223. Trump’s Latest Vanity Project Is Proof He’s Losing

12:13Katty Kay:It's got to be gold, I'm assuming, right? Gold, right?

12:15Anthony Scaramucci:It's got a lot more gold. It's got a kind of gold circular sofa thing right in the middle of it. Anyway, so he wanted that. That was he was very focused on. Apparently, there was a stage where he was calling the renovators of the Kennedy Center once a week. I mean, this guy's got a war going on, a tariff war going on, but he's calling because he wants to make sure that the marble is installed properly next to the chairs in the Kennedy Center foyers. So, he's been calling the Kennedy Center people about that. He's very involved in the renovation process. But now the judge comes along and says, you can't have your name up there.

12:47Anthony Scaramucci:He has to take the name down. And that's when he starts floating the idea of demolishing the building entirely. And here's my question to you. When he came in, and I get all of that, I think you're quite right on the background that he didn't go in the first term and that's now pissed him off. So he comes in and he wants to make it his. He makes it all his lackeys. Rick Grinnell, his very pugilistic former ambassador to Germany, takes over running the Kennedy Center with Trump as chairman of the board. And suddenly all of the acts pull out. They don't want to perform there. They have the prospect of no seats, no performances.

13:22Anthony Scaramucci:There's nothing in the schedule anymore beyond, I was told, this fall. And so they have nothing to put on. And at that point, the Kennedy Center is no longer viable. But do you think Trump, when he took over January of 2025, made himself chairman, do you think he thought this was going to be a kind of thriving MAGA cultural center? Or do you think he anticipated that all of these acts would drop out and they would have nothing left to show and it would be a disaster?

13:51Katty Kay:No, he thought that he was going to get the Kid Rock and the YMCA, the village people, and he was going to get his code array of people to reestablish the Kennedy Center. It was going to become the MAGA Center, which is why it was going to be the Trump Kennedy Center. And so he underestimated the amount of cultural hate he was going to get there because he's getting pumped. You know, Rick Grinnell, put him in charge. He's going to pump you, you know. And by the way, these people are so hated that they just dropped to the New York Times the emails from Rick Grinnell telling, you know.

14:32Anthony Scaramucci:Send back the artwork to the countries it came from.

14:35Katty Kay:Exactly. The slain president of the United States, when the center opened, art was contributed from around the world. But we're America first people. Send back the art. We don't want that foreign art. Yeah, it's unbelievable. But, but, Katie, my question back to you. Ready? The president is sitting there with his baseball cap on and he's looking at a thing that says Kennedy Center demolished and a picture is taken through the window. Okay. So you can see it. Was that intentional or accidental? Of course it was.

15:08Anthony Scaramucci:Totally intentional.

15:09Katty Kay:Of course it was.

15:10Anthony Scaramucci:Totally intentional. The press people said to the reporter, hey, heads up, when the president's about to take off, if you stand right there behind the window, you're going to get a great shot. People in Washington are asking, is he trolling us because he does that? We've seen him do it repeatedly. Or is there a world in which he's actually serious and he's so annoyed? And I've heard also that he's really annoyed that he's not being thanked, that why aren't they thanking me for rescuing the Kennedy Center? And the only way now his argument is to rescue the Kennedy Center is to put my name on it, to make this actually the Trump Center, because when they tried to take my name off it, everything went wrong.

15:55Anthony Scaramucci:So, he's in a mode of a lot of grievance about the Kennedy Center. It's occupying an awful lot of his time. That and the arch at the moment seemed to be occupying an awful lot of his time. But here's my question to you is why didn't he manage to get all of those MAGA performers, the village people, why didn't he manage to get them to come and play there?

16:19Katty Kay:Because they can support Trump, but they're still in the entertainment ecosystem. It's the same reason why Sylvester Stallone, as reported in the Times of London interview he was asked to be the hollywood ambassador for donald trump and maga and he turned it down interesting kid rock has got to deal with all of those people and he doesn't want to be shunned by all those people in in in entirely he can piss off those people by supporting trump but he's got he doesn't want to cross the union line of going into the kennedy center you You know, JFK had a famous line in his inaugural address, you know, asks not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

17:02Katty Kay:Trump is asking what the Kennedy Center can do for his name. Okay? It's all about me. It will always be all about me. And I just want to disrupt the very big lie that Trump is saying, which is about the money. Okay? The money is very easy for the Kennedy Center to raise. And let's just go back. Okay? in 2019, you know they did this thing called the REACH expansion. The FT, the Financial Times, who's a good friend of this program, did a weekend festival there, which I actually spoke at. It's in the REACH area.

