:33Anthony Scaramucci:That was part of it. I think that was part of it. Okay. I don't think that was not part of it because I know that NATO countries are worried and there have been these attacks and the Leipzig almost attacks scared everybody. So I think that is part of it. I think you're quite right. Iran is part of it. I think probably this prisoner swap may have been part of it. So we're not getting the full story. I still think it's interesting that you've got this politically. you've got the CIA putting out something and the White House stamping on it the next day, disowning the idea that they've set any kind of red line, which is exactly what people that I've been talking to in the national security space wanted Ratcliffe to go and deliver with some kind of a red line.

17:11Anthony Scaramucci:And Trump's now just said to everybody, oops, no red line, guys. That was not what this was about because he doesn't want to own that if it goes wrong. Yeah.

17:20Katty Kay:Right. One more question though, Caddy, will Trump punish Europe for Iran? So I go into Iran unilaterally, I'm blowing everything up. And oh, by the way, I want you guys now to enter the fight with me, even though I unilaterally started the fight with the Israelis. Is Trump going to punish them for not coming into the fight with them?

17:39Anthony Scaramucci:Yes. He will try and revisit the trade agreements, make them harder for Europeans, bluster about pulling American bases out of Europe, but that seems to me unlikely or bluster about pulling them out of the European bases who he feels where the countries haven't been supportive enough and perhaps then moving them to Central Europe. Well, actually, that wouldn't be a bad idea. But he'll try to punish them. And then the question is, that's why everybody's looking at Mark Carney, as we said earlier this week, will Europeans stand up to him?

18:06Katty Kay:Will they, Katty? Will they stand up to him?

18:09Anthony Scaramucci:No, because they don't have one concerted voice. It's much harder for the Europeans to stand up to And I think actually at the beginning of this week, Mark Carney looks like he's the superhero and he may well prove to be. But by the end of this week, I don't see the voices coming out publicly from the 27 members of the European Union or the United Kingdom saying that's the way to go. We need to be following the Mark Carney model. He looks pretty lonely at the moment.

18:36Katty Kay:Well, of course, because there are people that are saying you have no upside to doing that and let's not piss Trump off right now. but I think Carney has done something that people are going to study. And I think Carney has said, you know what, this is going to cause my nation economic damage, but like a war, because it is a war, it's a trade war, but like a war, it's going to galvanize my nation. Okay. And this is actually an attack on my homeland. And I think he's read it right inside of Canada. And so he's closing on 70 % approval rating. Imagine that for a politician in this type of society that we're living in with 38 million people.

19:21Anthony Scaramucci:You know the only other person with great approval ratings like that? One Dolly Parton, and we're going to talk about her after the break.

19:28Katty Kay:All right. Sounds good.

19:29Anthony Scaramucci:We'll be right back.

19:33Anthony Scaramucci:This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's easy to tell when somebody is passionate about what they do. Look at our world, the whole political world. You can tell the ones who are in it because they love it and who are in it because they've been there too long and they've got a little stale.

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20:32Katty Kay:Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash politics. That's ziprecruiter.com slash politics. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

20:48Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US. This segment is brought to you in partnership with eToro. This is MarketWatch. Each month with eToro, we look at what's been happening in the markets and what individual investors have actually been doing in response because the two often don't tell the same story. SpaceX is back in focus. Some early investors and employees can now start selling shares they previously had to hold on to. And when the company went public in June, ordinary investors got far more access than they normally would in a major IPO. And because, of course, eToro is a social investing platform, it can see how millions of investors responded to the IPO launch in aggregate.

21:27Anthony Scaramucci:Did ordinary investors see SpaceX the same way? I guess that's the big question.

21:32Katty Kay:A very exciting story, very interesting time for everybody. And I need to fully disclose everybody that I've been a SpaceX investor for quite some time. And I was also an ex-AI investor. And some people may remember this, those two entities merged prior to the IPO.

21:47Anthony Scaramucci:How did Wall Street see the SpaceX IPO?

21:50Katty Kay:There's something called capital recycling. Wall Street's interpretation of this is institutions were reducing their positions in smaller companies and raising cash, getting prepared for the SpaceX IPO. That did happen, I think, on the margin. My own personal view looking at it from the window of my seat at SkyBridge, to me, it was more of a groundswell of what I would call retail investors and high net worth individuals.

22:18Anthony Scaramucci:I always thought what was interesting about this story when it happened, Anthony, and about what eToro's investors actually did around the SpaceX launch was the kind of why there was so much excitement. So on launch day, eToro users worldwide invested more than twice as much in SpaceX, as in NVIDIA, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Bitcoin combined. Was it because this was a rare opportunity for ordinary investors to get access to an IPO on the scale of a kind of SpaceX IPO itself? Or was it because they were taking an informed decision about the future of that sector?