17:37Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, it's very nice. It's a little modern, couple of modern buildings right next to the Kennedy Center. Yep.

17:43Katty Kay:$250 million of private equity. Okay, went into the system. Chairman David Rubenstein helped to open it in 2019. And by the way, 100 % private and it came with no renaming demand. Okay, so here's where we are. And you and I are talking about this for a reason because Trump is losing. Because I know his personality. He would not be talking. If he was winning in Iran, if he was winning the midterms, if he was winning the House of Representatives, if he was beating up on Massey and Ro Khanna as it relates to this Epstein potential disclosure, he would not be focused on this. And you know this and I know this.

18:33Katty Kay:CNN, MSNOW, Politico, you're not allowed in the press room anymore. And I think it was Aaron Burnett because I was in London watching it late night. And Aaron said, well, we didn't even write a bad article about him this week. What triggered that? And the answer is, Caddy, he's got to distract you from all the things that are going wrong right now. So that's another string he can pull to get the press off of the stuff that is really going bad for the guy.

19:02Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, I think you're right. There's a whole load that's going wrong. He does like buildings. This is his comfort zone. He would rather honestly be talking about the marble armrests and door knobs and the gold faucets in the Kennedy Center and the gold statues on top of the Ark of Triumph and the drapes in the new ballroom than he would be talking about what is the long term strategy for the United States in the Middle East vis-a-vis China. What are we going to do for the long term to reduce America's deficit? What are we going to do for the long term to rebalance our industrial policy? Those things bore him.

19:44Katty Kay:So while you and I are speaking, one of the worst possible things just happened to Donald Trump. And let me tell you what that is. The White House press pool has just announced, while you and I are speaking, that they are not going to cover Donald Trump in New York after the CNN ban. So they're pulling out the TV poll reporting and they're pulling out all the other reporting. and so the white house correspondents association probably got together and said okay guys that's enough let's go home and very bad for donald trump because you know i need your eyeballs i need your attention and even though i'm berating you please come back please come back and that's what he's gonna that that's what's going on right now so he'll be furious this morning uh that the rest of the press is pulling out and he won't be able to garner the attention that he's looking for when he's at the UN.

20:34Anthony Scaramucci:Yep. Well, CNN was meant to be the press pool today and CNN isn't allowed to do it. So the others have stood by him, which is exactly what they should have done. Maybe they should be rethinking their annual schmooze fest as well with the president of the White House Correspondents Dinner. Okay, we're going to take a break, come back and talk about Saudi Arabia, the Houthis. Oh, and that long-term Middle East strategy that Donald Trump doesn't want to think about because he's got a lot of rebuilding projects to focus on in Washington, DC.

21:02Katty Kay:When we come back, we're going to be talking about 19D chess as opposed to marble and gold caddy.

21:11Anthony Scaramucci:This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. I am a big believer, Anthony, in saving time where I can.

21:19Katty Kay:If there's a way to lay off a job on somebody, I have found that way. So you just have to name the chore, whether it's a grocery list or hiring somebody to help clean the pool. I have figured out a way to delegate. And that's why ZipRecruiter is one of the most valuable things that you can use in your business.

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22:44Anthony Scaramucci:He took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

22:47Katty Kay:Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

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23:32Katty Kay:Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

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24:03Anthony Scaramucci:Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me and Anthony. and it has been a week of whiplash in the Middle East. Look, I think this has been a very interesting week for American foreign policy in the Middle East. I think we have just upended decades of foreign policy where the US guaranteed security in exchange for energy supplies and has now changed that policy under Donald Trump, who was asked by MBS in Saudi Arabia to help defend him against the Houthis who have been attacking as far as Riyadh, been attacking their oil refineries. MBS made those calls to Donald Trump. Donald Trump, at the end of last week and over the weekend, it was a weird weekend in Washington, Anthony, because first of all, we got the news that Donald Trump had been at Camp David for a little bit of a break over the weekend.

24:53Anthony Scaramucci:He suddenly cut that break short. He helicoptered back into Washington Saturday night. The State Department was putting out alerts saying the Middle East is very dangerous. We all assumed there was going to be some kind of an attack Saturday night. That's what it looked like. We were all checking our phones, my friends and I in the press corps. They were texting me. We woke up on Sunday, nothing. Donald Trump tells Fox News over the weekend, I am in deciding mode on the Middle East. He was talking about Iran and what he could do there, but he is being asked by the Houthis, you know, hold off, don't attack us.

25:27Anthony Scaramucci:He's being asked by the Saudis, don't hold off, do attack them. And then he's all ready to go. The reporting from the New York Times has been really good on this. The bombs were loaded onto the planes. The commanders had been given the targets. All of the intel had been sent over. They were ready to go. And overnight Saturday into Sunday, Donald Trump pulls back and says, no, we are not going to get involved in a second front in this war. Last year, it's worth a quick reminder, the Americans spent 50 days and lots of money and lots of munitions, more importantly, to attack the Houthis in Yemen and did almost nothing to change the Houthi positions.

26:08Anthony Scaramucci:So I think there was a recognition that this was the kind of strike that wouldn't necessarily work against the Houthis. The Houthis, meanwhile, have said to the Americans, it's okay, your ships can pass through the Suez Canal, your ships can pass through Bab al-Mandeb, that little choke point at the bottom of the Red Sea. We just want to go after the Saudis. And the remarkable thing here, and this is why I think this upends decades of policy and decades of careful diplomacy by previous administrations, here is Donald Trump saying, we are going to protect American assets in that region, but Saudi Arabia, we are not going to defend you so long as we have a guarantee from the Houthis that they are not going to go after us.

26:48Anthony Scaramucci:So we will sacrifice our relationships with MBS in exchange for some kind of security for American assets because we are overstretched, we are thin on munitions, we are spending too much money, and voters do not like this war. So they definitely don't want a second one. But what does this do, Anthony, for Jared Kushner's relationship with MBS. Is MBS now demanding his money back? Having paid$2 billion into Jared Kushner's private equity fund, he now finds that actually it didn't buy him very much.

27:24Katty Kay:You know, the mob used to have an expression, okay? And again, for the censors, I'll just say it this way. We're not talking about Jared Kushner, we're talking about the mob. You know, there's two types of bribes. You bribe the person, then they actually do what you want. Or there's the second type of thing where you actually bribe the person and then they don't do it and then money goes into a you know cesspool okay that's the second time again i'm talking about the mob not the kushner or trump family okay let's go back to this very very important okay because i understand from some of the people inside what actually happened here because i explained last week that trump wants that shipping lane open and i also now need to tell people that mbs went to trump and said i need this and he's willing to do certain things for americans to help the dollar and he's going to buy more munitions from them and all this other stuff.

28:16Katty Kay:So Trump was like, okay, okay, I'm going to do this. But his inner circle said no. And the most skeptical people inside the inner circle said, hey man, you open up another front six weeks before the midterms, okay, that would make a second war six weeks out with oil prices already elevated. Now, just for everybody knows, okay, oil prices are down about$4 today as you and I are speaking. stock market up in the United States because the market is sensing that this is de-escalation. Okay. The market was set up for the Red Sea getting closed and having a nightmare where oil prices were going to go to$120 a share.

28:56Katty Kay:And so they went to Trump with the gas prices and the diesel prices at historic highs and said, you can't do this. Okay. Now, the second most interesting thing about this, and this is the thing that is really going to vex Trump. You don't have a ground game, buddy. And when you don't have a ground game to back up the airstrikes, the airstrikes are going nowhere because these guys have learned without a ground game, we're going to put all of our drones in the mountains. Without a ground game, we've got 60 feet underground for all of our munitions. Waiting out your bombs until we can pull that stuff out.

29:32Katty Kay:Which is what happened last year. Exactly. To decimate your ports. They've tried this. Now, here's the thing that's really making me laugh, but it shouldn't make me laugh. And I apologize to my fellow Americans because obviously I want the Americans to win. But what's making me laugh is Tehran. They just sent conditions to Qatar, okay? And they want to, quote unquote, end the war on all fronts. But guess what they want? They want billions upon billions of dollars of reparations. And they want the Americans out of the Middle East, okay? So who's winning, Caddy? Who's winning?

30:07Anthony Scaramucci:On that point, Americans out of the Middle East, you've got General McCaffrey, who knows that region well, saying there are 15 bases that are not going to reopen. You've got the key base in Bahrain that is a shell of itself at the moment. The U.S. personnel have basically gone, making any kind of supply chain effort in the Middle East much more complicated, much more expensive. So in some ways, they have got the Americans out of the Middle East. And in this kind of equation of security for energy, which America has bought into for decades, they've also now shown that they've got the Americans out of the Middle East, at least in the terms that the Middle East had understood it before.