22:57Katty Kay:It's such a good question. I'm going to say that it's a little bit of both, but just remember in the United States, a company like SpaceX would have gone public probably 10 years ago. But because of the regulation in the US, these guys have waited. Uber waited, SpaceX waited. So I think that's where there was a lot of pent-up retail demand for SpaceX. But one of the things I love about eToro is that eToro examined the retail investor profile in their overall book of business and said, you know what? Maybe the institutions did that capital recycling that I was referring to, or they sold some of the smaller companies in preparation for SpaceX.

23:33Katty Kay:But the retail investor did not do that. The retail investor said, okay, I'm going to own this stuff, but you know what? I'm going to create cash somewhere to get myself into the SpaceX IPO.

23:44Anthony Scaramucci:I thought that was interesting because then we saw the wider space sector, because I think there'd been concern on Wall Street, right, that this could be the introduction of one massively dominant player that wipes out all of the other space sector companies. And that didn't happen at all. Their investment in the wider space sector increased amongst eToro users alone by 24%. So does that suggest that there's some kind of halo effect from SpaceX?

24:08Katty Kay:Yeah, I think there's a halo effect. There's a halo effect on Elon Musk. There's also some speculation that they may even end up merging Tesla and SpaceX longer term. But I think the real question, Katty, is why did individual investors respond so differently than Wall Street? And it's a very simple answer to that. Wall Streeters like myself did have access to the private stock of SpaceX. Very few retail investors were able to get in on the pre-IPO rounds of SpaceX. And so they were like, okay, finally, I get my chance to own SpaceX.

24:44Anthony Scaramucci:What I find interesting in eToro's data is that we're already seeing a shift in what investors are doing. So they had this period of buying, but now it looks like it's getting a little bit more balanced.

24:54Katty Kay:Yeah, it became much more balanced, okay? And the real question is, does this shift towards selling mean investors have changed their view on SpaceX, Caddy? No, I don't think that they've changed their view. It's just that you've got venture capitalists, Wall Street guys maybe have held SpaceX for 10 years. Maybe even some of the employees have held it for that long of a period of time. And so for diversification purposes, they might be selling at a time when retail is buying.

25:21Anthony Scaramucci:If you'd like to see what millions of investors are doing right now, go to etoro.com. Etoro is a multi-asset investment platform. The value of your investments may go up or down. Your capital is at risk.

25:33Katty Kay:The content that we've been discussing is intended for information and educational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or investment recommendation.

25:44Anthony Scaramucci:Now, I want to talk about Dolly Parton. Okay, Here is Dolly Parton, who has been a public figure in America at one of America's more devices times, and she manages to have the most extraordinary approval ratings. There was a YouGov poll out recently that has her net approval of 65%. Barack Obama is at 14%. Trump is at negative 19%, and Biden is at negative 18%. There was a UMass survey recently, and she is the only person in America to clear 50 % approval with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. I think she did it very deliberately, Antony. I think she was strategic and smart. And it was not that she didn't have politics, because you can tell where her politics are in many ways.

26:33Anthony Scaramucci:She was super inclusive about LGBTQ rights, about Black Lives Matter. She is a feminist icon just in what she has done with her own career. But she made a very disciplined, and I'm not sure that it's replicable, and that's what I want to get your take on, decision not to get involved in politics. And she did it by being super authentic.

26:57Katty Kay:Well, listen, I mean, they pushed her in 2018 during the first Trump administration. They pushed her very hard. And she said, look, I'm not into politics. I'm an entertainer. She then quipped that her mother was a Democrat. Her father was a Republican. And she said, that makes her a Hippocrat, which I thought was really funny. And she delivers it well. She is funny. Yeah, she delivered it well. Her whole thing about Trump, though, is she never said anything bad about Trump. And they pushed her very hard to say things bad. And she kept saying, listen, I'm an entertainer. Back in the 2016 campaign, this is something I remember from the campaign, you know, Kenny Rogers said, you're the Donald Trump of country music.

27:41Katty Kay:And she looked at him and said, that must be a joke about my hair. And so people, you know, interpreted that she didn't like Trump, you know what I mean? But that wasn't it. She may have not liked him. I don't know. But she was very good about not telling people, which is why he's lowering the flags. And remember, she was offered by Donald Trump the Medal of Freedom. She was offered it twice. She declined it because she said her husband was ill. And then the second time she said, I'm not going to travel because it's COVID.

28:09Anthony Scaramucci:Interestingly, she was offered it by twice from Trump and then from Joe Biden, right? And she says, I can't take it from Joe Biden because that would suggest I am political. So that's what I mean about her being very disciplined. She was prepared to turn down this incredible honor, which is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in order to preserve her political neutrality. I think it was a strategy. The strategy, a very smart business person.