30:48Anthony Scaramucci:There is no longer a large, broad security umbrella. There is a very narrow security umbrella, a tiny, teeny one for American assets. We will protect America's direct assets where they interest us, but we're not actually going to bomb the Houthis to protect the Saudi assets and help the Saudis. So I think the relationship in the last six months since this war has started, this war fundamentally upended decades of American policy in the Middle East in ways that we couldn't have foreseen at the time, but which we are starting now to understand. And the question, I suppose, Anthony, is, does Trump have a plan?

31:32Anthony Scaramucci:Is this the 9D chess that you were talking about? And actually, we want to, Barack Obama style, get out of the Middle East and do the pivot to Asia? Or, which is when I was in Hong Kong last week, this is the question people were asking me is, is it as chaotic as it looks? And is this because Trump has problems making decisions? And is it because he is surrounded by people who aren't very good at what they do? I think on the decision front, yes, he speaks to MBS. Yes, yes, yes, I'll come and help you, my friend. We have a good relationship. You're asking me. And then he has 24 hours speaking to other people, Marco Rubio, Scott Besant.

32:11Anthony Scaramucci:And then he comes back and says, actually, no, we're not going to bomb. So there's this kind of, he hates making decisions. The people around him are not necessarily the best advisors, all of them, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps we're looking at you. And so we're in this position where it's chaos and allies all around the world are just having to deal with constant chaos coming out of the White House. Well, I don't think there is a 90 strategy. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is a 90 chess strategy here.

32:36Katty Kay:No, I think we're at 19D now, Katie. We started at 3D. I sort of feel like by the time -

32:42Anthony Scaramucci:I think you're at 19, yeah.

32:44Katty Kay:By the time Trump's term ends, we'll be at 117D chess. But right now we're at 19D. And I think it's a little bit of both, actually. So I think it's the chaos is coming from Trump, his lack of decision making, trying to get everybody off guard, his reflexive contrarianism and all that other stuff. And then underneath that, there are some smart people around that are like, hey, we got to cease fire with the Houthis and we don't want oil prices to go to$12 a gallon. You better leave that cease fire in place. So I think it's a little bit of both. But where I want to ask you, and I want you to think about this for a second, what does all of this mean in the context of trade with Canada, Mayor Mondani?

33:26Katty Kay:Okay, so to let everybody know, all of a sudden, Mondani was called Trump a fascist and a despot. Donald Trump's going to be visiting him when he goes to the UN. and Mondani is going to be talking about getting a federal subsidy to build affordable housing, which is probably something Trump will be interested in because he - He likes housing. Yeah, he'll want his name on it. So step back for a second. We just explained this 19D disaster and we've just explained how chaotic everything is. So now square the circle for me with Mondani, Carney, and Iran. Where does it all go, Caddy, given the lack of predictability of this human being?

34:06Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, I think the advice to anyone looking at America right now is to expect more chaos and more volatility, not less. I think partly because you've got this kind of blurring of alliances on things like trade, on things like industrial policy, on immigration. You've just got, you know, there are people from the left and the right getting together. You've got Tucker Carlson endorsing effectively El Syed up in Michigan. So, things are being very scrambled, which makes things unpredictable. But I'm thinking of something that Bob Rubin, Clinton's former treasury secretary, said to me, which is the way to look at all of this is not to think of this about as Hungary and Viktor Orban.

34:47Anthony Scaramucci:That was a small country that was pretty simple. He could capture the courts. He could capture journalism pretty easily. It was not as complex a country, think of this more as feudal, as more of a kind of Latin American thing where everything is done on a personal relationship with the guy in the center. So Mamdani comes down, appeals to the builder in Donald Trump, plays a blinder, gets up kind of images of, you know, Trump's buildings in New York and the Trump housing projects that could be built. Trump loves that. Carney stands up to Trump. You and I have been told by senior Canadians that actually Trump really admires Carney, likes the way he negotiated.

35:26Anthony Scaramucci:So, I think it's very personal, which is also partly why it's so chaotic and unpredictable. In the world where you had a role for the National Security Agency and the State Department, there were processes. There were ways America managed policy. If you had had an active functioning National Security agency and an active functioning State Department right now, we would not have bombed Iran. I'm willing to guarantee we would not be in this war in the first place.

35:58Katty Kay:No question. No, you're down to a decision making of one person. You're down to a decision.

36:02Anthony Scaramucci:And that then is that one person's relationship. And it is kind of much more feudal Latin American in some ways was how Bob Rubin described it to me, where it's all about the personal relationships. And that inherently is more volatile, more emotional, and more chaotic. So I don't know that it's strategic. I think it's the last person Donald Trump spoke to, the person who finds a way to get through to him in a way that flatters his ego, gets kind of what he wants. I don't know. Do you think this is, am I wrong there?

36:33Katty Kay:You're not wrong. wrong and i think that squaring the circle from my angle okay i think the thing with mondani it's just a weird thing cat is like the kennedy center i can tie it back i want to be loved by these celebrities you're not loving me i'm going to blow up your center the new yorkers hate the guy he's got like a 70 disapproval rating in new york but i am from new york i want the gray lady the New York Times to love me. They don't love me. I actually want New Yorkers to love me. He's going to go see Mondani with a vision in his head that he's going to do a ribbon cutting somewhere in New York.

37:15Katty Kay:You see, you guys don't understand me. I'm going to help this kid build these houses so I can do the ribbon cutting. He has no meeting set up with Mark Carney, right? No meeting.

37:28Anthony Scaramucci:And no meeting, by the way, set up with Bibi Netanyahu either.

37:31Katty Kay:And no meeting set up with BBNet now. And so Carney's going to be there from the 21st to the 23rd. There's no meeting in the schedule. I am going to bet that they meet and I'm going to bet that they talk. Okay. Because I know Trump's personality. He's not going to leave New York without talking to Carney. They'll make it up. They'll say it's national security. Carney's told people privately. Trump's calling me all the time. And they say, oh, what is he calling you about? Is he talking about trade? No, no. No, he calls me under the ruse of national security or under the ruse of Greenland and the Arctic Circle and stuff like that.

38:05Katty Kay:So he's going to call them. The real leverage here, if you're a statesman listening, Trump wants to be loved, Katty Kay. He's getting no love. He's getting no love at home. You know that. And he's getting no love outside of the house. But what does he want? He wants to be loved.

38:25Anthony Scaramucci:And he particularly wants to be loved by people who are loved by other people.

38:30Katty Kay:Well, there you go.

38:31Anthony Scaramucci:So, Mark Carney is super popular at the moment. Trump wants a bit of that.

38:35Katty Kay:Very good insight. So is Mondani. Mondani's got a 70 % -

38:38Anthony Scaramucci:Super popular.

38:39Katty Kay:100%. He wants some of that too. Really good insight. It's reflected glory. We'll see what happens.

38:44Anthony Scaramucci:Anyway, it's going to be a busy week. And then, of course, on Wednesday, he's going to be meeting Xi Jinping. And we will talk about that on Thursday and where that goes. because I've heard that there was a whole load of activity planned between the Chinese and the Americans around important issues like AI. They were going to have focus groups and meetings, and Donald Trump proposed all of this earlier this year. And up until this week, absolutely nothing has happened. So let's see if we can kick off some meaningful talks.

39:10Katty Kay:So episode two of All the Wrong Moves, Katty. Look at this. Look at me promoting the book here. Look. By the way, everybody in the UK that came out and came to these seven events for me, Thank you so much. I had so much fun with all of you. And I got to go to the Ted Lasso pub in Richmond, which was also very cool. Nice. Cool. Of course, those of you that were trying to get me drunk prior to my presentation, uh-uh. But episode two, coming out, all the wrong moves for founding members. Katie, where do you go to become a founding member?

39:40Anthony Scaramucci:You go to therestispoliticsus.com.

39:44Katty Kay:All right. But thank you guys. And thank you guys for the support of the book.

39:47Anthony Scaramucci:Buy the book, guys. It is really good. but it gives us a lot of insights into where we are now and what needs to happen next.

39:54Katty Kay:Remember, we've got a thousand books where you can become an annual member and we'll send you a free book. Because of the way these restrictions work is only for UK members only, but if you want to become an annual member in the UK, we'll send you a free book.

40:07Anthony Scaramucci:And we will be back on Thursday with more, doubtless, talking about the She Visit as well. See you then, guys. Thanks for listening.

40:14Katty Kay:Thank you, guys.

40:18Thank you.