28:35Katty Kay:If Billy Graham was the Billy Graham of religion, Dolly Parton was the Billy Graham of country music and entertaining. And just hear me out for a second. Billy Graham figured out a way to have a relationship with every single president. It didn't matter Republican or Democrat. And I think that that's something that she did very, very well. And I think it's something that you learn from people like her and Michael Jordan. Remember, they wanted Michael Jordan to pick sides in politics. And Michael Jordan said, hey, man, Republicans buy sneakers too. Leave me out of this. She did it without even ever uttering a line like that.

29:12Katty Kay:So I admire her for a number of different reasons. But the number one thing I admire her for is the anonymity of her charity. If you walk around in the areas that she came from and she grew up very poor and you listen to people that she grew up with, she gave back to so many different people. And so much so that the Bezos family, Lauren and Jeff Bezos, I don't know if you remember this a few years ago, they gave her $100 million. And what was it earmarked for? Any charity that Dolly Parton wants. Okay. And they said, okay, here's a$100 million grant into your foundation from our foundation, do as you see fit.

29:54Katty Kay:That was the type of trust that people had in Dolly Parton. So, you know, a unifying person for sure, but also an incredibly generous person that needs to be remembered for all of that as well.

30:04Anthony Scaramucci:Do you think then when you look at what she achieved in terms of being somebody who was beloved right across the country by all sectors of America, which is just so extraordinary in itself because there is no one else like that right now. Is she a proposition, Anthony, or is it just about her person? So could this be replicated by somebody else in America? Could this be replicated by any kind of politician or political leader in America? or can you only do it? Can you only get Americans to agree on something if you refuse to tell them what you think? Because I feel like that for me, that is the message that Dolly Parton has left us with.

30:48Anthony Scaramucci:And I don't think that what she did can be duplicated by anybody else.

30:52Katty Kay:Not today, not the America that we're in today, not with the tribal media, not with the segmented messaging, not with the algorithms on social media.

31:01Anthony Scaramucci:Well, the algorithms on social media didn't destroy her, but maybe it was because she was just so disciplined. And she had this way of disarming people who asked her important political questions by being charming and sweet and smiley.

31:14Katty Kay:Exactly. And remember, the algorithm is designed for rage. I'm going to get your eyeballs if we have a lot of rage. One of the things we didn't talk about this week was the$18 billion settlement for the child mental health issues that Metta was faced with with this lawsuit. They settled it. The stock went up on it because people thought it was going to be a larger settlement. But people like Dolly Parton get well received and very popular because they don't fit into that algorithm. Unfortunately, I fit into the algorithm because I think Trump is a maniac. and I think he's very harmful to the society.

31:52Katty Kay:You're a lot cooler than me, Caddy. You're a lot more diplomatic than me. But I think that, and so I fit into that bucket. I think that you're, in some ways, you have a lot of Dolly Parton diplomacy. It could be your upbringing and your dad's diplomatic status, but I'm probably a little less diplomatic than you, and I get caught in the crosshairs more.

32:11Anthony Scaramucci:It suggests that if you have high approval ratings, you can't spend your political capital or your social capital or your cultural capital. And she never used it overtly in the favor of a cause beyond literacy. She was supportive, clearly, of gay rights. I mean, she said that, but she managed not to alienate conservatives. Even when she did 9 to 5, the movie with Jay Fonda in 1980, who was politically radioactive amongst many people who listened to Dolly Parton songs, right? Much of the country music audience is conservative. They didn't like Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda for her anti-war activism was somebody they would run a mile from.

32:51Anthony Scaramucci:But Dolly Parton did something that was extraordinary. She didn't ever alienate herself from Jane Fonda. She just said, I allow everybody to have their opinions. She was so generous and funny and charming and nice. Never underestimate in life the power of being nice.

33:08Katty Kay:Yeah, no question. That's a superpower.

33:10Anthony Scaramucci:She was a nice, good person. It was a superpower. And so it made it almost impossible for people to hate her, even though she could have friends like Jane Fonda and work with them, which very few overt liberals or Democrats would be able to get away with in America today.

33:28Katty Kay:I'm with you. I don't think any of us could say, if someone said to me, what was Dolly Parton's politics? I could guess at it. I could guess at it. And I think she was probably very socially liberal. But at the end of the day, I don't know. And that's how smart she was at handling these situations.

33:46Anthony Scaramucci:Somebody who the DSA and Donald Trump agree on. Who'd have thought there is somebody out there? Okay, guys, thank you so much for listening. We will be back, of course, next Monday with more for you all.

33:59Katty Kay:We'll see you next week, but don't forget to go to therestispoliticsus.com. Buy tickets for our tour. Come meet Caddy and I. Ask us questions. Hang out with us. These tours are a lot of fun for us. We hope to see you there.

34:11Anthony Scaramucci:Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend.

34:12Katty Kay:Have a great weekend, guys. We'll see you next week.

34:14Anthony Scaramucci:Play those Dolly Parton songs. You'll feel happier for it.

34:25Thank you.